Does economic growth rot the culture?

Georgetown political theorist Patrick Deneen thinks genuine conservatism is incompatible with global capitalism and that confusion of the two is a cold war artifact. I’ll not equivocate about this one: I very strongly suspect he’s right.

Other stimulating excerpts:

My goal has been (I hope) in particular to deepen some of our political understanding and vocabulary, to make visible to more readers some of the deepest presuppositions of modern politics and even the deeper philosophical ideas that inform discrete political issues. By enlarging the view and elongating the perspective, I also hoped that some other overlooked possibilities might be entertained – particularly beyond the worn and largely unproductive contemporary political positions adopted by the Right and the Left.

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[M]any modern proponents of democracy believe that true democracy will only be achieved when we have overcome all “particularity.” The root of the contradiction of modern democratic theory is the idea that there are only two justifiable and desirable conditions of humankind – the radically individuated monad and the globalized world community. Any intermediate grouping or belonging is seen as arbitrary and the locus of limitations – hence, unjust.

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Technology aids and abets the modern project of eviscerating attachments to local places and cultures. Not long ago, thinkers like Emerson and Dewey praised the liberating and transformative potential of the railroads and telegraph; today, it is the internet and Facebook. [No, the irony is not lost on me.]

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I think there is great systemic danger in the not-distant future due to a coming (or already arrived) energy crisis. This will be a traumatic experience for a civilization that has been built around the assumption of permanently cheap energy. I would submit that our economic crisis, our debt crisis, and our moral crisis are all pieces of this larger energy crisis. Because our way of thinking treats problems as separate and discrete, we tend not to see their deeper connections. I would be happy to elaborate on this, but won’t presume to take up the space to lay this out in this venue. The thinker who has best articulated the contemporary tendency to treat all problems as “parts” while ignoring the whole is Wendell Berry.

(I found the interview linked above through Deneen’s own summary at Front Porch Republic, which also reminds me that he was interviewed by Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, an excellent resource for commuters or people who like something other than frenetic music on the iPod when they work out, walk, bike or whatever.)

Is self-expression a good thing?

I didn’t know whether I – a mere scribbler – should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).

Theodore Dalrymple recounts and reflects on the oft-remarked lack of civility on the internet. What made him, a mere scribbler, worthy of the venom of professors? An astringent piece about about Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw, the latter of whom disbelieved the germ theory of disease and vilified Pasteur and Lister.

I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of the judicious mindset that supposes that the truth might be the opposite of what everyone thinks.

I have nothing to add except that spam and vitriol make the net less pleasant than it could be. Oh, yeah: I like his distinction between contrariness and judiciousness, too. I tend to be contrary, I fear, though I’ve never gone so far as holocaust denial, 911 Truthers, or those who are convinced that HIV was manufactured in a lab to commit genocide against whoever.

Education as counter-hegemonic

Over on the Porch, much of the talk is about education. Two recent posts there highlight some of the changes in higher education of which, it often seems, many are unaware because the change has been over maybe five decades or more.

For instance, Ted McAllister, one of the less active Porchers, riffs briefly on Pepperdine’s substitution of “first year” for “freshman:”

I’m struck by how thoroughly universities have largely given up any sense that they should serve as repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom, replaced by an embarrassingly old-fashioned and moralizing (and hence not morally serious) crusade to be institutions of social transformation.

Jason Peters focuses not on the crusade to be institutions of social transformation, but the pervasive money orientation of the whole enterprise:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that it is cast in monetary terms in the first place—and exclusively. Clearly the value of an education must be realized in dollars. Education is no longer an end but a means only—and a vulgar one. In such talk as we meet here it is impossible to make sense of knowledge “acted upon, informed, or . . . impregnated by Reason.”

“Repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom” are deeply counter-cultural in a consumerist society. We need our institutions of higher learning to be such repositories, not agents of faddish social transformation.

Contingent Vegetarianism

“Premiss [sic; I guess the Brits spell “premise” with two esses] one: we don’t need to eat animals; premiss two: eating animals in the way we now eat them causes suffering on an unimaginable scale; premiss three: eating animals in the way we now eat them is environmentally catastrophic. Conclusion: we should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them.”

Thus a reviewer summarizes a recent book, Eating Animals, that argues for (or perhaps just bears testimony to the author’s) “contingent vegetarianism.” Contingent vegetarianism is vegetarianism that the author might reconsider if we raised and slaughtered our food animals differently.

Eating is about as basic an animal activity as there is. For humans – a unity of body and spirit – it is traditionally as basic a social activity as there is, and I admire those who live out that reality still today. I want no reductionist “refueling” metaphors to dominate my view of food and the fellowship that accompanies. How and what we eat is important.

The arguments for vegetarianism of late have focused on the current realities of what we used to call “animal husbandry,” which now frankly has become “factory farming.” That’s this author’s second and third “premiss.”

But there’s at least one other argument, current when I was a young adult, that is based on the inefficiency of turning sun, water and soil into concentrated food through the bellies of beasts. For instance, Diet for a Small Planet.

Going back another generation, one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, worried a great deal about the ethics of vivisection. When did you last hear anyone worry about that? How many of you need a dictionary right now? Frankly, I need one to remember exactly what that refers to, though I know generally.

It worries me a lot that something of keen concern to a man of Lewis’s stature isn’t even on our radar screen any more. On my radar screen. Dare I suggest that we have a great capacity for tolerating ethically dubious practices that are convenient for us, from vivisection to factory farming, abortion on demand and embryonic stem cell research?

I have a metabolic disorder of longstanding, currently under control with a lot of expensive medicines, whereby a diet of almost pure meat and other animal protein (i.e., a very low carbohydrate diet) is a very attractive convenient option. It’s hard and time-consuming for me to fashion healthy meals without animal products, as we Orthodox do in Lent. I actually tend to gain weight in Lent with my “fasting,” and I frankly don’t want a lipid profile done immediately after Pascha. But I’m convinced that I could do it if I would take the time. An Orthodox friend lost his taste for meat during Lent, and now is essentially vegetarian year-round.

I could. Should I?

Afterthought: Bound up in my discomfort with factory farming is my antipathy to megacorporations generally. Tyson is not just a great producer of chicken waste, but a major political player in Arkansas – at the very least. And as the linked article shows, the factory farmers have stripped terms like “free range” of any real meaning (through the very cozy relationship megacorporations develop with their putative regulators). I’m flirting with distributist economic thought – “not fewer capitalists, but multiple more” – and I am just plain angry at bailouts of “too big to fail” corporations. So I’m not all that interested in questions like Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods; give me CitiFoods, please.