Anamnesis Journal

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2012 Ciceronian Society Annual Meeting.

The tools we wield – and how we wield them – necessarily shape the ways we think, feel, and live, thereby shaping who we become.  Without doubt certain material and perhaps even spiritual benefits are provided by technologically advanced civilization; unfortunately those benefits tend to mask accompanying temptations and perils.  Few have been more sensitive to these temptations and perils than English philologist and novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works often directly address the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate technê.  Which kinds of crafts and technique can help us perfect our nature?  Which kinds mar it?  Obviously a full answer to such questions is well beyond this paper, but one thing can be said:  Tolkien's narratives suggest that we must seek out wiser, better methods of generating and using power.

This paper was originally presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Ciceronian Society.

The history of scholarship on Augustine’s political theory is filled with a variety of interpretations and accusations. The passage that is most often cited as a summation of his innovation in political thought is from Book XIV of the City of God: “Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending even to contempt of self.”1 This distinction, often construed as a positing of a heavenly city beyond the boundaries and conditions of mortal life, is seen by some as a psychologically radical flight from reality. Augustine has been labeled an escapist and a staunch pessimist in his stance toward the potential good of politics, and many view his eschatological deferment of true peace as a concession to the impossibility of developing any effective political “system” or model for communal living.

When Pope Benedict XVI published Caritas in Vertitate in 2009, I was among the many who welcomed his defense of the integral dependence of charity on the substance of truth, and of truth on the gratuitous act of charity.  But I also noted that there and elsewhere, Benedict had elected to contrast this Catholic vision of authentic love with contemporary relativist skepticism.  “Without truth,” Benedict teaches, “charity degenerates into sentimentality.  Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.”1  The great danger to authentic charity is a hollowing relativism, which renders charity a sentiment emancipated from reason, and so turns it into a rudderless humanitarianism unable any longer to identify what is properly human.  But, as I wrote at the time, this contrast between a charity rooted in truth and one set adrift from it and merely hollow does not properly characterize the contrast between an authentic vision of truth and the intellectual or cultural conditions of late liberal modernity that the encyclical as a whole sets out to revive.2

An earlier version of this essay was produced for and presented at the Abbeville Institute's 2010 Scholars Conference.

January of 2011 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s sobering farewell address which counseled vigilance against the “military industrial complex.”  In his criticism of science and the industrialization of war, Eisenhower, who upon leaving office retired to a working farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, spoke as an Agrarian in his final speech.  During the address, Eisenhower reminded the nation that, prior to the Second World War, the country had no defense industry, but instead had relied upon “American makers of plowshares” to make “swords” as well.  At the same time, Eisenhower, in his insistence that American foreign policy ought to “foster progress in human achievement,” spoke as a Wilsonian idealist.1  In the end, Eisenhower’s sober-minded realism was chastened by a faith in progress and American exceptionalism.  Nevertheless, Ike’s warning serves as a reminder that, during the decades following World War II, there was, to reprise Clinton Rossiter, what might be described as a second “great train robbery of American intellectual history.”  Whereas the first, as Rossiter noted, concerned the ascendance of unfettered acquisitiveness as a conservative tenet in America during the late nineteenth century, the second, it might be said, witnessed the nefarious merging of American conservatism with unfettered warfare during the second half of the twentieth century.2  In the aftermath of the First World War, the Nashville Agrarians had striven to elaborate a traditionalist conservative response to the first of these intellectual heists while, as this essay will argue, their lineal intellectual descendant Richard Weaver, in the aftermath of World War II, endeavored to respond in kind to the second.

In his very interesting book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Steven D. Smith explains the enormous task facing those of us worried about governmental over-reach in the HHS contraception mandate.1 This was never Smith’s intention, I think, as the book was written well before the mandate, and has as its main concern to articulate why contemporary political and legal discourse is shallow, incoherent, and irrational, not only in the stump speeches but also in the land’s highest courts.