And yet, we should not despair. The desire to know and the passion for truth are hard to eradicate, and there must come a reckoning for those who seek to crush these aspirations. As was said long ago, all human beings by nature desire understanding; witness the delight that all healthy children take in hearing stories, seeing new sights, and learning the names and ways of things. Most of us, no matter how sophisticated, do not really want to be self-deceived about matters of human importance, and especially about what it means to live well. We want to see clearly; we want to appreciate the complexities and wonders and mysteries of the world and our place within it; we want to be taken seriously and to learn to live a life that makes sense. Wonder of wonders, our desire for such knowledge is matched by the (at least partial) knowability of the world, and, with effort, genuine learning is possible. Despite the lazy lure of relativism, we really do know in our bones that some opinions are truer, some books better, some lives and nations more admirable than others. And anyone who has even once tasted the exhilaration of discovery is a witness to the existence of truth and the value of seeking it.
Fortunately, we do have some educational institutions – first among them, St. John’s College – fully devoted to seeking truth and wisdom. And if we know how to look, we can find truth seekers and pockets of liberal learning even in the most decadent of institutions. Outside of the universities, other institutions still uphold the banner of truth and goodness, as did Irving Kristol’s journal, The Public Interest, and as does its replacement, National Affairs. At the American Enterprise Institute, my own current home, the president, Arthur Brooks, declared in his inspiring annual address to the staff that truth is more important than victory at AEI – though victory is also sweet.
But it is mainly evidence gained from forty years of teaching undergraduates and watching their delight in learning that sustains my belief that our intellectual and spiritual prospects are much better than we might think from listening to the nihilistic preaching of the professoriate. Despite extensive cultural rot and a shortage of edifying encouragement, American society still tosses up superb young people who want more from life, and from their teachers, than they are now getting. They understand, albeit dimly, that the open-minded yet passionate search for understanding is itself an integral part of a flourishing human life. If we treat them as better than they think they are, if we legitimize their spiritual hunger and feed it properly, they will more often than not rise to the occasion and vindicate our best hopes for them. Is it not only a matter of time before some radical young Turks rebel against their professorial elders, rejecting the sawdust and cheap tinsel of nihilism and showing again how honest concern with truth and goodness and beauty really does answer to the deepest longings of the soul? Will we not live to see the great day when serious students, with their parents’ blessings, decide to Occupy the Campus and demand real value for their time and money? We can only hope and pray so.
Our Theotropic Nature and the Virtue of Hope
Two concluding remarks, the first about religion. The discerning reader will have noticed that even in traveling only on secular terrain I have not exactly left religion behind. While deliberately avoiding any specific doctrine, I have presented a picture of our humanity that emphasizes the aspirations and longings of the human soul, aspirations that are distinctively ours because we alone among the creatures stand in the world as beings in quest of a calling. Unless and until our aspirations are crushed by the cynicism of bad teachers or by devastating defeats, we live looking for an upward path – toward worthy work, love, service, and understanding. Whether we know it or not, we are, as Irving Kristol so aptly put it describing himself, theotropic – oriented toward the divine – because we sense in ourselves and in our fellow human beings a divinelike possibility and a penchant for the good.
And that thought leads to perhaps the most important – and often misunderstood – subject of hope, the one indispensable virtue. Hope is different from optimism, a belief that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything will turn out well in the end. Hope is also more than a feeling; it is an attitude or disposition, an orientation, a way of being and holding oneself in the world. As a disposition, hope is deeper even than the sum total of our particular hopes for this or that future outcome. For even when – or perhaps especially when – specific future hopes are disappointed, the posture of hope – a strange fusion of trust, belief, and upward orientation of the will – still enables us to live and act trusting that the world is still and always the sort of place that can answer to the highest and deepest human aspirations.
In this most fundamental sense, hope is not a hope for change, but an affirmation of permanence, of the permanent possibility of a meaningful life in a hospitable world. Hope in this sense is not only a Judeo-Christian virtue. It is not only the most essential – and abundant – American virtue. It is the condition of the possibility of all human endeavor and all human fulfillment.
Yes, there is still much spiritual poverty in America. But we go forward with confidence that our spiritual hungers can yet be nurtured in this almost promised land, provided that we have the courage to insist that the well-being of the spirit is central to our notion of national success and personal flourishing. This war on poverty – on our spiritual poverty – will not add a cent to the national debt. It can enrich our lives beyond measure.
I · Love, Family, and Friendship
Some Reflections on Modern Culture
IN THE ONGOING WARS over the state of American culture, few battlegrounds have seen more action than that of “family values” – sex, marriage, and childrearing. Passions run high about sexual harassment, condom distribution in schools, pornography, abortion, gay marriage, and other efforts to alter the definition of “a family.” Many people are distressed over the record-high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, marital infidelity, and premarital promiscuity. On some issues, there is even an emerging consensus that something is terribly wrong: Though they may differ on what is to be done, people on both the left and the right have come to regard the breakup of marriage as a leading cause of the neglect, indeed, the psychic and moral maiming of America’s children.
But while various people are talking about tracking down “deadbeat dads” or reestablishing orphanages or doing something to slow the rate of divorce – all remedies for marital failure – very little attention is being paid to what makes for marital success. Still less are we attending to the ways and mores of entering into marriage, that is, to wooing or courtship.
There is, of course, good reason for this neglect. The very terms – “wooing,” “courting,” “suitors” – are archaic; and if the words barely exist anymore, it is because the phenomena have all but disappeared. Today there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony. This is true not just for the lower classes. Even – indeed, especially – the elite, who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage. There are still exceptions to be found, say, in closed religious communities or among new immigrants from parts of the world that still practice arranged marriage. But for most of America’s middle- and upper-class youth – the privileged and college-educated – there are no known social paths, explicit or even tacit, directed toward marriage. People still get married, though later, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully. People still get married in churches and synagogues, though often with ceremonies of their own creation. For the great majority, though, the way to the altar is