writing in today’s NYT

And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.

But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.

Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.

I think Lilla exaggerates the importance of Hobbes, but he is right to see him as one thinker in the chain of those who developed what I have called the modern moral conception of social order. A more apt founding figure for this outlook is Grotius. It sees human beings as both each pursuing their own goals, of life and prosperity, in potential conflict with others, while at the same time they are sociable, meant to live with others. Our social morality can be derived from this predicament. Those social rules are correct which can enable humans to live together; which can in other terms harmonize their projects, so that they become mutually strengthening, instead of causes of conflict and hence destruction. This is if you like a derivation of social rules from purely human considerations, and Grotius even makes the (in)famous claim that these rules would be valid, even if God didn’t exist. But in the way these ideas were worked out, in say, Locke, or Pufendorf, or the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, they were not disconnected from theology. The assumption was that God had made human beings so that they could achieve harmony by these rules, whether this was established by reason, often in a Deistic mode, or shown by Revelation (and for many people, of course, the fact that these truths were doubly guaranteed made them all the more credible). “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Where I agree with Lilla is that this new ethic of order could be detached from a theistic anchoring. It could be seen as inscribed in Nature (Jacobins), and then later as what our instincts and intuitions as they have developed in civilization suggest to us. What I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation, as it were, a crossing of a stream. Even today, our sense of this liberal order of equality, rights and democracy is sustained by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” in which people support the same principles for a host of different reasons, Kantian, utilitarian, but also theological. Now in fact, it is hard to think across these gaps; for a believer to understand an atheist, and vice versa. So people always fall into imagining that their grounds for upholding the consensus are the only valid ones. Certain people on the US right think that Christianity is the only possible basis; certain members of the liberal academy think that if you aren’t some kind of Kantian you have no good reason to believe in Liberalism. These beliefs help to generate the kind of Kulturkampf from which the US suffers. But the fact is that our civilization is anchored in widely incompatible “comprehensive views,” to use Rawls’ term. Only if you forget this can you believe that “we” have crossed a deep divide, and that we are now threatened with regression. It seems to me that the reality is more mixed and less dramatic than that.

So on “our” (modern liberal) side of the river, “political theology” has never been wholly absent, and has often been very prominent. Unless we choose to forget abolitionists in Britain and America, the Civil Right movement, all the Second World War rhetoric about “defending Christian civilization,” etc. It is more or less prominent at different times and in different milieu, but it is always there.

And symmetrically, the kinds of philosophical considerations which we rely on today were very present on the “other” shore. One has the impression at times that Lilla sees the pre-modern age as dominated by the Guises and the Münzers. There were far too many then, but then we’ve seen quite a few in our day, not just those with a “theological” outlook, but also Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Lilla never undertakes to describe the “other shore”, but the odd hints he does offer make me wonder. He speaks of contemporary recurrences to political theology as being unlike those of earlier days; they don’t “appeal to miracles, or biblical inerrancy, or divine providence, or sacred tradition.” Later he mentions “fanciful cosmologies.” But Biblical inerrancy is an invention of modern evangelical Protestantism; miracles were not standardly appealed to in political theory, even with a “divine nexus” (it’s true that they became very important in apologetics in the 18th Century, hence the punch in Hume’s deflationary arguments on this score); providence played a big role for thinkers of “British and American Liberalism,” of which Lilla says that for two centuries they “stayed well within the philosophical orbit that Hobbes had circumscribed.” This would certainly have surprised many of them.

Charles Taylor, on Mark Lilla’s *The Stillborn God*. The rest is at The Immanent Frame.

Without question, there are important human goods (especially material ones) that the United States provides more abundantly than any nation on earth, but to make too much of these goods is to misunderstand the nature of human flourishing. Many of my friends in high school and college assumed that what Americans most valued—socially, politically, or economically—was always in itself most valuable. Of course nobody would say that America contains everything of value. But sometimes Americans do seem to think that the absorbent power of democratic capitalism allows the nation to incorporate whatever is really any good about anyplace else. Why would anyone want the thickness of Indian society, when, even without it, they could have Indian engineers, saris, and samosas?

The dogma of American superiority makes many of its citizens defensive and humorless when faced with serious national failings, past or present. A too-earnest plea of extenuating circumstances or a rancorous tu quoque is generally judged sufficient, but sometimes the defense becomes more elaborate. Once in American history class, for instance, I noted the irony that the British abolished slavery before their rebellious colonies did (and without an orgy of bloodshed). In reply, someone suggested that I had ignored a counterbalancing fact: British abolitionists couldn’t invoke the natural-rights language of the Declaration of Independence.

In other words, what America officially aspires to be trumps what it demonstrably is. As Barack Obama said when he won the 2008 election, “That is the true genius of America—that America can change. Our union can be perfected.” Unlike, apparently, France, England, or Sweden.

The fervor of the republican faith naturally tends to backfire in the form of dramatic apostasies—which is why America has always produced some of the world’s fiercest anti-Americans. As the historian Walter McDougall once remarked, America is “not a lie, but a disappointment.”

But these criticisms should not obscure the fact that I feel unshakable loyalty and intense love for this country. I love the United States because I agree with Richard John Neuhaus that, on balance, considering all the alternatives, America is a force for good in the world. I am convinced that the glee many feel at the prospect of America’s fall is shortsighted idiocy.

Stefan McDaniel in First Things

The basic circularity implicit in our current moment reveals a deeply troubling truth about our current economic condition: growth is fundamentally generated by deepening and extending bad behaviors (such as indebtedness), the costs of which are to be obscured by economic growth. However, because those costs keep rising - in every sense, not only monetary, but socially, environmentally, generationally - the need for higher economic and social costs to spur greater growth, and greater growth to service and obfuscate the costs, increases exponentially. In recent years the frenetic logic of this basic truth has led us to a condition like a runner on an out-of-control treadmill, running madly to get ahead, at best standing still, at worst about to be thrown off the machine. 

We need to think here broadly about the necessity of growth in modern society. Growth, we are told, is the engine of prosperity: economic growth makes possible the “indolency of the body” that was the fundamental goal of modern philosophy. Yet, if prosperity and comfort is the goal, then “growth” is potentially, and often in fact, distinct from that goal: growth becomes its own object, undermining our capacity to enjoy any such “indolency” (as Weber noted long ago about the “Protestant ethic”) and feeds rather into a belief that there can never be a condition of satisfaction, but rather always the craving for more (see this video for hilarious confirmation of this basic fact). As Tocqueville came to understand, one of the central conditions of modernity was inquietude - “restlessness.” 

“Growth” is not necessarily, or even likely, a source of human happiness. Why is it the overarching and one univocally agreed-upon goal of our modern politics?

Patrick Deneen on Growth in What I Saw in America

Thus far, love them or hate them, U2 have been unassailable. No other rock band has lasted longer, nor made such consistently good, and often challenging, rock music, nor staged such epic and technologically cutting edge shows.

What is most intriguing - and, to their detractors, infuriating - about U2 is that they succeeded by ignoring, indeed breaking, most of the unwritten rules of rock stardom. They didn’t - with the exception of the pre-rehab Adam Clayton - do sex or drugs and, as their critics pointed out, neither did they really do rock’n’roll. They were not rebellious, nor angst-ridden, nor did they trade on adolescent alienation or anger. Instead, they did joy. And spiritual joy, to boot. This made them unfashionable in Britain, the irony capital of the world, where sincerity, especially sincerity tinged with spirituality, is seen, at best, as uncool, at worst as downright embarrassing.

“One of the reason’s for U2’s longevity,” says Brian Eno, “is that they are not in music for entirely selfish reasons. I don’t want to make them appear as evangelists, which, of course, they were seen as by some sections of the music media in the early 80s, but I do believe that they really think that what they do serves some greater purpose than simply filling their bank accounts.”

Initially, I had little time for U2, their songs, their haircuts, their Christianity. My epiphany occurred when I was sent to Rome by the NME in the summer of 1987 to interview Bono after the first gig of their European tour - The Joshua Tree tour. Put simply, it was a revelation: a rock group whose music made sense in a stadium, whose songs retained - and inspired - a kind of communal intimacy in a crowd of 60,000 people. And, boy, did Bono work that crowd. He was one part rock star, one part showbiz trouper, one part preacher man. In America, where cool is not such a reductive currency, U2 were embraced with open arms. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian