Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

America’s museums are at a crossroads. Will they be sites of civic education, centered on Americans’ shared history and principles? Or rallying points of advocacy, aiming to replace those principles with divisive identity politics?

Museums aren’t the only institutions facing such challenges. Our ultimate trajectory as a nation will be shaped by the outcomes of a multitude of disputes. Those skeptical of some of America’s principles have gained influence in government and in higher and lower education, the military, the family, and throughout our civic associations. But museums and historic sites deserve special attention right now: they have not been overrun yet, which presents us with both an opportunity and an urgent need.

How we preserve and tell the American story at sites like Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Colonial Williamsburg will help decide whether Americans will remain a self-governing people, since forming such a people is one of the main purposes of museums. Civic education promotes responsibility and gratitude, while advocacy that rejects the ideas of the American Founding tends to encourage a revolutionary impulse and feelings of resentment for past errors. Museums can provide occasions to unite around our inheritance and republican principles. Considering the importance of America’s history reminds and prompts us to assume our obligation to ensure America’s perpetuation.

 

The State of Affairs

George Washington’s Mount Vernon (run by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association) is an excellent example of how a museum can function as a site for civic education. When visitors go through the mansion, an entire museum, and education center detailing Washington’s accomplishments, they leave with an appreciation for the remarkable character of America’s general. The interactive exhibits put young people in Washington’s shoes, which invites them to be deliberative citizens who consider political questions and reach their own conclusions. Mount Vernon tells the American story fairly and objectively, rightly incorporating the chapter on slavery, while giving Washington his due and strictly adhering to historical standards.

James Madison’s Montpelier (operated by The Montpelier Foundation), on the other hand, discourages civic deliberation by pushing a political narrative on visitors. The site omits pertinent facts and, in crucial instances, Madison’s own words. Some exhibits sweepingly condemn the Founders and Madison for having owned slaves, without adequately addressing their myriad contributions to our nation. While Madison is discussed during a portion of the house tour and through a brief video in the visitor’s center, no exhibits cover the deeds of the man commonly referred to as the Father of the Constitution, and of the Bill of Rights, which Madison introduced in the first federal Congress. The sole exhibit on the Constitution paints it as pro-slavery. The one for children is a dispiriting display on race and slavery, housing a book that prompts children to imagine themselves as aggressors, whipping someone until he is bloodied.

 

Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg are mixed bags. Monticello lacks exhibits focused on Thomas Jefferson’s political accomplishments; he was president, vice president, secretary of state, governor, drafter of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. Most discouraging is the absence of a proper examination of the Declaration of Independence, America’s “rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” as Lincoln put it. In turn, Colonial Williamsburg is losing its own story: what the American Revolutionaries did there and what makes the town unique. But, even though these sites omit crucial historical details about the founding, they still offer some good content and are not beyond saving.

Montpelier, the National Trust for Historic Preservation (the organization that owns Montpelier and 26 other sites), and Monticello are all seeking new leadership. Who is selected will tell us much, and determine much, about their trajectory and that of the museum industry.

Republican Aims

Mount Vernon and Montpelier represent fundamental disagreements over the purpose of education and the character of our nation. Civic education centered on republican principles promotes unity, deliberation, responsibility, and gratitude. But far-left ideology requires advocacy, as it asserts that society is composed of power structures in need of dismantling. Reframing history is one step that activists take in pursuing a false sense of equity and justice.

This push for historical reeducation is reflected in the language used by national museum associations. For example, the American Alliance of Museums, which boasts 35,000 members (individuals and organizations), contends that teaching history is not sufficient. Instead, museums should “champion an anti-racist movement” to create a “more just and equitable world.” James French, who maneuvered to become chairman of the Montpelier board last year (and has since left the post while still serving on the board), has also commented that “museums such as Montpelier are dominated by people who look like Madison.” French believes that this must change, and that “[t]he change in the power structure then allows us to affect how public history is presented. And public history is really important.”

French is correct about one thing: public history is really important. Civic education doesn’t just happen in the classroom or cease upon graduation from high school. Museums and historic sites are unique places where multiple generations of Americans, who went to different schools and grew up in various parts of the country, can come together to rediscover their commonalities, the principles and history that formed the American character. Presidential homes, aside from being museums that house relics, can offer our children the reflective and reverential experience of standing in the same room where Abraham Lincoln considered the Emancipation Proclamation or James Madison envisioned the structure and potential of the Constitution.

Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings. Whitewashing is its own kind of propaganda, discouraging deliberation—and so it is inconsistent with the civic virtues needed to sustain a free society. But solely focusing on flaws demoralizes our children, forming them into citizens deprived of the gratitude for and proper pride in accomplishment.

The false promises of victimhood and resentment have never made anyone gracious, honorable, or happy. We want our children to navigate this world with spirited strength and the resolve of being able to contribute to a purpose greater than themselves: to an experiment that depends on their character.

That is the promise of the American Founding. When our children, as Lincoln explained, look

through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

We assume our civic responsibility when we realize that the Declaration’s maxim of human equality invites our participation, that America is a continuous, rather than a stagnant, story of hope. We have certainly had our setbacks and committed our sins, and that is part of the story. But our contributions to the cause of human freedom are significant, and America’s overall trajectory, despite its ebbs and flows, has been toward a greater realization of our principles.

 

That progression was renewed by Lincoln and his generation of soldiers, and it was originally made possible by the Founders who first declared our national purpose and creed: the idea that “all men are created equal.” The hope of America is not simply in those principles, but in the American people themselves. There is hope in the fact that we are asked to join in the experiment in self-government, to prove to ourselves, and to the world, that we are worthy of preserving it and perhaps even further perfecting it. But our institutions must cultivate these virtues, and as storytellers of our history, museums bear unique responsibility in fostering citizens capable of deliberation and self-government.

Historic sites like Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, and Colonial Williamsburg are places that connect America, from Pennsylvania to Virginia. The Miracle of Philadelphia—the Constitution—has its symbolic birthplace in Virginia, and largely through the mind of James Madison. The primary purpose of the document he imagined is to protect and form a nation of citizens capable of self-government, “to ensure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” That is the shared aim of our historic sites.

In this time of immense political discord, we must choose whether to defend the birthplaces of our national character, so that they may remain in the hearts of our children. We are worthy of fulfilling Madison’s vision for this nation and are capable of the demands of self-government.

How Should Conservatives Respond to Revolution?

Note from the editor: this essay is based on a recent talk our editor-in-chief R. J. Snell gave to an audience of college-age conservatives about the current moment. It also includes some commentary on the students’ response, as well as Snell’s advice for them and for conservatives more broadly. For a bit of context, the first part of the talk, not included in this essay, was a summary and exposition of Russell Kirk’s 1974 book, The Roots of American Order. A version of that excised section, first written in 2014, is available to read here.

We know that conservatives find themselves in a fractious moment. The old alliances of the Reagan era have frayed. New ideas and schools of thought abound, with all the tensions and arguments and (sometimes) exasperations natural to moments of rethinking and rebuilding. It is no longer 2014, and the conversation in conservative circles has changed considerably since then. In 2014 no one said “President Trump,” and the smart money was on Jeb. The Flight 93 essay was still two years in the future. No one thought David French-ism was either good or bad. The consensus might have died but people were polite enough not to mention it, and we wouldn’t know why liberalism had failed for another four years. Drag Time Story Hour hadn’t yet formally begun. There was a bronze age pervert but no one cared, and integralism existed only in dusty, unread manuals. A lot has happened in these years, to put it mildly.

In fact, so much has changed that the story told by Russell Kirk in The Roots of America Order reads a bit like a eulogy for America. When we hear a eulogy, after all, we expect an emphasis on the virtues of the deceased and a bit of window dressing on their shortcomings. But given the current mood, Kirk’s story can read like a sanitized account of an America that no longer exists, if it ever did. Rather than “ordered liberty,” the terms which might better describe reality would include the following: carnage, emergency, crisis, depravity, degradation, decadence, collapse, malaise, illegitimacy, and Benedict Option. Many believe  it is time for conservatives to reject civility, neutrality, free speech, originalism, fusionism, separation of Church and state, liberalism, right liberalism (and especially boomer liberalism), little platoons, localism, and bow ties. Neither Great Books nor the Constitution are going to save us, and politics isn’t downstream of culture. Moreover, instead of Locke, Madison, and Jefferson, we ought (apparently) to read Donoso Cortes, Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and the Hungarians. (If those names are unfamiliar to you, trust me when I say they are familiar to young, restless conservatives of the moment.)

The young experience not order, but disorder: drugs, deaths of despair, tent camps, fatherlessness, the lowest rates of marriage ever, non-replacement levels of birthrates, ubiquitous pornography (and of the most violent and vulgar sort), corrupt and rotten institutions, failed education systems, pointless (but utterly expensive) colleges and universities, crushing student loan debt and inability to purchase a house, gig economies, rust belt towns, miserably incompetent elites, wokism, DEI, the collapse of religion, the absence of marriageable men, the suppression of the Latin Mass, endless war, the national debt, and open borders and open markets. Zombie Reaganism and the neocons are not going to help us now, they think.

We are no longer the yeoman farmers of Jefferson or the commercial republicans of Hamilton but instead an unhealthy, enervated, exhausted, alienated, numbed populace zoned out on the filth produced by our anti-culture. Only the blind, the foolish, the RINO, the Boomer, and the cuck think otherwise. It’s time to get red-pilled, Claremonstered, #tradwifed, and out of the Longhouse! (That last line received quite a cheer from a sizable group of young men at the event. So sizable I read the line again, to another cheer, and then chastised them for doing so; they shouldn’t cheer for such ideas. The women, notably, did not cheer.) Some of this is perhaps understandable, but some of it leads to accepting vile ideas beyond the pale of decency.

 

Conservatism has fractured into many stories, each vying tremendously with each other. All these ideas are being embraced or repudiated, and there is much passion about it all. It makes sense that this is so. Things do seem to have fallen apart, the center does seem wobbly, and some older conservative institutions and policies are non-responsive to current needs. This is natural: when many, especially many of the young, feel the status quo is failing, a variety of new theories and positions will emerge, each attempting to reframe the story, capture imaginations, and win arguments and votes. This is to be expected, even welcomed. Fences need to be painted from time to time so they don’t rot; conservatives shouldn’t refuse to paint out of some strange nostalgia for the status quo. Conservatives are not ideologues, but inclined to cautious empiricism in politics, embracing what is sensible, workable, moral and decent, but without demanding perfection or stasis. If what we’ve been doing and thinking no longer responds, the genuine conservative does something better. The creation of a decent society never stops, and didn’t stop in 1776, 1989 or 2014.

With schools and camps arguing and competing, times like ours can be exciting, or exasperating, or enraging. That, too, is perfectly normal, and can even end up being a source of new life, energy, alliances, and policies if we manage to avoid tearing ourselves to shreds. I, for one, mostly welcome it, although I do wish we could dispute arguments rather than persons—but ad hominems are also to be expected. Conservatives realize we live in a time of revolution, of wildness, and as the revolution continues its monstrous but endless destruction, our own responses will be incomplete and even confused. That is to be expected. Conservatives don’t long nostalgically for a world no longer existing, but attempt to live in  ordered liberty, find the truth of being, realize the common good, and embrace a disposition of joy, gratitude, and delight.

As younger conservatives know, conservatism cannot simply continue as it has been operating. Rather than “natural conservatism,” something else is required of us:

. . . [A] conscious conservatism, a clearly principled restatement in new circumstances of philosophical and political truth. This conscious conservatism cannot be a simple piety, although in a deep sense it must have piety towards the constitution of being. Nevertheless in its consciousness it necessarily reflects a reaction to the rude break the revolution has made in the continuity of human wisdom. It is called forth by a sense of the loss which that cutting off has created. It cannot now be identical with the natural conservatism towards which it yearns. The world in which it exists is the revolutionary world. … [T]he revolution has destroyed … that tradition; the delicate fabric can never be re-created in the identical form; its integral character has been destroyed. The conscious conservatism of a revolutionary or post-revolutionary era faces problems inconceivable to the natural conservatism of a prerevolutionary time.

We have the burden and vocation of living in a moment of revolution; it can very much seem there is not much left to conserve, at times. Our task is to constitute a more self-aware, conscious, articulate account of who we are and what it is we are trying to do; to be intelligent rather than committed to the status quo, to be forward looking rather than attempting to instantiate a supposedly glorious past. Doing so will feel disorienting, experimental, and more risk-taking than conservatives find comfortable. It will also require us to argue with each other, making our case with each other—which will be also against each other, in many ways. But unless the revolution simply collapses under its own illogic, devours itself, fails to stop converting our children, loses its monopoly on our institutions, or decides to play fair—and none of this looks very likely—then we find ourselves in a position of rebuilding.

 

The author I quoted above is Frank Meyer, the famous fusionist who worked tirelessly, along with William F. Buckley, Jr. and others, to put together a fusion of anticommunists, antistatists, and social conservatives in the 1950s through 1970s. It is precisely his fusionism that has fallen apart, which became the so-called dead consensus many young conservatives find zombified. I am not trying to sneak in the old fusionism as if it were new again, not at all. Perhaps the old fusionism is dead and buried, and not a moment too soon; perhaps many moments too late. But if you read a history of that time, say by George Nash, you realize the arguments and inventions of theories, personas, and schools happening now is not so different from then. They were dealing with Revolution and so could not simply repeat what they had been doing; so, too, us. They had to decide who could be legitimate conversation partners and who, like Ayn Rand or the Birchers, were not going to be acceptable interlocutors; so, too, us. They had to decide what was principle and what was preference, what could be compromised and what must be maintained; so, too, us. I’m not suggesting we take Meyer’s solution, but, rather, that we acknowledge we live in the midst of a terrible revolution, and struggle to form a new, intelligent, responsive, and responsible conservatism to preserve the most precious things against those who wish to rend and tear and ruin.

In our experiments we can expect post-liberalism, and post-post-liberalism; we can expect originalism, in new and varied forms, but also common good constitutionalism. There will be variants of traditionalism. We can expect proponents of national industrial policy as well as those who roll their eyes. Natalists will look to support the having and rearing of children, and others see governmental action as inefficient and a moral hazard. All this is to be expected; all of this is to be welcomed, in some ways. We are thinking again. We are attempting to respond. We are attempting a struggle against a dehumanizing revolution—but we are all attempting to overcome the same common threat. City building isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that calm.

At the same time, in our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own. Guardrails are required, and some positions should not be legitimized. We should react with uncompromising scorn when we hear proposals to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment or disenfranchise Jewish people. These are not acceptable proposals. Kinism and ethnic nationalism are not acceptable proposals and should be rejected root and branch. Sneering references about the longhouse or satirical tones about the dignity of women are not acceptable. Any form of Nietzscheanism, the metaphysics of violence, and aristocrats of the soul is not acceptable. Revolution is not overcome with revolution. Wildness not undone with wildness.

Also, we’re not rationalists. We certainly believe in reason and reason’s capacity to know the good and true, but we realize the domains of metaphysics and logic differ from the domain of politics. Axioms and geometrical deductions work well in some human endeavors, but not at all in the political—or at least not without tyranny, violence, totalization, and the trampling down of the very thing conservatives most value, the integrity of the human person and the drama of their own responsible action. There are no five-year plans to perpetual justice or the messianic age; no theories of the city in speech which simply map on to actual cities; no common good to instantiate without the long, difficult, tentative, and modest work of reality-based governance. This kind of governance seeks the common good in a way it can actually exist in this city, in this time, with these people, under these conditions. There’s no magical solution, no panacea, no scheme of rationality, no blueprint, and no merely human ruler sent by God to bring about the eschaton in this vale of tears. It is as it ever was: prudence, seriousness, intelligence, gratitude, reverence, law, virtue, patience, forgiveness, forbearance, dependence, order, and responsible freedom. Those are good things. Think on them.

"The View" gets it wrong: Marjorie Taylor Greene must be covered — not ignored — by the media

The ladies of "The View" argued that extremists like Lauren Boebert and MTG should be ignored

Contempt, Inquiry, and Rational Disagreement: Learning from Aquinas in the Internet Age

The seventeenth-century mathematician, philosopher, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal once remarked, “The truth is so obscured these days that only those who love it will find it.”

Living at the advent of modernity, a time characterized by great ideological contests among and within philosophy, religion, science and politics, Pascal was quite aware of two facts about human beings. First, the need for truth is woven into the deepest impulses of our being. Second, the truth is not easy to ascertain. In many cases, the subject matter itself is difficult. But Pascal here speaks of truth being obscured, as if there were deliberate obstacles being placed before us. These obstacles are not just external forces that seek to deceive us. They are also internal, having to do with our own vices and disordered passions, our penchant for preferring our own fantasies over facts and our own will over that of others. If we have an impulse toward truth, we also cultivate impulses to evade the truth, even the truth about ourselves.

Fake news, irate passion, and violence are regular parts of our political life these days. Trapped in our ideological cul-de-sacs, eager to do battle with opponents in the disembodied world of social media, our default position is that anyone who disagrees with us must be both malicious and fatuous. Surveys show that there has been a marked decline in rich, personal friendships; meanwhile, civic friendship has been replaced by civic odium. We increasingly inhabit a culture of contempt. In response, there has been a great deal of talk about the decline in the quality of our public discourse. Thoughtful books on these topics abound, including Teresa Bejan’s Mere Civility, Danielle Allen’s Talking To Strangers, Arthur Brooks’s Love Your Enemies, Ben Sasse’s Them, Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, and Aurelian Craiutu’s Faces of Moderation.

In this essay, I want to consider an element that usually drops out in the focus on civility: the habits, strategies, and methods necessary to seek truth and—as Pascal would have us do—to love it. That’s different from the goal of consensus, which is quite often desirable, if only rarely achieved. A more achievable goal would be rational disagreement, for which in our public life we currently often substitute irrational vituperation. Rational disagreement is an integral part of the pursuit of truth.

For guidance on these matters, I am going to turn to what may seem an unlikely source: Thomas Aquinas. At first glance, Aquinas may seem to advocate a model of reasoning that is highly abstract, a matter of moving from self-evident principles through lucid deductions to unimpeachable conclusions. That would seem to have little to do with rational disagreement or with the messy, passion-inflected give and take of public discourse. But this impression is misleading. In reality, Aquinas has a great deal to teach us about rational disagreement, and about the character traits that assist or hamper the pursuit of truth, especially the pursuit of truth in concert with others.

 

The (Anti-) Social Scene

A chilling scene from George Orwell’s 1984, the “Two Minutes Hate,” nicely captures the mood and culture of much of contemporary cable news and social media. The description of the practice of the ritual venting of animosity toward political enemies runs thus:

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The posture of contempt is a radical defense mechanism, a way of making sure that we are not taken in by the ideology of our opponents on crucial, divisive matters. But it also renders us blind to the weaknesses in our own views. What’s more, it is contagious. Unchecked, it will infect all areas of human life and thought.

This posture also contributes to inaccurate estimations of political opponents. A recent study from the Brookings Institution entitled “The Perception Gap” “explores how Americans have a distorted understanding of people on the other side of the aisle.” It is not surprising, with the growth of partisan animosity, that erroneous opinions about political opponents have increased. What is surprising are the following results: the disconnection with reality was highest among “the best educated and most politically interested,” who “are more likely to vilify their political adversaries than their less educated, less tuned-in peers.” In other words, the least engaged and least politically active came the closest to having an accurate view of their opponents. Many self-proclaimed active and informed citizens are a far cry from the sort lauded in the Federalist Papers.

The mainstreaming of extremism, the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories, and the ease with which we can retreat to like-minded technological communities render our political discourse both vindictive and shallow. The isolation that so many experience as a defining fact of their lives increases the need for belonging through ideological identification and for connection through social media. These conditions exacerbate unhealthy tendencies that have always plagued us as human beings.

The Christian tradition has always been acutely aware of these tendencies, which are borne out by research in contemporary moral psychology. In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that, contrary to our perception of ourselves as fair-minded rational agents, we are in fact largely dominated by passions and unexamined assumptions, in defense of which we expend a great deal of effort. “We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves,” Haidt writes. We rarely start with a dispassionate examination of evidence and then move to conclusions. Rather, Haidt continues, we “make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.” Underscoring the social influence on our thinking, Haidt concludes, “Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.”

Another significant problem here is that we think we are free when we are not. Technology may be making it more difficult for us to distinguish between freedom and manipulation. In his 2016 book, The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, Matthew Crawford reflects on the fact that, in a world dominated by technology, activity on screens and interaction through social media substitutes for encounters with the real world around us. The mode of interaction with the virtual world puts before us the tantalizing possibility of what he calls a “frictionless universe,” one in which we are presented with few or no obstacles to our will. Crawford effectively deploys Freud’s contrast between the pleasure principle, most characteristic of infants and children, and the reality principle, in which adults learn to navigate various ways in which the world and other persons push back against our will. A frictionless universe is one in which we are liberated from the reality principle, in which the world ceases to push back against our will and technology reduces to the vanishing point the gap between “I want it” and “it appears.” That’s just how Tolkien describes the similarity between magic and technology: both offer instantaneous satisfaction of wants.

When we seem most unencumbered in our online activity, apparently most free to get what we want, we are also most prey to algorithms, to advertising, and to the influence of groupthink. The feeling of freedom is no guarantee of actual freedom. This is especially true of our assumption that our preferences express “a welling-up of the authentic self.” As Crawford, warns, “Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data.”

 

Aspiring to Rational Disagreement: Three Key Steps

What are the remedies for these obstacles to truth? I’d like to turn now to Aquinas and consider his accounts, first, of rational inquiry, which aims at least partly at rational disagreement, and, second, the role of habits and passions in our communal pursuit of truth.

One of the defining features of Aquinas’s mode of inquiry, one that students find both frustrating and tedious, is his voracious habit for objections. The disputed question mode of argument, popular in the nascent universities of the West and a pervasive feature of Aquinas’s most well-known work, The Summa Theologiae, has a determinate structure. Thomas begins with the posing of a question; then he offers a list of objections to his own position; then he resolves the question; finally, he returns to the objections and responds to them.

What seems artificial to us is but a snapshot of the very lively and highly contentious form of public disputation in the medieval universities. Josef Pieper once insightfully remarked that the disputed question is a distant offspring of the Platonic dialogue. For Thomas, the ample consideration of objections is a necessary condition of rational inquiry.

In fact, I would argue that there are at least three degrees of, or stages in, rational argumentation for Aquinas. It is good to make a rigorous argument—an argument in which the conclusion or thesis is clear, the evidence or premises used to reach the conclusion are lucidly articulated, and the connections among the premises are made evident. But it is even more convincing to add to such an argument a consideration of objections—the stronger, the better. The notion that one would go in search of strong arguments against one’s own position is counter-intuitive only to those who see argument as a weapon for defeating opponents or as a tool for the quick scoring of points. It is an indispensable element in any serious pursuit of truth.

Aquinas’s mode of proceeding may seem overly intellectual, almost disembodied, as if we were living in a realm of pure ideas. Yet clarity and rigor of argument do not mean that we are operating without passion or conviction. By all accounts, Aquinas seems to have had an equable disposition. Even so, at times he cannot avoid expressing displeasure, frustration, or jubilation. For the error of identifying God with prime matter, he calls David of Dinant stultissimus, which we might translate as “colossally stupid.” In a legend dear to G. K. Chesterton, while dining at the royal court, Aquinas interrupted the convivial conversation by slamming his fist on the table and yelling, “That will refute the Manicheans!”

Thomas seems to be most exasperated by views that have three characteristics: a) they are about matters that matter a great deal, b) they are positions he is quite confident are false, and c) they are nonetheless supported by very complicated and in many ways impressive arguments.

 

Take, for example, the view of the Islamic philosopher Averroes concerning the unity of the agent intellect. This view would undermine the possibility of personal immortality and bears on the question of moral responsibility. Early and often, Aquinas rebuts the position, often with great vigor. He tries to show not just that the view is contrary to the explicit teaching of the faith but also that it is contrary to reason and to the texts of Aristotle. He even devotes an entire work to this topic alone. Aquinas is not above voicing his displeasure at Averroes’s position, going so far as to label him a “perverter” of Aristotelian philosophy.

It is worth noting what Aquinas does not do. He does not ignore Averroes. He does not seek to have his books banned. He does not simply invoke authority in an effort to forestall further debate or to reach a peremptory judgment. In fact, he returns to the topic repeatedly. What’s more, each time, he constructs different arguments, sometimes completely of his own devising, on behalf of Averroes’s position. For all this disagreement on this particular issue, he is more than willing to embrace other positions of Averroes and even to model his own commentaries on Aristotle after those of Averroes, who is called The Commentator.

The appetite for objections contrary to his own position is, for Aquinas, a requirement of the pursuit of truth. It is a practice intrinsic, not accidental, to the quest for knowledge. As he says in a number of places, it is impossible to untie a knot of which one is ignorant.

The path toward truth is through one difficulty after another. In the examination of difficulties, we will find ourselves both learning from and disagreeing with others. One of the suggestions that Aquinas makes about how such conversations might best proceed occurs early in the Summa Contra Gentiles (I, 2), where he urges that in disagreeing with an opponent, it is best to begin from some sort of common ground. He states that with Christian heretics, we share the New Testament as a basis for debate; with members of the Jewish faith, the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures; and with all others, we have recourse to reason, which we share with everyone. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive points of departure. One can argue with Christian heretics using all three. The strongest arguments are those that come from within the position of one’s interlocutor. To be able to make such arguments in a convincing way can be quite difficult and is often possible only after one has learned the alternative position in a fairly deep and comprehensive way. In turn, this can require that we learn to see whatever question we are considering from a perspective quite different from the one we currently have.

Beyond clarity of argument and the response to objections, Aquinas offers something further in his account of rational disagreement. We can see it in his admiration for Aristotle’s mode of proceeding in the first book of the Physics, where Aristotle examines the nature of change. He begins by considering the received opinions about the matter, both those latent in common belief and ordinary language, and those that have been defended by philosophers. This is a common practice in Aristotle. It rests on the supposition that truth is like the proverbial door that no one can fail entirely to hit. I won’t take you through all the arguments, but he ends up arguing for a position that he thinks salvages the reality in our experience of both endurance and change. At the end, he doesn’t simply say, “I’ve made my arguments; that’s it.” He returns to the two most influential, inherited philosophical opinions about change: that of Parmenides, who through an analysis of the meaning of being and non-being insists that there is no such thing as change, and that of Heraclitus, who observes that all things are in flux and hence defends the view that permanence or endurance is an illusion. Aristotle takes the time at the end to go back over these positions, to sort out what is true from what is false in them, and then to explain how it is that they each depart from the truth. Presenting his own position as that which encompasses what is true in the positions of his rivals and showing where and why they go astray is the most convincing kind of argument.

So, in Aquinas, we can discern three stages in argumentation that enable rational disagreement: the giving of straightforward arguments, the consideration of objections (the stronger, the better), and the providing of an account of where and why rival positions differ from one’s own.

There is a further step, I’d like to suggest, in Aquinas’s account of rational disagreement, one that is quite close to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the rationality of traditions. In a work like the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas seeks not only to give convincing arguments and to respond to objections. He is also interested in offering a comprehensive account of philosophy and theology as an integrated pursuit of wisdom, an account that engages and seeks to surpass the accounts found in the most ambitious philosophical and theological texts of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. He seeks to show where and why he disagrees with these various traditions of wisdom.

Now, such an ambitious model of rational disagreement might seem to be only relevant at rare periods in human history when there is enough in common to aspire to bring varied traditions together in this way. Interestingly, Cardinal Ratzinger proposes that the engagement of wisdom traditions is likely to be the most fruitful path for the development of natural law discourse in the modern world. In much of contemporary society, he notes, the very grounds for morality have been weakened and the conception of nature, on which Thomistic natural law rests, has been “capsized.” Ratzinger issues a caution to the excessive optimism of those who would seek to deploy natural law in the public square as a basis for moral or political consensus. Rather, he proposes that we recover natural law as surfacing in various communities or traditions, what he calls wisdom traditions. In his marvelous summary of Ratzinger on natural law, Russell Hittinger writes that the result is a “new emphasis on natural law . . . as a search or path.” The fruits of such an approach can be seen in the recent book, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Trialogue, written by David Novak, Matthew Levering, and Anver Emon.

 

Careful Thinking Demands Care with Language

Few of us might have the opportunity or need to develop all the elements in Aquinas’s account of rational persuasion, though we can all aim for clarity and make the effort to examine objections to our views. But there is another feature of Aquinas’s approach that is relevant to all of us nearly all of the time.

Aquinas spends a great deal of time on what we might be tempted to call “grammar”: the clarification of the different senses or meanings of words. He is not inclined to think that all our disagreements are merely verbal. Still, he realizes that many of them are—or, at least, their resolution is greatly assisted by making distinctions about the meaning and scope of terms. Becoming reflective about the words we use can help loosen up the sedimentation that often afflicts our language. Sedimentation can have a variety of causes; perhaps our language has become overly and artificially technical or riddled with clichés and jargon. Clarifying terms helps us to frame the difficulty or problem in as clear a manner as possible.

In an essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” written long before the advent of social media, George Orwell has some pertinent observations about the decline of public discourse. Orwell highlights for us the danger of a kind of passivity with respect to the common language, the way in which a certain laziness with language atrophies the imagination and paralyzes thought. What sounds like a mere matter of style, mere rhetorical ornament, is for Orwell a matter of taking ownership of our own writing and thus of our own thinking. The habits he urges upon us have especially to do with skills of articulation, but these are inseparable from skills or virtues of inquiry and discovery. The realization that I don’t know exactly what I want to say or how to say it can generate questions: What do I think about this? What should I think? Why?

In a lesson that is spelled out in greater and more dramatic detail in his famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell insists that if we don’t consciously use language, language will use us. Others can seize on the sloppiness or deceptiveness of language to use it and us for their own aims. Passivity in our writing allows ready-made phrases to “construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

Such self-appropriation of language is particularly needed when we are in the grips of a ready-made vocabulary. Partisan discourse, whether in the form of the jargon of a particular philosophical school, in the catch-phrases of the social sciences, or in the clichés of approbation and derision of political movements, can all too easily control our thinking and speaking. Graduate students in philosophy, for example, would be well advised to learn how to explain their work in ways that are accessible to non-experts, to undergraduate students, and to those who inhabit different philosophical systems.

What Orwell is calling for in our writing, what Aquinas, in his varied modes of reasoning, is what the contemporary British philosopher, Bernard Williams, calls the virtue of accuracy, “a desire for truth for its own sake—a passion for getting it right.” Williams, who died in 2003, was a notoriously captious thinker, an agnostic and a skeptic of large claims in philosophy. Yet late in his life, in the book Truth and Truthfulness, Williams sought to provide a positive account of truth. He was concerned that we were entering an era, both in the wider culture and in academia, of a crisis of truthfulness, of a decline in truth-conducing practices.

 

Internal Obstacles to the Pursuit of Truth

In his analysis of the obstacles to accuracy, Williams turns our attention from external to internal obstacles to rational discourse, to the sorts of obstacles Jon Haidt and Pascal are fond of pointing out. Williams highlights laziness and a host of “desires and wishes” that “subvert the acquisition of true belief.” Thus, in addition to methods of investigation, accuracy also has to do with the will and the passions, with our penchant for self-deception and fantasy.

Aquinas seems to have an overly optimistic view of what reason can accomplish, as if it could operate in an unhindered way simply through practice. Yet he has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. In fact, he argues, for example, that we can hate the truth. Since our souls are naturally ordered to truth and goodness, it would seem that we cannot hate what it true. Aquinas counters that hatred is possible under certain conditions, namely, “when a particular truth . . . is considered as hurtful and repugnant.” Such conditions obtain when we strongly wish that something were not true, especially in cases where the acknowledgment of its veracity would get in the way of our fulfilling some desire. In another way, we can hate the truth when it concerns something about ourselves that we prefer would remain hidden. Aquinas quotes Augustine’s Confessions: we “love truth when it enlightens,” but “hate it when it reproves.” The aversion to truth exhibits itself in “blindness of mind,” evident in our turning away, sometimes quite deliberately, from a relevant truth or fact.

Such blindness can lead us to be unjust to others in ways that run from the innocuous to the heinous—a position Aquinas develops in his discussion of the vice of suspicion. Aquinas calls suspicion a “perversity or disorder of the affections” that has to do with thinking ill of someone based on “slight indications” or what we might call insufficient evidence. That’s a pretty apt description of the default disposition of many who are active on social media. In its gravest forms, suspicion involves the judgment that someone is evil, on the basis of flimsy evidence.

The vice of envy, which is rooted in sorrow over another’s good fortune, can also play a role here. What makes us sad is the alleged harm to our honor or good name caused by the good fortune of another. If justice looks to the good of the other, injustice, particularly in the vice of envy, is preferring my own good name or honor over what others deserve. This turning of the world in upon oneself, in an inaccurate estimate of one’s own worth and one’s own desires, is a source of injustice. Such a perversion of the just estimation of others can occur not just on an individual level but also on a communal one, when I prefer the good of my group, precisely because it is mine or ours, to the good of other groups or parties. The danger here is that we consider the truth to be our possession or our right and thus become envious when the argument of another is superior.

The interesting thing about our current divisions in relation to Aquinas is that he would recognize a basis for justified fear of opponents. And we are indeed fearful. A recent Pew survey reveals that 72 percent of adults think that, on the issues that matter to them, their side in politics has been losing more often than winning. Just 24 percent say their side has been winning more often than losing. The accuracy of such statements is less at issue than the fact that each side thinks this way. We on both sides are prone to apocalyptic pronouncements about what will happen if the other side wins. These are likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Each action on one side generates an opposite and exponentially greater reaction on the other.

Aquinas actually has something to say about such cases, and it is not hopeful. In the discussion of suspicion above, I skipped one type, which arises from “long experience” and can be justifiable. What if our suspicion is justified? What if it’s based on long experience or at least on sufficient evidence? In an odd twist, Aquinas finds in the high level of our mutual hostility grounds for justified fear of opponents. Aquinas identifies a type of envy, rooted in sorrow over another’s good fortune. Unlike the cases of envy that we mentioned above, in this case, the advance in another’s good fortune occasions sorrow because “it threatens to be an occasion of harm to” us, “as when a man grieves for his enemy’s prosperity, for fear” that “he may do him some harm.” Aquinas comments, “such like sorrow is not envy, but rather an effect of fear, as the Philosopher states (Rhet. ii, 9).” The divisions are great, and each battle, each election seems an all-or-nothing proposition in which if one side wins, it promises destruction of the other side. Aquinas would say fear is justified in this situation.

 

Joy, Inquiry, and Friendship in the Face of Irrational Incivility

The presence of feared evils or the prospect of their imminent arrival breeds sadness. If the sadness is not dispelled, it generates anger, a welling up of the powers of the soul in opposition to the present evil and the desire to defeat or evade it. It doesn’t take much observation of present-day America to see that we are a people consumed by anger. With Aquinas’s help, we might also see that the anger rests on deep pools of sadness, a depressing sense of isolation, loss, and fear.

Now, Aquinas does not think that anger is always evil. In fact, there are occasions when it is the appropriate response to evil. Still, he adds a warning from Gregory the Great: “We must beware lest, when we use anger as an instrument of virtue, it overrule the mind . . . instead of following in reason’s train, ever ready . . . to obey.” He also observes that anger is mostly useful in situations in which the evil can be directly vanquished by action. In cases in which we have to endure evils, the virtues of patience and hope are more important than anger.

I’d like to propose one other remedy to our divisive, sorrowful, angry culture. We can seek out those with different views who nonetheless have a genuine interest in truth and engage with them in a difficult but joyful pursuit. We can also seek to embody the standards of Aquinas on rational inquiry even in our interaction with those with whom we largely agree. Now, the paucity of folks with a love of truth may mean that the shared pursuit of truths across ideological lines will be rare, but we should also realize that the paucity is likely present on all sides, not just on the side of those with whom we disagree, perhaps even in our own souls.

This practice will not provide a quick fix for our political malaise. Nonetheless, the cultivation of such friendships can aid us in our individual and communal pursuit of truth, reshaping us into people who earnestly love the truth.

Myside Bias, Social Media, and the Malaise of Democratic Deliberation

For at least four U.S. presidential cycles, those involved and concerned with the American political landscape have lamented the threats to, as well as the loss of, the deliberative democratic spirit. And this is happening at the same time that, as Scott Aiken and Robert Talisse pointed out in The Critique in 2017, “contemporary democracy […]

Why the Super Bowl Is Good for America

Shadi Hamid is a man of The Establishment. His credentials include being a professor of Islamic studies, a senior fellowship at the august, center-left Brookings Institution, and a gig as a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Joe Kent ran on taking down that establishment. The retired Green Beret and Gold Star husband won his primary for a semi-rural congressional district in Washington state by unapologetically going full MAGA, before losing in the general election by 2,656 votes, the biggest election night upset of 2022.

Hamid and Kent’s views have little in common, save one contrarian impulse—they both find America’s love affair with professional sports annoying, if not downright deleterious.

Last month, as the Philadelphia Eagles punched their ticket to this weekend’s Super Bowl, Hamid found himself in a curmudgeonly mood: “The idea of (publicly) wearing a jersey and orienting your whole day around getting excited about a game where people run into each other with helmets is vaguely annoying,” he posted in a since-deleted tweet.

Likewise, Kent was sufficiently annoyed by the “bread and circuses” aspect of last year’s Super Bowl to vent his frustrations. How can people, he wondered, “watch pro sports [and] major corporations spreading woke propaganda while convincing men that the masculine thing to do is watch other men compete in a silly game”?

As the socialist web magazine Current Affairs pointed out, the left has a long history of finding sports problematic, “irrational, a distraction from the Very Serious Business of politics, a ‘bread and circuses’ corporate spectacle.” But the argument crosses the political divide. Conservative commentator Lyman Stone has argued that sports have displaced other forms of community life, bluntly stating that “professional sports are decadent spectacles that embarrass the nation.” In the digital pages of The Spectator, reactionary writer Pedro Gonzales compared watching sports to watching pornography.

 

De gustibus, as they say, non est disputandum. If paleocons or socialists find no pleasure in the thrill of a buzzer-beater or the tension of the bottom of the ninth, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But the insufferable condescension—that getting invested in sportsball is “cringe,” and that rooting for laundry is the opium of the unwashed masses—deserves to be pricked. Yes, modern-day sport is corrupt, venal, exploitative, craven, greedy, and, at times, lethal. It is, after all, made up of humans, who are all those things and more.

But gathering to take in these gaudy spectacles also provides a sort of community and a kind of identity. Beyond admiring the balletic excellence of a wide receiver or the crispness of a perfectly executed give-and-go—even beyond enjoying the chips and guac at a Super Bowl party—sports provide, at the very least, a shared experience, and even an ersatz brotherhood.

It goes without saying that high-fiving a stranger after a touchdown isn’t building authentic community. The tens of thousands who fill a stadium on a Saturday or Sunday share nothing of substance other than an emotional connection. And given that their loyalty is to a commercial product—one that thinks nothing of packing up and moving to another city when a better offer is on the table—some may wonder if we even call modern sports fandom any kind of positive civic practice.

But that view relies on a stunted understanding of how identities are formed. Shared loves, even loves of commercial goods, can be the basis for or the glue that cements more meaningful friendships or connections. How many college buddies or suburban dads would have fallen out of touch with old friends if a hole-in-one or fourth-quarter comeback didn’t inspire them to shoot off a quick text? How many Pittsburghers feel their heart beat a little quicker when they pass someone wearing black and yellow in a new town? Groups of friends don’t have to go full Silver Linings Playbook to have sports provide a reason to gather, reminisce, hope, celebrate, or mourn together.

 

And in our denuded age, when deeper forms of identity and commitment are increasingly being eaten away, a little more ceremony and civic pride, even if bought for $90 at the team store, is to be welcomed. As anyone who’s experienced a game day in a college town can attest, walking around city streets draped in local colors helps build a certain regional solidarity. Think of the clan-like rituals that kick off professional football games—blowing a horn, raising a flag, lighting a (virtual) cauldron. Like singing a college’s Alma Mater, they press back against the coolly rational side of everyday life. Getting swept up in the wave is a small blow against the above-it-all jadedness of the individual consumer.

Some have the opposite concern. If cheering on the hometown nine is successful in bringing communities together, that itself may be a problem. Sports, they fear, have been too successful at creating simulacra of community and associational life, crowding out the real things. In a sprawling report for the American Enterprise Institute, Stone worries that a “rise in sports culture has coincided with a weakening in other forms of social capital and an expansion of the state.” Perhaps without Thursday, Sunday, and Monday Night Football taking up our evenings, we’d have more time for our local high school’s Friday Night Lights and other forms of local association.

There is no question that the rise of mass entertainment has turned leisure into a more solitary pursuit. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam chalked up one-quarter of the decline in social capital to television alone. But participation in associational life has ebbed with every successive generation, across varying races, education levels, and, presumably, levels of interest in sports. The Netflix queue is long, social media beckon, and video games get better each year. If a new, doubtless very different, Emperor Theodosius were to ban professional sports, one would not expect a flourishing of American associational life.

At their best, sports should be experienced communally, whether in person or group chats, instead of through the disintermediation of an anonymous fantasy league or gambling app. That does not mean that affection, just like any other, can avoid becoming disordered. As a believer, I think the tailgaters whose Sunday morning worship site is a parking lot and whose communion is a brat and red Solo cup are making a regrettable choice. The bloodthirstiness of fans who cheer injuries and the violence that stems from rivalries are two obvious ways that the social bonds formed by pro sports can turn poisonous.

And football, in particular, has a relationship with violence that implicates the viewer. It wasn’t that long ago that the concussion crisis seemed likely to upend the future of America’s most popular sport. A decade ago, the libertarian polymath Tyler Cowen sketched out a potential vision of what it might take for football to be dethroned—a wave of concussion-related lawsuits, rising insurance costs, all parents save those with no other options keeping their kids from playing such a violent game. And only a few weeks ago, a monumental clash between two top teams was canceled as paramedics rushed to midfield to save a player from the grasp of death.

The outpouring of love and support for Damar Hamlin was truly heartwarming. But his freak injury was a reminder that any game that involves 250-pound men launching themselves into one another carries an element of inherent danger, to the point of lethality. As we’ve learned more about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the defense that players “knew what they were getting into” rings a bit hollow. Formula 1 racing, a sport gaining in popularity thanks to the popular Netflix series Drive to Survive, is another sport that involves an uncomfortable willingness to put lives on the line for that extra split-second of speed.

Intellectuals disagree on whether watching football makes one complicit in violence. Moral theologian Charlie Camosy has talked about boycotting the game, while Fr. James Martin, the Jesuit writer, is one of the many who are uncomfortable with the violence of the game while also endorsing the words to “Fly, Eagles, Fly.”

There is no easy way to reconcile these tensions. Men have always been daredevils for money, attention, or fun. And while the game has gotten safer, the force and speed that are integral to the NFL are part of what draws people in. Yet even if more civilized pursuits might be a more worthy way for America to come together, the 800-pound gorilla isn’t going anywhere. When Cowen and his coauthor wrote their 2012 piece forecasting a potential end to football, the NFL’s revenue was around $8 billion. Today, the NFL brings in about $18 billion annually.

 

In fact, it seems like the only real threat to sports over the long run may be its monetary success. Pro sports have launched themselves into a headlong embrace of gambling, which transforms the viewing experience into something more adversarial and mercenary. Teams chasing luxury box dollars at the expense of the bleachers, or blacking out their most loyal fans to push more expensive subscription packages, are eating their seed corn and making it less likely that future generations will have the same attachment. College sports, too, are selling their birthright, not in the form of much-needed licensing deals for amateur players, but in the pursuit of TV revenue above all other goods (any measurement of “success” that ends up with UCLA playing Rutgers on any given night instead of its in-state rivals is clearly miscalibrated). These moves should, obviously, be resisted.

For there’s also a final, more prosaic way sports contribute to stronger social capital: they give us something to talk about at the proverbial water cooler. The NFL, in particular, is the last remaining vestige of the monoculture. Movies, music, and TV shows have fragmented, with niche programming promising smaller and smaller slices of the population more of what they want. Meanwhile, according to Nielsen data compiled by the sports business site Sportico, 82 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts of 2022 were NFL games. Of the top 30 most-viewed live events in 2022, only two were not pro football: The State of the Union and coverage of the midterm election returns.

When so few topics avoid being translated through the lens of partisan politics, having largely apolitical aspects of community life to be able to join in full-throatedly should be unabashedly encouraged. (And why the heavy-handed woke messages from pro sports leagues during the summer of Coronavirus and George Floyd were so poisonous.) Embracing identities and debates that are orthogonal to our political divides is a key to making the American experiment work. As none other than Shadi Hamid wished in 2021: “If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere.”

That “elsewhere” rightly includes grandstands, box seats, and the living room couches of Super Bowl watches across the nation. Don the jersey, embrace the pageantry, and invite friends over for seven-layer dip. Celebrating the communal element of professional sports, ignoring the cynics, and intentionally pushing back against individualism, is the right way to celebrate this most American of weekends.

ESG, Woke Capitalism, and the Virtue of Humility

Americans can be forgiven for feeling disconcerted by the mutation of businesses and financial institutions into centers of woke capital. Following the Dobbs decision, major corporations like Microsoft and Meta affirmed that they would cover employee travel costs to abortion clinics, while others like Walmart and Lowe’s faced pressure to acquiesce to similar activist demands. But pro-abortion measures aren’t the only ways corporations are politicizing themselves: banks are expected to atone for slavery and small businesses are pressured to reduce their emissions even if they lack the resources, while tech giants seek to replicate China’s social credit system.

An important part of the story is the rapid spread of ESG, the investment framework that evaluates companies not according to profit generated or shareholder returns delivered, but on the basis of “environmental, social, and governance” criteria. Since a 2004 United Nations report—produced with eighteen of the world’s largest financial institutions—called for the global “integration of environmental, social and governance issues in investment decisions,” ESG has ballooned into what is expected to be a $34 trillion industry by 2026.

In concrete terms, the report’s abstractions have translated into the politicization of every aspect of business: “E” now stands in for climate alarmism that damages energy industries; “S” for pro-abortion and gender ideology; and “G” for decisions on hiring, firing, and compensation tied to critical race theory. Today, major investment firms grade companies based on their ESG policies, which means that activist notions relating to “environmental justice” and “racial equity” are significantly influencing business decisions. This thinly veiled project to pressure companies into elevating social justice grievances over making profit amounts to a direct attack on the free-market system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other in history.

 

After making deep inroads into corporate America, ESG is finally meeting resistance. A former senior executive at BlackRock, one of the leading proponents of ESG investing, is being vocal about the fact that it doesn’t work. The SEC recently fined Goldman Sachs $4 million for policy and procedural failures related to its ESG investment funds. In the words of a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business: “It’s very difficult to create a concept that’s empty at its source and toxic at the same time, but ESG people have managed to pull off that trick.”

ESG’s toxic impact on free markets and democracy calls for strong political, legal, and regulatory responses. But ESG also reminds us of the enduring truth that economic structures cannot be abstracted from the individuals and cultures that engender them. After all, ESG investing is enabled by woke CEOs, who enjoy the power and prestige that social justice advocacy confers. Some ESG critics argue that CEOs should focus instead on communicating the good that business does. Ultimately, though, overcoming ESG will require CEOs to grow in humility, developing self-regulatory habits of restraint, as well as a commitment to community.

Values Void

In his concluding reflection on Law & Liberty’s recent forum on ESG, Samuel Gregg emphasizes the role of CEOs in pushing back against the ideology. While acknowledging that ESG raises longstanding questions about the nature of the relationship between business, society, and government, he believes that intellectual arguments against ESG can only do so much. What’s really needed, he proposes, is for business leaders to be “far more explicit and confident” about the benefits that a profit-seeking system produces. If CEOs were “more skilled” at this kind of public advocacy, there might be “less of a values void in business that schemes like ESG try to fill.” Gregg’s focus on the role of CEOs reflects a broader trend among ESG critics that is likely to intensify with the new congressional balance of power in Washington, D.C.

But is the problem really that CEOs lack communication skills? While Gregg rightly calls for business leaders to articulate that profit is both a sign of customer satisfaction and the foundation of broader social goods, his own choice of language points to deeper concerns. He warns business leaders not to “play the appeasement game or avert their eyes from the wider agenda with which some ESG proposals are associated,” and he advises against the “calculated endorsement” of schemes, like ESG, that undermine the freedom on which capitalism depends. These notes of caution suggest that combating ESG is not just about communication; fundamentally, it’s a question of character. Free markets require free individuals and free competition, but to function correctly they also require these individuals to be virtuous.

As woke CEOs have embraced ESG, often for self-aggrandizing reasons, one virtue that has been conspicuously lacking is humility, which Augustine saw as the prerequisite of all other virtues. Humility involves recognizing the limits of our knowledge, overcoming our self-centered inclinations, and evaluating ideas in ways that orient us toward what is good and true rather than what satisfies our own preferences or fashionable political views. Since these tendencies would be beneficial within the context of resisting ESG, it’s worth encouraging business leaders not just to communicate more effectively, but to attend to cultivating the virtue of humility. In particular, humility will help clarify the importance of restraint and the meaning of community, each of which has tended to be neglected in ESG conversations.

 

Restraint

To a significant degree, ESG’s rise has been enabled by a lack of restraint among business leaders and the broader culture in defining the nature and ends of business. Profit is no longer enough; ESG investors and activists seek an extravagantly expanded conception of the values that business should pursue, including divisive ideas related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Predictably, this has prompted some right-leaning critics to call for a more assertive political response that would replace ESG causes with an alternative set of mandated values.)

What can humility teach us about restraint? Here we might turn to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, perhaps an unlikely source of business advice. (Though since ESG seems like religion for many of its advocates, maybe theology is the best response.) For Aquinas, the function of humility is “to temper and restrain the mind, lest it tend to high things immoderately.” ESG ideology is a textbook case of the modern mind’s failing to restrain itself, failing to keep business in its proper perspective, and failing to focus on profit and shareholder value. Instead, ESG investment metrics encourage CEOs to strive for dubious goals that lie outside the regular scope of business and belong more properly to the realm of NGOs.

By contrast, business leaders who embody humility would be less inclined to prioritize their own needs, ideological motives, or self-regard. They might be more receptive to the growing evidence that ESG doesn’t work, with funds underperforming and investors increasingly doubtful of ESG’s redefinition of the core purpose of business. More broadly, a posture of humility and restraint is a more natural fit with the messy uncertainty of free markets, which work precisely because they enable free individuals to exchange goods and services with each other—not because they can be managed and manipulated with reference to ESG priorities.

 

As corporate and political elites find more and more ways to publicly signal their compliance to ESG orthodoxy, Aquinas’s insight that true virtue is an “internal movement of the soul” might also be relevant. The ability to restrain ourselves from inadvisable public actions rests on the awareness of our own private limitations: the inner person shapes the outer world. This means that virtue will not be found in external gestures, but in the inward choices that we make over time. It can, as Aristotle said, be cultivated. The model of the CEO as humble, restrained, publicly modest, attentive to virtuous habits of mind, and carefully focused on delivering value for customers and shareholders sits uneasily with cocktail receptions and networking dinners at Aspen ESG summits. But it’s a model that needs to be restored if ESG is to be resisted in the long term.

Community

If ESG undermines a modest and restrained approach to business, it also challenges traditional views of the meaning of community. This is because ESG prescribes cookie-cutter practices of governance, social relations, and environmentalism, compelling businesses to incorporate arbitrary, predefined, and often contentious issues as part of their strategies. McKinsey, one of the largest management consulting firms and a leading ESG advocate, concedes that “top-down ESG pronouncements can seem distracting or too vague to be of much use.”

As an alternative to the top-down, coercive uniformity of ESG investment theories, humility will help business leaders and other supporters of free markets to prioritize the value of community. Humility is often seen as a personal disposition, but its etymology implies a wider, communal dimension. It is closely related to the Latin word humilis, which literally means on the ground, or grounded. To be humble, then, means to be grounded, rooted, and formed as part of a community, whose members we engage with constructively and without undue concern for our self-centered inclinations—or for calculations of what might be politically expedient.

 

How might this aspect of humility bear upon ESG? It reminds us that businesses—before they are anything else—are on-the-ground enterprises, located within specific industries and cultures, responding to customers, and providing goods both directly and indirectly to local communities. As such, businesses will flourish with a local, contextual approach to social and environmental considerations, rather than the one-size-fits-all ESG agenda emanating from international conferences. In this sense, it is unsurprising that resistance to ESG is being driven most notably by state leaders, who are best placed to discern its adverse effect on key industries.

Being humble is not the same as being lowly. It means recognizing that our actions are significant precisely because they shape the social fabric, each of whose members are of equal worth and dignity. It matters that CEOs attend modestly and diligently to the core purpose of business, which is to generate profits and shareholder returns, create jobs, and provide needed products and services. And it matters that CEOs perform this role as grounded in the communities that they form, and by which they are formed in turn. These are not small things—and if they provide the basis for repelling a toxic investment ideology that threatens America’s free-market economy, they will turn out to be more valuable than any corporate communications strategy.

The Congressional Fight over the House Speakership Was a Good Thing

Bad, bad, bad: generally, that was the media’s view of Kevin McCarthy’s contentious election to the speakership of the House of Representatives. Reporters and headline writers heaped scorn on the process. It was a “debacle,” a “disaster,” a “crisis,” and “chaos,” they intoned. Some media went so far as to pronounce the twenty-one dissenting GOP members nihilists engaging in nothing more than performative outrage.

For sure, Mr. McCarthy had a rough ride. He had to endure fifteen rounds of floor votes over three long days before securing a majority. Clearly, he had no fun sitting silently as fellow members of the GOP questioned his conservative credentials and nominated a slew of other individuals to the position he has sought for years. The House has not had an open, serious debate over who should be speaker since 1923, when it took nine rounds of ballots before the chamber settled on Frederick Gillette (R-MA), who lasted all of two years in the position. And, yes, C-SPAN viewers certainly saw some performative politics, such as when Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz nominated former President Donald Trump.

Now that a couple of weeks have passed and the noise has begun to subside, we can take a broader view of what McCarthy’s election suggests about Congress and the state of American politics. The media had it wrong: to equate Mr. McCarthy’s struggles to win the Speakership with political dysfunction is to grossly misunderstand both politics and Congress. In truth, the long debate over who should be speaker was a healthy expression of Madisonian transactional politics, and it helped illuminate the path toward restoring the people’s House as the seat of American self-government.

 

High-Stakes Battle

Floor fights over the speakership are rare, but intra-party scrums over who gets to lead the chamber are commonplace. Understanding why this is the case requires reminding ourselves of the nature of democratic politics.

It is, as James Madison instructed in Federalist No. 10, both an individualistic and a group struggle of contending interests all seeking power:

As long as the reason of man continues [to be] fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. . . . A a zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.

The decision to pick a speaker is a high-stakes enterprise. The speakership is a position with power; it has great sway over the House’s legislative agenda and resources. The modern-day speaker is a major player in national governance, and gets to negotiate directly with the head of the Senate and the president. Naturally, any legislator asked to support any particular candidate for the job inevitably will ask himself: What do I and my home state’s constituents get for my support?

Usually the competitions for the speakership occur almost entirely outside the public view. Congressmen who want to be the chamber’s top dog must earn their fellow partisans’ votes through wheedling, performing favors for them (such as supporting their bills and hosting fundraisers), and promising them benefits (like positions on committees). It is a grubby transactional process for anyone to get the support of 218 legislators (the minimum majority) from within his party.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a classic example. She out-hustled Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer to first win the speakership in 2007. After Democrats lost their House majority in the 2010 election, Pelosi shouldered much of the blame. Long knives were unsheathed, and some Democrats who ran for office in subsequent years campaigned to fight a future Pelosi speakership. The gentlelady from San Francisco spent years lining up supporters within the House Democratic caucus. Big Democratic wins in the 2018 election gave her 236 Democrats to choose from to get to 218 votes. Two years later, the Democratic majority shrank to ten, and Pelosi’s bid for the speakership could have failed. In the weeks before the floor vote, she pleaded for votes with factions (some younger, some more moderate, some much more liberal) within her party. Pelosi won them over by capitulating to their demands for various rules changes and their mandate that she serve no more than two additional terms as speaker.

Devolving the Speaker’s Power

Kevin McCarthy’s road was even tougher.

He first made a run at the speakership in 2015, but fell short. He was opposed by a corps of House conservatives who thought he was too close to lobbyists and a bit too eager to work with Democrats. Others simply did not like him personally. A media report describing McCarthy’s 2015 bid could have been reissued after the House’s first 2022 ballot: “A source close to McCarthy told CNN the decision to drop out came down to ‘numbers, pure and simple,’ adding that ‘he had the votes to win the [Republican] conference vote, but there just wasn’t a path to 218.’” Republicans, who had dumped Speaker John Boehner (OH), settled on Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin after much debate and deliberation.

Come summer 2022, there were clear signs that McCarthy’s long quest for the speakership faced hurdles. The House Freedom Caucus (HFC), a faction of perhaps three dozen GOP lawmakers, went public with their long-simmering, private dispute with Minority Leader McCarthy. For years they had complained that various GOP speakers had marginalized them and their Tea Party forebears. Many HFC members felt the party too often ignored their legislative priorities. Others were vexed that McCarthy had used his political action committee to fund primary challengers to HFC members and HFC-favored candidates.

But their anger toward McCarthy was not merely personal; their concerns also were institutional. “The leaders of both political parties have consolidated so much power that most Members of Congress have no meaningful role in the legislative process beyond voting up or down,” they observed in a memorandum. Restoring the people’s House, the HFC contended, required changes to Republican conference and House rules to devolve power from the speaker to committees and individual members, and, naturally, to the HFC.

This is not an idiosyncratic right-wing critique. Scholars, media, and legislators from both parties (including former Speaker Ryan) have also highlighted the costs of power flowing upward to the speaker.

 

Until about a half century ago, the House was a place where representatives of America’s diverse interests had opportunities to bargain with one another to forge bipartisan compromises. The process was often messy, with bills being debated and amended in committee and then on the floor, but it tended to work. Legislators got to be lawmakers, and the speaker was very much a facilitator who partnered with powerful committee chairs to get things done.

There is far less of that these days. More and more the speaker and his leadership team draft bills (often omnibuses) and present them to the chamber for an up-or-down vote. Legislators often hate being told to vote promptly on bills running hundreds if not thousands of pages, without any opportunity to read them, to say nothing of debating and amending them. And the House increasingly devolves into a zero-sum battle between two polarized parties whose members see few incentives to find common ground.

Mr. McCarthy might have avoided the trouble had he agreed to all of the HFC’s demands to decentralize power from the speaker role long before January. But he did not, quite probably for two reasons.

First, the success of a speaker depends in great part on his ability to assemble majorities to pass legislation. Doing that, he probably reasoned, requires holding on to all his powers rather than giving them away.

Second, he and many observers predicted a red wave in November that would sweep in a GOP majority of 230 or even more. Winning the speakership requires 218 yeas, so he may have seen little sense in caving to the half dozen HFC members who had publicly declared they would oppose a McCarthy speakership.

 

When that red wave did not come in, McCarthy was in a bind. He needed the support of 218 of the 222 GOP members. HFC legislators saw they had leverage and used it. The Not-Kevin votes grew from a half-dozen to thirty-one when the GOP conference met the week after the election. Absent immediate McCarthy capitulation, a floor fight was all but certain to occur, and did. McCarthy agreed to rules changes that permitted legislators to offer amendments on some bills that are brought to the floor, and gave HFC members a few seats on the mighty Rules Committee. He also agreed to allow votes on bills favored by the right wing of the GOP, and restored the rule allowing any GOP legislator to move to unseat McCarthy as speaker. All of which goes a long way to restoring balance between the powers of the speaker and the rest of the House.

Had James Madison been watching on C-SPAN, he would not have been surprised by the long debates and many rounds of votes. Humans are flawed beings partial to their own views, and liberty foments diversity. Congress is the place where ambition is supposed to counter ambition, and where interests are supposed to collide. Bargaining across difference is what a legislature is supposed to do, and legislators need the power to do just that.

Yet Mr. Madison quite possibly would have shaken his head in disbelief at the media’s relentless framing of the battle for the speakership as political dysfunction. And, no fan of parties, he also might well have guffawed at the media’s presumption that the representatives assembled should behave as partisans rather than legislators representing distinct districts. Nonetheless, the fight over the speakership was a healthy development for the institution, and we should welcome the House of Representatives’ return to the cacophonous, disputatious place the Founders designed it to be.