Question:

I just wanted to write to say thank you for “The Future of the Life of the Mind,” and for your references to the Sertillanges book in other blog posts.  Encouragement in the “traditional” intellectual life is rare.

I’m also encouraged by your observation that intellectual organizations these days are "all an experiment and adventure.”  Currently I am in an MSIS program (that’s Master of Science in Information Sciences), and we hear the same thing about the careers we’re going into in libraries and archives and who knows what else.  It can be too easy to assume that everything is decaying, the culture is collapsing, etc. etc., and voices like yours are invaluable to remind us that no, it’s not all horrible.

Relatedly, could you give a few examples of those "few beautiful successes” that you refer to?  Or advice on how to organize communities of serious thought?

Reply:

I can’t tell you how to organize them, because I don’t have an organizational gene.  (There is another notch on my chromosome where the sports gene ought to be, but that’s another story).  Still, I think can tell you a little more about their varieties.

Probably very few communities of serious thought develop because someone says, “Say, let’s develop a community of serious thought.”  At present, most such communities organize in the hope of doing some part of the work that universities ought to be doing but aren’t.

Consider for example Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California, which aims at providing a unified liberal arts education.  Students have very few electives, but they acquire the intellectual virtues; they are taught how to think.  By contrast, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, in Arlington, Virginia, aims at providing graduate-level professional training in a single discipline, the healing of the mind, but from a consistently Catholic understanding of the nature of the human person.  Considering the depth of the Catholic philosophical tradition, you might think that this would be one of the perspectives on display in a public university, but you would be wrong.

A third example is the religious orders which practice scholarship in the service of their spiritual vocations.  Included here are those lay members called tertiaries, who live in the world.  Although religious orders may seem very unlike the former two examples, they are alike in that their work too is part of a broader work.  In the case of the Dominicans, for instance, that broader work is preaching, teaching, and using the intellect to combat deadly moral, intellectual, and spiritual fallacies.

You may think I shouldn’t include religious orders in this list of “new” forms of community, since they have been around for many centuries.  But there are always new orders with new charisms, as well as old ones whose charisms are renewed.  I think many of the orders that practice scholarship may be doing things differently as universities continue to forget what universities once tried to be.

For now, perhaps the most important dimension of variation among the new communities of scholars is just what relationship they have to establishment universities.

Some come into being to compete with them.  This task is challenging for many reasons, not least of them the fact that accreditation organizations are often dominated by persons who are hostile to their aims.

Others exist as parts of establishment universities, for example as Western Civilization honors programs, right in the belly of the beast.  A few organize in the ambitious hope of encouraging the renewal of their host institutions, but most begin with the more modest goal of providing enclaves of sanity.

Surprisingly, officials in the host institutions sometimes welcome such organizations, if only for a while, just to placate donors and other parties who are looking over their shoulders.  On the other hand, since such organizations cannot be truly independent of their hosts, they risk what is called “capture” by hostile forces in the host institutions, and then their mission is corrupted.

Still other scholarly communities exist alongside establishment universities, offering resources, encouragement, and comradeship for the dwindling number of sane scholars who continue to work in those schools.  The more successful of such para-university organizations cultivate collaboration between scholars in the university and in the para-university, while maintaining financial and organizational independence.  But they cannot exist in isolation from the surrounding community.  Because they need to disseminate what they learn, and also because they need to attract donors, their success depends largely on community outreach.

Too much success can be dangerous, because it makes such organizations targets for another kind of “capture”; over time they may drift from their missions in the same way most institutions do.  The smartest ones try to set up safeguards, if not to prevent drift – that may be impossible – then at least to slow it down.

The last sort of scholarly community lives more or less apart from universities.  Such forms of association are neither competitors with universities, parts of them, nor deliberately crafted to exist alongside them.  I say “more or less” because at least for now, it would be virtually impossible for them to live just as though universities did not exist.

For example, scholars who are members of religious orders may have been recruited as university students, and may have received their scholarly training in universities.  For obvious reasons, though, as the universities continue to go crazy, such patterns become problematic.  If change is not already under discussion, I expect that it will be.

In the meantime, big and little tremors are taking place in scholarly and professional associations, as the old ones succumb to institutional sclerosis, ideological mania, or both, and as new kinds of networks are emerging.  Thank God, frivolities like Twitter are not the only results of the new technologies.  Scholars can now communicate, associate, and even publish in all sorts of new ways.  Here too, not all new developments are good.  But some of them are very good, and some may become better than they are.

Despite the rigidity of the establishment universities, the world of scholarship is increasingly fluid.  Twenty years from now, much of what I have just written will have to be revised.

In the meantime, don’t assume that if you don’t see anything, then nothing is happening.  That is like thinking that the mother isn’t pregnant, just because you can’t see the baby in the womb.  The first movements may be like the fluttering of a moth, but in time you can feel the child kick.

There are moments when I could imagine being a lexicographer.  One of the most interesting stories of the last few centuries must be how rapturous intensity of feeling came to be regarded as a good thing rather than a bad one, and the terms we use to describe it became words of praise.

This is especially true of the word “passion”:  “I just love your passion for your work.”  “The applicant is passionately committed to his studies.”  “Senator Fogbound has the rare ability to arouse the passion of his followers.”

Contrast that last line with the view of the American Founders, who thought of passion as the great danger of republics.  Among their chief goals was to make legislation so slow that any passion which does arise will have ample time to dissipate.

Understand me:  Emotions aren’t bad in themselves, as the Stoics morbidly thought.  But to be good, they have to be regulated.  Until very recently in history, almost all wise men agreed that such feelings as fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, pleasure, and pain may be felt both too much and too little.  What if I am so fearful that I cannot face danger, or so fearless that I cannot learn caution?

Unfortunately, when we praise someone for being passionate, we don’t mean that he feels his emotions at the right times, toward the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way.  We merely mean that he feels them intensely – that he is always either in the grip of an excitement, revving up to an excitement, or coming down from an excitement which we happen to find attractive ourselves.

Even science museums and children’s indoor play centers strive for sensory overload.  Love lyrics sound as though they were written by sociopaths and stalkers; they are so often about losing one’s mind, or losing control.  The unforgivable sin in politics isn’t to be wicked, but to be boring.

There is a lot of cultural blame to go around.  The day the poet Shelley rhymed “madness” with “gladness,” he committed a fatal error.  But the philosopher Hume was just as mad when he described reason as the “slave” of the passions.  If that were the case with his own reasoning, then why should anyone suppose that his views could have merit?

I have been promising my readers to try to end on upnotes, and I can.  The one good thing about frenzy is that it takes far too much energy to maintain.  If we can keep ourselves and our loved ones from succumbing, this too will pass.

Question:

Can you suggest – for starters -- just one thing to read about contemporary religion clause jurisprudence?  Have you written anything about it?  And what did the Framers themselves mean by the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses?

Reply:

Just one thing?  Sure:  Read Russell Hittinger, "The Supreme Court v. Religion," which is a chapter in his excellent book The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World.  As Hittinger points out, you might think that the members of the Court would have the same view of the law, but different views of religion.  Actually, they have very different views of the law, but surprisingly similar (and disturbing) views of religion.  Since you are also interested in my take on these matters, take a look at my chapter, “The Strange Second Life of Confessional States,” in the very interesting anthology of Paul R. DeHart and Carson Holloway, Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith.  But read the rest of those books too!

Now as to those clauses.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The first part is the Establishment Clause, the second the Free Exercise clause.

An “establishment of religion” is an official church, and the word “respecting,” in the Establishment Clause, means “about.”  So the clause simply forbids the federal government from making laws on the subject of official churches.  This means, among other things, that it tell the states whether to have official churches or not (six of the thirteen states did have them at that time), and it can’t set up a competing Church of the United States.  So this was a federalism issue, not a religious liberty issue.  Despite later claims to the contrary, it had nothing to do with “separating” Church and State; it was actually about separating the states from the federal government.  This has now become moot, because for reasons having to do with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court now thinks that the Establishment Clause applies to the states too.

The Free Exercise clause is a little more confusing.  By the rules of statutory construction, in order to know the meaning of the statement that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, we must figure out what the Framers and Ratifiers meant by “religion,” what they meant by the “exercise” of religion, and what they meant by the exercise of religion being “free” – and they didn’t make it easy.  Still, there are plenty of clues, for example in the Declaration of Independence.  As I read such tea leaves, by “religion” they meant providential moralistic monotheism, with a high view of the human person; that by “exercise” they meant action, as well as belief; and that by “free” they meant unhindered within the bounds of the common good, as illuminated by natural law.  But our contemporary jurisprudes pronounce upon what the Free Exercise clause means without defining any of those words.  Consequently, there is no telling what they will say the clause means from one case to the next.

If we take the two clauses to mean something like what I think the Framers and Ratifiers meant -- first, that the federal government must stay out of the official religion business, but second, that within the bounds of the natural law people may worship God and act as their religiously informed consciences direct -- then the two clauses are perfectly compatible, and one can obey them both at the same time.

But if we take the two clauses as our contemporary jurisprudes take them – they tend to think that the Establishment clause has something to do with restricting religion, but that the Free Exercise clause has something to do with loosening restrictions on it – then the two clauses are plainly inconsistent, so that to follow one is to violate the other.  This is why they so often say that the two clauses express not Constitutional rules, but Constitutional “values” which must be “balanced” against each other.  Translated, that means, “Never mind what the clauses mean; we, the judges, will tell you what must be done.”

Religion clause jurisprudence makes a logical man want to pull his hair out.  For example, a lot of the Establishment Clause cases go on and on about how the government must be “neutral” between religion and irreligion.  Members of the Court have said, for example, that the reason why words like the references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance aren’t Constitutionally problematic is that because of rote repetition, they don’t mean anything to people any more.  But the same members of the Court go on to say that such practices are very useful.  For example, they inspire people to perform acts they wouldn’t otherwise perform.

Now ask yourself:  If these words really have lost their meaning, then how can they inspire people to do these things?  What these judges mean is that the people who run things don’t believe them, but that certain fools do.

Let us be found among those subtle fools whose strings aren’t so easy to pull.  Trust God, but put not your trust in princes.  Or candidates.  Or judges.

Here is more I’ve learned about blogging.  If you missed the previous post, you can pick it up here.

When I first set up my website, my first thought was to make my other work easier for people to find and ruminate upon.  I soon discovered that the maxim “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to websites.  You have to give people reasons to visit frequently.  Those people tell other people about it, and there you go.  But don’t be fooled.  Not even occasional visitors will discover your website unless there is something for frequent visitors too.

Posting often burns a lot of energy.  Even if the purpose is to advance your other work, if you aren’t careful it will drain your time from it.  So don’t even consider a daily blog unless you compose and proofread swiftly, you don’t suffer from writer’s block, and you’re highly disciplined.  If you need to take a vacation from the blog, don’t just go away; do the posts for the time of your absence ahead of time.  Otherwise, when you come back you may find yourself like Little Bo Peep:  You’ve lost your readers and can’t tell where to find them.

Keep lists of ideas, and chew on them.  If you wake up with an idea in the wee of the morn’, don’t resolve to write it down when you get up; by then you won’t remember it.  Get up and commit it to a note.  As I learned when my children were born, sleep is overrated anyway (it was a great trade, by the way).

Know what a blog can’t do.  No matter how much your readers love reading, people don’t read on the web the same way they read books made from trees.  Most of your posts should be short.  You can provide links to books and to articles, but a blog is not a book or an article.

Know who your audience is.  I could write a blog that only specialists could understand – something like a rolling workshop among a few intensely interested people with similar obsessions.  Or I could write a blog that only non-specialists would find interesting – something more like a radio broadcast.  But what I write about, broadly, is ethics and politics, which means how to live.  And I am one of those funny blokes who think that if you are going to write about something that concerns two audiences, then you have to offer something to both of them (at least sometimes).

Once you push that first domino, the others start falling.  The decisions you make about your audience shape all of your other decisions -- about topics, frequency of posts, length, style, whether to be humorous (perhaps I should say whether to try to be humorous), whether to run comments, whether to run letters, and even how attractive your page has to be to the eye.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned – and I’m still learning it -- is this.  When I began, I already knew that anyone who reflects on the state of the culture will have to blow some blue notes on his horn.  What I didn’t fully appreciate is that whether I blow them or not, more people are hearing the world in a minor key today than twenty years ago – and many are finding it very hard to bear.

So I’m learning not to end on those blue notes.  There is no need anyway, because I don’t believe in Fate; I believe in Providence.  Long before we saw the gray banners of the neo-pagans, our foremothers and forefathers faced down the black ones of the pagans.  And though I may be only a scullion, I seem to remember that when knights were slaying dragons, they always sang.

A reader who is considering blogging asks me to blog about blogging.  Since I’ve been at it for a few years, what have learned?

Maybe not much.  Presently the site is pulling five to six thousand hits a month.  That may sound like a lot, but in the blogosphere, it isn’t really.

Still, I’ve learned a few things.  Consider one of my early posts, in which I did nothing but quote a pair of stickers seen on the same bumper of the same van in Austin, Texas:

#1:  Stop the Dissections:  Have Respect for Life.

#2:  Pro-Choice and Proud of It.

Today I would write that post differently.  It was short, and that’s good; sometimes less is more.  But too much less is still less.  All the post did was call attention to the incoherency of urging mercy toward little lab animals yet mercilessness toward human babies.  Lots of readers have noticed such things.  I wasn’t telling them anything new.

Besides, the post was a one-off, with no chance for development.  How much more interesting it would have been to comment on why such contrary sentiments might have been combined.

The reason is that so long as anyone remains obstinate in his support of abortion, he needs a way to drown the voice of his conscience and assure himself that he is really a good person.  Probably the driver of the car supported kindness to animals not despite his support for slaying little children, but because of it.

Had I written the post today, I would have made the point about conscience explicitly.  That would have provided a better opening for subsequent posts to dig deeper.

But I won’t do that digging this week!  Tomorrow, more about blogging.