AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

LEADING A WORTHY LIFE: FINDING MEANING IN MODERN TIMES

WELCOME:

KARLYN BOWMAN, AEI

DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS:

PETER BERKOWITZ, HOOVER INSTITUTION; STANFORD UNIVERSITY

MONA CHAREN, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER

CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH, HUDSON INSTITUTE

DIANA SCHAUB, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MARYLAND

MODERATOR:

LEON KASS, AEI; UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

5:00–7:00 PM TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2018

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/leading-a-worthy-life-finding-meaning- in-modern-times/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION — WWW.DCTMR.COM KARLYN BOWMAN: Good afternoon. I’m Karlyn Bowman, and I’m a senior fellow here. And I’d like to welcome all of you to today’s discussion of Leon Kass’ new book, “Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times.” Leon has asked me to introduce today’s panelists, and I will do so in a minute.

But, first, a preview of a coming attraction. Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, will be here on February 20 to discuss the state of debate and disagreement in the academy. And she will relate her own experiences in coauthoring an op-ed arguing that the decline of bourgeois norms has wreaked cultural havoc. We hope you can join us on the 20th.

I should also note that copies of “Leading a Worthy Life” will be available for purchase after today’s lecture, and Leon will sign them in this room. Now, back to today’s panel.

Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center. Mona already has two bestsellers under her belt, and I think it’s a safe bet that her forthcoming book, “Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Commonsense,” will be a third. The book is due out June 26 from Crown Forum, and it looks at the ways that feminism has led us astray. With her widely syndicated column, Mona has been an important conservative voice on popular culture and especially on feminism and the sexual revolution. Mona will be commenting on part one of the book, “Love, Family, and Friendship: Some Reflections on Modern Culture.”

Diana Schaub is a professor of political science at Loyola University in Maryland. Diana collaborated with Leon and Amy Kass on their magnificent anthology, “What So Proudly We Hail: America’s Soul and Stories, Speech, and Song.” Diana has also been involved with the AEI Program on American Citizenship, particularly its constitutional statesmanship series featuring Abraham Lincoln. If you haven’t visited the “What So Proudly We Hail” site, do so and read the entries for Presidents’ Day and Diana’s review of the 2015 book, “Picturing Frederick Douglas: An Illustrated Biography of the 19th Century’s Most Photographed American.” Diana will be speaking on part two, “Human Excellence and Human Dignity: Real and Distorted.”

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Last week, Peter gave the Justice Antonin Scalia Lecture at Harvard Law School. I urge you to listen to the lecture entitled “Liberal Education, Law, and Liberal Democracy.” The themes in his Scalia lecture are so much of Peter’s prolific writing on political philosophy, ideas, and institution that make him the ideal person to speak about part three, “In Search of Wisdom: Learning, Teaching, and Truth.”

Chris DeMuth was president and the guiding force of AEI for 22 years, working tirelessly to bring talented scholars to AEI and then to nurture and promote their work. Now a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, Chris has been liberated and able to return to his own scholarship. We are all the beneficiaries of his deep thinking about regulatory reform, the rise of executive government, and the travails of Congress in modern politics. Chris will address part four, “The Aspirations of Humankind: Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg.”

Finally, our author and moderator of today’s panel, Leon Kass. Leon is a resident scholar here and holder of the Madden-Jewett Chair. In thinking about introducing Leon, I remembered an essay by his good friend, Harvey Flaumenhaft. It is included in a book titled “Apples of Gold and Pictures of Silver: Honoring the Work of Leon Kass.” A number of the essays in the book were written by people who are in this room today, including Diana Schaub. In the book’s introduction, Flaumenhaft recalls discussing Leon’s future after Leon graduated from medical school and was working at NIH. Flaumenhaft suggested a possible teaching career for Leon, to which Leon responded, he had nothing to teach and no particular gift for teaching. I can’t think of many things that you’ve been wrong about, Leon, but that’s a big one. For nearly 50 years, Leon has been teaching life, and we are all in debt for his instruction, his guidance, and his wisdom.

I give you Leon Kass. (Applause.)

LEON KASS: Thank you very much, Karlyn. Thanks to my fellow panelists. Thanks to AEI for hosting this event, and thanks to all of you for your presence this afternoon. I’m eager to hear what they have to say about the book, so I’m going to keep the beginning brief and hold my fire for when I might need it.

This book is — grows out of an attempt to try to address the disjunction between the enduring and strong aspirations of America’s young people for a worthy and meaningful life and our culture’s loss of confidence, not to say cynical indifference, regarding what makes a life worth living. We’ve become super competent at efficiency, utility, speed, convenience, and getting ahead in the world. We’re at a loss concerning what it’s all for.

And precisely because the culture is now at sea and the old orthodoxies no longer provide us with compelling answers, we do have new opportunities for taking seriously the venerable Socratic question, how to live, a question which is in fact not far from the surface for our rising generation. If they were in fact liberated from the prevailing cynicisms, in my experience our young people would readily embrace the weighty questions and would undertake serious quests for a worthy life. What they need is our encouragement.

This book, essays written over a period of some 20 years, suitably revised, seeks to provide a needed encouragement. The starting assumption is simply this. Notwithstanding the massive changes created by modern life for human experience, the human soul continues to aspire to a life that makes sense through meaningful and fulfilling work; through love, family, and friendship; through the attainment of excellence and the practice of dignified humanity; through the search for understanding and wisdom, a place in the community, an opportunity to serve, and a relationship to something higher or beyond.

The essays seek to shed light on these fundamental aspects of human flourishing and the specific threats that they face today and tomorrow amid a glut of distracting, addicting, and isolating amusements; a debased popular culture; poisonous postmodernism in the universities; and emerging biotechnologies that promise a post-human future at the price of our humanity.

The introductory essay, which was a revision of the Irvin Kristol lecture called “Finding Meaning in Modern Times,” provides a synoptic overview. The next four sections, “Love, Family and Friendship,” “Human Excellence and Human Dignity,” “In Search of Wisdom,” and “The Aspirations of Humankind,” have been assigned one by one to my four colleagues on the panel.

We’ll start with Mona Charen, who’s going to talk about “Love, Family, and Friendship.”

MONA CHAREN: Thank you, Leon. And thank you all for having me today. I want to first thank and congratulate Leon for this wise, learned, and insightful book. It’s really more than a book. It is a life guide; that is, assuming that you have the skills and intelligence to get your degree — to begin your degree at the University of Chicago at the age of 15, then get an M.D. and a biochemistry Ph.D. before your 29th birthday — oh, wait. No. Actually — though that describes Leon. Fortunately, I’m here to testify that even those of us of normal intellect can extract pearls of wisdom and guidance from this book, so not to worry. It’s partly because it’s so well written and so deeply thought and so enriching.

Now, I hope that I will not offend anybody at AEI if I confess that over the years, there have been many great lecturers at the annual AEI dinners, but my favorite address was definitely Leon’s. Brilliant economists have enlightened us about interest rates, economic growth, debt, and human capital. Those are all important. Politicians have shared their experiences about war and peace. Judges have offered their wisdom about the intersection of law and policy. Social scientists have augmented our understanding of current trends.

But Leon, the philosopher, spoke of matters closest to the heart: what are the roots of human fulfillment, what is our purpose, and what it is in our natures. “Leading a Worthy Life” explores these themes in detail, ranging comfortably as perhaps only Leon can from Eros to Kant to altruism. He is like our modern Matthew Arnold, a tour guide to the best that has been thought and written.

Now, the sections on love and friendship resonate with me particularly because Leon has penetrated to the mystery of human life. That is right. Get your pencils poised. Here is the secret that has eluded our thought leaders, our chattering class, and most particularly, feminists. I will quote from it from page 65. He is citing a wonderful Erasmus colloquy between a young suitor and his beloved. And Leon writes, quote, “The colloquy should command our attention because it illustrates what may be the central truth about sexual manners and mores. It is women who control and teach mores.” Bingo.

Leon also quotes Rousseau on this point. I wasn’t aware that Rousseau had said it. I thought until now that it was just the Kasses and me. But I’m glad to know. Now, the point of courtship as Leon and his late wife, Amy, reminded us was not primarily to preserve the patriarchy or male dominance. On the contrary, courtship served women’s needs more than men’s. By withholding themselves until a man proved himself worthy, women molded the male character. They helped to transform raw sexual energy into admiration and love. By testing a man’s devotion, they gave themselves time to evaluate his character and his suitability as a husband and future father of their children. By withholding their bodies for a time, they spurred men to prove themselves.

In this colloquy, again, by Erasmus, the young woman, Maria, tests not only Pamphilus’ intentions, but his depth. She says, quote, “Maybe I will seem different to you when illness or old age has changed this beauty.” Pamphilus responds reassuringly, “Neither will I always be as handsome as I am now, my dear, but I don’t consider only this dwelling place which is blooming and charming in every respect. I love the guest more.” Maria asks, “What guest?” He answers, “Your mind, whose beauty will forever increase with age.”

Now, this passage reminds me of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Romeo declares, “Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear that tips with silver all these fruit-trees.” And she interrupts him. She says, “Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon that monthly changes in her circled orb lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” After lengthy and certainly highly sexually charged declarations to one another, Juliet moves to close the interview. Now, Romeo protests asking, “Oh, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” Juliet replies cautiously, “What more satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” Romeo asks, “The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.” Now Juliet relaxes, reassuring him that she has already pledged her love but, comforted by his respect, she giddily reveals the extent of her infatuation. Quote, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, and the more I give to thee, the more I have for both are infinite.”

This, friends, was no hookup. (Laughs.)

If Leon and Amy are right about the nature of wooing and courtship, a hookup can never be romantic. He rights, the correlative of manly honor is womanly modesty. Her reticence, her sexual self-restraint, this is the sine qua non of courtship, and we submit the key to sound manners and mores concerning manhood and womanhood. It is this that makes manly wooing necessary, that makes woman appear more desirable and worth winning, that spurs a man’s ardor and inspires his winning speech and conduct. It is feminine modesty that turns men into lovers, not mere sex partners, and that gives the physically weaker sex the more commanding power of judgment and selection.

This is a key insight that is so often lost in our confused age. Sexuality, one of the most powerful forces in human life, properly fenced and channeled is indispensable to social stability. Leon sketches the many ways that the sexual revolution and feminism has eroded milestones of adulthood. A man who need not win and woo a wife and begin a family is a man who need not really grow up. Reams of social science data confirm this insight. Young unmarried males earn less than their married peers, are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, to be depressed, and to get into trouble with the law. They are also less happy and less engaged in their communities than married men.

And what of women’s happiness? This book could not be more timely. In this era of #metoo and #timesup, we are hearing women’s disgust and fury with liberated male libido. But this moment needs clarification. The feminist interpretation of #metoo is that now, at long last, womankind has risen up to protest thousands of years of male predation. I don’t think Leon would disagree that there have always been males who’ve behaved badly.

But if I understand him correctly, I think he would say that feminists are missing a key step. For generations before the sexual revolution, women were protected by traditions of modesty, courtship, and gentlemanly conduct from the kind of abuse that is now so endemic. The feminists made a key mistake by signing on to the sexual revolution in the name of women’s liberation. What they’ve discovered all too often is that, in Leon’s words, quote, “the result has been male liberation from domestication, from civility, and from responsible self-command.”

There is so much to commend this book. Despite the many deformations of our time, I agree that people still yearn to live honorably and worthily. They could hardly have a better guide than Leon Kass, who thinks so deeply and writes so lucidly about the most important questions.

If there is one section of the book which failed to gain my enthusiastic agreement, it would be the argument about internet intimacy. Leon makes excellent points about the limitations of internet connections. We are all embodied beings, not just minds, and we communicate in a thousand nonverbal ways that are, doubtless, crucial to lasting intimate relationships.

Again, to cite the timeliness of this book, I would note that the recent short story called “Cat People” in the New Yorker ratifies many of the points Leon makes. In that story, a couple flirts primarily through texting and getting to know someone on a silicon device in which information is carefully curated and communication is asynchronous can lead to misunderstandings and even severe disappointments when face-to-face connection finally arrives. And it goes without saying that there are certain segments of the internet that are sewers best shunned by people of all ages.

But as someone who has attended more than one wedding that grew out of an internet-initiated romance, I would demur this far: Properly employed emailing, texting, facetiming, and other internet communication can perform some of the tasks of traditional courtship. Through cyber distance, a woman can keep herself unavailable and probe for evidence of good character. The internet also provides tools that her predecessors might have welcomed. She can Google her suitor, which would have come in handy for Richardson’s Clarissa when it came to Robert Lovelace, or Austen’s Miss Georgiana Darcy, who placed unwise confidence in George Wickham.

Moreover, with the decline of extended families, churches, and community groups where the young used to meet, single people can waste years vainly seeking suitable spouses at gyms, bars, and even supermarkets. The Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue used to be known as the social Safeway because it was considered a relatively safe place to meet fellow singles.

With the proper precautions and understanding that there is no substitute for face- to-face relationships, the internet can be a pretty good Cupid. Additionally, we cannot overlook other loves. Email and Facebook and, amazingly, even Twitter, can foster friendship. Leon’s great muse, Aristotle, might actually have approved of the internet’s capacity to facilitate, quote, “The most fulfilling form of friendship, the sharing of speech and thoughts,” unquote.

So to paraphrase the great Irving Kristol, I’d give not three but two cheers for the internet’s capacity to bring us together. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. KASS: Diana.

DIANA SCHAUB: I can’t say no to a good podium. This looks like a good podium. (Laughter.) My assigned section of the book is entitled “Human Excellence and Human Dignity: Real and Distorted.” In an email to the discussants, Leon specifically instructed us not to pull our punches. Now, to pull a punch, one first has to throw it. And I fear I mostly have pats on the back to offer rather than jabs, hooks, and crosses.

Before I attempt any pugilistic feats, let me give a quick overview of the five chapters in this second part of the book. The first deals with the use of biotechnology to achieve human perfection encapsulated in the shorthand formula, ageless bodies, happy souls. As so often in the writings of Leon Kass, the contemporary approach to these issues is shown to be insufficient. The prevailing approach evaluates biotech possibilities by attempting to draw a distinction between therapy and enhancement and by investigating threats to safety, equal access, and individual choice.

Instead of analyzing the means, Kass seeks clarity about the ends that are being sought. On closer inspection, ageless bodies and happy souls turn out not to be as desirable as they might seem. The cover art for the book, the Rembrandt painting, Aristotle with the bust of Homer, was well chosen, for it is by communing with ancient wisdom that Kass makes the case against bioengineered longevity and contentment. When tech-mediated perfection is judged against Aristotle’s notion of living well, it starts to look more like degradation than perfection.

Each of these chapters argues that we ought to be properly respectful of what is naturally and dignifiedly human. Kass knows that a term like dignity is notoriously vague, but he doesn’t think we can do without it. So in the second chapter, he undertakes the bold and arduous project of defining dignity.

He defines dignity down, and he defines dignity up, but more on that in a minute. There then follow three chapters that are in effect case studies. The chapter on the dignity of sports explores the human meaning of athletic prowess and its possible corruptions. Included in his analysis was a most welcomed account of what it means or what it ought to mean. To be a spectator for both athletes and admirers, Kass holds out the prospect of a revival of the amateur spirit and the love of the game.

Next comes a powerful chapter critical of euthanasia with particular reference to doctoring as a profession. Kass is an excellent reader of texts interspersed throughout the volume on interpretations of key passages drawn from works as various as Erasmus’ colloquy on courtship, just discussed, and Descartes’ rules for the direction of the mind. In this chapter, it’s the Hippocratic Oath that takes center stage. From it, Kass draws forth the intrinsic ethic that ought to guide the physician as he pursues the goals of healing and wholeness, mindful always of the inescapable fact of mortality. Kass shows how doctors can work faithfully within this tension. As he expresses it, doctors may and must allow dying even if they must not intentionally kill.

The final chapter is not on biotech, but on the underlying orientation called scientism. In looking to science for salvation, scientism distorts and misuses the genuine good of scientific inquiry. The somber reflections of this chapter begin from the supposedly progressive eugenic visions of the Weimar era’s doctors, scientists, and intellectuals, only to find some disturbing analogues to our contemporary scene. We too have intellectuals who trumpet an utterly soulless, reductionist view of the human being, and the eugenic temptation is still very much present. Indeed, Kass argues that we are largely unaware that we as a society have already embraced the eugenic principle that defectives should not be born because our practices are decentralized and because they operate not by state coercion, but by private reproductive choice.

The distortions emerge clearly enough in these chapters — the steroid-pumped ball player, the doctor as hired syringe, who offers, as Nietzsche predicted, a little poison now and then that makes for agreeable dreams and much poison in the end for an agreeable death. And then, the ultimate perversion of the trans-humanist dehumanizers.

Despite these nightmares, it must be stressed that the dominant tone of Kass’ writing is not that of the jeremiad. Quite the opposite: Each chapter invites us to a more elevated and a happier understanding. The oughts he sets forth and does like oughts — the oughts he sets forth are uplifting, joyous, redemptive. Kass helps the reader see and experience the for-itself-being-human-at-work-in-the-world. Those are all hyphens in between. Let me say it one more time: for-itself-being-human-at-work-in-the-world. That might sound like some bizarre Heideggerian locution, but it’s really straight out of Aristotle, a description of fully human full flourishing.

Okay. That’s the overview. Now, to return to the chapter entitled “Human Dignity: What It Is and Why It Matters.” In this definitional chapter, Kass examines what are usually thought to be two different and even incompatible versions of human dignity. On the one hand, we speak of the human dignity of each and every — the fundamental dignity of each and every human being. This understanding of intrinsic dignity is especially concerned with the fate of the weak, the incapacitated, or the embryonic.

On the other hand, we speak of the dignity of achieved greatness, the kind of rare dignity one sees in, say, George Washington or Leon Kass. What Kass argues is that these two hands, the basic dignity and the premium dignity, constitute a pair, a cooperative pair of hands. Indeed, he goes further. What is unique in the argument and characteristically Kassian is that each form of dignity is shown to depend on an essential way on the other. The good life depends on your life. Admirable thought and action cannot occur without the presence of human vitality and its bodily processes. And, on the flipside, all lives matter. All human lives, that is, because human life is that form of life that reaches beyond itself, toward god-likeness.

This insight into man’s compound character, the grown togetherness of the aspirational and the animal in us, is the insight that guide’s all of Leon Kass’ reflections on the human condition. He shows how the low is transmuted into the high and how the high remains tethered to the low. To give an illustrative instance, our animal need to feed can be transfigured into the human activity of dining, cooking a meal, welcoming a guest, raising a glass in gladness, offering a blessing in gratitude, sharing bread and conversation together. The human mouth is a multifunctional, many-splendored thing. It eats, it talks, it kisses, and can do all of these things in beautiful or un-beautiful ways.

Now, for my only objection, or let’s call it a question, at the end of this section of chapters, Kass declares that, quote, “one thing is clear: our inclination to think only in terms of American ideals of freedom and equality will not be adequate to the task, the task that is of keeping human life human.” Now, if this remarks is just a complaint about the degraded view that we now have of equality and liberty, where equality is some sort of ever-expanding progressive entitlement and liberty is indistinguishable from license, then I fully agree.

However, given what you say about the Declaration itself in the chapter on dignity, it seems to me that you find the American mind insufficient in some deeper way. Thus you note that the Declaration speaks not of equal dignity, but of equal rights and that human dignity is not the foundation of those inalienable rights. And yet, the very last chapter of the entire book is a wonderful commentary on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a document that you place on a par with two other supreme expressions, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Ten Commandments.

Now, I share your belief in the need for the wisdom of literature of Athens and Jerusalem, and I don’t intend to claim that the American creed and tradition are all sufficient. But I do wonder whether you don’t sell the Declaration in particular a bit short. The presentation of the rights teaching in the definition of dignity chapter struck me as a bit too hasty and too Hobbesian. On the basis of the summary of the 18th-century meaning of the right to life, you conclude that human dignity is remote from the document’s theoretical considerations. However, you say nothing about the other rights or the possibility that the three mentioned, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, constitute an hierarchically ordered trifecta. You acknowledge the document’s application of the word created to humankind but conclude that creatureliness is insufficient since the other animals are creatures too. But you don’t take account of the word “endowed.” Human beings are not only said to be created but endowed by their creators, and the elements of that endowment point to higher capacities of free will, inseparable from liberty, and then that rich word, happiness, which may well carry a teleological, Aristotelian resonance.

So perhaps the Declaration is a compound of the best of Athens and Jerusalem as filtered through the best of the moderns, Montesquieu and Locke. A survey of the entire document reveals that the faculty of speech, Aristotle’s logos, is highlighted. The classical virtues are all present. Justice and magnanimity and prudence are all mentioned by name. Courage and moderation are there abundantly. Indeed, a comprehensive list of the king’s injuries and usurpations provides a civics lesson in the content of the public good. It should also be mentioned that there is I think a discernable movement within the text from rights to duty, and there is acknowledgement of such higher goods as friendship and kinship.

In signing their names, another topic dear to Leon — in signing their names, the founders indicate that they are not a revolutionary mob but responsible individuals, and thus we still say, “Put your John Hancock here.” These citizen-statesmen pledged three things: their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But they are not pledged in the same way. In pledging life and fortune, they promise a willingness to sacrifice those things. Mere life, Hobbesian life, is not the be all and end all.

The pledge of sacred honor is quite different. In pledging one’s honor, one isn’t saying one would sacrifice honor. Rather, the pledge of honor stands surety for the pledge to hazard life. Rejecting the by-any-means-necessary approach, the American revolutionaries vowed to perform those acts “that may of right” — that’s a quote — “that may of right” be done. Properly understood, the American notion of rights involves rectitude, a matter of intentions, discernable, they say, only by the supreme judge of the world.

If our contemporary problems are at root spiritual problems, as Leon Kass I think rightly argues, then the spirit of Greek high-heartedness mixed with Christian humility in the service of Lockean political liberty that is on display in the Declaration is not a bad place to begin a liberal education. I’m going to leave that topic to Peter. (Applause.)

DR. KASS: Peter Berkowitz on education, liberal education, pursuit of the truth, whatever you have, Peter.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Sounds good. Thanks, Karlyn, thanks, Leon, thanks to AEI. I’m afraid even more than Mona and Diana, I’m going to flout Leon’s direct instructions to throw some punches and make them sting. It’s not because there are no disagreements. I would emphasize more than Leon does how liberal education needs to be relative to the regime — our regime of liberal democracy than Leon does. But the reason I’m not throwing punches very much at least is because I so much share Leon’s view of the importance of liberal education and of the crisis in which we find it.

The crisis of liberal education it seems to me is also a moral and political crisis. The crisis of liberal education is a moral crisis because we’re depriving students of access to the best that’s been thought and said in the West and because we create obstacles to the serious study of other civilizations. Higher education — so higher education actually works to stunt students’ curiosity and truncate their sympathies and sap their imagination and dull their critical faculties and restrict their store of knowledge and circumscribe their horizons.

Today, liberal education, or the nefarious imposter that has conquered our campuses, works to keep students in the dark about themselves, about their country, and about the world. Now, the crisis of liberal education, it seems to me, is also a political crisis because liberal education no longer teaches students about the principles of liberty that ungird actually liberal education and the American experiment in self-government. This harms the public interest because democracy depends on an educated citizenry.

Colleges and universities further impair students’ ability to govern themselves by teaching them that moral and political questions have a single, one-dimensional, incontestable answer that almost always coincides with campus orthodoxy. Now, you’re not likely to find a more eloquent or a wiser guide to the proper aims and true advantages of liberal education than Leon. The essays gathered in part three of the book also recount — autobiographical in the sense that they recount his decades-long love affair with liberal learning and they demonstrate his unflagging devotion to saving liberal education from the morass into which it’s sunk. I suppose one disagreement I have with Leon is that the situation is more dire than he lets on.

Many factors, Leon writes, have led to higher education’s sorry state. Higher education’s extravagant costs convert students into consumers with regard to liberal education as an unaffordable luxury on their path to lucrative and prestigious careers. Academic incentives encourage professors to specialize. Science and technology crowd out the humanities. Many humanities and social science professors abuse the classroom to inculcate political ideology. A fervent devotion on campus to diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender is combined with an intense aversion to diversity of opinion. This hobbles intellectual inquiry and enervates the love of learning.

Universities teach students to despise study of great books, once liberal education’s core, because such studies supposedly reinforces racism, sexism, and class oppression. These forms of bigotry and brutality, one often hears on campus, are hallmarks of the Unites States in particular and Western civilization in general.

Amidst this blight, Leon recalls for us the original, the classical meaning of liberal education. I quote now, “In its original understanding, liberal education was first of all the education befitting a free man rather than a slave and by extension the education of a human being free enough from the burdens of meeting necessity to have the leisure to seek self- improvement through learning and thus to prepare for a life of leadership, largely political, military, or religious, in his community.” In its original understanding, liberal education also and more radically aimed at, I quote again, “liberating people from slavish adherence to their unexamined opinions.”

Now, Leon recognizes that liberal education still provides benefits, worthy benefits that nevertheless fall short of liberal education’s loftiest goals. These include, I quote, “professional training, research and scholarship, general broadening of culture, the arcs of learning and familiarity with the intellectual tradition.” But Leon urges us to keep the proper aims of liberal education ever before our eyes. I quote again Leon on the proper aim of liberal education: “Not the adding of new truths to the world, nor the transmission of old truths to the young, but the cultivation in each of us of the disposition to actively seek the truth and to make the truth actively our own. More simply, liberal education is education in and for thoughtfulness. It awakens courage and renders habitual thoughtful reflection about weighty human concerns in quest of what is simply true and good.”

What can be done to advance liberal education’s proper aims? Leon identifies two great tasks dealt within two of the chapters — two of his chapters. First, we must rescue the humanities. Professors have hijacked them to advance partisan political agendas. Instead, we must study the great works of literature, philosophy, and religion to join the enduring conversation about the meaning of our humanity.

Second, we must put science in its place. That place is one of honor because modern science has produced extraordinary knowledge about the workings of the physical world. This knowledge has yielded spectacular improvements in human comfort, health, and prosperity. But science’s place of honor in liberal education must be limited by science’s limitations.

Science is mute concerning our natural questions about how best to live our lives. Yet the scientific sensibility betrays a tyrannical tendency to insist that its truths are the only truths. To reduce our humanity to evolutionary, materialist, and mechanistic causes, to mock and ridicule all inquiry that starts from and works through the world of ordinary, everyday experience, eventually ascending to the awareness of and longing for justice and nobility. Leon provides a masterful account of the substance of liberal education, the humanities, the sciences.

Alas, our universities have also corrupted the forms of liberal education, those norms and rules that make possible organized an institutional devotion to thoughtfulness. These forms must also today be rediscovered and rehabilitated.

Start with free speech. From speech codes and trigger warnings and microaggressions and safe spaces to disinviting lecturers and to shutting down speeches, free speech has been under assault for some time. Campuses curtail free speech in the name of diversity and inclusion. But a campus that upholds free speech and promotes its practice provides the diversity and inclusiveness essential to liberal education. Such a campus offers to all, regardless of race, class, or gender, marvelous benefits.

These include, first, the opportunity to express your opinions, test your thoughts and ideas with all the evidence and all the arguments at your disposal. Second, the opportunity to hear a variety of voices, some of which are bound to complement your views, some of which are sure to conflict with them. And not least, the opportunity to live in a special kind of community, a community devoted to intellectual exploration and the pursuit of truth.

Now, the curtailing of free speech on campus has not occurred in a vacuum. It’s closely connected to the denial of due process and disciplinary procedures dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct. But both the curtailing of free speech and the denial of due process reflect the same idea, the same supposition that there’s little to be gained from listening to the other side.

For example, campuses often presume guilt by designating accusers as victims and those accused as perpetrators. Universities deny the accused full access to the charges and evidence. They deny the accused counsel — (inaudible) — goes to the lowest standard of proof, a preponderance of the evidence, despite the gravity of allegations. They prevent the accused from presenting an exculpatory evidence and bar the accused of counsel from cross- examining witnesses even indirectly. They allow unsuccessful complainants to appeal, effectively exposing the accused to double jeopardy. Colleges and universities have even been known to flout their own rules and regulations to achieve their desired results.

Now, of course, please don’t misunderstand: Sexual harassment should be prohibited. Predators must be stopped. Sexual assault is a heinous crime. All allegations should be investigated. All complainants should be provided immediate medical care, where appropriate psychological counseling and educational accommodations. The guilty should be punished to the full extent of the law.

At the same time, schools must honor due process. Due process rightly embodies the recognition that implementing justice is always the work of fallible human beings. Due process is the cornerstone of legal justice in liberal democracies which stand for the equal rights of all. The denial of due process causes harms that go well beyond the life-altering injuries suffered by wrongly convicted students. The denial of due process also harms liberal education.

By jettisoning the distilled wisdom about fundamental fairness in a free society, higher education is accustoming students to the exercise of arbitrary power. It is habituating students to regard established authority as infallible. It erodes the habits and spirit of self- government.

In conclusion, the motive to restore the forms of liberal education, free speech, and due process springs from an understanding of what liberal democracy is and its promise to recover an understanding of what liberal democracy is and its promise it will be necessary to restore the substance of liberal education. To that urgent task at once educational, moral, and political, Leon Kass has made a towering contribution.

Thank you, Leon. (Applause.)

DR. KASS: Chris DeMuth on the aspirations of humankind.

CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH: My aspirations right now are very modest. (Laughter.)

For the first 312 pages of “Leading a Worthy Life,” Leon Kass is concerned with thoroughly contemporary problems that we’ve just been hearing about: the challenges to worthy living posed by modern technology and culture, especially biotechnology; sexual liberation; illiberal education; and personal self-absorption. And then he concludes with 67 pages on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from about 2,400 years ago, the Ten Commandments of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible from 3,300 to 3,500 years ago, and the Gettysburg Address from 154 years ago. What are these essays doing in a book about finding meaning in modern times?

For many authors of Kass’ range and prolificacy, one would be tempted to say, well, it’s really just an essay collection. And these ones are very good and interesting so he maybe just tossed them in at the end. And it’s true that there’s a good deal of old-school thinking even in Leon’s earlier chapters. Once when we were working together at AEI, Leon suggested to me that we might rename this institute the Old School for Social Research. (Laughter.)

But with Leon, everything is suited to a purpose. The most striking feature of his writing and teaching is careful attention to structure and context. And action or idea can be understood and criticized only in relation to other actions and ideas. A great text can be understood and criticized only by reading individual words, phrases, and sentences as components of a larger structure, oar to oar so to speak, with many oars cooperating to propel the reader in a certain direction.

This may of course reflect the influence of Leo Strauss, but my wife, who is a medical doctor, thinks it may reflect Leon’s medical training, where one studies individual organs and systems not only for their own attributes and functions but also and critically for how they operate as part of a whole body and person.

In any event, Leon says explicitly in his introduction that he has organized all of these essays into a coherent structure with a deliberate purpose, and we should take his words as seriously as he takes the words of others. If we do and we read his exegeses of the Ethics, the Ten Commandments, and the Gettysburg Address as carefully as he has written them, we will see their salience to his larger contemporary concerns. Of course, any work that endures through the centuries or millennia has found an audience in many different times and places. But I have in mind something very different, more specific about the pertinence of these three works to the modern world of the 21st century.

First and foremost, all three are works of individualism and were radically so for their times. They are concerned not with the sweep of impersonal history or abstract ideas about the good or bad or of individuals of passive beneficiaries or victims of society or other larger forces beyond their control. Rather, they are concerned with the actions of the individual whose most important attribute is freedom, the capacity to make choices, choices that have consequences and that invite the judgments of their fellow man and of God.

Freedom, moreover, exercised progressively, though not chronologically, in greater states of equality. Aristotle was no democrat, but his individual man made choices whose worth depended on the choices of other equally empowered men and who was affected by the opinions of those equals and forged friendships with them. God had just freed the children of Israel from bondage and was instructing them in how they were to conduct themselves as free and equal beings. And God was also implicitly insisting on the fundamental equality of men and women an insistence that Jesus would later run with. Lincoln propounded a new integration of freedom and equality. The equality of the Declaration was not a self-evident truth, but rather a proposition to be tested. And if Americans met the test, they would give birth to a new and larger form of freedom, one grounded in democratic equality for the first time.

From these modern premises, modern because they were themselves foundational, our three authors move in directions that are distinctly at odds with modern sentiments about freedom and equality, some of which Leon emphasizes. Of course, we know from Aristotle himself, from the Book of Exodus and those that follow, and from the history of post–Civil War America that our authors’ precepts were widely disregarded by their own contemporaries and audiences. But I’m thinking of modes of thought and conduct that are characteristic in our own time, where Leon’s interpretation of these great texts are antidotes to specific contemporary failings.

Let me mention three. First is the importance of conduct as opposed to being or identity. Aristotelian happiness and godly virtue can be achieved or even understood only through human action. We who have gathered to dedicate a battlefield can do so only by dedicating ourselves to a great task of action remaining before us. This is not “watch what I do, not what I say.” Aristotle highly values learning, conversing, and nobility of spirit. God commanded the Sabbath day of desisting from all activity and forbade false witness and the internal state of covetousness. Lincoln’s special calling was to inspire men through words.

Instead, our teachers, including here Leon, do not regard human goodness as a matter of personal status or intrinsic feelings or of professed ideals. It is rather a matter of human action in the world, including that most distinctive form of human action, conscious reflection and learning. Moreover, right human action depends upon habituation. To a significant extent, a man does noble or virtuous deeds not by rational deduction from abstract principles, but by adopting, copying the habits of others who they observe to be noble and virtuous.

Second is the importance of community and citizenship. Aristotle draws what he believes to be universal ethical lessons from the conduct of specific men in specific circumstances. But he makes it clear that true human flourishing or nobility can be realized only within a group or polity that admires and makes way for flourishing and nobility. The god of Exodus is instructing his chosen tribe with rules derived from his immediate experiences with them, but at the same time he’s addressing all of humankind. The Civil War was a test not only of America but of any nation so conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality. And its result would determine whether its form of government would or would not perish from the earth.

In every case, universal aspirations of humankind depend upon individuals conducting themselves within and subject to and constrained by concrete political communities. There are many lessons here for us moderns, from practitioners of identity politics to transnational bureaucrats. But I will say only one simple thing, that attachment to one’s group — racial, ethnic, religious, national — is natural and worthy, but ought also to be a vehicle for pursuing transcendent goods.

Third and most unhip of all is the importance of honor and sanctity. Aristotle’s great- souled man does not care for honor, regarding it as a petty thing, but he accepts it because it enables him to continue to do great deeds and because it inspires others to follow his example. God commands us to worship him and only him and to honor our father and mother regardless of whether they deserve it. Lincoln, Leon reminds us, was preoccupied with the worry that the cords of memory of the Founding Fathers had attenuated over time and hoped that we would be inspired to rededication by honoring the dead of the Civil War.

As against the modern practice of pronouncing absolutely everything to be awesome, we are instructed to submit to genuine awe and reverence to that which is noble and perfect beyond our capacities and often beyond our comprehension.

My three propositions I have presented in terribly oversimplified form. Each one admits of many qualifications and elaborations, which you can fully grasp only by buying and reading Leon’s awesome book. (Laughs.) But let me conclude in this free spirit by saying that the most important contemporary lesson that I learned from these three essays is entirely implicit and derives Leon’s studious attention to structure and context that I mentioned at the outset.

The Nicomachean Ethics, the Ten Commandments, and the Gettysburg Address are extraordinarily complex, intricate, subtle works. They need to be read, studied, unpacked, reassembled, tested against experience, and argued over for long periods of time before they can be even minimally understood. And Leon is their ideal exegete who teaches us of meanings and individual phrases that are utterly absent from the phrases themselves that live only in relation to other parts of the whole.

In the argot of modern constitutional debate, Leon is not a textualist but a structuralist. This is not to say that Kass, Aristotle, Lincoln, or God Almighty are practitioners of situational ethics or moral relativity. Far from it. Rather they see human living as highly, perhaps infinitely, deep and complex. Moral reasoning as a result is commensurately complex and not amenable to simple aphorisms. They are in this respect fundamentally opposed to the modern quest for simplification.

Science, for example, is based upon objectification and reductionism on breaking every phenomenon down into ever-smaller physical parts and on explaining their workings as parsimoniously as possible. This has been a great invention with phenomenal discoveries and blessings to its credit. But it errs and leads us badly astray when it proposes to settle every question of human life mechanistically and in a similar spirit.

Similarly, modern politics and popular culture are animated by the principles of simplification and reductionism. Political tweets and focus-group-tested talking points are designed to obliterate the very complexity of issues. Music and the narrative arts are stripped down to the most elementary urges and emotions. And in sports, the most physical and apolitical of human activity, where excellence is based upon an extraordinarily complex combination of skill, precision, strength, speed, judgment, and mental discipline, but where on television all of this is reduced to the pulsing excitement of a single touchdown pass or the last few seconds of a long race with the sprint to the finish line and then to tear-jerking stories about a competitor’s uncle who just came down with psoriasis.

These practices are inducements to passivity and to confusing feelings for thought and certitude for truth. Several decades ago, Pat Moynihan said, what the world needs now is great complexifiers. These great complicated demanding works faithfully expounded by Leon Kass may have come down to us from ancients, but they call on us to aspire above modern primitivisms. Thank you. (Applause.)

DR. KASS: Wow. Let me thank all of you for most generous, friendly, well, really just very kind and generous readings. Let me try to offer some response to each. I’m not sure I can do justice, but I’ll try to find those places where there might be either some explicit or tacit terms of disagreement so that we could proceed.

With respect to Mona, I’ll finish with a question to you. But with respect to your small quibble about the internet, as you know, I do give it high marks for introducing some distance and slowing things down, and I have members of my family now happily married who are now internet couples. And it is certainly in the modern time much better than almost all of the available alternatives for many people who thought that private life would take care of themselves and discover that it just doesn’t happen like that.

But there is — there is — I mean, the beginnings are — when people are out there perusing the various two-dimensional portraits that are up there, phishing and being phished 24/7, you begin in voyeurism. You don’t somehow begin with the immediate encounter of being struck by someone before whom you feel — you feel some kind of response, and it might even be a form of vulnerability.

But you’re out there shopping. And the disclosures are forms of control rather than the halting, tentative activities of self-revelation in which you in a way discover in part who you are because you’re trying to communicate it to someone else that you’re trying to get to know. That takes being present, co-present at the same time. It requires synchronous communication. It requires reading faces and gestures and not just the carefully contrived speech, which the safety of the internet provides.

So I think what can get past this, and in the present age it is for many people a blessing. But the medium itself is somehow at odds with what genuine intimacy requires, and I try to argue that out in the text.

The question for you would be, look, if you and I agree that one needs first of all a desire on the part of young people to grow up, and that means not just having an income and an apartment, but being willing to step forward into the shoes of your parents and take responsibility for the next generation. And if one needs to have a more serious view of what marriage is in fact all about — by the way, the internet, there’s a comment from Roger Scruton that I quote in that essay. The internet is absolutely sterile not only with respect to what’s out there in the culture, but it is sterile even in these courtships with respect to the future generation. In other words, unlike Eros, which emerges naturally, it has that kind of direction past itself, which may not be first in the minds of the young lovers but it’s somehow tacitly present in the feeling itself.

But if this is right and if especially some kind of discovery on the part of women that they really had it better in terms of the relations between men and women when these were not considered under the new solvent of power, as if all of these things were matters of who has power, but when saw this as a delicate dance between two in a way complementary and two in some ways opposing sorts of beings and that the power belongs to the women if only they would know how to exercise, how in the world — I certainly can’t persuade them. I’ve got the wrong credentials. (Laughs.) But how does one begin to persuade women that they’ve given away the game when they formulate all of these relations in terms of power in which they don’t understand that their own reticence was in fact the way of controlling the situation to their own advantage? So that would be — why don’t I go through these and then maybe people can come back rather than just —

MS. CHAREN: Okay.

DR. KASS: But that’s what I would like for you — Diana, what can I do with you? (Laughs.) That was a wonderful reading of the Declaration of Independence. And I have to go back to school to you on this. I think — I don’t read those — I haven’t read those three natural rights hierarchically. I’ve not seen a fat notion of happiness in the pursuit of happiness, but I’ve seen a more modern understanding of it. But that’s probably because I live with a debased view of it rather than in the 18th-century view of what that was. I liked what you did with the difference between pledging your lives and fortunes and the sacred honor. I thought that was magnificent.

However, there’s something very peculiar — for political purposes, this seems to me very good indeed to begin with the notion of the solitary rights bearing individual as a way of carving out a sphere of protected liberty against overbearing and despotic political rule. And for political matters, a view of our life as beginning with solitary individuals who have rights makes a certain amount of sense.

But it’s in a way false to the fact of the matter: The truth of human life is that we are not solitary and isolated individuals. We owe for our existence on dependencies to those who gave us life. We owe for our existence on the community in which we are reared, the kind of fiction of the natural rights state of nature teaching abstracts from the deep truths that we are really social beings, interconnected beings, with loves and hates and aspirations that are not somehow related to our rights.

And while you get to the duties, it seems to me that a regime that is founded with that kind of view doesn’t accidentally degenerate into a kind of radical individualism that eventually forgets its duties if and when the very sound political teaching which was balanced by Christian social and moral teaching, where the notion of rights becomes the moral coin of the realm and the other countervailing forces become weak, then you wind up with I think where we are in which we have a runaway individualism. People insist on rights and all kinds of matters.

John Kenney couldn’t make — no one could made today Kennedy’s speech about “ask not” in modern public life. The notion of our duties to our country — some people have it, but you can’t talk about it in those terms. Something has happened. And I think the something is somehow in the germ of what’s missing in the beginning. That’s why it seems to me one needs to supplement what’s Greek and what’s Biblical to what’s modern and liberal.

Peter, I haven’t given enough thought to the distinction that you’ve nicely drawn between the substance and the forms of liberal education. And it may very well be that the way to — the way to reopen the question about the substance is in fact to insist on the forms. But my own alma mater and place where I taught for a long time, the University of Chicago, which has gained a great deal of credit for, you know, upholding free speech and open inquiry and the importance of listening to multiple voices, cannot bring itself to say what you said and what I would say — that the reason you want these forums is because the business of the university is in fact to seek the truth. The president speaks about we’re in the business of knowledge creation.

And just a small footnote. The emphasis on diversity, which is now the coin of the realm everywhere, without anybody’s paying attention to it, is in fact — it turns out to be one of the real obstacles to the freedom of speech for the following reasons. People are brought in under the heading of diversity not as individuals who have their own thoughts, but as representative of groups whose opinions as members of groups we need to have in the community. A consequence of that is that you’ve in a way licensed the view that to attack their opinion is to attack their identity. And no wonder people get angry.

It was one thing when everybody’s here with his or her own opinion — and still some people took an attack on their opinion as an attack on their person, but now we’ve defined your opinions as belonging to the group for which you’ve been admitted here. And then it’s perfectly reasonable to object to an opinion on the grounds it’s an attack on my very being and my entire group identity.

So I’m not sure that you can simply restore the idea by just restoring the forms if the universities don’t somehow see that their ultimate purpose is somehow closer to what it once was.

Finally, Chris, I like very much your attempt to see the commonalities in these three essays — no, really. And particularly that they are all — I mean, it’s not surprising that it would come from you in this form, that they are all in a way attempts to address freedom. I stand by what I said to Diana that I don’t think that freedom is a sufficient principle. It is a great good in comparison with its opposite, but it needs to be instructed.

And all three of the texts in the end are in a way attempts to instruct human freedom in its open-ended and possibly wayward character. The importance of conduct and not just opinion, the importance of attachment in relation to community and citizenship, and above all, the idea that our perception of ourselves should be lifted up with notions of honor, in some sense of sanctification, all of these I think you can find in all three of those — all three of those texts.

But for me they live not so much as singers of one song, but as competing voices, all of which voices I love to listen to. I mean, they all have a claim on me. And if I find anybody who wants to deny one of them, I’m there to defend the last comma. But it’s perfectly clear to me that they are not simply — they don’t call us to the same things. And I think that’s OK. I mean, I don’t feel forced to choose. I think all of them are part of the profoundly great blessing that it is to live late in Western history. It would be terrible to think that we were born into the world after what we are bequeathing if we had not those things in our past to guide us. These are great teachings to wrestle with in their complexity and in their differences. And I certainly feel blessed to have gone to school to all of them.

If people want to come back — and, Mona, you’ve at least had an invitation to say something helpful — I will join your party if you can only tell me what to do.

MS. CHAREN: Well, you’ve given me a very easy assignment, you know, just solve the problems of the last 50 years, what’s gone wrong between men and women. And much of it, I — you know, the shameless plug — I do address in my forthcoming book, called “Sex Matters,” where I discuss the ways in which I think feminism has distorted relations between the sexes. And part of that is that I agree that we never do want to see the relationships between men and women, between lovers, as contests of power. And that is one of the things that feminism introduced into the equation.

And it’s a little ironic, too, because by phrasing things in terms of power when, in fact, what you want out of a romantic, a loving, a marital relationship is tenderness, mutual care, deep connection, not a brutal contest for authority or power, but there’s also a little bit of an irony in the fact that the feminists who were so keen to present the terms of ones of power also threw aside the one area of life between men and women where women really did have a lot of power; namely, sexual power. That was the one that the feminists said, we’re going to give the old heave-ho in the name of women’s liberation, and that, as I argue, was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Now, regarding though the way young people view it, I also do think — and I spoke to many, many people in the course of writing this book, and I do think that young people are still open to other ways of looking at the world. They are not all dyed-in-the-wool feminists. They are not all postmodern. They want the things that people have always wanted. They are open to the idea that bringing back dating, for example, is something that might be wholesome and healthy and enjoyable in this world.

There is a professor at Boston College named Kerry Cronin, who has now spoken on something like 80 campuses around the country and started programs bringing back dating. And she requires her students in a class that she teaches to go out on a date that does not involve alcohol, that is over by 10:00 p.m., that is not seeing a movie because the students have to be able to speak to one another. And it’s gotten tremendous enthusiasm.

So, you know, as you said at one point in this book, you know, that you might be clutching at straws and maybe I’m clutching at straws with this, but there are — I think that the basics about what people want from life don’t change and —

DR. KASS: I agree with that completely.

MS. CHAREN: You agree with that, exactly. And so it may be a matter of simply reintroducing some ideas that we may — you know, that some people may call passé, but, you know, a random 20-year-old might think, oh, really? A date? There’s a thought.

DR. KASS: Yes.

DR. SCHAUB: Yes. You persist in thinking that the debasement was inevitable and —

DR. KASS: Sorry?

DR. SCHAUB: You persist in thinking that the debasement was inevitable, and I guess I don’t know that it is. I mean, I take heart from the fact that Lincoln rescued the nation by recurring to the Declaration. I think it’s still possible for us to gain a lot by going back to the Declaration without students.

You know, I trained in political philosophy, but, over the years, as a teacher, I find myself shifting more and more to teaching American things. It seems it’s the best thing that I can do for my students. And the sort of new interest in, you know, each of the American founders, all of these historians coming out with these wonderful books — it seems to me that Americans want to know how they ought to think about the founding, and that that’s all very salutary. So I — the Declaration is not straight Hobbes, and it may not even be straight Locke.

DR. KASS: This is not the place to ask you, but you read it as a Christian document?

DR. SCHAUB: Well, I never used to. It wasn’t how I was trained to read it. But — I mean, certain leading lights in the founding may clearly move in a more anti-Christian direction, but the document itself is just much more complex than that. And it has these other threads there, and it seems to me all of those threads are present. So in that way, it’s a good way into the various strands of the tradition. All of those traditions are present in the United States in fairly strong ways.

And so looking at the Declaration could at least be a way to raise the question: What do they mean when they talk about happiness? John Adams at least seems to have a pretty Aristotelian notion of what happiness meant. He said political science is the divine science of social happiness. That sounds a lot like Aristotle’s “On Eudaimonia.”

DR. KASS: Peter?

DR. BERKOWITZ: Very quickly. I actually — I hadn’t mean to suggest that restoration of the forms free speech and due process would bring about a restoration of the substance, study of the great conversation and the great questions through it. In fact, I meant nearly the opposite, which is that one of the reasons that free speech and due process are under assault, one of the reasons is the one you suggested so nicely, that is the equation of opinion with identity such that a criticism of opinion is — or as we say now on campus, the invalidation of my humanity. (Laughs.)

What I had meant to suggest was actually that another reason we don’t have free speech and we don’t have due process is because our colleges and universities are not teaching the great tradition so that those who ought to be defending it are not even aquatinted with the principles of free speech and due process.

So I think we’re actually in this complex quandary in which to restore the forms, we need to recover the substance, but to recover the substance, we need the forms to protect its study. Tough situation.

DR. KASS: Chris, did you want something?

MR. DEMUTH: Well, I should just say that I agree emphatically with what you said. And just so I’m not misunderstood, I can remember once many years ago going to my first meeting with the Philadelphia Society, and everybody was walking around with buttons that said, “Freedom is my God.” (Laughs.)

I meant to say only that the Ten Commandments and the Nicomachean Ethics and the Gettysburg Address speak to us — speak to us, us modern Americans — because they are addressed to people as individuals who are coping with the problems of freedom in a world that has more or less equality. You’re exercising freedom in a world where other people have approximately the same powers and freedom that you have.

And this presents extraordinarily deep and complicated problems. And these three texts address them at a level that accords to the full depth and complexity of human life as none others have. And there have been many other people that have written in the last several hundreds years that do not speak to the idea of the free individual in circumstances of equality. Hegel doesn’t really speak to us that way, but these ancients do. That’s all I meant to say.

DR. KASS: Thank you. Do we have time to open it up for some questions? We do? Is there a mic that can be circulated, or people will just speak — there’s a question to the back there.

Q: Thank you.

DR. KASS: Would you please identify yourself too?

Q: I will. Bonnie Wachtel, ardent fan. And fabulous panel.

But let me push back on one thing that you said, Leon, just in offhand remarks here, which, as you said, we’re living — the joys of living late in Western history, and of course, we don’t know if we are living late in Western history. I would hope there’s a lot more Western history to come. And just to probe that a little further as to whether that was a Freudian slip, I am wondering if viewing the state of American culture now through the lens of the humanities and analogizing to other periods throughout history, if there’s an analogy that comes to mind which will give us a sense of your judgment of the significance of the difficulties you pointed to.

DR. KASS: Yeah. It wasn’t a slip. I didn’t say it very well or very properly. But it’s really wonderful that we come into a world in which, you know, Bach and Hayden and Mozart and Beethoven and I can continue, and Schubert, preceded us. Imagine if they were to arrive in the world, and all they had what we have been producing in the last 50 years. And I don’t mean to knock any particular creative act. I’m just saying that we are the inheritors of just extraordinarily deep, beautiful, exquisite works of the human intellect and imagination. And I’m not sure — I’m not sure that we’re going to see the like of that again.

And one of the reasons I’m doubtful of it has something to do with this. I mean, the attention span is changing. Look, I think — you know, it’s fun to imagine at what point could you resurrect the great of our — you know, the great ones of long ago, bring them back and say, “Do you still recognize human life?” And Mona said before, and I agree with it completely, that changes in the world have been unbelievable, the changes in my own lifetime. We used to stop when we were playing ball as a kid when an airplane flew overhead. And now people fly, and they have no appreciation of what an outstanding thing it is to be, you know, in the morning in Europe and in the afternoon in San Francisco, OK?

So the world is changing tremendously. But I think the human soul’s aspirations have remained recognizably the same. And you meet the young people, and they still — they want love, they want friendship, they want a life that make sense. They really do not want to lie to themselves if you give them an opportunity to think about things. That’s one of the great blessing of teaching the young. You recognize them.

But it’s I think a real question with these new modes whether there aren’t possibly real changes in the form of human attention, of human cognition, of human interaction. Facebook, which I regard as the work of the devil — (laughter) — is working on a virtual reality platform so that you can — it’s no longer sufficient that you walk down the street and you’re not there, if you don’t acknowledge the human presence coming in the opposite direction. Four out of five people aren’t on the street with you.

But now they’re not even going to be in their right minds. They’re going to be in some completely different reality. And this is going to be the new way. I hope that there’s revolt against some of this and that one can recover a certain more deeper connection to real life. I hope that the kind of postmodern rejection of the belief in truth can be overturned. But I’m not betting a lot on it.

Down here and then there. Please.

Q: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming here. We’re so honored to have you here. My name is Nicole Penn. I’m a research assistant here. And I was just wondering — it’s a question I direct both to Mona and you is — do you not think that you’re perhaps being a little unfair with the 25, 27-year-old woman that you describe in your book given that really it’s educated women that are the ones that are getting married, having children, perhaps in their late 20s. But they are still having lasting marriages. They’re having good partnerships. And is there — is the problem not that, you know, liberalism does not have space for this, it’s that liberals are not preaching what they practice?

DR. KASS: Well, there’s certainly some of that. And I borrowed that line from Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart.” No. Look, I’m already regretting the grim remark I made at the end of the last comment. (Laughter.)

And, in fact, let me just —

MS. CHAREN: On to Twitter.

DR. KASS: No. No. Not about Facebook. I don’t take that back at all. (Laughter.) Who would set out to destroy the distinction between private and public life? What kind of benefactor of humanity is that, and who’s doing it on purpose? Who’s doing it on purpose? Never mind. (Laughter.) An old man is entitled to a little outrage. (Laughter.)

Look, I think — I think if you get below the noise and you see the efforts people are making to live decent and worthy lives, I mean, to have solid marriages, to raise their children, to find meaningful work, to serve their community, serve their country, the facts on the ground are probably a lot better than what’s in the air and what people say.

And part of the reason for this book was partly to give voice to the things which many Americans know in their bones, but in which they won’t hear defended by the public intellectuals or by the popular culture and so on. I think — but it’s getting late and one needs to have a loud defense of these things. One needs to raise up — one needs to raise up a kind of intellectual and cultural elite that’s not ashamed of defending the things which are worthy and honorable and in a way to support and preach what they practice.

But I do think it’s harder and harder to — and any of the parents in the room of young children will know, it’s harder and harder to try to teach these things given what is the dominant part of the popular culture and what are the dominant sort of ideological teachings that get in the way of ordinary education. This is a small gloss on Peter’s comment also.

Look, if the colleges were doing what they were supposed to do with respect to liberal education, if the students were really excited about the learning, then all of this other extraneous ideological stuff wouldn’t have the same kind of foothold. I mean, we’ve never had a problem in our classes that weren’t — once, very early, teaching the Declaration of Independence, a young woman who since — still a good friend — said, enough of this stuff about the Founding Fathers. Where are the founding mothers, OK? Once in 34 years in a class in which we called mister and miss, they insisted that they call each other the same thing, we treated them as if they were part of our generation knowing that that was in a way a falsehood. But we treated them as better than they thought they were, and they acted the part. But the culture is not doing that for people.

One last or do you want to — one last. Please here. Oh, I’m sorry. It’s really late.

Q: Hi. David Amatis from AEI. Thank you for joining us. To continue the conversation about Locke, and I think a great debate that was much more illuminating than a lot of recent conservative arguments about liberalism, I’m curious to your thoughts, Dr. Kass, of whether you think the form of lay capitalism that we have today as described by Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch has led to kind of the eclipse of the sacred and of dignity that you decline or whether you think certain social, intellectual, and cultural choices we made in the 1960s itself gave us the form of capitalism, especially in terms of cronyism and rent-seeking that we have today.

DR. KASS: Wow. (Laughter.) I should defer to Chris on the economic part of the question, which I’m not fit to answer. But I do think — and this is — I don’t think that one can — the ’60s were a turbulent time. Lots happened then. I’m not sure that it wasn’t in the cards if not then at some point later. One is not going to have the old form of sexual mores once you have the pill. The world has changed. It’s probably the single most transformative innovation of the last century possibly after the automobile.

And we’d have a long discussion with Diana. I do think that the seeds of a certain kind of — look, you put together — you put together prosperity, democracy, democracy in a Tocquevillian sense and modern technology and the tendency is to the bottom unless there are countervailing forces. And I think Tocqueville saw some of these things coming, but he saw America as being at that time in a kind of balance. That balance has changed in the 20th century.

And I’m not sure that you could blame the economic forces primarily for those things. They played a role, but I don’t think the whole picture — I don’t think the whole picture is in the transformation of capitalism, though it has certainly changed the workplace, for example. And the problem of finding meaningful work in the new economy is going to be an abiding problem for a long time.

Thank you very much for your patience and your interest. (Applause.)

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