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Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times

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Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times 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.
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