Peter Augustine Lawler

The Problem of Technology

echnology is a problem because we cannot do without it and our use of it clearly makes us both better and worse. Human beings are—among other things—technological or tool-making animals. We use our brains and our freedom to transform nature, and in doing so we transform ourselves. We also have a perverse capacity to make ourselves unhappy and a singular pride in our misery. We are both proud of and wish to free ourselves from the burdens of our technological success. So we find it almost impossible to judge how much and what kind of technology would be best for us. In principle, we should be free to accept or reject various technological developments. Technology, after all, is supposed to be means for the pursuit of whatever ends we choose. But, in truth, it might be our destiny to be moved along by impersonal and unlimited technological progress. We do not have much evidence of significant numbers of human beings resisting technological changes for long periods of time. (The peaceful and admirable Amish, for example, are a very small exception to a general rule.) From a purely natural view at least, we do not know why human beings alone among the species are technological animals. Only we human beings can freely negate nature to satisfy our desires; only we human beings can create new and harder-to-satisfy needs through our technological success. Our technological acquisitions make us less happy than our being deprived of such acquisitions—of, say, air conditioning—can make us miserable, not to mention whiny. We do not know why we, through our inventions, came to dominate the rest of nature. One of the best pieces of evidence that we are different from chimpanzees and dolphins is that we can so easily control them if we want to, but they cannot give orders to us. We do not know why we have the capability and the desire to threaten the very existence of all life on our planet. It is almost impossible to call what we have achieved through technological success— from a natural view—progress. Technological change really is progress from another view. It is the increase in the human power to control or manipulate nature. The general rule is that societies that encourage or are open to such change overwhelm those that are not. That is why the modern West has exerted its control over the whole world, and why the Europeans almost eliminated the Native Americans in our country. But this control, of course, is quite ambiguous. Technology is characteristically the imposition of human will over nature; we comprehend nature insofar as we control it. But our control and our comprehension are always far from complete. When we dam up a river to produce power or end flooding, we have often discovered, to our surprise, that we have transformed a flourishing body of water into a dying one. We did not know enough to anticipate the destructive effects of our control, but that knowledge does not usually free us to remove the dam on which we have come to depend. We now know enough, though, to be very reluctant to build dams. Another reason that we are not free to relinquish control once we have achieved it is that we cannot dispose of technological knowledge once we have acquired it. Surely we regret, on balance, our invention of nuclear weapons. But it would be crazy for America to destroy its nuclear weapons or even to stop trying to produce better ones. The knowledge of how to build them is everywhere, and otherwise insignificant powers such as North Korea and even transnational terrorists groups are going to find it progressively easier to use that knowledge. So whatever our desires, we are going to become both progressively more afraid of and more reliant

Grade Inflation, Democracy, and the Ivy League

T he Ivy League is once again under siege from smart conservative critics. First among them is Harvard government professor and Perspectives on Political Science consulting editor Harvey C. Mansfield, who has found a new way to conofficial Harvard, ironically, was indignant at the suggestion that not all grades are really earned. The average grade now at Harvard is an A-minus, and the last bastion of competition among ambitious students is over the still relatively scarce A’s. The B-plus now stands tinrie /his attack on his institution’s incredible, shameless grade intlation. He has announced to his students that he will ni,w give them two grades: one for the registrar (what he callls the “ironic grade”) and one that is their real grade (whatithe student deserves but will not be recorded). Mansfield holds that to record the real grade would be unjust to his sttidents. It would, in effect, penalize them for studying with Ilim. lroibic grading is more than a publicity stunt for Mansfield. In tho ‘70s he wa.. called Harvey “C-minus” Mansfield, althoygh even he doesn’t give C-minuses these days. He might have been provoked into taking this stand by CSPAN‘S Brian Lamb, who bluntly asked the professor on Booktlntes what his grade distribution is today. Mansfield pled qonfidentiality, with a bit of blush. He couldn’t explain on TV’ why a professor whose average grade is far above C and ewen significantly above B might still be regarded as unreaionably tough. The only way Mansfield could clearly distinQuish himself from his Harvard colleagues was to make it cle# that he still knew the difference between an ironic gradeiand ;I real one, and to find a way of reminding students that tle had no choice but to give them more than they deserywd. As far as I can tell, students for the most part respoiided well to that reminder, not having been completely suck& in by the flattery of most of their other professors. But

Tocqueville on Pantheism, Materialism, and Catholicism

emocratic thought, Alexis de Tocqueville explains, opposes particular distinctions and so the particularity of the personal God and human persons. It tends to replace personal or individual explanations with impersonal ones, and so it tends to culminate in materialism and pantheism. My aim here is to consider Tocqueville’s view of the connection between pantheism and materialism, and to consider why he believes that the American alternatives in spiritual thought will eventually be pantheism and Catholicism. Tocqueville is not usually viewed as our guide on either the truth or the utility of fundamental intellectual doctrines, but what he says about materialism, pantheism, and perhaps even Catholicism accounts for America today even better than for the America of the 1830s about which he wrote. It may well be obvious that materialism and pantheism have become the cherished faiths of our intellectuals, but Tocqueville can actually explain why. More important still is the opening that the progress made by those impersonal faiths may give to Catholicism.

Chantal Delsol on Human Rights and Personal Dignity

Chantal Delsols work is distinguished by its articulation of the interdependence of an effective defense of human rights with a truthful understanding of the dignified responsibility of the human person. Most of the experience of the modern world, however, has called into question the sustainability of the experience of the person, while also making it clear that human beings do not have the option of returning to some more holistic world. Delsol reflects on the emptiness of the experience of the modern individual, the inability of modern societies to accord proper dignity to caregiving, and the continuing need for a personal theology.

Disco and Democracy: Thoughts on Stillman's Film and Book

W hit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco With Cocktails at Petrossian Aferwards (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000) is a milestone in publishing. It is a funny and serious novel based on a funny and serious film. The novel’s author is the film maker. Films based on novels are commonplace, but the reverse is extraordinarily rare, with the exception of tacky “novelizations” or quick and simple summaries of the film’s plot by a hack writer for semiliterate shoppers in mall bookstores. Stillman perversely throws up additional barriers to taking his novel seriously. The book has two title pages. The first begins The Lust Days of Disco With Cocktails at Perrossiun Afterwards, a novel by Whit Stillman. The second 7he Lust Days ojDisco, An Account of the Real Story Upon Which the Movie Was Based by Jimmy Steinway, the “Dancing Adman.” The book was actually written by Stillman, and it includes basically the same story as the one presented in the film with a number of additions, the largest being the reunion of the characters years later at “Petrossian,” a Manhattan bar, after the screening of the film. The fictional characters are described attending the film made iibout a certain real period in their young lives. Stillman presenk his novel as having been written by Jimmy Steinway, one of the characters in the film. Jimmy, the book says, got the contract for the “novelization” of the film. What happens in the novel is presented as having really happened; the film was based on real lives. And Jimmy’s novelization is not of the film but of “the real story upon which the movie was based.” The film is fictionally pre-

Aliens, the Cosmos, and the Foundations of Political Life

Abstract The possibility of a human encounter with extraterrestrials is a fundamental and inescapable feature of the contemporary imagination. Clearly, human beings have longings that elude earthly satisfaction. With the decline of religion, or belief in a providential and wrathful God, our attention remains fixed on the sky, but less on a heaven unseen and more on planets and forms of life undiscovered.

Tocqueville on human misery and human liberty

Abstract Tocqueville understands Rousseaus history as presupposing the authenticity of Pascals experience of being a self-conscious mortal. As human beings become more human or historical, they come to know and experience more of what was always true about the contingency of the human beings particular existence. Pascal had already know everything fundamental than Rousseau knew. I use both Tocquevilles “Memoir on Pauperism” and part of the second volume of Democracy in America to show how he accounts for and uses the historical observation that human progress increases self-consciousness and discontent and hence leads to revolution or some other form of misanthropic self destructiveness.

Reaganism, Liberal Education, and Conservatism.

Liberal education is often or even typically associ ated, to some extent or another and for one reason or another, with the serious study of the philosophical and literary texts that compose the Great Tradition of the West. A perennial argument against this sort of edu cation is that it promotes political conservatism, a propensity to oppose the modern and particularly American progress toward achieving the ideals of democracy and equality. This argument is once again at the center of American educational controversy in the 1980s. Striking evidence

Roger Scruton's Conservatism: Between Xenophobia and Oikophobia

ABSTRACT The English philosopher Roger Scruton calls himself a functional anthropologist. That means he defends the lifeworld—the relational, moral world in which we all must live—against the educated derision of the monstrous entity often called the self-conscious intellectual or elitist cosmopolitan. My focus here is to examine Scrutons defense of the nation—as the civilized mean between xenophobia and oikophobia—and religion as indispensable forms of social belonging. I conclude by offering the beginnings of an American and Catholic correction to his British form of liberal conservatism.

The Place of Liberal Education in America

Abstract Liberal education has a real, if precarious, place in America. Its purpose is to remind each of us that were all more than middle-class, more than beings with interests or rights. American liberal education finds its resources in classical and Christian thought, both European and indigenous. The main challenge to liberal education today comes from the libertarians.