MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — Last weekend, I ventured to my alma mater to attend the Center for Ethics and Culture’s tenth annual conference, The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good. An intoxicating breath of fresh intellectual air, the conference featured invited speakers, inter alios, Russell Hittinger (Attended and amazed by.), Michael Novak (Avoided; he seems to be affable enough, though), and Rev. Michael Baxter, c.s.c., as well as a fantastic lecture on Friday night, “Divorce as Fracture of the Common Good: Ingmar Bergman on Guilt, Art, and Confession”, from top Catholic intellectual (despite his presence at Baylor) Thomas Hibbs.
The arrestingly stunning lineup of sessions included a Front Porch Republic panel, chaired by Phil Bess
and featuring Professors Deneen, Peters, and Wilson. All three offered wonderful papers; Professor Deneen’s, on the front porch as intermediary place between public and private spheres, echoes many of the sentiments that he has expressed regarding localism and the contrast between localist/communitarian conservatism and the malignant beast that is liberalism — whether in classical form (and its contemporary right-wing progeny) or the more progressive/openly totalitarian forms — as well as the thoughts expressed in “A Republic of Front Porches”, one of the first disquisitions offered by that very fine online journal, wherein Professor Deneen wrote
In a microcosm, the forces that led to the decline of the porch as a place of transition between the private and the public realm have eviscerated both those domains of their capacity to educate a citizenry for self-government. The porch – as an intermediate space, even a sphere of “civil society” – was the symbolic and practical place where we learned that there is not, strictly speaking, a total separation between the public and private worlds. Our actions in private are not merely “private,” but have, in toto, profound public implications. The decline of courtship and marriage proposals within earshot of kin, for one instance, has led to ever greater “privatization” of our intimate lives, and a proportionate decline of the societal and public investment in undergirding families and the communities that foster them. Our private actions of driving ever greater distances in our automobiles have fostered devastated landscapes, deep dependence of foreign powers and tract housing devoid of real community. Meanwhile, our “public” world is increasingly shorn of the voices of citizens, wholly attenuated in the decline of the capacity of localities to govern their fates. For me, there is nothing more symbolic of this fact than the rush of Governors to serve the Obama administration, a sad, pathetic revelation that governing a State is less significant for most of our leaders than becoming a functionary in the national bureaucracy. Our States, not to mention our localities, are ever-less a kind of “porch,” that transition from the world of the home to the public realm of community and eventually State and nation. Instead, as wholly “private citizens” – or, to invoke the preferred term, “consumers” – accustomed to houses that are places of private retreat, we see only one public entity of significance – the national State – but find it difficult to see ourselves a part of it. We regard the State as a distant and mysterious entity, occupied either by our team or their team but in either event an organization so vast, complex and dizzying that we regard it as anything but the locus of our practice of shared self-governance. We are daily less a republic because we daily perceive less of what are common or public things – res publica. Without the literal spaces where we come to know what we have in common through speech, habit and memory, we regard politics as a competitive spectator sport and government as a distant imposition – but in any event, anything but self-rule.
Needless to say, it was an illuminating talk. Not, perhaps, as enlightening as Peters’ and Wilson’s, though, if only because their essays bridged the gap between political theory and literature quite interestingly, Peters speaking of Flannery O’Conner and place and Wilson on T.S. Eliot and Stoicism — that is, on Eliot and the importance of place in contradistinction to the the rootless cosmopolitanism of the Stoics.
For me, indeed, it was an ineffably needed inhalation of intellectual and high-cultural air; it was also a great cause for hope, hope that, however far we have damned ourselves, we may still have a chance at redeeming our culture. At the very least, a strain of Catholicism exists in America still that remembers that Catholicism is neither left nor right, but Catholic. As Deneen notes
This past weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of attending a conference at Notre Dame entitled “The Summons of Freedom.” The conference was sponsored by The Center for Ethics and Culture, an interdisciplinary program founded and directed by Professor David Solomon of Notre Dame’s Department of Philosophy. It was the tenth annual conference held by the Center, though the first I attended. Based on what I saw, heard, and experienced, it will not be my last. If there is to be not only a defense of, but a revival of, the full dimension of Catholicism in America today, I believe it will emanate from the work being done by this Center.
[…]
It was an exciting weekend and presentation, finally because in the contours of its basic premises and arguments one could see the beginnings of a revival of a truly dissenting Catholic voice in contemporary America. For too long Catholics have lined up in “conservative” or “progressive” camps in ways that have aligned too closely with the existing political parties. Those arguments have pulled the Catholic electorate to the left or right, becoming THE swing vote in national elections - but for that reason, also effectively splitting apart the consistency of the full teaching of the Church, and thereby obscuring its power and damaging its effectiveness in the broader culture.
God, Notre Dame, country, indeed!
Professor Peters also offers an account of the weekend, one more loyal to truth than to facts. (And the answer to your question is, “None of your business.”)
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