“Domesticity itself is altered beyond recognition; women no longer marry to help their husbands get a living, but to help them spend their income.”—Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture
“The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty. In a deep irony, liberalism claims legitimacy based upon democratic consent, yet it ultimately hollows out the prospects for functioning democracy.”—Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
“Yet this [government] expansion continues, largely as a response to people’s felt loss of power over the trajectory of their lives in so many distinct spheres—economic and otherwise—leading to demands for further intervention by the one entity even nominally under their control. Our government readily complies, moving like a ratchet wrench, always in one direction, enlarging and expanding in response to civic grievances, ironically leading in turn to citizens’ further experience of distance and powerlessness.”
“Perhaps above all, liberalism has drawn down on a preliberal inheritance, and resources that at once sustained liberalism but which it cannot replenish. The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life—familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national—reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability."
“In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment."
“Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from the constitutive associations and education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and communities were assumed, while their foundations were being philosophically undermined. This undermining led, in turn, to these goods being undermined in reality, as the norm-shaping power of authoritative institutions grew tenuous with liberalism’s advance."
“Hobbes and Locke both—for all their differences—begin by conceiving natural humans not as parts of wholes but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even nonrelational. As Bertrand de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who must have forgotten their own childhood.”
“Every generation must live for itself. Liberalism makes humanity into mayflies, and unsurprisingly, its culmination has led each generation to accumulate scandalous levels of debt to be left for its children, while rapacious exploitation of resources continues in the progressive belief that future generations will devise a way to deal with the depletions."
“Elite universities, and the educational system more broadly, are the front lines in the advance of liberalism’s deliberate and wholesale disassembly of a broad swath of cultural norms and practices in the name of liberation from the past. Two areas in particular are served and undergirded by the educational imperative to advance the contemporary anticulture: dissolutions of sexual and economic norms, both advanced in the name of liberation of the human will that is defined especially by consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking… The universities are the front line of the sexual revolution, the high churches charged with proselytizing the modern orthodoxy of individual liberation.”
“Liberty is the learned capacity to govern oneself using the higher faculties of reason and spirit through the cultivation of virtue. The condition of doing as one wants is defined in this premodern view as one of slavery, in which we are driven by our basest appetites to act against our better nature. It was the central aim of the liberal arts to cultivate the free person and the free citizen, in accordance with this understanding of liberty. The liberal arts made us free.”
“The aim of such an education [in the liberal arts] is not “critical thinking” but the achievement of liberty governed by the discipline of virtue.”
“Their practitioners still studied the great texts, but the reason for doing so was increasingly in doubt. Did it make sense any longer to teach young people the challenging lessons of how to use freedom well, when the scientific world was soon to make those lessons unnecessary? Could an approach based on culture and tradition remain relevant in an age that valued, above all, innovation and progress?”
“The humanities of old would be able to muster a powerful argument against this tendency. Its warning would be simple, recalling its oldest lessons: at the end of the path of liberation lies enslavement. Such liberation from all obstacles is finally illusory, for two simple reasons: human appetite is insatiable and the world is limited. For both of these reasons, we cannot be truly free in the modern sense. We can never attain satiation, and will be eternally driven by our desires rather than satisfied by their attainment.”
“The ignorance of its own history and aims—the “presentism” of liberals—is one of liberalism’s greatest defenses against recognition that it generates a civic catastrophe that it then claims it must cure by the application of more liberalism.”
“…the emaciated forms of spectator politics that we call democracy...”
“The national obsession with presidential electoral politics and the reduction of political conversation and debate to issues arising in the federal government are signs more of civic disease than of health. Politics is reduced largely to a spectator sport, marketed and packaged as a distraction for a passive population. Elections provide the appearance of self-governance but mainly function to satiate any residual civic impulse before we return to our lives as employees and consumers."--Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed
“There is an enthusiasm born of skill—a joy in doing what one can do well—that is far more effective, where art is involved, than the enthusiasm born of vivid feeling. The steady advance of veterans is more powerful than the mad rush of raw recruits.”—John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching
“The difference between the pupil who works for himself and the one who works only when he is driven is too obvious to need explanation. The one is a free agent, the other is a machine. The former is attracted by his work, and, prompted by his interest, he works on until he meets some overwhelming difficulty or reaches the end of his task. The latter moves only when he is urged. He sees what is shown him, he hears what he is told, advances when his teacher leads, and stops just where and when his teacher stops. The one moves by his own activity, the other by borrowed impulse. The former is a mountain stream fed by living springs, the latter a ditch filled from a pump worked by another’s hand.”—Gregory
“The love of knowledge for itself or for its uses is in reality moral, as it implies moral affections and purposes of good and evil…hence no education or teaching can be absolutely divorced from morals. The affections come to school with the intellect.”—Gregory
“The explanation that settles everything and ends all questions, usually ends all thinking also.”—Gregory
“Those who lead disordered lives say to those who lead ordered lives that it is they who stray from nature, and believe themselves to follow it; like those on board ship think people on shore are moving away. Language is the same on all sides. We need a fixed point to judge it. The harbor judges those on board ship. But where will we find a harbor for morals?”—Pascal, Pensées
