American Culture in Peril

Sources of Renewal in Twenty-First-Century America

SOURCES OF RENEWAL IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICA Wilfred M. McClay These past few years have been a rough and discouraging stretch for Americans in general, and perhaps especially for American conservatives . Yet in such times all of us should recall the counsel of Shakespeare , expressed by the exiled and deposed Duke Senior in As You Like It: Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. (act 2, scene 1, lines 12–14) There is, in other words, something to be said for the sheer gravity of the challenges we now face as a nation, challenges that we can no longer evade or postpone. Their weightiness may even turn out to be a providential gift, albeit one shrouded in deep and unattractive disguise. Arnold Toynbee saw the dynamic of challenge-and-response as the chief source of a civilization’s greatness. Far from being the fruit of a steady inner-directed maturation, a civilization’s higher development arose out of its skill and stamina in overcoming a succession of ordeals. “Creation,” he asserted, “is the outcome of an encounter,” and “genesis is a product of interaction.”1 Great civilizations die from suicide rather than murder, which is to say that they die when they no longer possess the will to respond confidently and creatively to the very challenges that would otherwise make them stronger and better. He was right. Challenge and response is the way of life—and the way of national renewal. The challenges facing us are so great now, as 136 Wilfred M. McClay we look at our massive and unsustainable deficits, our faltering economy , our fragile families and fraying moral fabric, and our diminishing place in the world, that we have no choice but to respond to them. The gravity of the situation forces us to think our way back to our first principles. This is not quite what President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had in mind when he spoke his now-famous words— probably the chief ones for which history will remember him—“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” But we would be doing just that, wasting the crisis by failing to learn from it, were we to respond with acts of mere band-aid pragmatism and temporizing. OBAMA AND CULTURAL CHANGE Some think the way to respond is to ramp up the comprehensive supervisory power of our cultural elites, and of the political class that embodies and serves them, over our society and economy. This is the view of the Obama administration, with its centralized and technocratic vision of social reform and its stress on the uses of expert knowledge in the proper governance of human affairs—ideas that are far from new but rather are throwbacks to the central contention of the Progressive movement of a hundred years ago and a clear gesture in the direction of the vast, all-embracing, and severely strained welfare states of northwestern Europe. It is also the view of figures like New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has warmly embraced the Obama administration, praised its “pragmatism” and reliance upon “professional expertise,” and admonished conservatives for choosing to “stick with Reagan” in perpetuating an “insane” antagonism to a large and powerful national government.2 What we are seeing is the latest installment in a long-running theme of modern American history: the dream of technocracy, meaning the rule of society by accredited and academically certified experts , disinterested authorities who in turn direct an enveloping web of bureaucrats, engineers, civil servants, and other professionals and technicians employed by a vastly enlarged and all-embracing state apparatus . This was the lofty dream of philosophes and utopians such as Marquis de Condorcet and Auguste Comte and Lester Frank Ward, who believed that, given the intelligibility of the world and the lim- Sources of Renewal in Twenty-first-Century America 137 itless capacity of human reason, the methods of science should be extended to embrace all aspects of life, including the ordering and administration of social and political affairs. The idea, in full or partial form, has had many exponents over the years, even in democratic America. It informed the shape and direction taken by the professions—medical, legal, scientific, scholarly —that established themselves as bastions of expertise in the last decades of the nineteenth century...