A free people must be virtuous

Dear Reader ( Even those of you who didn’t seem to notice or care that I failed to file this “news” letter on Friday),

So I’m sitting here at Gate C6 at O’Hare waiting for my flight home. I am weary, pressed for time, in desperate need of a shower, and filled with a great sense of dread for the work ahead of me, sort of like the stripper with an hour left on the clock realizing that Eddy “Sweaty Sponge” Spaluko just walked in from his job draining Porta- Potties.

Meanwhile, a few minutes ago ( which would actually make it erstwhile), I saw aman eating a pre- made salad — no doubt put together in some giant salad sweatshop outside Cicero, Ill. He dropped a crouton, covered in somuch dressing it looked like some strange sea creature that exudes creamy ranch as a defense mechanism against predators.

When the crouton hit the blue airport carpeting, time slowed to a crawl, the background sounds of a busy airport vanishing as if the Almighty Himself had hit the mute button. The man picked it up barehanded, unconcerned by the squid- ink defenses of this soaked bread product. He looked around, mouthed something I can only assume was a silent prayer to the god of the Five Second Rule, and slyly popped it into his mouth.

In my mind’s eye, I pointed at him like I was Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers but shouted, “Noooooooo!” like Bruce Campbell at the end of Evil Dead 2.

In reality, I just sat there ( here actually) and stared. I kept staring, even as he walked out of my field of vision, wandering off to some future where many a soggy floor- nugget repast awaited him. Perhaps it was the deep contrast between someone inclined to both eat sensibly — a salad! — and insensibly: Every strand of airport carpet lint is a feudal city state inhabited by hydrothermal worms, and ranch dressing is known to cause severe cases of worm- gigantism in them.

Perhaps it was because

I am so overwhelmed with weltschmerz that I could find myself day- dreaming even as a ranch- dressing metamorphic hydrothermal worm ate my foot.

But, whatever the reason, I just sat here, numb to the horror. Comfortably Numb Numb is a funny word — and not just when the “b” isn’t silent as when spoken by Mushmouth in Fat Albert. Its original meaning is “taken” or “seized” from the Old English niman: “to take, catch, grasp” in the way one is taken by palsy, seized by paralysis or shock, or, especially, overcome with cold. What’s interesting about this is that a loss of feeling wasn’t central to the word. Rather, it’s the sense that some powerful affliction takes over you and, I presume, renders you indifferent to other sensations or feelings. As when you feel so cold that you grow numb — and I assume that’s where the modern meaning comes from.

One of the oldest critiques of modernity is the claim that it breeds a kind of numbness of the soul. We become seized or grasped by the demands of the disenchanted modern world, and we in turn become deadened to the important things that give life meaning.

That’s essentially the point of Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed. For Deneen, this condition is an inevitable product of liberalism — and here he and I mean the liberalism birthed from Locke and Hobbes, Hume and Bacon ( mmmm Bacon). But for Deneen, it’s also the liberalism of Rousseau and Dewey. He believes the political arguments between left and right these last 500 years are far narrower than most of us think. What he calls “progressive liberalism” and “conservative liberalism” are both at the end of day poisonous fruits from the same tree:

The only path to liberation from the inevitabilities and ungovernable forces that liberalism imposes is liberation from liberalism itself. Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin.

I think this is profoundly wrong. But this is not to say that I think Deneen’s book is profoundly wrong. In a panel on Thursday night, I compared Why Liberalism Failed to The Road to Serfdom— a deeply valuable and prophetic book, which detractors often mock because Hayek’s prophecy turned out not to be true ( yet). But prophecies are not scientific predictions; they are warnings. And when a people heed a prophecy, the prophet’s cataclysm is avoided.