What we've been up to

From the new issue: America's dominant political cultures have hardened into a regularly vicious though now apparently self-defeating partisanship. Even if there are few left who will defend the value and necessity of the political center the way that liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., did decades ago in The Vital Center, many underestimate the challenges that the passing of the middle ground pose for the future of liberal democracy. In "The Once and Vital Center," Antón Barba-Kay, associate professor of philosophy at Catholic University of America, offers a eulogy both witty and wistful about the passing of the political myth of the center.

"The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness; it was not a norm of comity, civility, deference, or bonhomie. People used to have more formal manners, but they did not necessarily exercise them in their dealings with one another….But even if such a center is a retrospective fiction, or an imaginary aggregate occupied by no one in particular, it remained operative as an ideal measure of political difference. The political myth of the center consisted in the recognition that disagreement, pluralism, and multilateralism were valuable to democratic politics—not for their own sake, but as expressions of a single underlying civic care."

Also from the new issue: These days, it's understandable to bemoan the loss of some unifying vision or cultural ideal—some civil religion, say—that apparently used to bind our social and political lives together. But as Ian Marcus Corbin, philosopher, writer, and co-director of the Human Network Initiative at Harvard University, explores in his review of political scientist Samuel Goldman's new book, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, those who search American history for "ostensible Edens of cohesion and belonging" will search in vain. And even if we look homeward to our "subnational" communities for normative visions of social life, we still have to reckon with the larger society—and whatever ideals, if any, are driving it.

"You can't run a business, much less a country, without agreed-upon desiderata. So what will be the principle of our action? We clearly have one—we are currently operating the most dynamic economy in history. The engine of this undirected dynamism is competition. But competition for what? If we can't agree on much that matters, why do we work so frantically, with increasing, sometimes crippling anxiety? You can observe in widespread feelings of precarity, spread across all classes and occupations, the sense that the things we need are scarce, and that others are rushing to get them before we do. Scarcity frames our comings and goings, here in the richest land humankind has ever seen."

Hedgehog Chat: There's a certain account of modern society that goes something like this. Once upon a time, primitive peoples believed in myths about gods, goddesses, and supernatural events. Pre-modern folk told and re-told these fantastic tales because such stories made sense of their world and they were useful for binding people together for common action. But eventually, at least by the time of the Enlightenment, we grew up and no longer needed these myths. We exchanged obsolete and now embarrassing traditions for science and public reason.

It's a story that is almost entirely wrong. Myth—especially political myth—still matters.

In this inaugural THR podcast, editor Jay Tolson moderates a Hedgehog Chat about the enduring significance of myth to modern political life with three leading scholars: Tae-Yeoun Keum, assistant professor of political science at the University of California-Santa Barbara; Kevin Duong, assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia; and Isaac Ariail Reed, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Want to read more from the new issue?

"The Man Who Built Forward Better" by Witold Rybczynski.

Jackson Arn reviews David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

"The Return of the King" by Philip S. Gorski.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (or simply The Wealth of Nations) was published 246 years ago this week. And in the intervening time, the book has had a remarkable career, though perhaps one of its more unusual and significant turns has been the tendency of postwar interpreters to cast the book as an ideological treatise for a so-called free market system. As Christina McRorie, assistant professor of ethics at Creighton University, argues in "The Emptiness of Modern Economics" for the Fall 2014 Issue, if we want to understand what Smith was up to in The Wealth of Nations we have to consider his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. As McRorie came to see, because so few economists carefully consider his intellectual world, Smith remains a deeply misunderstood thinker.

"After a while, I began to compile a list of complaints about these peculiarly incomplete readings of Smith. Their gist was that the economists failed or refused to approach Smith in his own context, that of a moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, and so missed the full-orbed moral sense of his economic writing, particularly the role of his moral philosophy and moral psychology in making his political economic observations plausible."

A roundup of work on the cultural dimensions of the Russian attack on Ukraine:

At The New Statesman, Katie Stallard writes about the truth of Putin's violent fantasy of "denazifying" Ukraine.

Religion News Service journalist Thomas Reese considers what Catholic moral theologians have to say about this conflict.

In the pages of The Spectator, Orlando Figes writes about the battle over history in the fight for Ukraine.

In an essay at Unherd, Ben Judah indicts Putin for what his actions have cost a generation.

National Review's Jim Geraghty considers the Ukraine war as a religious war.

In Memoriam

We remember Paul A. Cantor, accomplished critic and longtime professor of English at the University of Virginia, who passed away last month. His interest in and shrewd observations about everything from Shakespeare and Shelley to the Simpsons and Breaking Bad made him an indispensable observer of modern cultural life. We are proud to have published his essays on the meaning of horror stories and zombie characters: "The Apocalyptic Strain in Popular Culture" for the Summer 2013 Issue on the American Dream and "Inviting Evil In" for the Spring 2020 Issue on Monsters.

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