What we've been up to

From the new issue: It's a familiar, if baffling experience probably common to anyone who has aspired to be educated. You encounter a book, film, or piece of music or art that all (or nearly all) of the cultural authorities say is good—even great—and yet you find it difficult, inaccessible, and even boring. What to do? As Matthew Mutter, assistant professor of literature at Bard College, points out in "Judge Knot: Is There a Good Way of Knowing Things?" you could just dispense with the authorities. Perhaps the supposed greatness of Melville's Moby-Dick or Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" is just a ruse, a form of priestly gatekeeping, or maybe another case of the blind leading the blind. But in his review essay on two recent books on the humanities and artistic judgment, Mutter argues that dispensing with authority creates its own set of problems for aesthetics.

"Initially, [my students] saw no meaningful difference between a judgment and an opinion…. I asked them to entertain the possibility that authority played a more substantial role in their intellectual and aesthetic lives than they surmised. Can you say that all of your convictions and tastes were formed spontaneously, through an unadulterated encounter with the relevant objects? Consider the influence of your peers, your family. The task, I suggested, is first to bring the role of authority to full consciousness. If you disavow the imprint of authority, you will not achieve meaningful emancipation from its sway. The next task is learning to cultivate a dialectic in which you notice your responses aligning with a particular voice. By this process you clarify the cast of your own thoughts and discover how a sympathetic mind could expand them."

Also from the new issue: However much progress we make in physical health, economic prosperity, and other quality of life measures, many Americans are not, as a general rule, particularly happy. Matt Dinan, associate professor at St. Thomas University, reviews Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey and considers that one key to happiness is to find the right balance between the transcendent longings of the soul and the interior gaze of the self. It's a theme that the authors trace through the work of key modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

"The hero of the book is Blaise Pascal, whose Augustinian criticism of Montaigne gets lost amid the excitement and optimism of early modern Europe, despite its influence on Rousseau and Tocqueville. As a preeminent natural scientist, trenchant Christian thinker, and habitué of stylish Parisian salons, Pascal was well situated to evaluate the project of immanent contentment."

Web Features: Even though it is obviously facile, deceptive, and problematic, we've all gotten pretty used to thinking about the human brain (and the human mind) as if it were a computer. Why is that? Alan Jacobs, honors professor at Baylor University and senior fellow at the IASC, thinks one reason is that we're increasingly asked to behave like a computer. As Jacobs points out in, "You Are Not a Server," our digital experiences, particularly on social media, are severely circumscribed. As he argues with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Dickens, that's a problem for how we think about the human person.

"The more authoritarian a social regime is, the more insistently it will simplify the possible responses—always converging on thumbs up or thumbs down—and demand the correct one. I don't think we live in a totalitarian, or even an authoritarian regime—not even close—but in any given culture there are always authoritarian subcultures, and we have more of those than we used to, because our social media empower such attitudes and practices and demands. And to accept those attitudes and practices and demands is to undergo a diminution of personhood."

Want to read more from the new issue?

"Injured Parties: Considering the Wider Effects of Harmful Speech" by Alan Jacobs.

"A Democratic Mythic?" by Stephen K. White.

Trevor Quirk reviews Mark Jackson's Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis.

"Small-Town USA" by Phil Christman.

Rhode Feng reviews Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age.

"American Captivity" by Ed Simon.

Lily Meyer reviews Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.

"A Tale of Two Stories: Meditations on the American Dream" by Angel Adams Parham.

Wilfred M. McClay on mystery.

"The First Authoritarian: Popper's Plato" by Tae-Yeoun Keum.

Ronald W. Dworkin writes about the medical humanities and the specialist.

"The Once and Vital Center" by Antón Barba-Kay.

Ian Marcus Corbin reviews After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman.

Witold Rybczynski on Frederick Law Olmsted: "The Man Who Built Forward Better."

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

"The Return of the King: The Politics of Immanence and the Disenchantments of Liberalism" by Philip S. Gorski.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: What are business corporations for? The conventional wisdom over the last forty years or so was that the ultimate, even sole, purpose of business corporations is to maximize profits and increase stock value for shareholders. Even though that conventional wisdom remains operative, we live in a moment when it is questioned and sometimes denounced by proponents of corporate social responsibility, ESG investing, and so-called stakeholder capitalism. But as David Ciepley, political theorist and associate fellow at the Institute, argues in "Wayward Leviathans" for the Spring 2019 issue, if we want to understand what corporations are for, we have to understand what they are—and that means uncovering the public purpose found in the early modern and early American histories of these institutions.

"Astonishingly, the most basic feature of the corporate firm—the state-ordained legal entity at its heart, that owns the firm's property and is party to all its contracts—has vanished from common understandings of the corporation, along with any sense that the corporation has a public purpose. Instead, for two generations the reigning wisdom has been that the business corporation is a private contractual association (a mere 'nexus of contracts') to be run in the interest of its shareholders alone—in accordance with a doctrine known as 'shareholder primacy.' In other words, the corporate firm is viewed as a glorified private partnership, with the stockholders as the partners."

From further afield:

At Gawker, B.D. McClay considers the ambition to have your writing read hundreds of years from now.

For The Point, Paul Franz interviews Congressman Ro Khanna about the intellectual genealogies of left-liberalism in the United States.

At The New Republic, Jedediah Britton-Purdy reviews Olivier Zunz's new book on Alexis de Tocqueville.