Amy Wax - Bring Back Bourgeois Virtues
The Restoration Podcast 003
This week on the Restoration Podcast I’m delighted to introduce you to Professor Amy Wax!
Luke has been in Poland while I have been travelling and writing, and he has been chatting things through with a few interesting thinkers who I’m excited to host on the Bulletin.
When he told me he was with Amy Wax, I said he should make sure to interview her so that you can all see how precisely she has thought about some of the structural and moral issues facing America, and the West more generally.
Anyone who has followed her work will already know that she is putting up the good fight to defend Academic freedom at the University of Pennsylvania. And we are fully behind Professor Wax at RestorationBulletin.
But what struck me watching the interview was how specific her recommendations were for the Restoration of Academic freedom, and for the inculcation of virtue in the lives of every American.
I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to be quite so moved by Professor Wax’s answer to Luke’s final question. It certainly choked him up, and I can see why.
There really is a crisis of leadership in the West today. I would be keen to hear your thoughts in the comments on how we go about fixing that.
p.s. you should be able to hear our very talented friend, a virtuoso pianist, playing a concert in the background.
I am posting links below to two of the things Professor Wax mentioned in the chat:
Eisenhower speech.
Moynihan report: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/
Enjoy!
In an increasingly complex world, an ideal leader for the United States would be conversant if not fluent in such subjects as history, finance and the sciences. And today's exigencies call for no less. Instead we get career politicians, eloquent but vapid lawyers with good hair, and others generally unsuited to such a demanding job.
How do we upgrade the caliber of our leaders? I invite all to weigh in, but I would start with this: (1) stricter and much reduced limits on campaign financing, (2) term limits for the House and Senate, (3) maximum transparency for everything related to the operation of our government (absent compelling intelligence requirements for secrecy) and (4) a conflicts of interest firewall between politicians, staff and donors that extends for years and reduces the pay to play conflicts that characterize our very corrupt system today.
I'm afraid it goes without saying that our elected officials will be opposed to all of the above. What does that tell us?
HOW do we bring back bourgeois virtues? (And even better, Christian virtues?)
The answer is simple, but not easy. Virtues are a function of our ends, of our vision of the good life. That's how we define them, practically. They are necessary means to those ends, to that vision.
And so we recover the virtues by making sure that our ends in life are the right ones.
Why are our leaders so poor, so inferior to previous eras?
Because they—and we—love wrongly. It's not that we love completely worthless things. It's that we love lesser things more than we should. We do not love the Highest and Best as highest and best.