Frank Easterbrook is here giving the Winter Lecture on corporate law (that's Ralph Winter, not freezing-cold winter). Quotes ensue:

-- As you can tell from this introduction, Ralph and I are really the same person, except that I didn't clerk for Thurgood Marshall and he doesn't have a beard.

-- The next time somebody tells you that [the Campaign Finance Act] is just about money, you should say . . . that the Alien and Sedition Acts were just about imprisonment.

-- When the faculty of the University of Chicago teaches that markets are bad and only federal regulators can save the day, you can be confidant that there was a market consensus.

-- I have sometimes suggested that The University of Chicago buy up Harvard, change up the management and faculty, and spin it off at quite a substantial profit, but the lack of traded shares make that impracticable.

-- As Everett Dirksen would have put it: a few percent here and a few percent there in a multi-trillion dollar economy, sooner or later it adds up to real money.

-- It is not clear to me that anything had to be done [about fraud]. Fraud was not invented in the 1990s. ... It is illegal in all 50 states, even Nevada.

To continue to touch upon the bands between sacred and profane, this excellent Times article illustrates some of the dangers of uncritical value relativism. The young women described in this article are certainly at the center of a conflict between competing notions of the good, and are ill-served by a German polity wary of making morally dispositive judgments about other cultures (to be fair, there's a fair amount of historical contingency which informs that polity). Just because liberal values and traditional Muslim values are incommensurable does not mean that the liberal state does not have an obligation to allow an authentic value pluralism -- that is, a German state where these women have a legitimate choice between proffered value distinctions. The slavery that these women are made covenant to is risible, and should be unacceptable in a free society.

And the activists quoted in the story have an unenviable task:

In fact, they are fighting on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Seyran Ates complains.

Because Germans have been uncomfortable about their local historically effected consciousness, and because so much of the language of German cultural identity has been semiotically polluted by the radical totalization of the Nazi regime, they have been resistant to enforce social norms as a matter of policy. In fact, German immigration policy, because of the nation's intensely racial vision of citizenship, has served to construct walls between its own, who are guaranteed certain liberal rights, and its gastarbeiters and their daughters, walled off from the "corruptive German influence." But to romanticize this faceless withdrawal into a ghetto self-made and host-country encouraged is to endorse the rejectionist doctrine of sour grapes for a generation of men and women: I do not want what I cannot have and what I do not know. The veil is an inner citadel devoutly to be unwished; its blessings exist only when freely entered.

To a larger extent, the article points out some of the flaws in a liberal vision of unrestricted immigration. Surely immigration must be met with real legal and cultural assimilation. Not to a singular dominant national identity (heaven forfend that Turkish Muslims feel compelled to become beer-drinking, wurst-eating Lutherans), but to a national identity that dominates other existing difference. Part of America's cultural strength resides in its greatest noble lie, that we are, as a nation of immigrants, all equally American. This myth encourages immigration even as it requires quantitative limits on its pace and the rapid assimiliation of its practitioners. As Burke understood, national character is not related to race or ethnicity or religion, except when these identities are allowed to flourish separately and subvert the institutions and traditions of the state, by the formation of special law. Here is the Giant of Liberty in his speech "On Conciliation:"

Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. They attempted to subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by all sorts of rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of arms into Wales, as you prohibit by proclamation (with something more of doubt on the legality) the sending arms to America. They disarmed the Welsh by statute, as you attempted (but still with more question on the legality) to disarm New England by an instruction. They made an Act to drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have done (but with more hardship) with regard to America. By another Act, where one of the parties was an Englishman, they ordained that his trial should be always by English. They made Acts to restrain trade, as you do; and they prevented the Welsh from the use of fairs and markets, as you do the Americans from fisheries and foreign ports. In short, when the Statute Book was not quite so much swelled as it is now, you find no less than fifteen acts of penal regulation on the subject of Wales. [...] The march of the human mind is slow. Sir, it was not until after two hundred years discovered that, by an eternal law, providence had decreed vexation to violence, and poverty to rapine. Your ancestors did however at length open their eyes to the ill-husbandry of injustice. They found that the tyranny of a free people could of all tyrannies the least be endured, and that laws made against a whole nation were not the most effectual methods of securing its obedience. Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of Henry the Eighth the course was entirely altered. With a preamble stating the entire and perfect rights of the Crown of England, it gave to the Welsh all the rights and privileges of English subjects. A political order was established; the military power gave way to the civil; the Marches were turned into Counties. But that a nation should have a right to English liberties, and yet no share at all in the fundamental security of these liberties--the grant of their own property--seemed a thing so incongruous that, eight years after, that is, in the thirty-fifth of that reign, a complete and not ill-proportioned representation by counties and boroughs was bestowed upon Wales by Act of Parliament. From that moment, as by a charm, the tumults subsided; obedience was restored; peace, order, and civilization followed in the train of liberty.

And Burke has it eminently right. If the tyranny of a free people is of all tyrannies least endured, so too the tyranny of restriction that sets aside the measure of law and citizenry and reserves them from a people in the name of protection must stand for special condemnation. This is not protection: it is the legal equivalent of live burial. The awareness of our difference-genetic, economic, cultural, historical-deserves careful disarmament; or rather we might say that the fashioning of a just myth of the Citizen that transcends the structural divisions with which we are individually saddled is the only worthy challenge for the State.

There's a very interesting internal debate going on at the Corner right now. John Derbyshire, my favorite bigot*, is taking on one of the sacred cows of neoconservative belief, their false water-carrying for the Intelligent Design movement. The Derb links to this Reason piece on the same chicanery, and is rightly offended by the position. The offense arises not from support of ID (however risible it is as non-science), but rather from Kristol's and Himmelfarb's faux-religious posturing (and moreover their doing so in the name of Strauss). It is highly worrisome when respected intellectuals on the Right believe so strongly that Religion and Science are fundamentally incompatible. The values that respectively gird various religious practices and expressions of the scientific method might be incommensurable, but surely Science, as a method for determining natural explanations for material phenomena, and Faith, whether in transcendent reason or Will or the divine, are not mutually annihilating. There are many hard and soft determinists on either side, which illustrates that they do not make for very well defined sides at all.

Beyond the cliffs of material perception lie the wide and stormy oceans of the metaphysical.** Our interaction with their shoals is problematic, but unless someone expresses a purely physicalist position (material monism), which is not a requirement for the practice of the scientific method, and is in fact antithetical to much of the teleology found in Darwin, the grand intersection between Faith and Science is no more problematic than the dissection of any of our actions which we believe to have intention. Which is to say that at its core, parsing why I choose to cross the street or eat a tuna fish sandwich is a remarkable task, whose full interpretation could lead to an existential crisis. But let us not surrender to the O altudine! of explication. If every conflict of values that result in behavior is a great conflict, then every conflict is also a small conflict, as it is a lived one.

If we accept a basic incommensurability between choice generative values for different people (hopefully even for our different contingent selves), then their particular weights become matters of Parmenidean speculation, and their practical containment is a matter of law and tradition, rather than forceful moral induction. I believe that this modified Berlinian notion is a fundamentally conservative position, a skeptical idealism that encompasses the historically contingent positions of our hermeneutic and also argues for a restrained state.

Admittedly, there exists a Straussian argument that certain types of knowledge should be reserved from the public, although a more charitable (and arguably Straussian) reading of Strauss would be one that noted that the interpretive movement from exoteric to esoteric meaning is fundamental to philosophical learning, and that the attainment of certain truths should be made difficult so that their attainment is more enriching. That's not an argument that Kristol should mock faith by an evasion of it, and an unreserved (how secret is AEI?) instrumental view of religion as a means of social discipline surely is more elitist cattiness than it is an actual "noble lie."

It is depressing evidence that Kristol, in his movement from skeptical liberal to neo-Conservative, has never really internalized that the core of Christianity is the resurrection, not the creation myth. Christianity is fundamentally eschatological. You either have faith in the resurrection, or you are a Samaritan. Nothing about the scientific method (even a Humean scepticism of miracles) detracts from an existential Faith. Only a faith that is the opposite of the Faith described in the quote that Derbyshire eloquently cites from Hebrews 11:1, that is, a faith that requires material evidence of things not seen, would be dissatisfied by a science that tossed away the largest follies of Biblical literalism. And that is no faith at all, but a type of Simonianism, a faith dependent on the continuous production of miracles.

As a non-believing Jew, and as a Straussian, Kristol would be wise to listen to the literal/figurative disjunction in the hermeneutic of Maimonides. After all, as Leon Wieseltier perceptively noted in this recent diarist:

There really is something childish about the notion that everything is exactly as the Bible says it is: this is the spell of fairy tales. I was eventually released from my anxiety about the freedom of my mind by a startling passage in Maimonides, who is not for children. Almost perversely, he wished his students to know that his belief in the creation of the world was not owed to the Bible's account of the creation of the world. This is how he denied them a fundamentalist satisfaction: "Know that our shunning the affirmation of the eternity of the world is not due to a text figuring in the Torah according to which the world has been produced in time. For the texts indicating that the world has been produced in time are not more numerous than those indicating that the deity is a body. Nor are the gates of figurative interpretation shut in our faces ... regarding the subject of the creation of the world in time. For we could interpret them as figurative, as we have done when denying His corporeality."

Maimonides is surely not for children, but to treat Americans as children is perverse. Even in a more careful form than the casual support of ID from prominent neoconservatives, this is not a “noble lie.” A defense against Darwin in the name of biblical literalism is not at all a virtuous exoteric teaching, since it requires a belief in religion that is perverse and limiting, and a belief in science that is equally uninspired. Kristol’s support of ID in the name of religion as social opiate is even more insulting to Christians than to scientists (of whatever religious stripe). Himmelfarb’s critique of scientism (also in The New Republic) fares better, but I would like to see a new human polity emerge from these thinkers, rather than a reflexive embrace of the forces of retreat. They have not offered a better exoteric homily in their retreat from the excessive conclusions of materialist thought and the conclusive excesses of unrestrained liberty ([ed. – do we admit liberal excess on Crescat?]). And they have significantly moved against Strauss, who argued for a life between Jerusalem and Athens, not a choice of one over the other.

*I mean this in all seriousness, as I agree with him on quite a few things substantive, and think I'd enjoy having dinner with him, but find his opinions on homosexuality vile. But he's an upright, honest, forthright, funny, and smart guy. At the end of the day, a little fundamental incommensurabilty goes a long way.

**Kant's resonant and somewhat tragic metaphor of man standing at the edge of the phenomenal island holds great imaginative sway, although Peirce's notion of continual semiosis probably describes our active hermeneutic more correctly. But I like the metaphor, so it remains, even if it's not my flavor of idealism.