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Resisting Tech’s Coercions

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Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel, The Glass Bees, is prescient. But it also clarifies many of our own present challenges as we struggle with the role of technology over our lives. In a society defined by sound bites, 280-character tweets, three-minute TikTok videos, and deep fake videos, the line between what is authentically real and what is mere performance or imitation is blurred.

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, March 2023

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At Public Discourse, we intend to play the role of moderation and calm. We know our society is in the middle of a Revolution—and not a good one—and we know conservatives are experimenting and fracturing in their responses. We try to read and understand all the trends, all the possibilities, and stay calm and reasonable as we host debate and conversation about the best way forward.
Silhouette of soldier in combat helmet and ammunition saluting on background of sunset sky. Army special forces fighter

The Military Depends on Virtues that Are Fading

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An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding for some time, and is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment.
Close-up of hands texting on cell phones

Contempt, Inquiry, and Rational Disagreement: Learning from Aquinas in the Internet Age

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Present-day Americans are a people consumed by anger—an anger that rests on deep pools of sadness, isolation, loss, and fear. In spite of his reputation for dry, unemotional logic, Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. His work can teach us how to resist the vices encouraged by social media, pursue truth in concert with others, and achieve rational disagreement.
Silhouette of sad teenage girl looking out the window on a cold autumn day

Sending the Wounded to the Front

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The stories of Chloe and other detransitioners are the ultimate rebuke to the arrogant claims of activists and the medical groups they have captured.
Brand new mother and child after delivery in hospital room

Practicing Pro-Life Medicine: A Conversation with Dr. John Bruchalski and Leah Sargeant

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It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies. Children are not STDs. Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.
ChatGPT image

Exclusive: ChatGPT Admits That Elective Abortion Rests on Moral Contradictions

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We already know that ChatGPT’s coding is biased. But even ChatGPT recognizes that logic is logic, and it is willing to admit the contradiction in the pro-choice position. If only our human interlocutors would be so honest.
Benjamin Franklin

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

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Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author of an autobiography is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?
Stock Market Graph next to a 1 dollar bill (showing former president Washington). Red trend line indicates the stock market recession period

The Morality of Money

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Finance facilitates the collaboration necessary for the functioning of a free market economy, but does it do so in accordance with concepts of justice and fairness?
Young African American man sitting and lifting a dumbbell with the rack at gym

Is “Self-Improvement” a Real Thing?

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As we decide what habits to adopt or discard in 2023, it’s important to carefully sort through the advice on offer to see if it’s based on a sound vision of human nature and of what constitutes a good life. Thankfully, the Public Discourse archives can offer guidance here, as on so many other topics.
woman absorbed by her cell phone

Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized

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While the digitized promises of meta-man may entice us, they are ultimately false promises based on a rejection of fundamental aspects of human embodiment. There is an integrated wholeness to man that requires both resting in the givenness of human identity and actively engaging with the world.
Black and white photo of large family gathered

Toward a New Vision of Wealth

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In modern societies, wealth is not tied to land or long-lasting material things, nor is it transmitted across generations; it is fluid, shapeshifting, and usually doesn’t extend beyond the horizon of our own lives and personal needs. This series attempts to offer fresh ways of imagining wealth so that it becomes more conducive to cultural vibrancy and helps us flourish.

The Cash Economy’s Liquidation of Social Stability

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In some ways, the central problem of America has become liquidity: wealth, energy, and the self all have lost their solidity. The flow of money has had a profoundly corrosive effect on our financial institutions and also our social ones. But there’s no going back to a golden age. Only by reinvigorating our modes of association can we successfully address the pathologies brought on by the quest for financial (not economic) independence.
Photo of dad holding sleeping newborn baby

Liberal Individualism Is Undermining Itself

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By making the false ideal of independence the basis of our political and social order, we end up denigrating actual, dependent human lives. But life begins in dependence and remains inseparable from unchosen obligations. We have responsibilities to others, for which we have not signed a contract.
Woman on phone laying in bed

Confessions of a Comatose Son of Liberalism

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Even the healthiest patriotism does not address whether America’s political regime ought to re-main basically neutral about whether its citizens flourish. If what our politics can give us is fair procedures for resolving disputes, and protections for speech and property, and a broad enough distribution of power that tyranny has difficulty taking hold, that is remarkable and we should be grateful. That still isn’t living well.
Photo of William F. Buckley

Where Does National Review Stand Today? A Conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru and Matt Franck

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National Review midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being. Conservatism today is in a very different situation from the one that Bill Buckley confronted in 1955. There is this vast conservative enterprise now; it’s kind of hydra-headed. But the basic need is, first, to think about the circumstances in which we find ourselves and how to apply conservative principles to them—or a conservative disposition, if one prefers—and second, how to build a coalition that is large enough to take these ideas off of the shelf.
Photo ofa broken iPhone

Let’s Stigmatize Smartphones

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Between the individual and government is a great bulk of institutions that could help us address the cultural challenges posed by tech. In addition to policy reforms and individuals’ weaning themselves off tech, we also need to create stigmas around social media and smartphone use—culturally agreed upon limits, including designated times and places where screen time is socially unacceptable.
Small child holding an iPad

Virtue Can’t Be Learned from Devices

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During the pandemic, schools deployed digital technologies enabling them to efficiently transmit content and monitor student engagement at a distance. Unfortunately, these technologies have become entrenched, and screen-based activities now dominate many classrooms. But to develop intellectual and moral virtue, schools must engage students’ bodies, minds, and souls. Screen-centered, digital modes of learning undermine education because they are incapable of fostering virtue in embodied human beings.
Photo of Kindle on top of books

The Bookshelf: Books in the Hand, Books in the Ether

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For all their convenience, e-books just can’t do for us what physical books do. Something about the physical act of reading a book—the intertwined visual and tactile experience—stamps these things on our memory. An ebook is just too ephemeral—too disembodied, literally.
Thomas Wyck painting, "Scholar in his study"

Why You Should Enjoy Being Perplexed

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Being perplexed means allowing other people and ideas to change or move you at times. Perplexity doesn’t seek cheap or easy answers to serious questions. And it isn’t satisfied with momentary highs from oversimplified and triumphant assertions, but prefers the rewards of prolonged contemplation. Perplexity also turns its sights from the grotesque, and doesn’t abuse its objects for the sake of stimulation or entertainment.
Image of Abigail Favale's book cover, The Genesis of Gender

Our Bodies, Our Selves: Gender Dysphoria and the Longing for Wholeness

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Gender dysphoria needs to be acknowledged and treated as a psychological illness. I understand the resistance to language of disorder and pathology, motivated by a fear that such language is stigmatizing. I understand, but I disagree. To reclassify disorder as order forecloses the possibility of recovery. I think of my own battles with anxiety, depression, self-harm. I don’t want someone telling me those things are normal and good. I want to be healed.
students, library, books

What Do We Mean by Liberal Education?

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“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Such is the task of a liberal education, rightly understood. It is a liberating exploration that results not in being permanently uprooted and alienated but in being more fully at home in the world that we already inhabit—and more fully able to enhance it, beautify it, ennoble it, and sustain it.
kansas state capitol

The Meaning of Kansas: Lessons from a Pro-Life Defeat

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The recent defeat of a pro-life constitutional amendment in Kansas was not a consequence of strategic overreach, nor was it a rebuke of Dobbs. In fact, it followed from the difficulty of communicating complex legal and political principles, as well as navigating the fear and distortion generated by abortion advocates and their media allies. To help secure a pro-life future, we must learn the correct lessons of the Kansas loss, including the need to harness the emotional power of truthful narrative to shape political choices.
doctors, stethoscope, health

Social Justice Ideology and the Decline of American Medicine: A Conversation with Stanley Goldfarb

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The prevailing zeitgeist of American medical education is an almost complete and unthinking acceptance of a “woke” mentality. The demonstrations at academic medical centers and medical schools throughout the United States following George Floyd’s killing led to widespread declarations of the need to purge “systemic racism” from American medicine and to adopt “antiracism” as a dominant aspect of the medical ethos.
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