Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Several groups of rightwing intellectuals hover around the Republican Party, defending a stark conservatism. But there is a very different group, definitely rightwing, that is equally disdainful of Republican conservatives and Democratic progressives — who are all at bottom, its members insist, liberals: classical free-market liberals or egalitarian liberals, it’s all the same. These ideological outliers call themselves “post-liberal,” and they aim at a radical transformation of American society. Their overweening ambition is based on a fully developed theology, Catholic integralism, but the political meaning of this theology has not yet been fully worked out or, better, not yet revealed. A small group of writers, mostly academics, constitute what they hope, and I hope not, is the vanguard of a new regime and a Christian society. They have mounted a steady assault on liberal individualism and the liberal state, but so far they haven’t had anything like enough to say about life in the post-liberal world — not enough to warrant a comprehensive critique.  So here, instead, is a series of critical vignettes dealing first with the style of post-liberal writing as displayed in the work of Sohrab Ahmari and then with the strange version of world history that Patrick Deneen asserts but never defends. My own defense of liberalism comes later, along with a critique of recent post-liberal writing on the Ukraine war and some worries about the cautiously reticent, but sometimes ominous, description of the post-liberal future that can be found in the books of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. For now, I ignore all the other post-liberals. Sohrab Ahmari, the leading non-academic among the post-liberals, makes his argument for “the wisdom of tradition” through stories of great men; only one woman and one married couple are included in the twelve chapters of his book The Unbroken Thread, which appeared in 2021. These are nicely told but highly contrived stories, with radical omissions and crucial questions left unanswered. Three examples will serve to show the tribulations of tradition.  Ahmari uses (the verb is right) Augustine to discuss the issue of God and politics. His story is focused on Augustine’s efforts to respond both to the rise of neo-paganism after the sack of Rome and to the Manichean heresy. The question that Ahmari poses is the great question of Augustinian politics: should Christians call on the secular authorities to use force against heretics and unbelievers? Augustine, with hesitation, ends by saying yes; Ahmari ends by saying…not quite yes. This is a common feature of post-liberal writing: just when Ahmari should show his hand, he covers his cards. I suppose that a defender of traditional wisdom, making his case in the United States today, can’t quite bring himself to call for religious persecution. His claim is simply that God “needs” politics — but exactly what is needed is left unspecified. Ahmari’s heart yearns for a strong Christian ruler who would set things right: “a godly servant ruler.” But his mind counsels prudence, and so he is unwilling to tell us exactly what the wisdom of tradition requires today.  Cardinal Newman is used by Ahmari to address the problem of critical thinking — which, from a traditional point of view, is indeed a problem. Should we think for ourselves? Should I follow my conscience? Late in his life, Newman responded to William Gladstone’s polemic against the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gladstone claimed that any Catholic who accepted the doctrine rendered himself incapable of thinking critically, unable to follow his conscience — and therefore not a useful citizen of a free state. Now remember that Newman had, after years of agonized reflection, followed his conscience and left the Church of England. Nonetheless, according to Ahmari, he now argued that conscience is not a matter for individual reflection; it is God’s truth implanted within us, and we need the help of churchly authority and Christian tradition to recognize the truth and understand what conscience requires. But then how did Newman manage to defy the authority and tradition of the Church of England? This seems an obvious question, which Ahmari doesn’t ask. Didn’t Anglicans think Newman a man of extravagant self-will? Surely he was guilty of thinking for himself. Why not, then, the