There is a new Tocqueville-inspired book making the rounds with an excellent Lawlerian title: Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (that should remind readers of Peter Lawler’s classic book on Tocqueville, The Restless Mind). Leo Strauss once wrote that for the modern philosopher John Locke, “life is a joyless quest for joy.” Christian thinkers like Augustine, Pascal, and Tocqueville have an explanation for all that modern restlessness: even in modernity the human soul cannot rest until it rests in God, in spite of all our attempts to distract ourselves away from thinking about it.
I had never run into the authors of this book before, but it seems clear to me that they should be counted as POMOCONS or at least fellow travelers. It is written by a husband and wife team, Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey, who teach at Furman University in South Carolina. Having just read a few reviews so far, such as this one by Adam Thomas, I can tell there are alot of great insights in this book:
Why We Are Restless traces the increasing unsteadiness in our lives and instability in our social order to defects in our education and ways of thinking. Under the influence of Montaigne and his successors, we have been taught to seek our happiness in this world while “fencing off the mind’s dangerous forays beyond the immanent frame.” However, as splendid and alluring as Montaigne’s humane “art of ordinary life” may be (and the authors show that it is indeed very powerful), the result—as the author of Ecclesiastes would have predicted—is new pretense followed by new anxiety. Since we know that we can now be happy, we feel that we ought to be, and therefore are surprised and ashamed to find that we are not. Immanence turns out to be “as mad a master as transcendence had been.”
…The book’s hero, however, may be Pascal. The authors contend that in Pascal, “the restlessness that is truly modern—the restlessness of the soul that tries and fails to hold itself within the confines of immanence—finds its first and most powerful voice.” By giving a full articulation of Pascal’s attempt to awaken indifferent modern men and “set them in motion,” the Storeys have given us another resource for persuading our contemporaries to look up and beyond the modern thinking that confines them.
All that restless modern striving is just vanity in other words- the “vanity of vanities,” as Ecclesiastes says.
One of the sources for the Storeys’ reflections also includes the experiences of their real life students. In attempting to revive institutions through education, as Yuval Levin says we must do in order to avoid the destruction of our regime through our lonely restless ways, the Storeys have noticed a certain problem. The problem is that “cultural formation has come to seem cultish,” strange, and a turnoff to younger Americans. The problem is the classic American/democratic aversion to forms and formalities, as Tocqueville noted almost two hundred years ago. And yet, there are certain small forms and formalities Americans are willing to accept- and when these forms are accepted, they help strengthen Americans where they are weakest. This can be channeled to the good.
So, welcome to the party Storeys!
Wow- there you go on page 1:
"To three great teachers: Larry Goldberg, Leon R. Kass, and Peter Augustine Lawler"
In the Acknowledgments at the end:
"We give thanks first to our teachers: Larry Goldberg, whose capacious love of the wisdom of old books, and genial affection for the liveliness of young minds, has been an enduring model to us; Leon R. Kass, who took us more seriously than we took ourselves and showed us that a life of upright dignity may partake of a higher playfulness; and the late Peter Augustine Lawler, who demonstrated that Pascalian Christianity can allow one to see the greatness and misery of human life with distinctive clarity."
And in a footnote:
"Lawler treats restlessness as the key to understanding Tocqueville's view of liberty. Our aim here is to show that this restlessness is intimately related to a particular ideal of happiness we will call immanent contentment, an ideal powerfully articulated by the French tradition of moralists to which, we argue, Tocqueville must be understood to belong"
More admirers of Peter Lawler--glad to hear about them, Chris! By the by, I just ran into another admirer on LinkedIn, who got in touch to talk about our pomocon podcasts, one of the editors of Athwart, a fine online publication for thoughtful essays, largely by academics who are at least somewhat eccentric...
I'm especially pleased to see people pay attention to the great Montaigne, the least studied of the great French writers or the early modern philosophers.
If you learn more about the whole notion, please let me know how these scholars deal with this happiness problem in comparing, say Montaigne with the Stoics or Epicureans or Aristotle or pre-Socratics...