During аn аssessment оf а 32-year-оld wоman who sustained a head injury in an automobile accident 4 hours previously, the nurse notices the following pupillary changes- the right pupil is now fully dilated and non-reactive, the left pupil is 4 mm and responds to the pen light by constricting. What do these new objective eye assessments suggest?
The inаdequаcies оf liberаlism One is bоund tо wonder at the inadequacies of bourgeois liberalism that have made it so vulnerable, not only to the Old Left, and the New Left, but to so many attacks from the right as well. The key problematic fact of a liberal society is that it is of necessity a secular society, one in which religion is mainly a private affair. Such a disestablishment of religion, it was predicted by Catholic thinkers and others, would gradually lead to a diminution of religious faith and a growing skepticism about the traditional consolations of religion-especially the consolations offered by a life after death. That has unquestionably happened, and with significant consequences. Question: what do you think Kristol’s solution to all of the problems of modern society is? One such consequence is that the demands placed upon liberal society, in the name of temporal “happiness,” have become ever more urgent and ever more unreasonable. In every society, the overwhelming majority of the people lead lives of considerable frustration, and if society is to endure, we must have a different kind of meaning and hope beyond simple material acquisition. So liberal civilization finds itself having spiritually expropriated the masses of its citizenry, whose demands for material compensation gradually become as infinite as the infinity they have lost. All of this was clearly foreseen by many of the anti-modem critics who witnessed the birth of modernity. Question: what is his argument here? Another (and related) consequence of the disestablishment of religion as a publicly-sanctioned mythos has been the inability of liberal society ever to come up with a convincing and generally accepted theory of political obligation. Liberal philosophers have proposed many versions of utilitarianism to this end, but these have remained academic exercises and have not had much popular impact. Nor is this surprising: No merely utilitarian definition of civic loyalty is going to convince anyone that it makes sense for him to die for his country. Question: what would David Hume say here? In actual fact, it has been the secular myth of nationalism which, for the past century and a half, has provided this rationale. But this secular myth, though it has evolved hand-in-hand with bourgeois society, is not intrinsically or necessarily bourgeois. Nationalism ends by establishing "equal sacrifice" as the criterion of justice; and this is no kind of bourgeois criterion. We have seen, in our own day, how the spirit of nationalism can be utterly contemptuous of bourgeois proprieties, and utterly subversive of the bourgeois order itself. Even the very principles of individual opportunity and social mobility, which originally made the bourgeois-liberal idea so attractive, end up-once the spirit of religion is weakened-by creating an enormous problem for bourgeois society. Well, I think it is becoming clear that religion, and a moral philosophy associated with religion, is far more important politically than the philosophy of liberal individualism admits. Indeed, I would go further and say that it is becoming clearer every day that even those who thought they were content with a religion that was a private affair are themselves discovering that such a religion is existentially unsatisfactory. Libertarianism and libertinism The genuine threat to liberal capitalism today is not socialism but nihilism. Only liberal capitalism doesn't see nihilism as an enemy, but rather as just another splendid business opportunity. Large corporations today happily publish books and magazines, or press and sell records, or make and distribute movies, or sponsor television shows which celebrate pornography, denounce the institution of the family, revile the "ethics of acquisitiveness” and justify civil insurrection. In short, while the economists think about nothing but money, the capitalist class believes in nothing but money. They promote the ethos of any and all political ideologies for only one reason: they cannot think of any reason why they should not. For them, it is “business as usual.” And indeed, why shouldn't they seize this business opportunity? The prevailing philosophy of liberal capitalism gives them no argument against it. Though Milton Friedman is, in the name of “libertarianism,” reluctant to impose any prohibition or inhibition on the libertine tendencies of modern bourgeois society. He seems to assume, as I read him, that one must not interfere with the dynamics of "self-realization" in a free society. I cannot see why this self-realization would stop at market consumption, and every reason that it would lead to excessive consumption of drugs, promiscuous consumption of polyamorous sex, in short, an endless world of egoists who see all things and all people as nothing more than instruments in their own pleasure seeking. Today, the New Left is rushing in to fill the spiritual vacuum at the center of our free and capitalist society. For the most part, it proclaims itself as “socialist,” since that is the only tradition available to it. It unquestionably feeds upon the old, socialist yearnings for community --for a pre-individualist society and is therefore, if not collectivist, at least “communalist” in its economics and politics. Question: what is it that Kristol likes about the “New Left”? What medicine does one prescribe for a social order that is sick because it has lost its soul? Our learned doctors, the social scientists, do not understand at all this kind of “imaginary” illness, which has dramatic physical symptoms but no apparent physical causes. Some, on what we conventionally call the "right," cannot resist the temptation to conclude that the patient is actually in robust health, and that only his symptoms are sick. Others, on what we conventionally call the "left," declare that the patient is indeed sick unto death and assert that it is his symptoms which are the causes of his malady. Such confusion, of course, is exactly what one would expect when both patient and doctors are suffering from the same mysterious disease. Question: what does this doctor metaphor mean to you? Try to explain it to me and tell me, in your opinion, if it is helpful or not.