Deneen's most recent post is about the Feds getting tough on colleges and universities regarding sexual assault. He makes the case that this is the inevitable result of abolishing in loco parentis rules on college campuses (I"m old enough to remember parietals), which have created a vacuum that the state, a la Hobbes, must fill:
In effect, this immorality tale is Hobbes in microcosm: first tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then, we see that absent such norms, anarchy is the result (“the state of nature”). Finding such anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate by habit and within the context of ongoing communities, and replaced it with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And, now lacking any informal and local forms of authority, it’s virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur, and that the role of the State in ever more minute personal affairs will increase (“Prerogative”).
In place of the parent we now have a distant power which, perhaps like a parent, seeks to punish us when we act against decency and civilization. But, unlike a parent, it does not educate or seek to cultivate its wards into self-governing adults. It infantalizes us by saying that we don’t have to grow up—just don’t get caught. Of course, know too that your professors and every adult on campus—while we can’t speak of norms or character or morality or virtue (and most don’t even believe in such things) will be acting as “agents” and reporters. You are free, but Leviathan is watching.
This goes to my recent arguments about the difference between having an inner sense of what's lawful, and not having it which requires that one be constrained by extrinsic means, which boils down to the fear of punishment if caught. Does it matter qualitatively if it's Father O'Brien or the politically correct police or the real police who punishes you? The real issue, the real moral failure, lies in that the person who committed the offense is not a master of himself and needs to be constrained by something outside himself.
I get his larger point about Leviathan, but honestly, if the parents haven't done their job by the time their kids go away to college, they can't expect the college to do what they failed to. Sexual assault is a crime, and it should be dealt with by the local police. So if Deneen's larger point is that the Feds getting involved is overreach, well, maybe. But the idea that the college itself playing policeman is unrealistic and, frankly, counterproductive. Does he really think that clergy patrolling the hallways in dormitories at Notre Dame is a solution? It will create more Mary McCarthys than Dorothy Days.
I'm not happy with this 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 scheme, because it's too oversimplifying, but it's useful as shorthand to layout the larger argument that I am trying to make. The moral evolution of humans requires a movement from external constraints on greed, glory/pride), will to power--and, yes, appetitive excesses like gluttony, drunkenness, and lust--imposed by law and custom to the internal restraints on these. Because we have more freedom or latitude to choose them, we have to build more interior capacity to refuse them. In other words, we have to be moral grownups. Living in a 2.0 society forces one to face up to what he is--a child or an adult.
When the constraints are primarily external in law or custom, there will always be those, on the one hand, who game it, try to remain "legal" while doing the minimum, or follow the letter while abusing the spirit. On the other hand, a system of external constraints creates in the "spirited" a need to rebel against its oppressiveness, and so we come to celebrate the transgressors as rebels who stick to the Man. This response to external constraint is silly and tedious, as well. But it thrives so long as there are conservatives trying to impose their extrinsic norms.
So my point is that both responses miss the point, which is that it's not about the external constraints or what is permitted or forbidden by society; it's what's inside you that matters, and the only morality that matters concerns the ability to master yourself. Everything else is just a matter of setting up rules to get along, like agreeing that green means go and red means stop.
So I'm fine with saying good-bye to all that and having a civil code that seeks minimally to protect citizens from the assaults on their economic well being or civil rights. Gesellschaft is sink or swim, and for most of us, it forces us to grow up. There is nothing morally superior about fearing neighbors gossip in the gemeinschaft face-to-face world conservatives lament having lost. That's the great gift to humanity of 2.0--it has washed away all the 1.0 extrinsicism and created a space for individuals to grow from the inside out.
We forget the tyrannies of outside-in gemeinschaft society. There's good reason people fled it, and rather than lament its loss, which is a pointless waste of time anyway, I say good riddance, and let the moral grownups build something new from the inside out. In the long run, it's the only thing that protects us from the Leviathan that Deneen and all sane people are right to fear as our possible future. My overall argument here is that only 3.0s, whether they are religious or not, will have the inner moral capacity to push back against the machine that is growing out of the 2.0 materialist/positivist thinking. The only question for me is whether there will be enough 3.0 critical mass to constrain its growing power. The 1.0 thinking that typifies the critique of religious conservatives fears what I fear, but it frames the solution in ways that are irrelevant and a waster of time.