St. John's College profiles alumnus Timothy Carney

St. John's College is famous as the college that pioneered the Great Books curriculum in 1937. Still known as "The New Program," the single track takes all students through the progression of western literature, mathematics, philosophy, science, and music, through the authors and works in which the great insights of Western Civilization were first expressed.

From time to time, the college profiles an accomplished alumnus about his life and work and how a St. John's College education prepared him for his vocation. Today SJC published an interview with Timothy Carney, commentary editor for the Washington Examiner and author of a new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Carney graduated from the Annapolis campus in 2000. In the interview, Carney ties his insights about connection and community back to his college readings of Homer, Tocqueville, and Aristotle:

I refer to the Cyclops from the Iliad, pointing out that it's a beast that tries to raise his family without society around it, and that humans aren't meant to do that. Even though he's sort of a nice family man, he's still a beast because he's not in society. That's one of the important lessons here: We have a lot of people correctly saying that strong families are the building blocks of a strong community. But I think it's very important to emphasize that it's the necessary infrastructure around strong families that make strong families possible....

To some extent, Tocqueville talked about 80 percent of what I talk about here, which is local small institutions and particularly religion in American life. This was something I read 20 years ago, but I didn't understand until I was trying to raise a family and all that stuff was really important. And there's the notion that man is a political animal from [Aristotle's] Politics. It was also something that in the 23 years since I read it has taken on a deeper meaning.

In the acknowledgments of the book, I actually start off with a story about Mera Flaumenhaft. She had just finished her book on the ethics of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli. And she turned to Mr. Flaumenhaft and said, "I'm afraid there's nothing new in this book." And he replied something like, 'Oh, Mera, if there were anything new, that would be a sure sign it was wrong.'

The great insights that we make are going to be standing on the shoulders of giants, as we like to say. [They] are going to be synthesizing other insights. So that was a great thing that carried me through as I would write stuff and think I had come up with a new interpretation and then find either Tocqueville or Robert Putnam or just some essay online with exactly the same argument.

If we were going to not publish truths that weren't new, we would've stopped shortly after Aristotle at least.

Carney also talks about the benefits of St. John's apolitical approach to the classics, which he witnessed during the heat of the Clinton impeachment drama: "If you're going to get into this political fray as an adult after college, you're better off spending four years thinking about these things removed from the heat of the current political debate and the temptations of partisanship or oversimplistic ideologies."

Also in the interview, Carney discusses the influence of his St. John's education on his political and religious views and offers advice for St. John's students interested in journalism.

I first met Tim at a gathering of right-of-center writers and journalists before the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004. He was working for Bob Novak and the Evans and Novak Political Report. Tim, Robert A. George (another St. John's graduate, now on the editorial board of the New York Daily News), and I had an enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation that evening. Tim was very interested in Tom Coburn's campaign for Senate. Carney's appreciation of Coburn makes sense in light of his years of reporting on corporate welfare and crony capitalism.

We'd be much better off as a nation if there were more reporters and columnists with the depth and breadth of a classical liberal arts education.

MORE about Timothy Carney:

Why Ex-Churchgoers Flocked to Trump: Timothy Carney's piece in The American Conservative, summarizing the findings in his new book.

Trump's improbable likeness to a mega-church preacher allowed him to capture the love of a huge swath of the electorate that previously tuned out or voted for Democrats. The people who came to Trump, especially early in the primaries, weren't really joining the GOP and they weren't primarily seeking policies. They didn't even necessarily believe Trump would bring back their jobs. Many of Trump's earliest and most dedicated supporters were seeking a deeper fulfillment.

They came to Trump seeking what they had lost because they had lost church.

When Trump caught so many political commentators off guard, we looked for an explanation amid the closing factories, but we should have been looking for the closing churches....

And this is a story much bigger than Trump. Trump's early appeal was his declaration that "the American Dream is dead," as he put it in his campaign launch. Faith in the American Dream is the weakest where people lack strong religious institutions where they can seek deeper meaning.

The best way to describe Trump's support in the Republican primaries--when he was running against the likes of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich--would be: white evangelicals who do not go to church....

There was one cluster defined by being non-ideological and being pessimistic about the future. Ekins labeled them the "Preservationists." This was Trump's strongest cluster in the GOP primaries, by far.

The Preservationists, Ekins found, were the most likely to say religion was very important to them. They were also the least likely to attend religious services.

This gave an easy and satisfying explanation during the primaries to Christian conservatives put off by Trump and his base: Oh, these are hypocrites, not real Christians.

That dismissive explanation misses the point. We shouldn't see this as a story of working-class whites slacking off and turning away from God, as much as one of working-class whites finding themselves in places where institutions of civil society--most importantly the church--are drying up.

Cultural alienation and the rootless killer in Vegas: Carney's October 10, 2017 column:

The search for the shooter's motive keeps turning up nothing. The nothing here may actually tell us something, though. This was a man untethered to society. He was unmarried. He was unchurched. He was unrooted. He was adrift.

"Steve was a private guy," his brother said, "That's why you can't find any motive."

Maybe not a motive, exactly, but perhaps we've found a context. The context was cultural alienation, which is the backdrop of so much of America's current tumult.

When trying to explain the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, one local publisher used the phrase "social vacancy." Writer Margot Talbot expanded on the publisher's point: "Many drug addicts, he explained, are 'trying to escape the reality that this place doesn't give them anything.'"

There's no support structure, no sense of purpose. Other people become abstractions, and thus they are at best means to ends.

A rumble on the Mall feeds into the war on institutions: Carney connects the Covington Catholic High School controversy to a broader attack on the mediating institutions that uphold individuals and families standing against the culture:

The prior week, the media had been freaking out that Karen Pence teaches at a Christian school that demands its students and faculty follow Christian teachings, including on sexuality. "How can this happen in America?" one Washington Post editor cried on Twitter. In other words, it should be impermissible for institutions to maintain rules that don't comport with elite sexual morality. You see, individuals may be allowed to believe those weird Christian views, but institutions are not allowed to uphold them.

This was right after two Democratic senators tried to brand the Knights of Columbus an extremist organization. The senators, including the very prosecutorial presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., were suggesting that membership in the Knights, a service organization, disqualified a judicial nominee. Why? Because the Knights are all-male and espouse Catholic teaching on issues like abortion.

Again, people are allowed to disagree with the court-made law on abortion, but institutions of civil society that hold such dissenting views as a matter of policy -- they are the enemies of the people.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned us of this impulse. "Among democratic peoples it is only by association that the resistance of citizens to the central power can come about," the Frenchman wrote, "consequently, the latter never sees associations that are not under its control except with disfavor."

MORE about St. John's College:

Here's the original New Program from 1937, published as an addendum to the college catalog.

Here's the St. John's reading list from 1940 with a description of differences with the current curriculum.