We live under an authoritative opinion or attitude, often called “humanitarianism.” It is authoritative in the sense that it provides the basic scaffold of meaning for prestige opinion in the West, in its encounter with non-Western peoples. This attitude, one of unqualified welcome to “the other,” appears to grow out of the Christian inheritance, yet is distinct from it.

In this lecture, Matthew Crawford will critique humanitarianism as resting on a thinned-out and abstract anthropology of “mankind.” Adherents to this humanitarian anthropology yearn for a post-political condition, one of unfractured unity among all peoples, and takes itself to be uniquely empathetic. Yet this crusade for unity induces a peculiar disability of moral perception.

Crawford will make a contrary case for understanding man as “the political animal,” who becomes what he properly is only through formation among a particular people. He will also sketch the need for a Christian humanism that would do justice to this fact.

About the Speaker:

Matthew B. Crawford is a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and author of the NYT Bestseller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009). He does philosophically-informed cultural criticism, often with a historical angle, on topics as varied as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the sub-rosa political transformations in the West revealed by the Covid drama. His writings have appeared in First Things, American Affairs, The New York Times Magazine, The New Atlantis and many other venues. 

Additional information will be provided in due course.