In her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (Collins, 192 pp., $19.95), veteran conservative author and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan diagnoses the malady of America’s political culture in the post-9/11 era. The illness began, she writes, with partisan “teamism” — and subsequently “degenerated” into outright “gangism.”

She summarizes the tone of the decade’s politics as follows: “From the Left: Bush lied, people died. The chimp started the war to pay off his corporate cronies. From the lunatic fringe of the Left: 9/11 was an inside job.” And from the Right: “You don’t support the war? Then you are not a patriot. . . . You criticize Bush? Now, while we’re at war?” The Left “indulg[ed] in grim, and mindless, triumphalism,” showing “a smirk of pleasure” whenever bad news was reported from Iraq. The White House, for its part, resorted to “the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. Their attitude was: ‘Oh yeah? We’re Lincoln, you’re McClellan. We care about the troops and you don’t.’” Both sides, reports Noonan, have been called “thuggish”; and in both cases, she says, the charge “was not unfair”: “I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought.”

Even after the (almost universally recognized) success of the surge strategy in Iraq, it’s hard not to read the quotes in the above paragraph through the prism of one’s views of the war. Someone on (my own) pro–Iraq-War side will feel the bile rising: But dammit, we were right; all we needed to do was double down and get serious, with more ground troops. Why can’t she see that? And I can easily imagine someone on Barack Obama’s side feeling equally angry: But dammit, we were right; just because Bush won back the family’s house and car at the poker table doesn’t mean he wasn’t crazy to have bet them, and have lost them, in the first place. Why can’t she see that?

To appreciate Noonan’s point, therefore, requires a certain level of abstraction from the political rages of the day, and — as if to prove her point — this kind of detachment appears increasingly rare. Political culture, like every other kind of culture, needs cultivation: It needs a willingness to restrain the urge toward the lowest common denominator, recognizing that the demonization of political opponents depletes the common fund of good will, with dire consequences for society.

Pervading Noonan’s book is the theme that catastrophic events are impending — in her words, “a 9/11 times ten, or a hundred, or more” — and that that’s why we should embrace a new politics: “The old politics are over. The weary going through the motions as each side brutalizes the other: over. . . . This is a time for seriousness, for high-mindedness, forbearance, and reason.” But I think her rhetorical strategy here is misjudged, and hints that she might be suffering from a milder strain of the same infection she’s trying to cure: a hyperbolic expansion of political views into articles of faith, of disagreement into existential crisis. Let’s say the terrorist threat is overblown, that the Bush administration has done a great job of wiping it out, and that as a result we won’t have anything like 9/11 anytime soon; and let’s say the technicians who run our electricity grid are doing a fine job, and as a result we won’t have a civilization-wide power outage that sends us back to the Dark Ages (a concern Noonan expresses at some length): Would that make it okay for us to persist in the “spirit of mindlessness [and] of dim, conceited carelessness” that characterizes today’s politics?

Kierkegaard had a famous parable in which a clown rushed out on stage to warn people that a fire had broken out backstage and that they should leave the theatre; they just laughed, because they thought it was part of the show. The more frantically the clown insisted on the danger, the funnier everyone thought it was. To couch the case for civility and national unity in an assertion of the likelihood of national calamity is to invite a similar failure of communication: Poor Peggy, the cynical operatives will whisper, she’s not a conservative — she’s an overreactionary.

And that would be a genuine shame, because people would then miss the deeper wisdom in this book, on matters large (decency, maturity) and small (the “Caesar-Pope” cult of the presidency, the absurdity of the Department of Homeland Security with its “useless pork” and its “Nazi-ish name”). Because Noonan is right: We do, in fact, need a “patriotic grace — a grace that takes the long view . . . and eschews the politically cheap and manipulative. That admits affection and respect. That encourages them.” One of her best lines comes on the heels of her excoriation of Internet extremists, and cuts to the heart of the problem: “I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don’t need to ‘control’ free speech, we need to control ourselves.”

“Confirm thy soul in self-control,” as the great old song has it: That’s the task to which Noonan summons readers. And it’s a message we need, now as ever.

• Try to imagine the Summa contra Gentiles as written by Keith Olbermann, and you will have some idea of the tone and style of The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 299 pp., $27). The book’s author, Edward Feser, is an immensely talented Aristotelico-Thomistic philosopher, and the pages he devotes to explaining the proofs for the existence of God are as clear, cogent, and convincing as any I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many).

Now, about the tone. Many right-wingers will delight in much of Feser’s angry and abusive invective: Richard Dawkins is “a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn’t know metaphysics from Metamucil.” “Where philosophy is concerned, Richard Dawkins evidently knows about as much as Richard Dawson.” “There are no greater vulgarians” than secularists. A particular student is “a shallow and sophomoric jackass.” The denial of final causality is “bulls**t.” The authors of recent atheistic bestsellers are “mental and moral midgets” and “charlatans.” And so on.

Now, I have endured my share of verbal abuse at the hands of angry propagandists for the New Atheism, so I can certainly understand Feser’s desire to pay them back in their own coin. But his decision comes at a cost: There are readers to whom I would very much want to give this book, because, e.g., it explains splendidly just how convincing the unmoved-mover argument really is and how the distinction between essence and existence in things means that the principle of causality remains unassailable (despite centuries of unsupported proclamations to the contrary). But will these readers get past the first paragraph of the preface, where Feser suggests that legislating a right to gay marriage is analogous to declaring a donkey to be a horse? This is the debating strategy known technically as “leading with one’s chin”: There are philosophical arguments that try to demonstrate that gay marriage is a contradiction in terms, and Feser makes some of them later on, but to insist that the reader accept such an assertion before he even gets to the beginning of page 1 is an imposition on that reader’s patience. First, try to establish the principle of teleology; only then, if you insist, should you hit the reader with the most controversial (and indeed highly questionable) conclusions you believe to follow from that principle. (By the way, there’s actually a lot about gays in the book. Suggestion: If you have a gay friend you’re trying to convince of God’s existence, this book would emphatically not make a good Christmas gift for that person.)

Feser is most helpful when he explains that the New Atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris is not — contrary to their noisy assertions — based on physical science. It is a philosophical argument, and one that is not as strong as the argument for theism. “Contemporary science and philosophy,” Feser writes, “have if anything and despite themselves made the reality of irreducible teleology even more evident.” He shows especially how our deeper understanding of biological phenomena and complex inorganic systems points to an innate goal-directedness in nature. What is DNA, after all, but information — which is to say, evidence of meaning and purpose? Feser quotes Nobel-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, who wrote that if the Nobel Prize could be awarded posthumously, “they should consider Aristotle for the discovery of the principle implied in DNA.”

The classical philosophical tradition has a high understanding of physical science, as a search for the full truth about the material world. For centuries, the scientific world has largely been sidetracked from this calling by indefensible philosophical assumptions —and it may now be waking from its long dogmatic slumber.