So one reason among several I’ve been MIA this week is that I’m at the week-long Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Program. It’s the type of thing that goes on all day and most of the night, and I really don’t have the energy for that. It’s getting clearer than ever that I’m not going to make it to the Singularity. I’ve told the students that one reason I’m so edgy is that I might be among the last cohort of Americans to die.

Tonight, there’ll be a break from all the nerdiness to watch the debate. I need to watch it because I need to have an opinion on it. But I’m assuming there’ll be no game-changing going on. For now, the truth remains that Trump is sucking up all the air that might otherwise be available to other candidates who aren’t Bush and Walker. Lots of conservatives I’ve talked to lately really hope that the nominee will not be Bush, Trump, or Walker, although they’re often fuzzy on who the real alternative is. The polls, for now, are so Trumped up as to be meaningless, maybe with one exception. Trump runs way behind Hillary Clinton, but the other leading Republicans are about even with her. I will add the controversial point that the truth is that Bush and Walker are equally establishment candidates, and I’m not confident that either of them is ready to operate far enough outside the box that caused Romney’s demise. One more thing: It’s getting clearer to me than ever that all the candidates are pretty clueless on foreign policy. That’s not so surprising, given that our present situation is depressing (owing, in part, to the erosion of American power and influence) and somewhat unprecedented. Although this comparison is in some ways weak, the situation is not so different from 1980, when America suffered from the toxic combination of Nixon and Carter (although Carter had, to be fair, started to catch on to how vulnerable our situation had become). Now we suffer from the combination of Bush and Obama. So, you say, we need a Reagan! We do need someone with his confidence, prudence, and savvy — not to mention his willingness to spend for military modernization and use all means necessary to restore the morale of our warriors. Who?

I’ve to give a talk tomorrow on liberty today or something like that. And to help myself prepare, I’m now going to devote the rest of the brief time with you to list some talking points.

1. Things are ordinarily getting better and worse. Our best public schools are getting better, but most of them are getting worse. There are pockets of excellence in higher education that continue to surge, but in general higher education is on the decline because of consumerism; the incompetence of too many freshmen; the focus on minimalist, readily measurable competence at the expense of excellence; the new kind of political correctness that aims to purge all controversy from campus; the proletarianization of the faculty; techno-vocationalism that does not allow students to develop the literacy that would really prepare students for the marketplace they will enter, and so forth and so on. The family is getting more stable for members of our “cognitive elite” but is collapsing for the lower part of our middle class and below. Along the same lines, rich sophisticates are prudently obsessed with the risk factors that surround them, and so live longer and healthier lives. But anyone with eyes to see notices that many or even most Americans are alarmingly indifferent to risky behavior. Do we have more or less religious freedom? It depends what you mean by that. We have more freedom from religion than ever; we’re more free than ever, for example, from the religious thought that there might be such a thing as sexual sin that has nothing to do with being unsafe or unconsensual. And we’ve about finished detaching civil marriage from the relational duties we’ve associated with sacramental marriage. But if religious freedom is for the free exercise of religion, freedom for corporate or organized religion, it seems to be slipping away pretty rapidly now. Are Americans more or less Puritanical? Yes! They’re less Puritanical than ever when it comes to sex and public virtue in general. But they’re much more Puritanical when it comes to health and safety (helmets, smoking, giant sodas, “the environment,” and so forth), and in coming up with new egalitarian boundaries to freedom of association.

2. As our lives continue to get more free and more secure, Americans are obsessing more about the contingency of their personal beings. The more risk factors we get under control, the more we notice ones that threaten us despite our best efforts. The only solution to what ails us, we think, is detaching personal being from biology or nature. And so we’re willing to detach sex from procreation, in the name of safety, and we’re willing to imagine the unrealistic possibility of detaching personal being from our ephemeral and unreliable bodies. One way to flee from embodiment is to make your life more virtual, or screen-centric. Even the Supreme Court managed to make marital love “supernatural,” insofar as it detached it altogether from sexual differentiation and sex itself.

3. The ideology of our time is libertarian securitarianism. We demand to be free to define the mystery of our personal identities, to live as we please. But we don’t do so in the spirit of the cowboys of old, who thought of individualism as a rugged and dangerously nonconformist adventure. We demand that the world be a safe space for our personal expression, free from not only from being assaulted and bullied but even from being criticized. I demand the security that comes with being affirmed, and I might even demand that my free choices be branded with the virtue of courage. That’s why libertarianism is morphing “left” among the young. It’s not as much about dismantling the entitlements of the welfare state as wanting the security of government (or campus safety!) without accepting the responsibilities of being a citizen or, more generally, of being oppressed by the relational duties that make a community a community. The most extreme or consistent libertarian securitarians are the highly intentional and philosophic Silicon Valley transhumanists, such as Peter Thiel.

4. It’s pretty stunning how much we’re obsessed with various forms of extinctionism. There are those who focus on the extinction of all life on our planet, a process that includes, so far, the rapid diminution of species diversity. Even the pope’s encyclical was, well, a little alarmist along those lines. Then there are those who are a bit more anthropocentric and so worry a lot about the extinction of our species. They often say that the key to saving the species is diversifying ourselves on a number of planets. And then there are the transhumanists, who obsess about their own personal extinction. Some extinctionists say we should live more in harmony with nature; others say the key is to escape from nature altogether. But all extinctionism confirms Solzhenitsyn’s observation that what we lack these days is a clear and calm attitude to death, as well as his observation that below the surface of our happytalk pragmatism it’s easy to hear the howl of existentialism. A therapy for our time might be to read St. Augustine, to remember what it really means to be happy in hope, and that leads to the gentle criticism of Pope Francis for not giving his noble project for the lovingly relational reconstruction of our social ecology an Augustinian dimension. Another therapy that wouldn’t work as well because it isn’t as truthful is Socrates’ conversations about learning to die, which means learning how to get over yourself, including getting over the ridiculous thought that the future of the species or the planet or the climate or one’s own being could ever be brought under rational control. Without help we can’t provide for ourselves, extinction is a fact, Jack, one that might be much more around the corner than we imagine.

5. Are we on the road to serfdom? Well, the good news is that demographic crisis (too many old people and not enough kids) will implode our system of fairly minimalist entitlements, producing “a new birth of freedom” that no libertarian securitarian wants. So on that front, the road to serfdom never gets to serfdom. But there’s another road to serfdom paved with obsession about health and safety. Don’t know about that for sure..

I have to stop here, and I apologize to those who have heard me say a good deal of this before.