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Congratulating him on being made a fellow at Cambridge, Sorely told Oakeshott he was likely to produce work of value: ‘If you have been ploughing a lonely furrow, you have learned to plough deep and straight.’

But I still care deeply for the liberty of my conservative students. For this reason I have some advice for those in college who are concerned about their freedom of speech.

My Conservatives Club colleagues and I received national attention. Some were featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and others got booked on popular TV shows like “The O’Reilly Factor.” In short, for an oppressed minority group whose speech was stifled, we had an awful lot of press.

My fellow conservative students and I half-ironically borrowed the language of the multiculturalist left and applied it to ourselves.

Most of us conservatives didn’t suffer from similar injustices, but we saw ourselves nevertheless as victims of ideological oppression.

It seemed that everyone was celebrating diversity and multiculturalism, and I didn’t see a role for myself in that. It occurred to me, as it has to countless other conservative students, that I might also be a kind of minority — an “ideological minority” — because of my conservative political views.

You know the world doesn’t love a victim. Don’t adopt a posture you disagree with just because it plays well in conservative media.

false equivalence is not helping you prepare for the wider world.

What I’m getting at is that I was never a victim. My message to conservative students is that neither are you.

You have a voice and ideas that people need to hear, but don’t compare disagreement with your ideas to suppression.

Many conservative students denounced recent protests against the college tour of the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as an attack on free speech. In all likelihood, those were protests against Mr. Yiannopoulos’s bullying and ridicule.

A “conservative campus speaker” is not someone who belittles left-wing students, but whose visit is for teaching and learning.

It is important you invite speakers to campus. We certainly did. But seek out the highly credentialed thinkers, like Walter Williams, Victor Davis Hanson or Yuval Levin.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education keeps a handy database of nationwide attempts to withdraw invitations to speakers, and 2016 was a record year. But almost a third of those attempts were directed at Mr. Yiannopoulos alone. That should be food for thought

Until you stop settling for what’s surely the satisfying release of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s deliberate and superficial antagonism, you can’t know whether it’s the actual conservatism that your fellow students have rejected.

If you take responsibility for the parts of your education you control, and focus your energy on learning, writing, speaking and debating (instead of shock-value pranks, appeals to victimhood or dismissal of academia at large), you will grow and succeed

Read Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, Russell Kirk, Thomas Sowell, Michael Oakeshott and Peggy Noonan. Acknowledge arguments you disagree with on their own terms, and respond to their substance.

Put conservative ideas at the forefront of your politics, even if conservative leaders and icons have largely abandoned conservatism. In some ways your potential to make civil choices and to restore dignity to the Republican Party makes you the most crucial allies of those across the political spectrum who care about truth, honor, liberty and democracy.

My aspiration for all the students I teach who don’t agree with me is for them to become my most formidable interlocutors. If you don’t like this advice, consider it a prompt.

Obama’s approach to politics was marked by a circumspection that went even deeper than policies

To be conservative, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a movement hero, once put it, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” The former president channeled the sentiment faithfully when he said recently that “the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.

His second inaugural address was a thoroughly conservative document, underscoring equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome. Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich praised it at the time, saying, “Ninety-five percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together.”

“At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”

He once argued that in certain circumstances, government programs created welfare dependency, saying that “as somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it, where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time, their motivation started to diminish.”

Obama went out of his way to lecture that, after the civil rights era, “what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.”

Obama cast himself as a role model for young black men and repeatedly stressed that not all inequities in American society are attributable to discrimination, racial or otherwise. This posture helped earn him currency with the black electorate (in particular, older black voters), which votes overwhelmingly for Democrats but skews moderate to conservative on several issues.

He embraced respectability politics as a way to signal how conventional it was to have a first family of colo

The difficulty Democratic candidates have in grappling with Obama reflects the dissonance he’s generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but to the far left, he’s a sellout.

Notwithstanding the “Change we can believe in” slogan that propelled his rise, his aim was never to turn things upside down.

Favoring “the familiar to the unknown,” as Oakeshott wrote, was Obama’s disposition and also his political project: expanding traditional priorities — the familiar American Dream, not a reconceived one — to Americans for whom they had been denied. That meant building, gradually and at times almost reverently, on his predecessors’ foundation.

Our vocabulary of commendation and condemnation is perpetually changing, but it has always relied on “thick” ethical terms, which combine description and evaluation.

Aristotle is obscure in other ways, too. His highbrow potshots at unnamed contemporaries, his pop-cultural references, must have tickled his aristocratic Athenian audience. But the people and the plays he referred to are now lost or forgotten. Some readers have found his writings “affectless,” stripped of any trace of a human voice, or of a beating human heart.

For Aristotle, ethics was centrally concerned with how to live a good life: a flourishing existence was also a virtuous one.

“famously terse, often crabbed in their style.” Crabbed, fragmented, gappy: it can be a headache trying to match his pronouns to the nouns they refer to. Some of his arguments are missing crucial premises; others fail to spell out their conclusions.

“How to flourish” was one such topic, “flourishing” being a workable rendering of Aristotle’s term eudaimonia. We might also translate the term in the usual way, as “happiness,” as long as we suspend some of that word’s modern associations; eudaimonia wasn’t something that waxed and waned with our moods

Flourishing is the ultimate goal of human life; a flourishing life is one that is lived in accord with the various “virtues” of the character and intellect (courage, moderation, wisdom, and so forth); a flourishing life also calls for friendships with good people and a certain measure of good fortune in the way of a decent income, health, and looks.

much of what it says can sound rather obvious

Virtue is not just about acting rightly but about feeling rightly. What’s best, Aristotle says, is “to have such feelings at the right time, at the right objects and people, with the right goal, and in the right manner.” Good luck figuring out what the “right time” or object or manner is.

Virtue is a state “consisting in a mean,” Aristotle maintains, and this mean “is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by reference to which the prudent person would define it.

“good judgment” is an improvement on the old-fashioned and now misleading “prudence”; it’s also less clunky than another standby, “practical wisdom.”

it helps to reckon with the role that habits of mind play in Aristotle’s account. Meyer’s translation of “phronesis” is “good judgment,” and the phrase nicely captures the combination of intelligence and experience which goes into acquiring it, along with the difficulty of reducing it to a set of explicit principles that anyone could apply mechanically, like an algorithm.

The phrase “prudent person” here renders the Greek phronimos, a person possessed of that special quality of mind which Aristotle called “phronesis.” But is Aristotle then saying that virtue consists in being disposed to act as the virtuous person does? That sounds true, but trivially so.

The enormous role of judgment in Aristotle’s picture of how to live can sound, to modern readers thirsty for ethical guidance, like a cop-out. Especially when they might instead pick up a treatise by John Stuart Mill and find an elegantly simple principle for distinguishing right from wrong, or one by Kant, in which they will find at least three. They might, for that matter, look to Jordan Peterson, who conjures up as many as twelve.

the question of how to flourish could receive a gloomy answer from Aristotle: it may be too late to start trying. Why is that? Flourishing involves, among other things, performing actions that manifest virtues, which are qualities of character that enable us to perform what Aristotle calls our “characteristic activity

But how do we come to acquire these qualities of character, or what Meyer translates as “dispositions”? Aristotle answers, “From our regular practice.”

In a passage missing from Meyer’s ruthless abridgment, Aristotle warns, “We need to have been brought up in noble habits if we are to be adequate students of noble and just things. . . . For we begin from the that; if this is apparent enough to us, we can begin without also knowing why. Someone who is well brought up has the beginnings, or can easily acquire them.”

Aristotle suggests, more generally, that you should identify the vices you’re susceptible to and then “pull yourself away in the opposite direction, since by pulling hard against one fault, you get to the mean (as when straightening out warped planks).

Sold as a self-help manual in a culture accustomed to gurus promulgating “rules for living,” Aristotle’s ethics may come as a disappointment. But our disappointment may tell us more about ourselves than it does about Aristotle.

Sometimes we acquire our skills by repeatedly applying a rule—following a recipe—but when we succeed what we become are not good followers of recipes but good cooks. Through practice, as Aristotle would have said, we acquire judgment.

My tutor’s fundamental pedagogical principle was that to teach a text meant being, at least for the duration of the tutorial, its most passionate champion. Every smug undergraduate exposé of a fallacy would be immediately countered with a robust defense of Aristotle’s reasoning.

“How to read Aristotle? Slowly.”

I was never slow enough. There was always another nuance, another textual knot to unravel

Michael Oakeshott wrote that “nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to the good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in the cookery book.” Proficiency in cooking is, of course, a matter of technique

What we were doing with this historical text wasn’t history but philosophy. We were reading it not for what it might reveal about an exotic culture but for the timelessly important truths it might contain—an attitude at odds with the relativism endemic in the rest of the humanities.

There is no shortcut to understanding Aristotle, no recipe. You get good at reading him by reading him, with others, slowly and often. Regular practice: for Aristotle, it’s how you get good generally.

“My parents taught me the difference between right and wrong,” he said, “and I can’t think what more there is to say about it.” The appropriate response, and the Aristotelian one, would be to agree with the spirit of the remark. There is such a thing as the difference between right and wrong. But reliably telling them apart takes experience, the company of wise friends, and the good luck of having been well brought u

we are all Aristotelians, most of the time, even when forces in our culture briefly persuade us that we are something else. Ethics remains what it was to the Greeks: a matter of being a person of a certain sort of sensibility, not of acting on “principles,” which one reserves for unusual situations of the kind that life sporadically throws up

That remains a truth about ethics even when we’ve adopted different terms for describing what type of person not to be: we don’t speak much these days of being “small-souled” or “intemperate,” but we do say a great deal about “douchebags,” “creeps,” and, yes, “assholes.

In one sense, it tells us nothing that the right thing to do is to act and feel as the person of good judgment does. In another sense, it tells us virtually everything that can be said at this level of generality.

If self-help means denying the role that the perceptions of others play in making us who we are, if it means a set of rules for living that remove the need for judgment, then we are better off without it.

Aristotle had little hope that a philosopher’s treatise could teach someone without much experience of life how to make the crucial ethical distinctions. We learn to spot an “asshole” from living; how else

It points us in the right direction: toward the picture of a person with a certain character, certain habits of thinking and feeling, a certain level of self-knowledge and knowledge of other people.

Is it any surprise that the Internet is full of those who need help seeing rightly? Finding no friendly neighborhood phronimos to provide authoritative advice, you defer instead to the wisdom of an online community.

“The self-made man,” Oakeshott wrote, “is never literally self-made, but depends upon a certain kind of society and upon a large unrecognized inheritance.”

when our own perceptions falter, we continue to do today exactly what Aristotle thought we should do. He asserts, in another significant remark that doesn’t make Meyer’s cut, that we should attend to the words of the old and experienced at least as much as we do to philosophical proofs: “these people see correctly because experience has given them their eye.”

We have long lived in a world desperate for formulas, simple answers to the simple question “What should I do?”

the algorithms, the tenets, the certificates are all attempts to solve the problem—which is everybody’s problem—of how not to be an asshole. Life would be a lot easier if there were rules, algorithms, and life hacks solving that problem once and for all. There aren’t.

At the heart of the Nicomachean Ethics is a claim that remains both edifying and chastening: phronesis doesn’t come that easy. Aristotle devised a theory that was vague in just the right places, one that left, intentionally, space to be filled in by life. 

Twenty-four centuries later, we’re still guided by the approach toward ethical life that Aristotle exemplified, one in which the basic question is not what we do but who we are

The Internet has no shortage of moralists and moralizers, but one ethical epicenter is surely the extraordinary, addictive subreddit called “Am I the Asshole?,” popularly abbreviated AITA

what is it that American conservatives want to conserve?

To translate: civility in public discourse, maximal federalism and subsidiarity, a sense of transcendence to overcome the delusions of materialism and individualism, and a relentless defense of universities as the core places where our society learns to breathe and grow in the light of knowledge and understanding.

Here’s what McClay gleans from Oakeshott’s writing that could help the cause of conservative reform: First, the idea of conversation as the model for civilized life. Second, the need to create and preserve appropriate scale in our communities, for the sake of fostering just such conversation. Third, the profound human need for release from the burden of purposefulness, which is perhaps another way of expressing the enduring need for transcendence, an avenue that Rationalism tends to foreclose to us. And fourth, the irreplaceable mission of liberal learning.

Today’s Republicanism is, in contrast, absolutist, ideological, fundamentalist and angry. It has ceased to be a voice among others in a genuine conversation about our country and become a rigid, absolutist ideology fueled by the worst aspects of the right – from racism to Randian indifference to the many others who made – and make – our lives possible. A lot of the time, it is quite simply philistine.

Is this an agenda? Not in any sense of the word. And that is the point. There is no fixed set of policies that an Oakeshottian conservative will embrace. It will all depend on the time and the place and the problem. He will question change and reform as a constant necessity

But he will also try and judge when reform is necessary to preserve the coherence of a society.

The issue, in the end, is one of prudential judgment about all these questions, a skill and virtue that can never be reduced to an ideology or “ism”.

Understanding the limits of one’s own understanding makes a political conversation natural.

It’s a way of thinking. And until we revive that manner of thinking, American conservatism will remain defined by its ugliest and dumbest protagonists.