Book Review
Trapped by Liberty
Stuck With Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future
by Peter Augustine Lawler
ISI Books, 2005
(261 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Anne Hendershott
Trained as a physician, Catholic novelist Walker Percy recalled at one time thinking that science could explain everything in the world—until he read Kierkegaard’s comments on Hegelianism, the science of his day: “Hegel explained everything in the universe except what it is to be an individual, to be born, to live, and to die.” Percy asked: “If the scientist cannot address himself to this reality, who can?”
Peter Augustine Lawler’s newest book, Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future is a good start in finding the answer.
Our Surrender
Like Percy, Lawler tries to help us understand what it is to be a man or a woman in today’s technological society. Like him, he tries to help us understand our isolation, loneliness, and alienation by restating the Judeo-Christian notion that the individual is more than an organism interacting with his environment and more than an integrated personality. And, like Percy, Lawler traces our alienation to our societal surrender to the biotechnological future, a future in which we experience ourselves either as things, as commodities, or as nothing.
But Lawler goes beyond Percy by arguing for virtue. His thesis is that despite the best efforts of the proponents of the biotechnological world, it will always be impossible to “feel good without being good . . . virtue will still be the best way to live well with what we really know.”
This is something we may not wish to know, but something we are, so to speak, trying to tell ourselves through our worries about who we are and where we fit in the cosmos. And so, he insists, “We have a right to our anxiety.”
Rather than being a symptom that should be eradicated through psychopharmacological remedies, like Prozac or Paxil, promising to “relieve the anxiety and reveal the person,” our restlessness and our anxiety are signposts directing us to the truth about our purpose as human beings.
They are clues that we are homeless wayfarers lost in the cosmos—aliens who can never be truly at home in this earthly city. Our pursuit of ways to alleviate our anxiety only cuts us off from this truth.
Free Solitude
In his introductory chapter, Lawler, the Dana Professor at Berry College, argues that in pursuing our self-interest, we have become disconnected from the past and the future, from family and community. In thinking of ourselves as “individuals” as opposed to parents, children, friends, citizens, or creatures, we begin to think that everything exists for ourselves.
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Urban Affairs at the King's College in New York City (www.tkc.edu). She is the author of Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (Transaction, 2008). She and her husband have two grown children and are members of St. Mary's Church in Milford, Connecticut.
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