Customer Reviews

Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls

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This is an extraordinary book which reminds me a bit of Allan Bloom's best-seller, "The Closing of the American Mind." The book is a startlingly original reflection on the kinds of trends in American culture (high, low, and popular) that we read about every day, and about which we all have some not very well considered opinions. But like Bloom, Peter Augustine Lawler brings to these reflections a deep learning in philosophy and political theory, so that you leave the book not only with a series of remarkable insights ("I've never thought about it that way before!") but also with an understanding of the philosophical sources of our present discontents.

"Aliens in America" ranges widely--from Richard Rorty and Martin Heidegger to David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise," from John Courtney Murray and Thomas Jefferson to the novelist Walker Percy--but perhaps Lawler's main foil is Francis Fukuyama, who after the fall of communism made famous the idea of the "End of History," and who more recently has speculated about questions of biotechnology in "Our Post-Human Future." To my mind, at least, Lawler gets the better of Fukuyama, showing how history can never come to an end, and how there can be no post-human future, because of the ineradicable human fact of self-conscious mortality. There is something genuinely profound behind the book's joshing title and sub-title.

Like Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind," "Aliens in America" will probably be understood as some kind of conservative book. But unlike Bloom, Lawler is no wailing Jeremiah, denouncing a hundred years of intellectual history and offering secular salvation only to a chosen few. Rather, Lawler's book is filled with wit and good humour and hope; and like Tocqueville, he can see with an unprejudiced eye both what is bad and what is good about modern America.

Heartily, even fervently recommended.

As a long-time Walker Percy fan, I was initially attracted to this book to once again be reminded of Percy's brilliance. I was not disappointed as there is plenty of Percy. Professor Lawler has drawn upon the Moviegoer's Binx Bolling, the telescope metaphor, and more for us Percy devotees. The book provides new insights into Percy that continue to surprise me. Beyond Percy, this wonderful book draws upon classical philosophy, Aquinas, and actually makes natural law accessible to help remind us all that we are indeed "strangers in a strange land."

Peter Lawler is an insightful observer of the human soul. Part social theorist, part political scientist, and part psychologist, Lawler helps make sense of the moral and spiritual discontents that Americans increasingly experience today. Over and against those who would biologically transform human nature in order to rid us of all disease and discomfort, Lawler shows how (and why) we can live well in a world that, at best, ambiguously fulfills our natural desires.

According to Harvey C. Mansfield: "In this brilliant book
Peter Lawler looks steadily and not too sympathetically
at America's liberty today. He doesn't scold but teases us
for our lack of fun and our farcial attempts at self-control.
He also shows us what's good about being an alien: you
can't be either thoughtful or loving without being moody,
not to say miserable."