THE ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY & LETTERS
2024 Annual Conference
(Register Here)
Return to the Real: Hope and Moral Restoration in Work, Play, and Politics
June 6-8, 2024
College Park Marriott
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
Our world is rife with idealism—and that’s a bad thing.
Consider our social policy where we dream of a world of perfect equality, rejecting obvious differences of sex, talent, and culture. The result is suppression of free speech (no room for a loyal opposition), mutilated children (a small price to pay for egalitarian paradise), and institutions increasingly under the grip of an idyllic ideology (wokeness is a common contemporary form).
Consider our foreign policy where we dream of liberative action predicated not on sinister conniving to dominate, but on an idyllic dream of a world without evil. When that world proves impossible to bring about, the dream collapses into pessimism, only to be renewed again in a different theater with a different evil—but the same disastrous result.
What does it mean to the Return to the Real? This is not a call for pessimism, but a call for a return to a moral imagination, one not given to idyllic dreaming, but vibrant engagement with real places, real people, and ideas of the real.
Hope, not idyllic dreaming, is the virtue that should animate our participants’ papers.
The conference will consider the following questions:
- Philosophically, how do we distinguish between idyllic and moral visions of order and freedom?
- How does an idyllic vision of the world order warp our foreign policy?
- How has the idyllic imagination encouraged the astronomic growth of the administrative state? What role might the moral imagination play in taming it?
- How might an effective family and education policy protect our most vulnerable from the idealists who want to cleanse our institutions of hetero-normativity, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity?
- How might our religious institutions and religious leaders engage the moral imagination in the pastoring of their respective flocks?
- How would our architecture and art be different if based not upon the idyllic or its rejection, but upon real beauty contextualized to place and time? How does a moral vision shape the expression of beauty?
- What are the qualities of good literature and poetry imbued with the moral imagination, rather than idyllic?
- How may a moral vision guide our politics while falling into neither cynical Machiavellianism nor idyllic dreaming?