The conversation here has covered a lot of ground, and I think it has been a good and needed one. So for myself, thanks to NRO and K-Lo for hosting, to the many who contributed to the spirited exchange, and especially to Rod for getting it started and putting up with the inevitable slings and arrows. As I trudge back to my log cabin, I thought the following passage appropriate to sign off with:

The hard and binding requirement that freedom must answer, if it is to last, or if any meaningful sense it is to exist, is that of responsibility. For a long time the originators and innovators … have made extravagant use of freedom, and in the process have built up a large debt to responsibility, little of which has been paid, and for most of which there is not even a promissory note.

The debt can be paid only by thought, work, deference, and affection given to the integrity of our ecological and cultural life. The condition which that integrity (or that one-time integrity) imposes on human work and human freedom is that everything we do has an effect or an influence. But it is generally true to say that among the originators of the modern era there has been no flinching before effects …. And thus we have assumed that all problems merely lead to solutions, an article of pathological faith.

All along, the enterprise of [progress] has been accompanied by a tradition of objection. Blake’s revulsion at the “dark Satanic mills” and Wordsworth’s perception that “we murder to dissect” have been handed down through a succession of lives and words, and among the inheritors have been scientists as well as artists. The worry, I think, has always been that in our ever-accelerating effort to explain, control, use, and sell the world we would destroy the wholeness and the sanctity of all that which it is our highest obligation to “make new.”