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At the moment, the deep emotional commitment of the New England school to blue model governance and social ideas — and the visceral hopes among some anti-New England types that the death of blue is the death of New England — gives a strange and ultimately not very useful cast to many of our national debates. We are trapped into debates between the advocates of spendthrift compassion (maintain Medicare and add new entitlements whether or not we can pay for them because they are needed) or cut budgets even though some of the services lost are, in fact, necessary for millions of people.

What disappears from this debate is the possibility that the transition into a higher form of social organization and governance will make society so much more affluent, and so bring down the costs of important services, that we can strengthen our health care provisions without strangling the economy or busting the budget. The question of transitioning past the blue model and developing an information society isn’t about cold hearted austerity versus spendthrift compassion. It is about reconfiguring society and reforming our institutions so that compassion is no longer spendthrift. It is about creating a more productive and abundant society in which we can afford to see that old people and poor people get good medical care. It is about building a society in which good education is more widely available on better terms than it now is. It is about ordered liberty: about building a government which can do more while restricting less.

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When the Affordable Care Act passed in early 2010, many in academia—faculty and students alike—cheered on. But now that its provisions are going into effect, some of these same people are learning firsthand that Obamacare has some nasty side effects.

A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect

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And if spirituality is properly political, the converse also is true, however distant it may be from prevailing assumptions: politics is properly spiritual. The spirituality of politics was affirmed by Plato at the very beginnings of Western political philosophy and was a commonplace of medieval political thought. Only in modern times has it come to be taken for granted that politics is entirely secular. The inevitable result is the demoralization of politics. Politics loses its moral structure and purpose, and turns into an affair of group interest and personal ambition. Government comes to the aid of only the well organized and influential, and it is limited only where it is checked by countervailing forces. Politics ceases to be understood as a pre-eminently human activity and is left to those who find it profitable, pleasurable, or in some other way useful to themselves. Political action thus comes to be carried out purely for the sake of power and privilege.

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The 20th century’s unceasing climb in living standards could very well be a one-time event, Gordon says. At its onset, the United States, with 75 percent of its population living in the countryside, was primed for an industrial makeover. That opportunity won’t be repeated. Few future advances will be as fundamentally transformative as air conditioning and the car.

Innovations will occur, Gordon acknowledges, though they will face a gale of “headwinds” including high levels of government and household debt, climate change, the globalization of industry, and weak secondary education. If U.S. economic growth slows as he predicts, these headwinds could flatten the per capita real GDP growth rate to a dismal 0.2 percent per annum by 2100. To those who doubt his argument about the limited impact of today’s technology, Gordon poses this question: Which would you rather have: an iPad or indoor toilets?

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While granting that Lewis deserves credit for his academic, literary, and theological work, the writer pointed out that the Oxford don “was born in 1898 … a decade after the setting of Back to the Future III. Annie Oakley was still the most popular woman in America. In 1898, the ink was hardly dry on the patent for the radio and the Wright Brothers had never been to Kitty Hawk.”

But now “[i]t is 2013.” And, well, that just changes everything, right?

The argument hangs on the assumption that Lewis is a product of his times and has trouble speaking to our postmodern world. But the fact that Lewis is a product of his time is exactly why we should still read him. As Lewis himself argued, every age has its own unique outlook. While dead authors are just as likely to go wrong as we are, he said, they’re not likely to go wrong in the same direction, which means their perspectives can serve as a check on, and a corrective to, our own.

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Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way. A child raised in the Andes to believe that a mountain is a protective deity will have a relationship with the natural world profoundly different from that of a youth brought up in America to believe a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. The mythology of the Barasana and Makuna people is in every way a land management plan revealing how human beings once thrived in the Amazon rain forest in their millions. Take all the genius that enabled us to put a man on the moon and apply it to an understanding of the ocean, and what you get is Polynesia. Tibetan Buddhism condenses 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as to the nature of mind. A lama once remarked that Tibetans do not believe that Americans went to the moon, but they did. Americans may not believe, he added, that Tibetans can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but they do.