Notes from Omaha

Written during the mid-March (2026) conference:

Among the lyrics to a dulcet ballad played by the tatted and pierced driver of the hotel shuttle from the airport: “I got nothin’ to live for . . . there is no point at all . . . ,” more a parody of nihilism than actual nihilism. There was more to it, of course, I’m sure a gentle counterpoise fugue for artistic effect, but I have no idea, lost as it was in the sound of a metal trash can being thrown down metal stairs, interspersed with howls of incoherent screaming. Or so it seemed to me. So much for first impressions, on my visit here for an academic conference.

It was a nice afternoon, here in Omaha, so I walked around the neighborhood of the hotel a bit. There didn’t seem to be much on offer, on a Wednesday late afternoon, but I would learn later that the restaurant/bar/art/tourist scene was in walking distance, in the downtown area close to the few high-rises. Closer to the hotel, in fact directly across from my window, was a sold-out hapnin’ venue featuring various bands that drew fans with variously-hued hair and fashion choices heavy on human skull motifs.

The descriptive heading for my panel at the conference is “from death to life in America,” did I mention?

It’s a Ciceronian Society conference, about which more anon. My contribution: The Spirit of Negation and the Therapeutic Worldview. I get 15 minutes to present this paper, after which I’m sure I’ll hear a spontaneous burst of applause igniting a warm glow of fellow-feeling and bonhomie spreading across these central plains like the first glinting rays of sun after a heavy snowfall; indeed perhaps we’ll all experience a shared feeling of having witnessed a new dawn for mankind. Or something like that. No doubt.

On my walk I looked around for an Omaha-specific picture to take, to prove I was here, but I couldn’t even narrow a frame down to midwest-y, until I came across a life-size bronze sculpture at the edge of their downtown. It was a plains Indian on a horse, I don’t know what kind—of Indian, I mean, not horse—but I’m willing to speculate one from the Omaha tribe. Could be Kansa or Osage or Lakota, I guess, depending on when. All of those tribes were woodland Indians from the Ohio River valley, at one time, but had migrated west ahead of European-Americans. The Indian was on a horse, so this far north of the place horses were introduced in North America by the Spanish, it had to be one of the latter-year tribes that crossed this area. Plus he has a rifle. “This area” is eastern Nebraska, hard by the Missouri River just downstream of its confluence with the Platte. On the other side of the Missouri is Iowa, town of Council Bluffs.

I took a picture of the Indian sculpture. Then I saw another life-sized statue just behind it, which I hadn’t yet noticed because it was shadowed by the harsh slant of late-afternoon light. This one was a land-schooner driven by a woman with a child next to her on the buckboard, drawn by a team of two horses, with another westering pioneer, a man, on horseback alongside. And then lo! A whole line of wagons behind that. Real estate and artists must be cheap here. Then I turned to continue my walk and there on the opposite side of the street was a full-grown male bison. Just standing there like it’s waiting for the light to change. Not a real one, come on. Another sculpture.

So these pictures are my bona fides that I’m really in the midwest/west, and in fact more or less along the Oregon Trail which, this far out from the usual jump-off of Independence, Missouri, mostly followed the Platte. I didn’t see any sod houses, alas, nor bison herds in their immensity, nor snow mounting like a blanket of silence nor Willa Cather vibe of neighborliness and longing. Just the usual travel and business accommodation, mostly. Could be anywhere, but for the sculptures.

Next day, day one of the conference. The philosophical significance of the C.S. Lewis trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Serendipitously, I just re-read these a couple of years ago when I was pinned to the mat with covid. There were hints of what I’m going to present in a couple of days. Lewis was always pointing us back to moral realism (strong e.g.: The Abolition of Man, what he meant by the “Tao”) and warning against exactly the sort of Machine technocracy we’re experiencing now, more than 70 years after he wrote. “Remove the organ but demand the function;” i.e., remove the realism of virtue but demand social interaction as if it still existed. After Freud we replace moral realism with “psychic liberation,” which carries the dark side of enslavement to therapeutic subjectivism.

The point of a conference is to confer. There seems to be a social dynamic, however, that dictates finding the security of a small group and sticking with it. So here you hang with others at your institution or else people you’ve met at prior academic conferences and I’m sure this makes the whole thing more enjoyable, but cliques can develop so that one’s natural self-consciousness inhibits breaking out to form new alliances, even though to do so is professionally advantageous.

I managed a bit of time for another walk, this time to Iowa across an impressive pedestrian bridge spanning high above the Missouri. At some point I plan to skip a session—please don’t rat me out to the Ciceronians—to visit a highly-acclaimed art museum barely a mile from our venue, right here in the land of corn, dust, and stockyards. It’s called the Joslyn, and I’ll give you a brief report if/when this happens.

More conference sections. Shareholder virtue maximization. Eric Voegelin, he of the famous “Don’t immanentize the eschaton” phrase. Not a klingon war-cry, he was referring to postmodern philosophical movements that shift our focus to the “Becoming” of social dialectic, rather than the eternal transcendent “Being” of moral- and truth-realism.

End of day 2. Ok, so I went to that museum, yesterday, and it was fantastic. They conveniently separate out the 20^th-century “modern” and “contemporary” art so you don’t have to look at it, but there were pre-modern really fine paintings and sculptures. To give you an idea, they had Bierstadts, Monets, Rodins, Cassatts, Delacroix, and Degas, among many others. Even a section on Renaissance art, and the facility itself was photo-worthy. Because this is Omaha, there was interesting Indian art and artifacts. Weirdly, there was a nineteenth-century painting of a “Russian beauty with cat,” according to the placard, who looks exactly like one of my daughters. After that I returned to the conference for the dinner and evening speech by the recipient of an award. She’s a biographer of John Dickinson, one of the (previously) lesser-known founding fathers.

Today, the second day of the conference, started earlier than I intended (meaning I woke up too early and couldn’t go back to sleep) but fine, I got to go through my presentation one more time but, as on previous runs-through only got it squenched down to 15 minutes by basically blurting out names of philosophers and philosophical principles one after the other, leaving it entirely to the audience to figure out how on earth I mean them to fit together. Take-away: don’t try to eat a Big Mac in one bite, you’ll just choke and die. I didn’t maybe bomb the presentation, but you decide, it was recorded for posterity here.

By the way, as it happened, my substack post Emotivism was published at the same moment I began talking. I had posted it weeks ago but scheduled it for a later date, which by coincidence was the same day and time I was presenting at the conference. I could’ve just read that, it might have gone better.

After my meh performance I went to several other conference sessions. Especially of interest was one that covered some of my favorite novels, including The Road and Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, in addition to Beowulf and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Then one on localism, which I’m still chewing on. I wanted to ask “isn’t that just the other end of the spectrum from globalism?” and “does localism reduce to individual subjectivism?” but I didn’t ask those things because (1) I’m an army brat and have no idea what localism is about, that’s why I went to this session; and (2) I couldn’t get called on anyway, these scholars are aggressive question-askers, you gotta be quick, man. A skill I haven’t mastered is appearing to be polite and deferential while wearing a tie and brutally elbowing out the competition like it’s roller derby.

I didn’t even get to ask the Cormac McCarthy presenter (1) if the Judge in Blood Meridian is a Mephistophelean figure (the answer is yes, I knew that but wanted to show off) and (2) why the Judge was always collecting specimens of dead insects, animals, and plants, because I think it had something to do with Aristotelian particularity in defiance of Platonic universality and maybe also affirmation of William of Ockham’s nominalism, but a materialist version. So maybe I could say all that in the guise of a long-winded question which would itself be the real point, not her answer, I mean who cares, I just wanted to hear myself talk, but as I said it’s tough to get an allotment of airspace to fill with your own words except for that one golden quarter-hour in the whole shindig when you exclusively have the floor. That last punctuation marker is a period, or “full stop,” for you Brits. I’ll try to use more of them.

After the day’s sessions on the afternoon of the second day I walked to Iowa again. From a map and from the view at the top of the pedestrian bridge it looks like there’s a large green space just upriver on the Iowa side. I walked there but it was disappointing. I have the impression it’s unusable flood-zone that got used as a landfill, and now they’re trying to reclaim it without scraping off all the vegetation. So I looked around and returned to Nebraska and walked around the real downtown instead of what I thought was downtown yesterday. God willing, I’ll report to you tomorrow on day 3.

Day 3. Presentations on several movies and McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (another of my favorite novels and an unusually good film adaptation) and the TV series Deadwood. Also The Northman and Tolkien and the “Ragnarok” spirit, the worth of defeated valor. Made me think of the Lucerne lion and the sculpture Gloria Victis I recently wrote about. For some reason I stopped taking notes toward the end of the day, I guess I was just listening, but there were several good presentations on theories of politics and governance.

People in Omaha are so nice I just wanna slap ‘em. Tomorrow I wing my way back to the land of meanies where I fit right in. If my flight isn’t cancelled, that is. Today I’ve been walking around with a light jacket. Tomorrow there’s a substantial chance of snow, high winds, and low temps. Maybe people are nice here because of vicious weather providing all the meanness they need.

From this conference I’ve got all kinds of notes on things I want to look into when I get back. Movies I want to see, books I want to read, lines of inquiry I want to pursue, like meta-metaphysical ontology, if I’m bold enough. Time feels more expansive here than when I’m back to regular life, however, owing to the purposeful setting aside of time, and travel to get here. There’s time to talk with others about deep subjects you wouldn’t dive into in the course of your daily work life. They take time. So I recommend this. The Ciceronian Society, certainly, but really I mean whatever association feeds your soul. Even, or perhaps especially, if you’re not compelled by your job or profession.

I’m now at the end of the third and final day. Winding down with this and a light dinner. Tomorrow I hope to beat the weather out of town. After lunch I heard a panel that was in part about an author I have little experience with (HP Lovecraft) but some of the presentation titles were intriguing and it provoked some furious note-taking on my part including possibly a topic for next year. Tentative title: “What does it mean to be ‘real’?” I wrote this year on moral realism, and how we should think that’s “real” in the same way mathematics is “real,” but I keep wanting to back the question up still further. It feels like I’m always describing but not really explaining. Maybe I start with ontology as addressed by WVO Quine, who asked whether Pegasus is “real.” In fact it occurs to me that maybe only divine revelation is real. Even Descartes’ opening question is up for grabs. I may find an ally in Mircea Eliade. Just a few will-o-wisp thoughts inspired by this conference. I had trouble cramming this year’s presentation into 15 minutes, why not take on all of reality? I’ve got a whole year to think about it and endure suggestions from the spousal unit that maybe the living room doesn’t need to be so cluttered with books in process (though she’s a saint by all other measures).

But back to the conference. There was a final plenary session on religious liberty, that was excellent. The incisive questions posed after the presentations always blow me away more than the presentation itself, because the audience is hearing it cold. Then there was an award, some closing remarks by leaders who infuse their energy into this fandango at I’m sure no small personal expense, and then, finally, get this: we sang the Doxology. I bet every Christian tradition was represented, and no doubt some skeptics joining in solidarity. It was beautiful.

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