The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  The educated, temperate portion of the American public is right to wonder about the temperateness of many educators. It is reasonable to wonder whether many of them remain faithful to the educator’s traditional mission. That mission is the conservation, enlargement, and transmission of the ideas, understandings, and virtues on which a society such as ours—a society based on persuasion and consent—depends. A particular cluster of ideas, and a concomitant sensibility, has gained currency in academic circles. What happens on campuses does not stay there, so if the ideas are not identified, understood, and refuted, they will seep like slow, cumulative toxins into the larger society, with large and lasting consequences in our politics, our governance, and our traditions of civility.

  For a while, these ideas advanced under a battle flag that has now been furled because the battle has been largely won, the banner of “postmodernism.” That is a faith with many factions, but it had a founding prophet. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the core tenet of postmodernism when he said: There are not facts, but only interpretations. There are, however, facts, and being oblivious of them can be embarrassing. During the campus convulsions of the late 1960s, when rebellion against any authority was considered obedience to every virtue, the film To Die in Madrid, a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for, and vain about, its dedication to all things progressive. When the film’s narrator intoned, “The rebels advanced on Madrid,” the students, who adored rebels and were innocent of information, cheered. This college had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of progressivism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the mundane task of teaching them facts, such as: The rebels in Spain were Franco’s fascists.

  At a moment when the phrase “higher education” prompts the question “Higher than what?” it is well to remember the poet Robert Frost’s advice: “Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family—but not much in between unless a college.”34 That advice, like the man who proffered it, is quintessentially American. It is especially American in its general injunction in favor of individualism and against excessive joining—against defining oneself too much by group affiliations. But it also is very American in its inclusion of an institution of higher education, along with family and nation, in a trinity of essential allegiances. America’s universities are entrusted with a task central to the nation’s identity and success. The task is to transmit the best of the West—the culture of our civilization—to successive generations who will lead America, which is the most successful expression of that civilization. Because there is a high idea-content to American citizenship, being an American is complicated. We are not made up of randomly aggregated moral and intellectual materials. Rather, we are made up of moral and intellectual resources that have been winnowed by time and should be husbanded by universities. We define our polity by decisions about what schools should do, about what the rising generation should read and learn. This is why America’s primary and secondary schools have always been cockpits of religious and ethnic conflicts. And what is now occurring on campuses is an episode in the unending American drama of adjusting the tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community.

  Individuals have a broad right to study and teach what they wish—up to a point. That point is set, in part, by the community’s right to perpetuate itself. Lincoln said: A house divided against itself cannot stand. It is equally true that a society unaware of itself—with no consensus about its premises and purposes—cannot long endure. In Lincoln’s day, a collision of two clear and diametrically opposed premises nearly proved fatal to America. Today, there is a potentially fatal idea in circulation. It is the idea that this pluralistic society should not want to have, should not be allowed to have, any core culture passed on from generation to generation.

  To those who say we are threatened by a suffocating “hegemony” of Western civilization’s classic works, the correct response is: If only that were the problem. The danger is not cultural hegemony but cultural amnesia, and the concomitant balkanization of the life of the mind. This begins with the assertion that any syllabus composed of traditional classics of Western civilization will “underrepresent” certain groups—racial, sexual, ethnic, or class-based. Are the great works of Western civilization primarily products of social elites? Of course they are, for many reasons, including the fact that these works come to us from centuries where literacy itself was an elite attainment. But it is a non sequitur to argue that therefore these works perpetuate an oppressiveness that allegedly is the essence of Western civilization.

  Some people who fancy themselves intellectually emancipated—who think themselves liberated from what they call a stultifying cultural inheritance—actually reside in what G. K. Chesterton called “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”35 Today’s imprisoning idea is philosophically primitive and empirically insupportable. It is that any humanities text merely “reflects” its social context, and thus should be read as a political document, a symptom of the “power relations” when and where it was produced. Too often the meaning of the word “reflects” disappears in a mist of imprecision. Usually the assertion that a text “reflects” its context is either trivially true or flagrantly false. It is trivially true if it means only that the text, like its author, stands in some relation to the setting in which the author wrote. But it is false if it means that any text should be construed politically, with politics understood crudely as mere relations of domination and subordination in the author’s era. Such thinking causes the study of literature to become a subdivision of political history, and to be studied as sociology. This reduction of the arts to social sciences is reverse alchemy—turning gold into lead.

  This is the result of the imprisoning idea that the nature of everything, from intellectual works to political acts, is determined by race, gender, and class. Any single idea purporting to be a universal explanation—a comprehensive simplifier of social complexities—requires its adherents to be simple. It makes them simpleminded. Today’s dubious idea also makes its adherents condescending—and worse. It is condescending and deeply anti-democratic when intellectuals consign blacks, or women, or ethnics, or the working class, or whomever to confining categories, asserting that they can be fully understood as mere “reflections” of their race, gender, or class, and that members of those groups should be presumed to have the “consciousness” supposedly characteristic of those groups.

  The root of such mischief is the assertion that everything is “political.” If the word “political” is used to describe any choice or judgment involving what is or should be valued, then indeed everything is “political.” But this then becomes a classification that does not classify. One cannot say this too emphatically: Not all judgments about what is valuable are political judgments. It is not a political judgment that certain works have contributed mightily to the making of our civilization and hence must be known if we are to know ourselves. It is not a political judgment that certain books have demonstrated the power, down the generations, to instruct us in history, irony, wit, tragedy, pathos, and delight. Education is an apprenticeship in those civilized—and civilizing—things, and not all texts are equal as teachers.

  Civilization’s enemies attack civilization’s foundational idea, the proposition that human nature is not infinitely plastic and therefore that people cannot be socialized to accept or do whatever those in charge of socialization desire. These enemies believe that human beings have no common nature, no shared moral sense that is a component of a universal human nature. Rather, they say, all we have in common is a capacity to acquire an infinite variety of cultures. The cult of cultural diversity in higher education contains an aggressive ideology concerning the meaning of culture, the aims of education, and the merits of the United States. Multiculturalism is a fact: Americans have various racial and ethnic backgrounds and experiences. But multiculturalism as a policy is not pr
imarily a response to this fact. Rather, it is an ideology, the core tenet of which is this: Because all standards for judging cultures are themselves culture-bound, it is wrong to “privilege” Western culture and right to tailor university curricula to rectify the failure to extend proper “recognition” and “validation” to other cultures. Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues. This explains the multiculturalists’ attempts to politicize and purge higher education curriculums. And once universities are reduced to therapeutic institutions working to heal victimized groups and reform the victimizing society, our trickle-down culture produces similar distortions in primary and secondary education.

  The proper legacy of Western thought is a mind capable of comprehending and valuing other cultures while avoiding the nihilism that says all cultures are incommensurable and hence all of equal merit. Sensible people rejoice at any chance to study another culture’s Rousseau or Cervantes or Dickens. But education is too serious a matter to become a game of let’s pretend, a ritual of pretending that enduring works of the humanities are evenly distributed throughout the world’s cultures. We want to be able to imaginatively enter, and to empathize with, other cultures. We must, however, live in our own, which is being injured by some academic developments that impede understanding.

  We see on campuses the baneful habit of joining what Robert Frost would have considered too many gangs—and the wrong sort of gangs. We see the spread of intellectual gerrymandering, carving up curricula into protected enclaves for racial, gender, and ethnic factions. Often this is done on the insulting assumption that members of these groups have only watery and derivative identities, which stem from membership in victim groups. The premise of this analysis is that Western civilization has a disreputable record consisting primarily of oppression and exploitation—that Western civilization has been prolific only at producing victims. This idea leads, in turn, to the patronizing notion that members of a victim group are disadvantaged unless taught by members of their own group, and unless they study works by members of their group. Otherwise (so the theory goes) members of the group will lack self-esteem, which is presumed to be a precondition for, not a result of, achievement. Such thinking promotes envy, resentment, suspicion, aggression, self-absorption, self-pity, and, ultimately, separatism.

  It is a non sequitur to say that because America is becoming more diverse, university curricula must be balkanized. Actually, America’s increasing diversity increases the importance of universities as transmitters of the cultural legacy that defines and preserves national unity. Some policies advanced today in the name of “diversity” might better be designated as instruments of fragmentation. Some policies instituted in the name of “multiculturalism” are not celebrations of the pluralism from which American unity is woven, they are capitulations: They involve withdrawal from the challenge of finding, and teaching, a common ground on which Americans can stand together. Instead, people increasingly stand on little patches of fenced-off turf for irritable groups.

  Many of today’s balkanizing policies are motivated by a desire to show “sensitivity” to the feelings of particular groups. Sensitivity is admirable, but remember: The four most important words in political discourse are “up to a point.” Armies, police, taxation, even freedom and equality are good only up to a point. In the context of today’s campus disputes, “sensitivity,” too, is good only up to a point. What is not good is the notion that “sensitivity” about one’s own opinions generates for oneself an entitlement not to be disagreed with or otherwise offended. Or that the only way to prove one’s “sensitivity” is by subscribing to a particular political agenda.

  Some critics complain that a traditional curriculum built around the canon of great works of the Western mind necessarily reinforces authority and encourages docile acceptance of existing arrangements. But these critics, some of whom fancy themselves radicals, could take lessons in real radicalism from the many writers of those classic works. Virtually every subsequent radicalism was anticipated in Plato’s inquiries. No person more radical than Machiavelli ever put pen to paper—Machiavelli, whose The Prince became the handbook for modern masterless men and women who are obedient only to rules they write for themselves. Four years after The Prince was written, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door, asserting the primacy of private judgment—conscience. There is a golden thread of magnificent radicalism connecting this German theologian to his namesake, the black American minister, a thread connecting Luther’s 95 Theses and Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Europe’s late-twentieth-century revolutions against tyranny were fueled by the words of two American presidents, the third and sixteenth, Jefferson and Lincoln.

  There is today a warm-hearted idea that every academic activity must contribute to the reforming of society by assuaging this or that group’s grievances. This idea leads to fracturing the community into antagonistic groups; to the drowning of individuality in groupthinking; to the competitive cultivation of group grievances; to the subordination of education to political indoctrination. Too much educational energy is being invested in the pursuit of social goals that are peripheral to education’s main mission. A university cannot be a democracy, all sail and no anchor, blown about by gusts of opinion and fashion. It must be anchored in the convictions of intellectual leaders who are confident of their authority because they know they stand on the shoulders of giants, the great thinkers of whose legacy today’s teachers are custodians and transmitters.

  Arguments about university curricula should not be narrowly, crudely political. They are, however, in an important sense, constitutional arguments: They concern how the American mind shall be constituted. And in a democracy, mind is what matters most because everything rests on opinion. This is why democracies are in permanent danger, and why it is prudent to keep one’s capacity for pessimism awake. One should not be paralyzed by fatalism, but one should be alert to the perpetual danger threatening a democracy’s mind with amnesia. The moral of the human story is that things go wrong more often than they go right because there are so many more ways to go wrong than there are to go right. Truths increase arithmetically, but errors increase exponentially. Most new ideas are false; hence most “improvements” make matters worse. This is why wise people are wary of intellectual fads and are respectful of the received greatness that in academic context is called, and frequently disparaged as, the canon.

  No academic fad in recent decades has been as consequential as the dogmatic skepticism that postmodernism labeled “deconstruction.” Novelist Walker Percy defined a “deconstructionist” as someone, usually an academic, who claims that the meaning of all communication is radically indeterminate but who leaves a message on his wife’s answering machine requesting pepperoni pizza for dinner.36 The indeterminists launch a non sequitur from a truism. The truism is that because our knowledge of facts is conditioned in complex ways by the contexts in which facts are defined and encountered, the acquisition of knowledge is not simple, immediate, and infallible. The non sequitur is: Therefore all assertions are equally indeterminate and respectable, and all ascriptions of truth are arbitrary, hence there are no standards of intellectual conscientiousness. So whoever has power shall decree the truth. Postmodernism was erected on the rickety scaffolding of what is less a paradox than an absurdity, the assertion that it is a fact that there are no facts. Unfortunately, the fact that something is absurd does not mean it is inconsequential. Indeed, much of modern history is a sad story of absurdities that became cloaked in power.

  Postmodernism is preoccupied with power because it has no content other than the assertion that the content of any proposition, book, or mind is arbitrary. All content is the res
ult of race or ethnicity or sex or class, and deserves no more or less respect than any other content of any other proposition, book, or mind. Sensible people might suspect that this is a caricature of the postmodernist idea. As evidence to the contrary, consider a pamphlet issued in 1989 by the American Council of Learned Societies. The pamphlet boldly asserted that “the most powerful modern philosophies and theories” are “demonstrating” that “claims of disinterest, objectivity and universality are not to be trusted and themselves tend to reflect local historical conditions.”37 But how can anything be “demonstrated” when disinterestedness and objectivity are untrustworthy?

  The crux of postmodernism is the postulate—asserted, not “demonstrated”—that any supposedly disinterested deliberation actually is merely self-interest disguised. And, postmodernists say, it is a duty to “unmask” the “power struggles” that are the reality beneath every pretense of reasoned persuasion. These ideas subvert civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts to portray accurately a reality that exists independently of our perceptions, attitudes, or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex, or class. Once a foundation of realism is denied, the foundation of a society based on persuasion crumbles. All arguments necessarily become ad hominem. They become arguments about the characteristics of the person presenting a thought, not about the thought. Once a society abandons its belief in facts and truths, and its belief in standards for distinguishing facts and truths from fictions and falsehoods; once intellectuals behave as though “We are all Nietzscheans now, and there are no facts, only interpretations”; once this occurs, then it seems arbitrary, elitist, and “judgmental” to assert that some books are intellectually superior to others, that some theories are truer than others, and that some cultures are superior to others. If there are no standards rooted in reason, if there are only preferences and appetites arising from group “solidarity” and interests, then there can be no education as it has traditionally been understood.