Until recently it was believed that the study of literary classics gave the reader insights into human nature and the human condition. Nowadays, however, many intellectuals consider it arrogant folly to speak of “classics” or, for that matter, of human nature. Being “subversive” is a postmodernist’s aspiration, so to subvert the “privileging” of classics, they are referred to as “texts.” The works of, say, Walt Whitman or Walt Disney are all, and equally, texts, and merely texts. Infusing academic life with such sandbox politics and frivolity subverts the function of, and dissipates the social support for, colleges and universities. And when the relationship of such institutions to the surrounding and sustaining society becomes problematic, those institutions swiftly learn a painful lesson about the perishable nature of prestige.
I once stood with a friend, an Oxford don, looking out from his study window at the university’s “dreaming spires.” He was worried about the decreasing public support for the university. “This is the prettiest view in Oxford. Hence the prettiest view in the south of England. Hence the prettiest view in Europe. Hence the prettiest view in the world. And yet the time may come when young people and scholars will no longer beat a path to our many doors. Remember, three centuries ago everyone wanted to go to the University of Padua.” Who in a future shaped by the postmodern sensibility will want to attend any college or university steeped in the idea that “there are not facts, but only interpretations”? What society will devote scarce resources to the support of institutions that regard intellectual life as merely sublimated—barely sublimated—power struggles over competing political agendas of racial, ethnic, or sexual groups asserting solidarity against one another?
We are witnessing, on campuses and throughout society, the displacement of learning—a culture of reason and persuasion—by politics of a peculiar and unwholesome kind, “identity politics.” Its premise is that the individual is decisively shaped, and irrevocably defined, not by conscious choices but by accidents; that people are defined not by convictions arrived at by reasoning and persuasion, but by accidents of birth and socialization. The theory is that we are whatever our group is, with its circumscribed mental makeup. Although this theory is incompatible with the premises of American democracy, many intellectuals are receptive to the idea that all politics is, or should be, “identity politics,” and that all intellectual life is really politics. The idea is that intellectual life may be unconscious politics, but it is politics nonetheless—a struggle for power—and should become conscious of itself. We are told it is simple honesty to get the struggle aboveboard, front and center, by calling every intellectual distinction and dispute what it is: a political move in a power game.
Often nowadays we hear a question posed that is not really a question. It is an oblique assertion of what the ostensible questioner considers a self-evident truth. The question is: Should we not all honor one another’s differences? But in what sense should “honor” accrue to accidents of birth? Given that they are accidents, what precisely is there to honor? Surely respect is owed to individuals because of their humanity, not because of any membership in any group. Surely honor should flow to individuals because of their attainments of intellectual and moral excellence, not merely because of any membership in any group.
If identity politics is valid, then the idea that education should make the educated a member of a larger intellectual culture is invalid. If the premise of identity politics is true, then the idea on which America rests is false. If the premise of identity politics is true, then there is in no meaningful sense a universal human nature, and there are no general standards of intellectual discourse, and no ethic of ennobling disputation, no process of civil persuasion toward friendly consent, no source of legitimacy other than power, and we all live immersed in our tribes, warily watching other tribes across the chasms of our “differences.” No sensible person wants to live in such a society.
Today, therefore, sensible people should be worried. Identity politics tends toward a ruthlessness that comes from the dark belief that there can be no other kind of politics—no politics of ideas and persuasion. When groups assume that they are locked in their mutually unintelligible differences, the postmodern sensibility produces premodern tribalism. A society steeped in the postmodern sensibility will have an uneasy conscience about teaching certain great truths, values, or works because it will wonder: Who are we—who is anyone—to say that anything is greater than anything else? And a postmodernist community cannot long remain a community. It will lose the confidence necessary for the transmission of precious things—tested ideas and celebrated virtues—held in common.
Virtues, however, cannot be celebrated when talk about them is displaced by talk about “values.” In this regard, we have come a long way, in the wrong direction, since the Marquis de Lafayette returned to America for a hero’s tour in 1824. His extended visit catalyzed the young republic’s unease about what it sensed was a decline from the pinnacle achieved by the Revolutionary generation that by then had largely passed from the scene. The nation then was feeling its oats economically, but was feeling queasy about whether its character was as strong as its economy. It worried that the process by which it was becoming rich—the banking, industrialization, speculation, and urbanization of early capitalism—was leading it away from the sturdy virtues of a yeoman’s republic. The anxiety of that day was, however, not voiced in talk about values. Americans talked then as the Founders had talked: of virtues.
You may well wonder: values, virtues, what’s the difference? Today, talk about “values” is so incessant that it is difficult to recognize that it is a new and regrettable departure from our traditional vocabulary of moral aspirations. Once upon a time, the word “value” was used most often as a verb, meaning “to esteem,” as in “I value your friendship.” It also was a singular noun, such as in “inflation hurts the value of the currency.” However, in today’s political discourse, value is used most as a plural noun denoting beliefs and attitudes of individuals and societies. This is evidence of the de-moralization of society. De-moralization advances when the categories virtue and vice are “transcended” and we are left with the thin gruel of values talk as we slide beyond talk about good and evil.
How very democratic values talk is. Unlike virtues, everyone has values; everyone has as many as they choose. Hitler had scads of values. George Washington had virtues. Who among those who knew him—surely not the Marquis de Lafayette—would have spoken of George Washington’s “values”? Values talk, however, alas, suits today’s zeitgeist. It is the talk of a non-judgmental age. Ours is an age judgmental only about the sin of being judgmental. Today, it is a mark of broadmindedness to say, “Oh, one person’s values are as good as another’s.” It is, of course, nonsense to say, “One person’s virtues are as good as another’s.” Values are an equal-opportunity business; they are mere choices. In contrast, virtues are habits, difficult to develop and therefore not equally accessible to all. Speaking of virtues rather than values is elitist, offensive to democracy’s egalitarian, leveling ethos, which is precisely why talk of virtues should be revived and talk of values should be devalued.
PREVENTIVE VIRTUES
Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America not long after Lafayette did, noted that although much is gained by replacing aristocratic with democratic institutions and suppositions, something valuable is often lost—the ability to recognize, and the hunger to honor, hierarchies of achievement and character. Therefore, democracy requires the cultivation of preventive virtues that counter certain unhealthy tendencies in democracies. People, particularly young people, need to be taught how to praise. They need to learn, especially in school, to look up—to the elevated and the heroic in thoughts and deeds, in history, politics, literature, science, and faith. After all, some of the glittering minority of men and women who became heroes often were pulled up to greatness by visions of nobility found in history and literature. The proper purpose of education in American democracy is not t
o serve as a values cafeteria, where young people are invited, and therefore encouraged, to pick whatever strikes their fancies. Rather, the purpose of education, and especially higher education, for young citizens of a democracy is to help them identify a rarity—excellence—in various realms, and to study what virtues bring it about and make it excellent.
Denying that great individuals are great history-makers is a democratic impulse in the historians’ craft—“history from the bottom up” or “history with the politics left out.” “Elitist” history that stresses great individuals and events—political, military, diplomatic, intellectual—supposedly insults common people. The supposed corrective is “affirmative-action history,” which allots more attention to ordinary activities of the many than to the extraordinary activities of the few. This involves painting mankind’s story without the bright primary colors of personal greatness. Which has two bad consequences. Pastel history teaches that mastery of events is a chimera, so why bother with politics? And it makes the idea of “leadership” suspect, so who cares about the character and caliber of leaders?
Ours is an age in which children are taught not to discover the good but to manufacture “values,” not so they can lead noble lives but so they can devise pleasant “lifestyles.” It is an age in which the aim of life is not autonomy in the sense of a life regulated by exacting standards but rather “authenticity” in following strong feelings. It is an age of the egalitarian distribution of esteem, so indiscriminateness is a moral imperative. And this extends to the whole wide world. In 1991, Florida’s legislature enacted a law requiring public schools to teach that no “culture is intrinsically superior or inferior to another.” The word “intrinsically” seems intended to make the assertion foggy. This entire law must have been especially mystifying to the many Floridians who are refugees from communist Cuba and know from firsthand experience that the law is rubbish.38
It is probably said by every generation that the problem with the younger generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting. Today, however, the rising generations have not been instructed at school in the Founders’ premises. Perhaps this helps to explain the ravenous appetite, in the relative small portion of the public that reads such things, for biographies of the Founders. The Founders’ premises have few adherents in higher education, which in our homogenized intellectual culture sets the tone and agenda for all education. Today, students are not taught that, as the Founders believed, a hierarchy of moral and political choices can be established by reason. Instead, the social sciences teach that the world is a bazaar of cultures, no one of which is demonstrably superior to another. Some cultures place high value on tolerance, but relativism teaches that a preference for tolerance is as arbitrary as any other preference. Intellectual openness—to experience, to arguments—used to be an instrumental virtue valued because it made possible the quest, through reason, for knowledge of the objectively good. Now openness is not instrumental for important ends, it is an end. It is the only universal value because reason has been declared powerless to discern the good. There is, however, vanity beneath this supposed intellectual humility: Openness makes the absence of principle look principled. The American mind is being closed in the name of openness—closed to the idea of reasoned discrimination between ways of living.
The sociology of virtue would be a fertile field for research, if more sociologists believed in virtue. Jefferson, who wrote the distilled essence of the American creed, was a sociologist of virtue. He is sometimes caricatured as a person who was optimistic to the point of simplemindedness. He did, indeed, have the confidence of a natural aristocrat, and the expansive intellectual expectation of progress that characterized the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of which he was an exemplar. But consider what he actually said about the problems of governance, and about the myriad lurking threats to the goodness of America. Democracy, he said, depends on the nurturing of certain virtues in its citizens. On those virtues, personal independence depends. But those virtues, and hence the strength of character that we recognize as true independence in individuals, depends, he thought, on a very particular kind of social order. It depends on a rural society that produces sturdy yeomen. Hence his warning against piling up people in cities. He did not allow his enjoyment of Paris to crimp his theorizing that cities are, inherently and everywhere, “pestilential.”39 He exhorted Americans to let Europe have the cities—and hence the workshops, as well. Jefferson lived with his customary flair and zest in the Paris of the 1780s, a city fermenting with cultural and political upheaval. And having seen urban crowds abroad and at home, he still said, “I am not among those who fear the people.”40 But cut the people off from connection with the land, from a life of rural husbandry, and Jefferson’s trust became as attenuated as he said the people’s virtue must then become. He believed that human nature presented political problems but that those problems could be ameliorated by nature itself—by the education in hardihood and independence that comes from a life engaged in labor on the land.
The contrast between Jefferson’s political philosophy and the philosophies of the ancients is stark. The words “civic,” “citizen,” and “city” have a common root. Classical political philosophy taught that man could only become civilized—made suitable for life in the city, and for citizenship—by the close proximity to, and involvement with, other people that is required by life in a polity compact enough to be walked across in a day. Compactness was a necessary condition for the flourishing of a political community. So said most political philosophers prior to America’s Founders. Jefferson’s and America’s break with this classical tradition was complete. He wanted space not only between the citizen and the government, but also between citizens. Hence the alacrity with which he leaped at the opportunity to make the Louisiana Purchase for Americans’ suddenly very “extensive Republic.”41 From the beginning, American virtue was linked with space, meaning room enough for Americans to develop the virtues that undergird personal independence.
Classical political philosophy taught that the fulfillment of human life depended on active engagement in the civil, political life of the country. Jefferson lived such a life, but he did not live it contentedly or even happily, and he did not recommend it. To him, political engagement was a duty to be done, but not a career to be sought, still less a pleasure to be relished. He delighted in shaking the dust of Washington from his shoes. Government, he thought, should not be at the center of American life, or at the center of the life of any American who could honorably avoid it. In 1813, speaking after what he called “an intimacy of forty years with the public councils and characters,” he said: “An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.”42 In American political thought, and especially in Jefferson’s thought, it is work, which takes place in the private sphere of life, not politics in the public sphere, that is the primary source of American dignity. In this regard, Lincoln was squarely in the Jeffersonian tradition. Lincoln came (in the words of his campaign song) “out of the wilderness, down in Illinois” when people still spoke of “the Illinois frontier.”43 Lincoln came from where people were grappling with nature, subduing it, fulfilling their (and the nation’s) manifest destiny in work.
American literature reflects—and reinforces—this national yearning for private space in which to work out one’s personal destiny. James Fenimore Cooper in the forest, Herman Melville at sea, Mark Twain on the Mississippi, Henry David Thoreau by his pond: All expressed an American—a Jeffersonian—faith in virtue developed without dependence on political engagement, or even on “society.” Few people in contemporary America have even an inkling of what that cowboy from Manhattan, Teddy Roosevelt, called “the Iron desolation” of the Great Plains. What Willa Cather, the novelist from Red Cloud, Nebraska, called “the inconceivable silence of the plains” is indeed inconceivable to most modern Americans who are enveloped by the cacophony of metropolitan living.44 For this reason, America needs to become again wh
at it once was: more Lockean and less Hobbesian.
Locke, so important to America’s Founders, tempered his philosophic individualism by stressing shareable norms that come to us from nature and common experience, and which require us to take into account things other than our own desires. Locke’s intellectual precursor, Thomas Hobbes, had portrayed human beings almost as not possessing true personhood—as not rational, responsible, or free beyond a few elemental calculations. Hobbes said people are subject to irresistible stimuli and hence are as determined as physical objects, like billiard balls struck by a cue or other balls. Human rights, as Hobbes understood them, arise from, and are defined by, irresistible urges, such as fear and the desire for security from violent death. People who become comfortable with such a characterization of human beings will lose their ability to take responsibility for their self-creation through moral choices. And a society morally anesthetized by the reduction of persons to bundles of impulses, and by the definition of rights in terms of powerful desires, should not be surprised by the coarsening of the culture. Hobbes famously said that life in the state of nature is completely presocial (“solitary”). But a society that describes, as Hobbes did, a world void of natural norms will become barely social. The void at its center will be filled entirely by individual’s interests and drives. Man, said the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, is a creature who makes pictures of himself—and comes to resemble the pictures. Hobbes’ de-moralized and demoralizing picture of mankind can be self-fulfilling, and is becoming so on campuses.
Leave aside the pandemic infantilization of students, faculty, and administrators as colleges and universities descend into perpetual hysteria about “microaggressions” that “trigger” stampedes to “safe spaces” where students, traumatized by encounters with—or rumors of—uncongenial ideas recover their emotional equilibrium with the help of coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies. But dwell upon this: Through eight centuries of ecclesiastical and political interferences, the West evolved its great research universities, and now, in a generation, some of them are frittering away their prestige and forfeiting their reputations for seriousness. And notice the truth of this mordant definition: “College: Those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.”45 Students study many fewer hours a week than they did two generations ago, a fact masked by grade inflation for young adults who as children all won participation trophies for just showing up for soccer practice. Graduation rates at hundreds of public colleges and universities are under 25 percent, and barely more than half of those who matriculate graduate in even six years. According to the Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40 percent of recent graduates have jobs that do not require a college degree—which is perhaps a good thing, considering that often their degrees do not denote serious encounters with demanding curricula.
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