May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
May the Rising Generation Redeem the Time?
By Russell Kirk
The Heritage Foundation
Lecture #377
Lecture given: December 11, 1991
(published at 7 pages)
This year my Heritage lectures have been concerned with American political errors during the closing decade of the twentieth century — errors of the Republican party, of the Democratic party, and general blunders in foreign relations. This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my lecture series for Anno Domini 1991 with some desultory remarks on the possibility of redemption from error — and, in particular, whether our rising generation in these United States may find it possible to “redeem the time, redeem the dream” — to borrow T.S. Eliot’s line.
First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To generate is to beget; to bring into existence. In popular usage we mean by a generation a large number of persons brought into existence about the same time; in the same year, perhaps, or possibly in the same decade. Thomas Jefferson promulgated the somewhat vague concept of every “generation” of people making its own choices; of the generation of the living not binding the generation which soon would come into existence.
Yet, this notion cannot be sustained logically or pragmatically. For really there exists no line of demarcation parting alleged generations of men and women. Every minute, as I address you, babies are being born somewhere; and during the same minutes, old people are dying in every land.
Actually, society is an intricate continuity of lives, not a mere succession of human beings resembling the flies of a summer, generation unable to link with generation. It is possible for me to say truthfully that six generations of my family have lived in our house at the village of Mecosta, in Michigan; but those alleged “generations” have much overlapped; at no time over the past twelve decades has only a single generation lived in our family home. The notion of distinct generations, then, each generation monopolizing the earth during its brief span of existence, is merely a convenient fiction.
Nevertheless, we employ that useful fiction frequently, particularly with reference to literary and political movements. Thus Spaniards refer to the “Generation of ’98,” made up of literary movers and shakers whose convictions were formed at the time of Spain’s naval and military defeats that caused the loss of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Thus, in Britain, Wyndham Lewis referred to the “men of 1914″ — certain innovating writers who began to appear in print about the beginning of the First World War: Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Lewis himself. And thus, a very few years ago, here at The Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ben Hart introduced the concept of three generations of American conservatives that have exercised influence since the late 1940s, say. Tonight, I address especially the third of those hypothetical generations.
By the First Generation, I take it, Mr. Hart means men and women of politics and letters who began to come to public attention about the end of the ‘Forties and the beginning of the ‘Fifties; who, most of them, had grown aware of the sunken state of the world about them, some time between, or during, the First World War and the Great Depression. Among such persons who grew up with a conservative inclination were Richard Weaver, Francis Wilson, Robert Nisbet, Daniel Boorstin, William Buckley, and your servant; one might add William Yandell Elliott (a little older) and William McGovern, and others who were active so early as 1933, say. There would be regarded as belonging to an earlier “generation,” both in point of years and of thought, such persons as T.S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Among public men, Senators Robert A. Taft and Carl Curtis, say, would be classified as members of the pre- conservative generation, I suppose, their activity having occurred mostly during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman; while Senator Barry Goldwater, a relatively late conservative champion in arms, would be classed with the First Generation conservatives, I suppose, in Mr. Hart’s scheme. You will perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that membership in a hypothetical generation does not necessarily coincide with the date of one’s nativity.
The Second Generation of conservatives, in Mr. Hart’s categories, consists of persons of varying ages who were attracted to conservative causes, or began to style themselves conservatives, sometime after 1953, in which year The Conservative Mind was published. Thus Mr. Irving Kristol, almost so old as is your servant, is classified as Second Generation; so is my wife Annette Yvonne Cecilie Courtmanche Kirk, the first secretary at the organizational meeting of Young Americans for Freedom, twenty-one years younger than myself. I take it that Dr. Jeffrey Hart, Mr. Ben Hart’s father, is Second Generation — although very nearly meeting the requirements for Generation I; that Mr. M. Stanton Evans, despite his many years of active duty in the conservative array, is a Second Generation legionnaire; while Mr. Ben Hart himself, and his spouse are field marshals of the Third Generation.
But, more subtle distinctions and classifications I leave to Mr. Gregory Wolfe, now engaged in preparing an Encyclopedia of the Right. So far as public men go, permit me to suggest merely that such conservatively-inclined gentlemen as Senator Richard Lugar, Governor John Engler, and Mr. Patrick Buchanan seem to fall within the Second Generation fold. In brief, nowadays First Generation conservatives — such of them as have not passed unto a less troubled realm of being — usually are people in their seventies or their sixties; Second Generation conservatives, most of them, in their fifties or forties; Third Generation conservatives, in their thirties or their twenties — or even in their teens. Pass we then to these ladies and gentlemen of the Third Generations.
Few of the Third Generation folk retain personal memories of the Disaster of 1964 — that is, the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, the centralizing follies of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” the foretaste of ruin in Vietnam, the loathsome and destructive antics of the crazy black militants and the crazier young white radicals. The present members of the Third Generation were reared when the hearts of our great American cities already were dismal and rotten; when addiction to narcotics plagued every social class; when public schools, with few honorable exceptions, offered next to nothing for mind and conscience; when Demon TV offered something for every taste but good taste; when promiscuity and sexual perversity demanded recognition as normality; when it was unwise to walk the streets o’nights; when shrieking mobs dominated what had been the grove and halls of Academe; when altercations in Washington made it almost impossible to conduct the regular business of government; when American life seemed confusion worse confounded; when one came to appreciate the mordant aphorism of Albert Jay Nock: “American society is like German beer; dregs at the bottom, scum at the top.”
In short, the conservative Third Generation have not known a tranquil and pleasant and confident America. They scarcely can imagine a time, not many decades past, when it was the happy evening diversion of families or couples to stroll in New York’s Central Park of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park. They have little knowledge even of the neighborhood grocery or butcher-shop, the corner drug-store with its soda-fountain; for them is the leviathan shopping-mall, commercial collectivism. They have experienced little of continuity; the expectation of change has been greater far. Yet, they know that much remains to conserve, and that much ought to be restored.
In one respect, but in that respect only, the task of the conservative of 1991 looms less oppressive than was the task of the conservative of 1951, when my first book was published. I mean that the grim menace of the Soviet Union no longer hangs over us. Seventy years were required for the Communist ideology to work its own ruin, so that it fell to pieces at a good-natured push, quite bloodless, from Mr. Ronald Reagan. Always will there be wars and rumors of war; yet from the Soviet terror we have been saved, so that the Third Generation conservatives may address their energies to something more fundamental than resisting the armed doctrine called Marxism.
What, then, is the mission of Third Generation conservatives, young men and women who seek to preserve the Permanent Things, those elements in human existence that were not born yesterday? It is not to promulgate a “conservative ideology”: for conservatism is the negation of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to govern all life by political slogans; while American conservatives believe that no mere political formulas can make a people content. Conservatives take for their guide in politics what Edmund Burke called “the wisdom of the species”: that is, the experience of human beings in community, extending over many centuries. Thus, American conservatism is a cast of mind and character, not a neat body of political abstractions. Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by rigorous abstract dogmata. The dogmata of an abstract “democratic capitalism” may be mischievous as the dogmata of Marx.
It is possible to describe certain attitudes that make up America’s conservative mentality, even though not all Americans could express coherently their belief in such general principles, and although some conservatives would dissent from one or more of the general assumptions or principles I now mention.
First, belief in some transcendent order in the universe, some law that is more than human: a religious understanding of the human condition, if you will; a belief in enduring moral norms. As the national pledge of allegiance puts it, “One nation under God…. “
Second, opposition to totalist ideology and the totalist political order. The American conservative rejects the notion of a future earthly paradise — which the ideologue promises to attain.
Third, confidence in the American Constitution — both the written national Constitution and the intricate fabric of custom, belief, and habit that makes up the underlying “unwritten” constitution of a nation-state. Many decisions of the Supreme Court in recent decades are bitterly resented; nevertheless, attachment to the Constitution itself remains strong.
Fourth, maintenance of the rights of private property and of a free or competitive economy, as contrasted with a directed or socialist economy. This healthy prejudice persists despite the increasing consolidation of business and industry into large conglomerations or oligopolies.
Fifth, suspicion of central political direction, and preference for state and local powers: insistence upon private rights.
Sixth, a deep-rooted patriotism, joined to uneasiness at “entangling alliances”; this latter attitude, nevertheless, modified by determination to resist totalist powers that menace the American national interest.
Seventh, an awareness that change is not identical with healthy improvement; a relish for the American past; a genuine preference for the old and tried.
Such is the consensus of that very large body of Americans who choose to call themselves conservative in their politics. Within this crowd of conservative citizens exist various factions, each emphasizing some aspect or another of the general conservative attitude. There exists no “party line” to which conservatives of one persuasion or another are compelled to conform.
Retrenchment and Reform. With such assumptions as those I outlined just now, America enters upon an age of retrenchment and reform in economic concerns. If American prosperity is to endure, public expenditure and taxation must be kept in check. Conservative economic measures must be employed to prevent inflation of the currency and to reduce the national deficit — a hard necessity of which the general public is becoming aware.
In this present era when the Soviet power fades away, the majority of the American public seem disillusioned with social experiments and with the rapid pace of change; with excessive governmental regulation; with cities fallen to ruin and tormented by crime; with subsidized abortion, with judicial usurping of power, with a permissive indulgence of license and criminality, with the blight of pornography, with the whole liberal climate of opinion. For the next half-century at least, I suggest, the American democracy will tend to reject those politicians who still indulge dreams of Lotos-land. Liberalism has undone itself.
There have been ages when custom and inertia have lain insufferably upon humankind; and such an age may come to pass again; but such is not our age. Ours is an era when the moral and social heritage of many centuries of civilization stands in imminent peril from the forces of vertiginous indiscriminate change. Resistance to the folly of such change is the primary duty of the Third Generation conservative.
The continuing American conservative movement, if it is to be carried on tolerably well, must work within the minds and the consciences of a good many young men and women. I do not think that this work of conservation can be accomplished by any particular group; certainly not by any idealizing of “business rule.” I trust that Americans will conserve a market economy and all the better features of an economy marked by volition. But Americans will conserve such advantages only if they conserve something higher and older: that is, a society of tradition, diversity, and the life of spirit.
The critic Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet, as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed by ages of renewal.
What can you do to commence redeeming the time, to conserve the Permanent Things, to raise up the human condition to a level less unworthy of what Pico della Mirandola called “the dignity of man”? Why, begin by brightening the corner where you are; by improving one human unit, yourself, and helping your neighbor.
You will not need to be rich or famous to take your part in redeeming the time: what you need for that task is moral imagination joined to right reason. It is not by wealth or fame that you will be rewarded, probably, but by eternal moments: those moments of one’s existence in which, as T.S. Eliot put it, time and the timeless intersect. In such moments, you may discover the answer to that immemorial question which now and again enters the head of any reflective man or woman, “What is all this? What is this world that surrounds us, and why are we here?”
Yes, what is all this? Why, this present realm of being, in which your consciousness and my consciousness are aware of reality, is a divine creation; and you and I are put into it as into a testing- ground — into an arena, if you will. As the German writer Stefan Andres put it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.
The Roman Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but that the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Shrug your shoulders at things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, said the Stoics, find that peace which passes all understanding.
True Authority. How do we know such postulates, religious and philosophical, to be true? Why, by the common sense and ancient assent of mankind — that is, by hearkening to the voice of true authority, the voice of what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” I think of what John Henry Newman wrote about Authority in 1846: “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.” Believe what wise men and women, over the centuries, have believed in matters of faith and morals, and you will have a firm footing on which to stand while the winds of doctrine howl about you.
This counsel that I offer you, conservatives of the Third Generation, will not guarantee your winning any of the glittering prizes of modern society; for those too are among the things indifferent, and some of them are among the things evil. Yet, this advice from a conservative of the First Generation who has seen a good deal of the world conceivably may help you on the track toward certain eternal moments, when time and the timeless intersect. What happens at such timeless moments, such occurrences in eternity? Why, quiet perfect events, usually; among them the act of telling stories to one’s children, or of reading aloud to them.
What is all this — this confused American world of glittering material things and of appalling personal and social decay? I have found it to be a real world, sun-lit despite its vices; a real world in which one may develop and exercise one’s potential virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; one’s faith, hope, and charity. You will take your tumbles in this world, which can be rough enough in our age, Lord knows; but also you may enjoy your triumphs. It is a world in which there is so much needing to be done that nobody ought to be bored. For young Americans especially, this is still a world of high opportunity.
All this creation about us is the garden that we erring humans were appointed to tend. Plant some flowers in it, if you can, and pull some weeds. If need be, draw your sword to defend it. Do not fancy that a sorry policy of Looking Out for Number One will lead you to Heaven’s gate. Do not fail to remind yourselves that consciousness is a perpetual adventure. Do not ignore the wisdom of the ages, the democracy of the dead. Such, ladies and gentlemen, is the counsel of this survivor from the First Generation.
Those of us who aspire to conserve our inherited order and justice and freedom, our patrimony of wisdom and beauty and loving- kindness, have a hard row to hoe nowadays — that I confess. But, I am heartened from time to time by a stanza from Chesterton’s long poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Chesterton is describing the prophets of doom, who tell us that nothing in life is permanent; that all is lost, or is being lost, in our culture; that we totter on the brink of an abyss. Such prophets of doom think themselves wise. Chesterton has in mind the typical intellectuals of the twentieth century, but he calls them the wise men of the East. Here I give you Chesterton’s lines:
The wise men know what wicked thingsAre written on the sky,They trim sad lamps, they touch sad stringsHearing the heavy purple wings,Where the forgotten seraph kingsStill plot how God shall die.
Such despairing souls, though possessed perhaps of much intelligence, in truth are not wise. In our time, ladies and gentlemen, many voices have been declaring that life is not worth living. A multitude of writers and professors and publicists and members of the class of persons commonly styled “intellectuals” gloomily instruct us that we human beings are no better than naked apes, and that consciousness is an illusion. Such persons insist that life has no purpose but sensual gratification; that the brief span of one’s physical existence is the be-all and end-all. Such twentieth- century sophists have created in the murky caves of the intellect an Underworld; and they endeavor to convince us all that there exists no sun — that the world of wonder and of hope exists nowhere, and never did exist. Plato knew just such sophists in his age. Those doctrines of despair, the rising generation of conservatives must confront and refute.
My counsels so far may have seemed somewhat ghostly, no doubt. But, I have learned from life in various regions of the world, and under differing circumstances, that it is the life of spirit which truly matters; and that the Permanent Thing most worthy of preservation is an understanding of the human soul. The conscious conservative defends the soul of humankind against the corrosive materialism and sensuality of twentieth-century will and appetite.
Let me turn, however, to the art of worldly wisdom. I can offer, too, some practical advice. How, for instance, you may ask me, does one contrive to forge ahead in practical political life in this sprawling American democracy, with the intention of conducting a conservative defense of the Permanent Things?
Why, ordinarily it is fairly simple to make one’s way in the American political structure. American political parties could not function without volunteers. Volunteer, and you will be gladly accepted, such as you being urgently needed; you will find, indeed, that a number of your fellow-volunteers are rather peculiar people, almost Outcasts of Poker Flat, but welcome in a local political organization (if not welcome in many other circles) because, whatever their peculiarities, they are willing to work for the common cause.
If you are an intelligent and adept volunteer, you will be made much of by the party leaders and faithful, and will be advanced in your responsibilities. You may be asked to be a delegate, whether elected or appointed. If chosen delegate, arrive early at caucus or convention. When the meeting proper commences, endeavor to sit at the chairman’s right hand; then others may take you for his right-hand man. There are many little arts by which one may gain ascendancy over the minds of one’s political colleagues. But, the great necessity is to have acquired previously a fund of knowledge and some mastery of rhetoric — and honest principles. That is why I sometimes advise undergraduates not to expend their time in street demonstrations, but instead to study. If Karl Marx, instead of reading books within, had spent his days parading round and round the outside of the British museum, a placard “Down with the bourgeois!” tacked to a sandwich- board over his shoulders — why, had he been so foolish, the world would be so much better off today.
Redeem the time, redeem the dream — in ways mundane as well as ways spiritual. If you should resolve really to take a vigorous part in restoring the American Republic, choose your vocation accordingly, so that the work by which you gain your livelihood, and the work by which you help to redeem the time, may coincide. Take to the law — if you can endure the boredom of our law schools nowadays. Or, take to serious journalism — or, for broader and more immediate influence, to television and radio. You may accomplish some reform of the American mind through book-publishing. Or, supposing you possess fortitude sufficient to fight your way through our PC graduate schools, aspire after a college professorship that might enable you to counteract the freaks who appear to dominate the typical campus nowadays. Or take to pedagogy, if you can surmount the dull obstacles to certification as a teacher. If you feel a religious calling — why, in no way might you accomplish more to restore meaning to lives in the twenty-first century. And, the best way to insure a Fourth Generation of intelligent young conservatives is to beget children, and rear them well: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. As Edmund Burke put it, “We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society.” The institution most essential to conserve is the family.
If we aspire to redeem this age of ours, so far gone in decadence — well, we have no time to lose before commencing our endeavors. Fixed to the walls of the entrance hall of my house are masks of the archaic god Cronos, in his role of Time the Devourer; his half-leonine, half-human face bares his fangs, which the ancient Greeks dreaded. Those masks serve to remind me daily that the night cometh when no man shall work, and that I had best turn back to my productive typewriter.
Yet, Time is not a devourer only. With proper use of the life- span that is allotted to us, we may accomplish our part in redeeming our era from its vices, terrors, and catastrophic errors. With Demosthenes, ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you to think. For only if you think soundly at this juncture in your lives will you be enabled to act decisively in those years when you have achieved some influence.
I conclude with an exhortation which Orestes Brownson, that redoubtable conservative reformer, scholar, and journalist, delivered at Dartmouth College in 1843. His topic was “The Scholar’s Mission.” He concluded, as follows, his charge to the rising generation:
Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind.
In the later ‘Sixties, many of the rising generation thought it amusing to pull down what earlier generations had patiently built up; their zeal extended even to the burning of university libraries. In the early ‘Nineties, I hope and trust, many of the rising generation will find it satisfying to restore and redeem their patrimony from earlier times — and so save the world from suicide. That labor will require cleverness and courage. Some of you present here tonight may choose it for your vocation.
Bramwell to Define Post-Buckley Future
July 17, 2004
Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
n 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.
That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.
Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.
“Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days,” said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. “It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions,” he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver, one of five new trustees of National Review, is a leader in a group no longer characterized by uniform views.
The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall’s and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America’s Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.
In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. “Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism,” she began. “The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?”
Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.
“I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people,” said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute’s vice president for publications.
Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell’s husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute’s programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.
Mr. Nelson said young conservatives’ greatest challenge might come from their predecessors’ success. “Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,’ ” he said, “but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement’s view of itself, from history’s opponents to destiny’s child.”
“We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture,” he continued. “There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did.”
The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been “unimaginable” to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.
Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. “Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy,” Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. “I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.”
Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.
Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.
“I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement,” he said, “back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn’t necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world.”
But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.
In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists’ weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. “The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home,” he said.
Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration’s preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.
“Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been,” he said. “I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations.”
Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen’s support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.
“If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability,” he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. “For us, those two halves are inextricably linked,” he said.
But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. “I am personally abstinent,” he said, “and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms.”
Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big “a political payoff.”
“There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats,” he said.
Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. “The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart,” he said. “But I don’t think the threads are by any means abandoned.” He added: “There has never been a movement that doesn’t go through this perplexion and development.”
Buckley on Reagan
When Character Counted
The importance of Ronald Reagan.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On February 4 and 5, 1999 the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Center for Public Affairs sponsored a two-day symposium at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. The theme of the event was “Eight Years that Changed the World: The Reagan Legacy in the New Century.” Mark Burson, executive director of the Reagan Foundation, opened the meeting. Speakers and panelists were: Brian Mulroney, Martin Anderson, Sander Vanocur, Edwin Meese, Murray Weidenbaum, Dinesh D’Souza, Stephen Entin, James Miller, Clark Judge, Larry Arnn, Richard McKenzie, William Niskanen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Maureen Reagan, Ken Adelman, Richard Allen, Howard Baker — and Mrs. Reagan.
The keynote speaker was William F. Buckley Jr. His remarks were published in the March 8, 1999, issue of National Review and are reprinted here.
An excerpt from Mark Burson’s introduction: “With the establishment of National Review, Buckley gave to conservatism what it previously lacked — intellectual firepower, sophisticated and literate reasoning, and, yes, even a sense of humor. These are the weapons with which the long, twilight struggle with liberalism has been waged, and along the way attracted more than a few converts to the root message. And we know that one of the proud Americans who heard the message was a popular movie actor, television personality, and former Democrat who also did a few things in politics.”
Mrs. Reagan, Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Burson, ladies and gentlemen:
I recall that Henry Mencken described an introduction to him on a celebratory occasion as having evoked “a full moon, the setting sun, and the aurora borealis.” In this perspective, if all of that which Mark Burson has said of me really belongs to me, how am I expected even to intimate the achievements of Ronald Reagan? Well, I can do that, really, in one sentence.
He succeeded in getting Nancy Reagan to marry him.
The country is familiar with the legend of Nancy, familiar with her accomplishments as companion, aide, monitor, wife, and lover. There was never anyone who more devotedly served a husband. She has renewed for us all the meaning of the pledge to stand by in sickness and in health.
This being a convocation of friends and admirers, in celebration of his birthday, I propose as keynoter to dwell a while on a longtime friendship. It began in the spring of 1960. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom I hadn’t met, were seated at one end of the restaurant, I and my sister-in-law at the other end. We were out of sight of one another. Both parties were headed, after dinner, across the street to an auditorium in a public high school. There I would be introduced, as the evening’s speaker addressing an assembly of doctors and their wives, by Ronald Reagan, a well-known actor and currently the host of a television series sponsored by General Electric; moreover, a public figure who had taken an interest in conservatives and conservative writings.
We bumped into each other going out the door. Ronald Reagan introduced himself and Nancy, and said he had just finished reading my book, Up From Liberalism. He quoted a crack from it, done at the expense of Mrs. Roosevelt, which he relished. I requited his courtesy by relishing him and Nancy for life.
He distinguished himself that night — and dismayed Mrs. Reagan — by what he proceeded to do after discovering that the microphone hadn’t been turned on. He had tried, raising his voice, to tell a few stories. But the audience was progressively impatient. Waiting in vain for the superintendent to unlock the door to the tight little office at the other end of the hall in which the control box lay, he sized up the problem and, having surveyed all possible avenues of approach, climbed out of the window at stage level and, one story above the busy traffic below, cat-walked, Cary Grant-style, twenty or thirty yards to the remote office window of the control room. This he penetrated by breaking the glass window with a thrust of his elbow, climbing in, turning on the light, flipping on the microphone, unlocking the office door, and emerging with that competent, relaxed smile of his, which we came to know after Grenada, Libya, Reykjavik, and Moscow; proceeding with the introduction of the speaker. And all that was thirty years before bringing peace to our time!
In later years I thought his movements that night a nifty allegory of his approach to foreign policy, the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment: leading to lights and sound — and music, the music of the spheres.
We stayed friends.
Twenty years later he was running for President of the United States. Early that winter the Soviet military had charged into Afghanistan, beginning a long, costly, brutal exercise. A week or two after he was nominated in Detroit, I wrote him. I told him I thought he would be elected. And told him then that, on the assumption that on reaching the White House he might wish to tender me an office, I wished him to know that I aspired to no government job of any kind.
He wrote back that he was disappointed. “I had in mind,” he said, “to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan.” Over the next eight years, in all my communications with him, I would report fleetingly on my secret mission in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan where, in our fiction, I lived and worked. In his letters to me he would always address me as Mr. Ambassador. The show must go on, where Ronald Reagan was involved.
Soon after his election I was asked by the Philadelphia Society to speak on the theme, “Is President Reagan doing all that can be done?” It was a coincidence that my wife Pat and I had spent the weekend before the speech as guests of the President and Mrs. Reagan in Barbados. I recalled with delight an exchange I had with my host on the presidential helicopter. We were flying to our villa the first evening, before the two days on Easter weekend reserved for bacchanalian sunning and swimming on the beach in front of Claudette Colbert’s house. I leaned over and told him I had heard the rumor that the Secret Service was going to deny him permission to swim on that beach on the grounds that it was insufficiently secure. I asked him whether that were so, that he wouldn’t be allowed in the water.
Helicopters, even Marine One helicopters, are pretty noisy, but I was able to make out what he said. It was, “Well, Bill, Nancy here tells me I’m the most powerful man in the Free World. If she’s right, then I will swim tomorrow with you.”
Which indeed he did.
I recall also that during one of those swims I said to him, “Mr. President, would you like to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom?” He confessed to being curious as to how he would qualify to do this. I explained, “I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me.” We went through the motions, and that evening I conferred that medal on him, in pectore.
I remember telling the Philadelphia Society that the most powerful man in the Free World is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. Retrospectively, I have speculated on what I continue to believe was the conclusive factor in the matter of American security against any threat of Soviet aggression. It was the character of the occupant of the White House; the character of Ronald Reagan. The reason this is so, I have argued, is that the Soviet Union, for all that from time to time it miscalculated tactically, never miscalculated in respect of matters apocalyptic in dimension. And the policymakers of the Soviet Union knew that the ambiguists with whom they so dearly loved to deal were not in power during those critical years. So that if ever the Soviet leaders were tempted to such suicidal foolishness as to launch a strike against us, suicidal is exactly what it would prove to have been. The primary obstacle to the ultimate act of Soviet imperialism was the resolute U.S. determination to value what we have, over against what they, under Soviet dominion, did not have; value it sufficiently to defend it with all our resources.
TOTAL COMMITMENT
Ronald Reagan, in my judgment, animated his foreign policy by his occasional diplomatic indiscretions: because of course it was a diplomatic indiscretion to label the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But then, quite correctly, he would switch gears when wearing diplomatic top hat and tails. He did not on those occasions talk the language of John Wayne — or of Thomas Aquinas. But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the free world. When in formal circumstances the President ventured out to exercise conviviality with the leaders of the Soviet Union, the scene was by its nature wonderful, piquant: What would he say that was agreeable, congenial, to the head of the evil empire? The summit conferences brought to mind the Russian who, on discovering that his pet parrot was missing, rushed out to the KGB office to report that his parrot’s political opinions were entirely unrelated to his own.
The ensuing chapter in the life of Russia presents its own problems. They are internal problems, with a surly outer face. You can hear the words framed on the mouth of the few remaining statues of Lenin. His lips are saying, So much for your capitalism! Russia poses no strategic threat to the Free World, to which Russia, de jure, belongs. But the contemporary experience of Russia is a devastating rebuke to facile, universalist ideas about what it is that needs to be done to nurture advances towards prosperity.
One key, of course, an indispensable key, is human freedom. When West Germany was liberated from fascist tyranny, and Japan from imperialist militarism, well-wishers of freedom cheered the results as life began its dramatic turn toward self-rule and a market economy. But in Russia the old brew didn’t mix, did it? It isn’t hard to compile a list of the missing elements. We know now about the profound corruption, and know how corruption conjoined with industrial satrapies can defy the benevolent ministrations of a free market. The causes of the wealth of nations heralded by Adam Smith cannot make their way in the absence of a reasoned mobility of a nation’s resources and a receptive theater for the entrepreneurial energies of its people.
There will be many books written about what happened in Russia in the decade beginning with liberation. The inquests will be various and prolonged, and they will all be sad; but they will make vivid lessons we need to absorb, as we project the economic future of other nations to be sure, but also of our own. The overarching lesson is that the elements of a good society oriented to the improvement of life aren’t all disembodied, inanimate; weight scales at a free-market counter. There is the live component.
And it is not just formal self-rule. Democracy is a mantra, but it isn’t an amulet. We can chant the benefits of democratic arrangements and cheer democratic practices; but these practices do not always lead to enlightened policies. One third of the Duma in Moscow are Communists. The freedom the Russians had, for the first time, to vote, very nearly returned a Communist president in the election of two years ago. The popularity of the democratically elected president of Russia today is given as 1 percent. (He should try poking an intern.) A substantial number of Russians would exchange life as it is today for life as it was yesterday. Thirty million Russians have not been paid for weeks of work, in some cases for months of work. What is a Russian gravedigger supposed to do, if he is not paid? Dig his own grave?
At the other end of the world we have the dismaying spectacle of Japan, recently referred to as the Land of the Setting Sun. “It is quite amazing,” Larry Kudlow recently opined: “They haven’t managed to do anything right.” Eight consecutive years of mismanagement by the second wealthiest country in the world. A democratic society whose people are demoralized, seemingly lost.
A STAMP ON THE NATIONAL MOOD
The lesson for our students of political economy is that we cannot fully depend on autopilots to do what is necessary. The Framers of our own republic said it again and again, that in the absence of virtue, no government could vouchsafe to a people a life of liberty and order. There are technical questions to solve and others that aren’t at all technical. What Japan needs to do its governors are not doing, in part because of ignorance, in part because pride and stubbornness and fear prompt them to preserve decadent enterprises. The Russians despair of reform, and the social festers continue, awaiting what almost inevitably and sadly we think of as another revolution, one that might make dominant a class of leaders willing to adjourn their own fleeting interests today, for prospective gains tomorrow that will endure.
The problem is theirs; our concern is limited to geostrategic questions. At our blessedly immediate geographical remove from Tokyo and Moscow, we have the finite benefit of a little insularity. But the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific are exactly that, finite comforts, only as reassuring as the distance between where mid-range missiles land and where strategic-missiles land, a distance that time is battering away at, progressively diminishing the security we feel in our little snuggery here. To utter the words From sea to shining sea used to evoke an almost infinite distance. It is now a mere stretch of space, traveled by missiles in about 18 minutes.
The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But he had strategic visions. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That of course is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand, it is only a government leader who can affect a national mood or summon up a historical period. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but it put a stamp on the national mood. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because by nature and by the words he spoke, he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.
We have now the paradoxical situation, a leader whom 75 percent of the American people don’t wish to disturb, and whom 75 percent of the American people do not trust. It is comforting to tell ourselves that what this means is that we live in an age in which the long arm of government is so discredited, it can’t really do us much damage. If Mr. Clinton were indeed powerless, then he would be a threat only to maidens passing by. But leaving aside the power he wields as commander in chief, he has the power, and has exercised it, to cultivate a cynicism whose final effects we cannot appraise, nor even imagine. If what he has done is trivial, then much of what we think of as the infrastructure of civil society is also trivial — our commitments to truth, to the processes of justice, to the sanctity of oaths. It is possible that in future years, if there will be a return to wholesomeness of habits of thought and deed, the cloud that will hang over the last year of the 20th century won’t be the memory of a year spent on impeachment, but the memory of a year in which no action was taken after impeachment.
It is fine that the Ronald Reagan Library, Museum, and Center for Public Affairs, which serves as our host, will collect his papers and ambient literature, permitting generations of students and scholars to explore and linger over those happy years which augured the end of the Soviet threat, the revitalization of our economy, and a great draft of pride in our country. To the library I’ll convey in years ahead my own collection of letters from Ronald Reagan. The very last one written from the White House the day the Soviet Union announced that it would withdraw from Afghanistan was addressed,
“Dear Mr. Ambassador:
“Congratulations! The Soviets are moving out of Afghanistan. I knew you could do it if I only left you there long enough, and you did it without leaving Kabul for a minute.”
He closed by saying, “Nancy sends her love to you and Pat.” That was eleven years ago, and we cherish it today, and through her, convey our own love and gratitude to the President, on his 88th birthday.
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406051743.asp
The Founders and the Rising Generation
The Founders and the Rising Generation
by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
delivered at
The Philadelphia Society Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia
November 23, 1996
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “A people which no longer remembers, has lost its history and its soul.” That profound insight underscores the centrality of our deliberations this weekend. It is especially haunting when applied to the theme of tonight’s session: the Founders and the rising generations.
It is appropriate that we gather this weekend in Williamsburg, a city where the mist of history surrounds us, to discuss ways in which to recover our historical consciousness. The alarming rate at which historical ignorance–and worse, apathy–are advancing in the ranks of our fellow citizens puts the future of the nation as conceived by the Founders at risk. Indeed, a recent symposium in a highly regarded journal has gone so far as to suggest that the experiment undertaken by our Forefathers in erecting a republican system of limited, representative government is in acute danger of failing due to a “long train of abuses and usurpations”–to use the language of the Declaration–by the courts and by big government. The question explored in the symposium by several distinguished writers in “whether we are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” That such a question is seriously posed by leading conservative thinkers is a sobering comment on the state of the republic.
How have we come to this pass? Certainly one of the principal reasons is the ever widening gap between the Founding generation and the rising generation. This chasm is a “generation gap” of a different sort than the kind commonly referred to by political pollsters. I mean here something much different than chronological distance–I mean a separation more in consciousness than in time. Today’s high school and college youth exist, in an historical sense, a mere 220 years from the signing of the Declaration–but for most it may we well be 2020. Survey after survey confirms the basic fact that the rising generation is learning next to nothing about American history. What is at stake here is more than a lost acquaintance with names, dates, events, and figures, important as that acquaintance is. More significantly, the rising generation increasingly is being denied the acquisition of an historical consciousness and the cultivation of the discipline of historical memory.
The fact that most citizens today complacently accept the abrogation of power by governments and the courts at the expense of their own sovereignty is not surprising given the dramatic recession of historical understanding and memory among large numbers of Americans now coming of age. What is the significance of historical consciousness and its connection to our present discontents? Wilfred McClay, an historian of distinction here with us this weekend, put the connection this way in a recent, and poetic, address at The Heritage Foundation.
“Historical consciousness,” McClay writes, “is to civilized society what memory is to the individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is–one can’t say one is anyone, or anything, at all–without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use
language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of
memory….A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically
advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified
events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music.”
What is it about the men of America’s founding generation that makes them worthy of the memory of the rising generation? For some, the extraordinary extent to which large numbers of our forebears were prepared to sacrifice their fortunes and their very lives to preserve liberty is enough to merit historical distinction and commemoration. For still others, the extraordinary fact about the Founding era was the talent it generated. People seemed to notice from the beginning the shear number of planters and shopkeepers, men of the courts and countinghouses, coming together to fight a war and forge a nation. Silas Deane, a member of the Continental Congress wrote home in 1775 that “Times like these call up Genius, which slept before, and stimulate it in action to a degree, that eclipses what might before have been fixed as a Standard.” And in 1789, David Ramsey of my own South Carolina noted that the heroic events of the war and the succeeding years of constitutional deliberation had “not only required, but created talents. Men, he said, “spoke, wrote, and acted, with an energy far surpassing all expectations, which could be reasonably founded on their previous acquirements. And, indeed, in our own day historian Edmund S. Morgan expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that “if one were to make a list of the great men of American history, by whatever standards one chooses to measure greatness, an astonishingly large proportion would be found whose careers began or culminated in the Revolution. It would be hard to find in all the rest of American history more than two or three men to rank with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, or John Adams.” When a society wishes to encourage right conduct, the ability of history to throw forward exemplars of right conduct is not to be underestimated.
But when we attempt to unveil these, and other, ways in which the Founders are worthy of a central place in the individual and collective memory, we are met by formidable obstacles. One is the reigning utilitarian approach to history, which is surely one overwhelming reason why such a large historical generation gap currently exists. A utilitarian view of historical studies is not a new problem; since the early decades of this century conservatives have waged a sustained offensive against the progressives and John Dewey, objecting principally to the transformation of the educational mission of one of “social efficiency.” Transmitting the legacy of the Founding Fathers will never be a central concern of historians chiefly occupied with constructing a program directly “relevant” to their students interests, and in concert with their students’ personal and professional goals. The extreme of this view was best expressed thirty years ago by radical educator Edgar Wesley in an infamous essay entitled, “Let’s Abolish History.” In it, Wesley argued that students need a history they can “appreciate.” “No teacher at any grade level,” he confidently asserted, “should teach a course in history as content. To do so is confusing, unnecessary, frustrating, futile, pointless, and as illogical as to teach a course in the World Almanac, the dictionary, or the Encyclopedia. [History should be] utilized and exploited–not studied, learned, or memorized.” Needless to say, such ardent utilitarianism, and even milder expressions of the same view, had proved disastrous for the study of history generally, and the cultivation of an historical appreciation for our American forebears in particular.
A corollary view to the utilitarian approach to history is the scourge of moral relativism which, in the modern academy, cloaks itself in the garb of multiculturalism.
Relativism has stalked the corridors of the academy for years, but the echoes of those footsteps resound as never before. Of the strains of academic relativism, two of the most virulent are relativism as among cultures and relativism as among standards. The transmission of culture depends on the assumption that there is in the body of Western thought truths that are worth preserving through the ages, truths that justify the immense effort and cost of the educational establishment traditionally entrusted with transmitting the culture. but what if there is no truth? Or mores specifically, what if the traditions and institutions of the West, and the moral order that these imply, are neither more nor less valuable than those of other cultures? Well then, concern for transmitting an inherited body of learning does not matter, because the culture of the West itself does not signify.
Once the leveling scythe of relativism has cut the higher achievements of civilization down to size, we are exempted from thinking through such fundamental questions as What is the good? What is just? What deserves the allegiance of duty and of honor? Why do civilizations rise? Why do they fall? For relativism also attacks any notion of standards that proceed from a moral order and that form the basis of right conduct.
Forrest McDonald has observed that the Framers themselves were not strangers to this notion of moral relativism. But, McDonald notes, the Founders “put it to their use, with their understanding that a regime must be suited to the manners and morals of a people if it is to endure.” “They would [however] have been appalled,” he argues further, “at the modern idea that Western civilization is no better than other civilizations, that the heritage of The West is not superior to as well as different from that of The East, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is not morally superior to as well as different from that of Islam or paganism or tribalism, that one so-called life-style is as good as another. Such thinking, if it can be so described, is a rationalization for being unable to measure up to the duty of living in accordance with and transmitting the higher values.” Political correctness and identity politics are the practical manifestations of this relativistic approach to academic inquiry.
There are of course trends other than utilitarianism and moral relativism which make it difficult to advance the Founders as a group worthy of study, appreciation, and placement in a broader “community of memory.” But I want to turn finally to a brief consideration of some hopeful developments in recent years that can perhaps serve to embolden us in our efforts to close the ever widening consciousness gap between the rising generation and our Founding generation.
The first cause for tempered hope is the proliferation of idea-mediating institutions dedicated to redressing the woeful neglect of our Founding principles among the rising generation. Frank Chodorov, the man who founded ISI as many of you know, once noted that “what was done can be undone if there is a will for it.” That will has been “institutionalized” in the form of organizations like our own ISI, and like Jim Taylor and Ron Robinson’s Young America’s Foundation, Ed Feulner’s Heritage Foundation, Gene Meyer’s Federalist Society, Larry Arnn and Charles Kesler’s Claremont Institute, Father Sirico’s Acton Institute, and many, many other organizations like these now dotting our cultural landscape. Such groups exist to put ideas into action, and serve as vital mediators between an establishment treading heavily on the intellectual tradition of the West, and students wearied of politicization and in search of the historical truth and the roots of their own cultural order. And so an infrastructure now exists that was but a dream even three decades ago. Scholars, books, journals, seminars, reprints, tapes, fellowships, and similar resources are now available in abundance to provide intellectual substance for young minds. The plenitude is so great that the main problem is organizing what is available and bringing it to bear where needed.
But the will that animates institutions like those mentioned above had to come from some source: and for most of them, the direct source has been the intellectual legacy of a broad ranging group of conservative intellectuals who for the most part put aside their differences in emphasis and approach and came together as a movement at a critical moment in our history to strengthen the faltering institutions of the West. This fact is the second reason to be mildly sanguine about our prospects for recovering our past. Because while intellectuals on the Left have for decades been working to tear down the cultural bridge that extends from one generation to the next, thinkers on the Right have been laboring heroically, and I think successfully, to extend that bridge unto the next generation. While after the last great war, the circle of those concerned with the recovery of our patrimony was a small one, it has with every decade been enlarged–creating a kind of concentric development of conservative-leaning scholars that is slowly extending itself outward into the most hostile cultural venues, poised, perhaps, one day to envelop them. One need only recall the names of Kirk, Niemeyer, Weaver, Burnham, Voegelin, Kendall, Meyer, Tonsor, and Strauss; and then consider those who picked-up their mantle, more numerous and diverse, Evans, McDonald, Carey, Liggio, Edward McClellan, Campbell, Kesler; and then consider their students, still more numerous and more diverse.
And, indeed, it is this last group which represents the third reason why I believe we can be reasonably cheered by our prospects for recovering an historical consciousness among the rising generation. For there is now in place in the university classroom a generation of young faculty members who are friendly to at least the broad strokes of the above analysis and are working in the “trenches”–often against serious odds and at risk to their careers–to transmit our Founders’ intellectual, political, and cultural legacy to their students. And the numbers and quality of their graduate students–those who will succeed them–are truly impressive. The most striking testament to the truth of this proposition is this assembly itself. Present in this room is a representative sample of young scholars that prove, I believe, that our hope is not misplaced. This conference is the perfect analogue to the question at hand, senior scholars learning from and refining the energies and insights of the ascending generation; and both together looking to a previous generation–our Founding generation–for the new perspectives on the issues we confront today. This is historical consciousness at work, and we are to commend Stan Evans and Bill Campbell for seeing the need and importance of such an event.
As I mentioned, Stan and Bill have told me that their source of inspiration was a program near and dear to my heart–the ISI Richard M. Weaver and Henry Salvatori Fellowship Programs. This may be the ISI program with the smallest number of participants, but it probably has had the highest multiplier effect and the greatest impact. Both are awarded to promising students intent upon pursuing a career in the academy–with the Salvatori program focusing specifically on young thinkers with a demonstrated interest in the principles of the American Founding. Well over 400 total ISI fellowships have been awarded since 1964, with most of the Fellows now teaching or writing, as well as pursuing careers in politics and public policy. This weekend we have all had the privilege to see first-hand many products of this particular ISI program. ISI Weaver and Salvatori Fellows present please stand. Four of the other young speakers have not held fellowships from ISI, but work with us closely, and are certainly poised to make their mark on the academy and the world of affairs.
It is not inevitable, then, that our collective memory be totally lost. With the human and institutional resources such as the ones just mentioned, we should have good reason to hope that what has been done to sever the historical connection between our Founders and ourselves can be undone, in Chodorov’s phrase, and repaired by this most promising generation with us tonight.
Burke, at the moment of his most bitter parliamentary defeat, still had the confidence in the young to say: “I attest the rising generation.” And why should the rising generation listen to us?
Put yourself in the place of an undergraduate of keen mind and superior preparation, a student who likes to read and dispute and flex the muscles of his mind. What does the Left offer him? Turgid Marxists tracts. The straight jacket of the closed system. The politically correct jargon of a welter of splintered interest groups. A false compassion that is but thinly disguised lust for power in
the people’s name, but notably without the people’s participation.
And what do the conservators of the great tradition offer him? They offer a rich and various story that Russell Kirk called a tale of four cities. Jerusalem, of the one God and his Incarnation; and Athens, the birthplace of democracy and of that school of philosophy to which all other philosophical inquiries are a series of footnotes; and Rome of the stern republican fathers of the rule of law; and London, the mother of parliaments and of the chartered rights of Englishmen; and this weekend our young scholars have recommended to our attention our own Philadelphia, where just over two hundred years ago our Founding Fathers taught that self government could be preserved from the eventual corruption of power, by dividing power against itself.
And you offer not just analysis, but allegiance born of a love of the truths that our founding tradition embodies. That which has made your lives rich, you wish to share freely with those students whose life of the mind is before them. You offer them your hands, to boost them onto the shoulders of the giants of the West. And from there they will see farther than any of us.
Let us believe with the faith that abided in Burke, that the best of the new generation will clasp your proffered hands–and that they themselves, in good time, will offer theirs to those who follow.
