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.
We Have Yet to Learn
We Have Yet to Learn
By Gregg MacDonald
Mr. MacDonald, a trustee of The Foundation for Economic Education, resides in Issaquah, Washington.
The ideas of man, expressed in one way or another, have come down to us over and over again for the past 50 centuries. As we approach the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to come up with an original thought. What a great thing Adam had, quipped Mark Twain. When he said something good, he knew nobody else had said it before. One would think we would have learned something after 5,000 years, but it just hasn’t happened. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Hegel observed, What experience and history teach us is that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Hegel was right. People and governments never learn from history, and go on repeating the same mistakes.
If we had learned anything at all from the past, we would know that every economy must sooner or later rely upon some sort of profit-and-loss system to spur groups or individuals to productivity. Slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm have always turned out to be too unproductive, or too expensive—not to mention too immoral.
Prosperity depends on the incentive of profit, but more than that, it depends on freedom. Those who failed to learn this from the past should certainly learn it from the present by looking at the collapse of communism in Russia, the failure of communism 90 miles off our coast in Cuba, or the tragic legacy of communism in China.
What We Can Learn from Rome
When we think of the Roman Empire (and it seems that everybody today tries to draw an analogy between the decline of America and the fall of the Roman Empire), we think of Roman citizens as being free, even though there were a great many slaves in the Empire. Roman politicians lusted after citizens’ votes and support just as politicians do today. Commerce and business thrived in this free economy. Farmers, shoemakers, estate agents, bakers, manufacturers, builders, innkeepers, and a host of other tradesmen and professionals flourished. In the early centuries of the Empire, just as in the early days of the United States, the farmers were the backbone of the nation, providing stability and food as well as strong, free men to defend Rome and fight its battles.
Under the Emperor Diocletian, however, Rome succumbed to outright socialism. Government spending led to inflation and increasing poverty. In A.D. 301, Diocletian issued an Edictum de pretiis, which set maximum prices and wages for all important goods and services. (In today’s world such measures are simply called wage and price controls.) The results were disastrous and set the stage for the fall of the Empire and the beginning of serfdom in the Middle Ages.
Diocletian put extensive public works into operation to boost employment, and food was given to the poor at little or no cost. The government brought nearly all major industries and guilds—unions—under explicit control. Paul-Louis, in his Ancient Rome at Work, tells us that in every large city, the state became a powerful employer . . . standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation. Will Durant noted that businessmen predicted ruin, but Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure.
Diocletian’s expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy proved to be too much to handle. To support all this government—the army, courts, public works, and welfare—taxes rose so high that men lost the incentive to work or earn. Lawyers kept finding ways to evade taxes, but other lawyers formulated laws to prevent evasion. To escape the tax men, thousands of Romans fled over the frontiers to find refuge with the barbarians Diocletian said were at the walls of Rome. (It makes one wonder why the barbarians wanted to get in.)
In an effort to stem the tide of fleeing citizens, and to facilitate regulations and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the farmers to their fields and the workers to their shops until all their debts and taxes had been paid in full. And, as mentioned, serfdom entered its initial stage.
The Modern Welfare State
Technologically, the modern world, and the Western world especially, are no more like ancient Rome than the moon is like the sun. But, technology and science aside, the civilization of Rome in the time of Diocletian vividly reminds us how much our own government parallels the Roman government that existed then. The welfare state, the huge bureaucracy to run it, stifling government regulations, and exorbitant taxes to pay for it all—is there that much difference between our present-day American government and the regime that prevailed in Diocletian’s Rome? And, again, technology and science aside, ideas and thoughts seem to have changed little.
There can be no lasting, healthy economy without freedom. When we are told by government bureaucrats just what we are allowed to do on our property, told whom we must employ, and where we must send our children for an education—can we honestly say we are free?
The average American worker pays government forty-seven percent out of each dollar he or she earns. This money is taken by the IRS, FICA, local and state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and on and on. Many people don’t realize this. How can you say you are free if half of everything you earn is taken away from you by government?
A healthy economy, in order to grow and spread and benefit the most people without taking away from others, needs freedom to expand. What we have in the United States today is an economy that has evolved through government control to satisfy self-indulgence and greed. Nor is it an economy embedded in freedom. Somerset Maugham warned us that If any nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The people of the United States at the end of the twentieth century have certainly placed a high value on comfort and money. Entitlements, golden parachutes, and rich government pensions are just a few of the programs and schemes that are relentlessly driving our economy onto dangerously thin ice. If enormous bureaucracies on the local, state, and federal levels are the price we are willing to pay for government contracts, welfare, and entitlements in order to retain comfort, then can a sick economy be far behind? And is the loss of freedom even closer? []
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3525
Unshakable Books
John Willson
Hillsdale College
The Philadelphia Society, Williamsburg Meeting
November 22, 1996
“Was There A Founding?”
(Permission to quote this speech must be granted by the Author)
(For a short Real Audio excerpt of John Willson’s clarion call for
unshakable books, click here)
Some of you–my friends and colleagues in this society for more than twenty years–know what an honor, what a privilege it is for me to introduce this pathbreaking meeting. Bill Campbell tells me that it is the largest regional meeting in the thirty-two year history of the Philadelphia Society. Without a doubt that is due to the fantastic drawing power of my name. It has nothing to do with Williamsburg, or that we are here to discuss the origins of our republic, or that we have assembled a remarkable group of the most promising young scholars in the country.
Most of you will be glad to know that the title of these remarks does not imply that I am about to rehearse an old debate between Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa about whether America is “unfounded” or “founded.” That debate is interesting and to a degree even important. But tonight I want to give instead an exhortation, to the scholars we will hear tomorrow, to the Society, to the academy in general. That exhortation is based on the conviction that we are now closer to recovering our past (or at least we have a greater opportunity) than we have been in over seven decades.
Stan Evans told me about two months ago about a conversation he had in Indianapolis with the great Richard Weaver, about 1960. Stan asked him what was most needed to keep the conservative momentum going, after the revival of ideas that Weaver was so instrumental in bringing about. Weaver said, we need “unshakable books.” Unshakable books. Books so compelling and elegant and true that they survive all challenges and the ravages of time. Weaver said this, remember, only about a decade after Lionel Trilling had pronounced the absence of conservative and reactionary ideas in America. Well, now, in 1996 there are no liberal or progressive ideas in America. They were used up in the sixties. To paraphrase Trilling, there are only “pollyannish or tyrannical mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas.”
But this doesn’t mean that it is entirely clear in which direction we are going. Daniel Boone’s biographer (1) recently told a story about the old hunter. A young interviewer asked Boone (when he was an old man) if he had ever been lost. Boone thought for a minute and said, “No, but I was once bewildered for three days.” Old Boone may well have been bewildered about the Founding. During the War for Independence he lost his son Israel in a disastrous and ill-considered attack at the battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky. He was accused of treason, although acquitted in a court-martial. Neither the Commonwealth of Virginia nor the United States Congress sympathized with his debt problems or his applications for land grants. He eventually moved to Spanish territory, pretty ambivalent for a while about the future of his country.
As things were uncertain for Boone looking ahead, they are also complicated and sometimes bewildering for us looking back. I often wish there were more honest bewilderment in my profession.
Here, we have brought together some of the ablest young scholars who are thinking about ideas, especially ideas concerning our Founding. In fact, if Mount Williamsburg were to erupt this weekend and bury the Old Capital, the prospects for recovering that Founding would be dim, indeed.
This program is a first for this increasingly venerable organization; but notice that lest we allow the kids to be home alone, the sessions are chaired by folks of my generation–that is, born after the Great Crash and before December 6, 1941. We have fought against the pagan forces of Leviathan. We have fought against New Dealers and Fair Dealers and no-dealers. We took on the Vital Center and the End of Ideology and have shown that all reports of our death were premature. We have not gone away. We have bequeathed to this new generation unshakable books and the deconstruction of deconstruction, and we charge them to “see then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise; Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Eph5:15-16)
You must deal with Boomer-books, and the legacy of the Left’s long march through the institutions. On one level you have a task easier than ours: how much of a problem can it be, intellectually to annihilate the Clinton generation and its pathetic offspring, multiculturalism? On the other hand you have almost invincible ignorance to combat. I have found that almost three-quarters of my Hillsdale freshmen have not read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. What do suppose is the percentage at Appalachian State, or even William and Mary?
As a teacher, I used to worry about this, but it is actually a bad-news, good news situation. The bad news is that they haven’t read the documents. The good news is that they haven’t read the documents–taught to them by people who think the Revolution was a multicultural event. In a way, the generation following yours is a forest of virgin timber. We have held off the clear cutters of the Left, and have destroyed or rendered obsolete most of their tools. It is your forest to harvest.
Not that it’s an easy task. Three-quarters of a century ago progressive ideas (almost all of them collectivist and relativist) about the Founding swept through the habitats of elite culture. Charles Beard was one of the apostles (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution had come out in 1913), and he wanted us to believe that the Founding was, eventually, about greed. Walter Lippmann made a comment that could have saved us a great deal of pain: that, far from creating the Constitution to protect their property, the founders used their “class privileges” to preserve their country.(2) This was apparently too much common sense; it was a generation later that an unshakable book by Forrest McDonald finally laid the forces of neo-marxism to rest.
But, just as failed socialism in recent years has put on a new political disguise (environmentalism), progressives keep grasping at the Founding. Their headings are more likely now to be “race, class, gender” than “the Revolution considered as a social movement,” but the point is the same. “The compelling image of Revolutionary transformation”(3) is still very exciting for a whole new generation of neo-progressives. They believe the Founding was “as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.”(4)
There wasn’t much change, on the whole. I keep looking. Not long ago I discovered that the loyalist Anglican Rector of Trinity Church (which owns Wall Street), Samuel Auchmuty, was part of a notable social event. Fleeing New York, “his critics were amused to see his house immediately taken over by female camp followers of the Regulars for a place of business.”(5) That, I guess, is social change. And George Washington did try to fix wages and prices in areas controlled by the Continental Army, prompting John Witherspoon to criticize him severely on behalf of the Congress. Neither episode lasted long.
I am particularly annoyed when neo-progressives take refuge in the “touched-off” or the “made possible” theory. The Founding “touched off” the anti-slavery movement, for example, or it “made possible” the movements for women’s rights in the 19th century. Aside from the silliness of this argument–everything, it can be said, was “touched off” in the Book of Genesis–do we really need to be reminded that the United States was one of the last civilized countries to abolish slavery? And then only after a war which really was a revolution in certain undebatable ways? Or that every argument ever made by women’s rights movements was written down by Mary Wollstonecraft by 1792; who had nothing whatsoever to do with the American Founding?
In fact, most of what is really important about the American Founding lies in how a potentially harmful revolution was contained. It was not entirely averted, but it was contained and directed to the ends of limited government and the practice of liberties that had long existed in most American provinces. David Hackett Fischer tells this story:
…historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke? The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke. Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine. Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? The veteran thought not. When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.(6)
The old Yankee’s attitude helps to explain why a potential revolution could be contained, but it doesn’t explain how that attitude was converted successfully into a relatively stable republic. We should note here that progressive historians have the same advantage as their political counterparts. In pursuit of what Forrest McDonald has called their “dogmatic, scientific, secular millenialism,” if a program doesn’t work, it hasn’t been tried ardently enough. The “touched-off” historians won’t leave their dreams of social transformation alone until they have gotten grants to study every backcountry settlement, slave cabin, Iroquois longhouse, sailor’s wharf, and household kitchen in revolutionary America.
In contrast, the men and women on these panels this weekend take ideas and the public record seriously. A few liberals learn to do this from experience. Theodore White, reflecting on his confrontation with revolution in Yenan during World War II, said (many years later, in In Search of History), “In the simplest historic terms, [Mao] was not campaigning against Chiang K’ai-shek; he was campaigning against Confucius and two thousand years of ideas he meant to root out and replace with his own.”(7) White was unusual: an intellectually honest progressive, who eventually gave up on his visionary agenda and learned how right John Dickinson was when he said to the federal convention, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”
Dickinson’s wise counsel brings me to what I really want to say tonight–and I’ll say it briefly. In continuing to take ideas seriously, as they are held by people, and contained in the public record and in the great documents of the Founding, and in its law and literature, we are engaged in a powerful act of recovery. The “experience” to which Dickinson referred was the common experience of his (or by extension any) generation in their solemn deliberations; the tests of history and common sense. “Experience” was the “ubiquitous criterion” of the ages, the “cardinal touchstone of validity.”(8) Dickinson wrote a note to himself for one of his convention speeches: “The best Philosophy is drawn from Experiments, the best Policy from Experience.” The Founders (or most of them) knew they were doing something profound, or they would never have used the phrase, Novus Ordo Seclorum. But they knew that they were doing it in a way that was consistent with older orders, too.
Four elements of their common experience appear in all of the Founders’ debates, writings, and documents: Classical history, especially the history of the Roman Republic (often as it was filtered through Renaissance and Enlightenment authors) The Bible, which they read as history as well as theology English Common Law, which was the repository of natural law as well as of English liberties American colonial history, containing by then lessons from a century and a half of “managing their own affairs”; that so much of their discussion was conducted in this context shows that they were engaged in recovering as well as founding, of protecting liberty much more than inventing it.
They were as serious about what could be learned from the fate of the Amphictionic Council as we should be about their arguments over imitating foreign fashions. They thought that stable and secure and decent governments, devoted to the protection of liberty, must be based on truths of human nature revealed in experience.
It seems to me that our unshakable books should emulate their enterprise. John Adams once said about the American and French revolutions, “Ours was resistance to innovation; theirs was innovation itself.” A flippant comment, certainly; it nevertheless captures an important truth: insofar as it was successful, the American Founding was rooted in ancient truths, it was not attempting to “touch-off” a transfiguration of the world.
Let me finish this exhortation with an example and a suggestion. I have tried for many years to teach the American Founding by inviting my students into the lives of its Philosopher-Statesmen, and then into the rich things they wrote. A teacher cannot do this with Big Books, however unshakable. I have written four Little Books, hoping to prepare students to read with profit the greater works of unshakable scholarship my generation has produced. I have found that even the generally conservative and often religious students at Hillsdale College are infected with what Perry Miller once called “obtuse secularism.” It is hard for them to connect liberty and religion in a way that will help effect a recovery of our past. They want either to put a wall of separation between the two, as the Supreme Court instructs them to, or to believe that the Founders were empowered by the Almighty to proclaim a Christian nation.
That Christianity (and the Bible) was at the heart of the Founding is simply undeniable. The controversy over a resident Bishop consumed at least as much ink as the Stamp Act. The constitutions of the states and the United States are nothing if not written expressions of the Christian view of human nature. In every one of the first twenty years of independent national existence governments at all levels proclaimed days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving. The churches (even a majority of Anglican priests) overwhelmingly supported the War for Independence. The definition of liberty preferred by Americans was Biblical: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Mi4:4) John Adams said in 1818 (and by that time he was a Unitarian) that the revolution was over before the war began–it was a change in the religious sentiments of the American people. So important was the Great Awakening to later events that it is very tempting to parody Mark Twain. He said that Sir Walter Scott caused the Civil War; we might add that George Whitefield preached the American Revolution.
This does not mean that even the most enthusiastic ministers thought that the Founding created a Holy Commonwealth. But it does mean that the deism of Benjamin Rush and Tom Paine dramatically failed to become the faith of the republic, that the ambivalent Unitarian Jefferson was profoundly out of step with his countrymen religiously, and that a crucial part of our act of recovery is to show again the right relation between religion and liberty.
The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, President of Princeton, signer of the Declaration, member of Congress, teacher of statesmen, a principal author of the Presbyterian Constitution, has had one biography written about him in the 202 years since his death. That was in 1925. The Rev. Dr. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, epic poet, chronicler of New England and its “second citizen” (John Adams was its first), has inspired one biography since his death in 1817. That was in 1939. I pray that someone will write these characters into unshakable books.
We don’t have to claim unreasonable things, or to insist that the American Founding was “conservative” in its essence, or that America was Christian at its core, to make our point, and to effect a recovery. There were radicals around, even French-style Jacobins, and they had their followers. There were plenty of “enlightened” deists and Unitarians willing to take Christianity to new heights of progress. But a remarkable generation of Founders–not “inventors,” but Founders–contained them all, and built, and protected institutions based on ideas about liberty and truths about human nature that are as old as God. Do good work this weekend. Advance the cause of recovery.
End of exhortation.
Footnotes
1. John Mack Farragher, at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives Seminar, “Legends of the American West,” September, 1996.
2. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (NY: Macmillan, 1923), p.280
3. Ronald Hoffman, in the Preface to The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville and London: United States Capitol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1996).
4. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), p.5.
5. Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p.482.
6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.827.
7. Theodore H. White, In Search of History (NY: Harper & Row, 1978), p.260.
8. Ellis Sandoz, “Philosophical and Religious Dimensions of the American Founding,” Intercollegiate Review, XXX (Spring, 1995), p.29.
