The task of conservation, in our present day, necessarily entails supporting liberal education. Those conservatives who do not support it will fail to conserve our Western identity. That is to say: they will fail to conserve anything significant, no matter how many tributes they pay to some abstract ideas of “freedom” or “liberty.”
I’d like to explain why conservatives must support liberal education. To do that, I must first explain a few things about conservatism.
The first major conservative magazine in the U.S. was National Review. National Review was founded, in the mid-1950s, by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Mr. Buckley was a witty man with controversial opinions.
For instance, Buckley—who was a Latin-Mass going Catholic—defended and praised the Spanish Catholic authoritarian, Francisco Franco. And, during the AIDS epidemic, Buckley called for all AIDS patients to be tattooed on the forearm and buttocks to keep junkies and homosexuals from unknowingly spreading AIDS.
Buckley died in 2008, but National Review lives on till this day—although it has evolved.
For instance, David French—a contributing editor to National Review—is, perhaps, the foremost defender and venerator of the religious neutrality of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. French doesn’t sing the praises of General Franco, or any theocratic leader. French readily reminds his readers that he—a practicing lawyer—often relies on first-amendment religious neutrality to defend religious minorities, as well as Christians, in their right of free worship.
And, in 2019, David French defended the right of drag queens to rent private rooms so that they may read books to young children. This is commonly called “drag queen story hour.” Mr. French called it “a blessing of liberty.”
An entire book could be written on how conservatism evolved from Catholic triumphalism and AIDS tattoos… to religious indifference and drag queen celebrations.
Conservatism’s transitioning—or maybe we should say “trans-ing”—has at the very least, inspired a lot of fighting.
Buchanan Years
In the 1990s, that fighting centered around Patrick J. Buchanan, a former White House staffer, political commentator, and Presidential candidate.
Buchanan ran for President three times on a platform intended to conserve the American way of life as he had known it. Buchanan opposed the unrestrained flow of goods and people across America’s borders—meaning, he favored restricting immigration and trade. Buchanan also opposed American military intervention in the name of “spreading American values” because the American way of life cannot be exported; it is uniquely American.
Buchanan’s vision of America was of a normal country made up of a people united around shared heroes, holidays, and history—in a word, “identity.” Buchanan sought to conserve a distinct American identity. “We are losing our sense of who we are,” he would often warn.
Buchanan’s brand of conservatism was not widely accepted by the professional conservative pundit class.
Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of the prestigious, conservative National Review, said that Buchanan was not a true conservative because he valued tribalism over ideas:
Conservatives tend to place a lot of emphasis, maybe too much, on the idea that ideas have consequences. They hoist their ideas up the flagpole and then see who salutes. Buchananism puts its idealized social base first, and lets it drive everything else. For Buchanan, loyalty to the tribe trumps any idea.
Here, Ponnuru draws a dichotomy between “ideas” and “identity.” The true conservative, says Ponnuru, wants to conserve ideas associated with free-market capitalism: the system by which we make money.
The problem with Buchanan, according to Ponnuru, is that he sacrifices free-market ideas to the interests of his tribe and their identity. Capitalism means the free flow of goods and people. By opposing this free flow of goods and people, Buchanan excommunicates himself from conservatism.
Of course, Ponnuru was not the only Buchanan critic. There were others.
There was one particularly harsh Buchanan critic—a charismatic, billionaire, real-estate mogul, who would become a reality-TV star: Donald J. Trump. Trump briefly competed with Buchanan for the presidential nomination of the nascent Reform Party in the 2000 election cycle. During this political contest, Trump accused Buchanan of racial bigotry and anti-Semitism. He even called Buchanan a “Hitler lover.”
Several years later, however, Trump would apologize to Buchanan, then adopt Buchanan’s positions on the major issues, run for President on those positions, and endure the same attacks that Buchanan had previously endured—many of those attacks coming from the prestigious National Review.
During Trump’s first week in office, Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor at National Review, wrote:
Up until very recently, American exceptionalism—i.e., we are a creedal nation dedicated to certain principles reflected in our founding documents—largely defined the conservative understanding of patriotism. Trump, however, sees America more as an identity than an idea.
Here, again, is the dichotomy: ideas versus identity.
According to Goldberg, a conservative conserves the principles codified in the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
So, which is it? What does a conservative primarily concern himself with? Ideas or identity?
What Is Conservatism?
The great Southern Conservative M.E. Bradford—an English professor at the University of Dallas—exhorted his readers and students to, “know who you are.” That is the task of the conservative, as understood by Bradford.
Michael Oakeshott—the English conservative and professor of History at the London School of Economics—wrote in his essay “On Being Conservative,” that conservatives are not averse to change but are wary of change because “all change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction.” For Oakeshott, “identity” is composed of associations and property, not mere abstractions. The conservative, according to Oakeshott, notices and appreciates his place in the cosmos, he has attachments to real things and people, and he prefers them to whatever supposed gain may come from radical experimentation, adventuring, or conquest.
It is no wonder why nearly all the old heavyweights of the conservative intellectual movement—those who were still alive—supported Pat Buchanan when he ran for President in the early ‘90s. In fact, Russell Kirk—largely credited for starting the American conservative movement—served as Pat Buchanan’s Michigan State Campaign Chairman.
In a press release, Kirk explained that he was backing Buchanan because “Buchanan would discourage indiscriminate immigration into the United States.” Kirk elaborated: “Our country cannot play host to all the world and still maintain its established culture, successful economy, and social cohesion.”
In an interview with a local reporter, following his public endorsement of Buchanan, Kirk and his wife, Annette, would further explain that they were initially drawn to Buchanan because of his opposition to two things: (1) affirmative-action programs, and (2) liberal immigration policies.
Some of Kirk’s former students and acolytes were taken aback by their mentor’s support for immigration restriction. Just three years prior, in his economics textbook, Kirk had said positive things about immigration, and he appeared to be endorsing a more open immigration policy.
Kirk’s apparent evolution on this issue explains a lot about the nature of conservatism—and the importance of education.
Conservatism and Education
Russell Kirk’s former research assistant Wesley McDonald explained Kirk’s apparent evolution on immigration in a talk given at a Philadelphia Society meeting in April 2005. According to McDonald, Kirk supported immigration with assimilation. Immigrants who came to America and assimilated to the dominant culture were an asset, not a liability.
In the early ‘90s, however, Kirk had become convinced that assimilation was not happening as it once had. One reason: America’s public school system, no longer fostered assimilation to the dominant culture; rather, it fostered multiculturalism.
In his essay “The Fraud of Multiculturalism,” Kirk explains that the proponents of multiculturalism (the “multiculturalists”) claim that the public-school curriculum is far too Western or Euro-centric; that various ethnic groups, which have contributed mightily to the American cultural experience, have been woefully under-represented in the curriculum.
Kirk notes that school textbooks—at the urging of the multiculturalists—are evolving from tools for instruction into “devices for ‘increasing the self-esteem’ of ethnic groups.”
Kirk warns that a new brand of ethnic grievance studies combined with technical training were crowding out liberal education, or what we, today, often call “classical education.”
One of the great effects of liberal education is that it instills a sense of Western identity by taking the student through the Western cannon and passing along to him the wisdom of the perennial philosophy.
What Is Western Civilization?
What is Western identity? You may ask. What is Western Civilization?
There is no shortage of professional fundraisers in and around the conservative movement asking for money to “defend Western Civilization.” But what is it?
Western Civilization is languages—such as Greek and Latin. It is the great ballads, the great explorers, the discovery and conquering of the new world! It is Holy Scripture. It is Gregorian Chant. It is a daily schedule ordered around liturgy—with working people pausing their work to pray the Angelus at noon. It is the mass. It is the sacraments. It is a calendar filled with holidays honoring various heroes. It is those heroes. Some became heroic by practicing the cardinal virtues; they are called warriors or knights. Others became heroic by practicing the Christian virtues; they are called saints. Western Civilization is stained-glass windows honoring those heroes. It is stained-glass windows teaching Bible stories to the poor and illiterate. It is paintings and sculptures; it is art and architecture.
Western Civilization is composed of many things.
Hilaire Belloc famously said, “Europe is the faith, the faith is Europe.” Belloc elaborates,
The peculiar function of the Catholic Church in the story of our civilization has been to preserve the philosophic conquests of pagan antiquity and to expand them over an even greater range of discovery than the greatest of the ancients had commanded. There is no one acquainted with the story of Europe who does not know this to be true. (Editor’s Preface to The Catholic Philosophy by Fr. Vincent McNabb)
The story of Europe—the story of Western Civilization, the story of OUR civilization—is the story of Catholics “preserving” and “expanding upon” the philosophic conquests of pagan antiquity.
By “the faith” Belloc means two things: the Catholic faith and the wisdom of the perennial philosophy. That is the core of Western Civilization.
The keeper of the deposit of faith is a divinely protected institution: the Church. We have a guarantee from sacred scripture that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church. Do we have a similar guarantee that the wisdom of the perennial philosophy will be divinely protected? Can we safely assume it will be handed down to our posterity? No. We don’t know, and we cannot assume.
Just as we have the Church conserving the deposit of faith, we need liberal education conserving our inherited wisdom.
What Is Man?
Here, we need to back up a bit and consider our identity—not just as Westerners, but more broadly, as men. What is man?
Man is a thinker. The object of his thinking is truth.
Truth is a correspondence between the mind and reality. It is not a mere “idea.” An idea is something that exists in the mind—a mental construct—which may or may not correspond with something in extra-mental reality.
The perennial philosophers were not just men who happened to have the right ideas concerning truth. They knew what questions to ask, and what distinctions to make, to lead others to the truth.
Aristotle was not just some guy who had the correct ideas handed to him. Through the intellectual virtue of understanding, he grasped first principles, then he reasoned from those first principles (what we used to call “science”), and he arrived at new knowledge. This new knowledge was a better understanding of something that he had noticed before called “wisdom,” or knowledge of the causes of things, or ultimate reality.
A seventh grader notices right triangles. He notices how the A-side squared added with the B-side squared is equal to the C-side squared. He will not, however, understand what causes this until he grasps the first principles of geometry, then reasons step by step—each step following necessarily from the prior—and finally arrives at the conclusion that A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared.
The Pythagorean theorem—which is what I’m talking about—is more than 40 individual proofs, together proving that A-squared + B-Squared necessarily equals C-squared. When the student sees how one proof necessarily follows from the prior, and the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, he knows a more ultimate reality than just “A-squared + B-squared = C-squared.” He knows what causes A-squared + B-squared to necessarily equal C-squared.
The great philosophers of our Western patrimony took a journey that led to truth.
A tradition needs to be rooted in truth. If it isn’t, it will not be passed down for long; It’ll be abandoned.
Just as we pass down “A-squared + B-squared = C-squared” because it signifies some truth, so we also pass down material things because they signify some truth.
Culture
What we call “culture” is a collection of such signs and symbols. They call to mind deeper, more-spiritual meanings. They are largely material but informed by something immaterial. As T.S. Eliot writes in his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, “Culture is the incarnation of religion.”
The signs and symbols comprising our culture call to mind faith and wisdom; we could say they are the incarnation of faith and wisdom. And, when we discard those signs and symbols, we begin to forget that faith and wisdom; we begin to forget who we are, and an identity crisis sets in.
The communion rail was a material distinction between clergy and laity. As we discard that material object, we begin to forget the immaterial distinction for which it stood.
It is no coincidence that as female attire became less distinctly feminine, women began acting more like men, and men began treating them as such.
“Common sense,” warns Chesterton, “must be kept as an esoteric secret in the dark temple of culture” (“Christmas and the Aesthetes,” Heretics).
That men and women exist and are distinct from one another is, indeed, a matter of common sense. That may prompt some—even some self-styled conservatives—to regard material signs of male and female distinction as superfluous—mere relics from a bigoted past—and yet, when we tear down a culture with all its material signs, we find common sense disturbingly uncommon.
The removal of a sign (a cultural symbol) is a public statement that the truth for which the sign stood is now considered taboo, and just as that truth’s signage can be expelled from society, so too can anyone who espouses said truth.
We expelled the signs of sexual distinction. We are now in the process of expelling the truth of sexual distinction.
When we expel a truth about a thing, we replace it with an idea of the thing. As we expel sexual truth—which is based in reality—we replace it with an idea, which is nothing more than a mental construct. In this case: gender.
Once adopting the idea of gender, men are habituated to view reality through the lens of this idea. This is called ideological thinking.
The man who thinks ideologically is known as an ideologue. The ideologue cares more for ideas than reality. What G.K. Chesterton says of the “maniac” in his book Orthodoxy is equally true of the ideologue: “He is trapped in that clean, well-lit prison of a single idea.” The idea always comes before reality.
The ideologue unconsciously assumes that everything in the senses originates in the mind. If he is committed to his ideology, he will fail to understand reality. He will even fail to understand an obvious crisis.
To understand the nature of a crisis a man must first perceive the crisis through the senses; he must see it, hear it, feel it, and/or smell it. A man knows his house is on fire when he sees the fire, he hears the smoke alarm, he feels extreme heat, and smells smoke. After perceiving through the senses, he knows in the mind that his house is on fire. In other words, everything in the mind originates in the senses—not the other way around.
Western Civilization is in crisis, right now.
House on Fire
Western Civilization is like a big estate—a large manor—handed down through countless generations in our family, and it is on fire.
The so-called conservatives are the ones who are trying to save or conserve different things from the flames. Everybody is grabbing something different.
On some level, today’s conservatives know something is going wrong, but, with their vision obscured by ideology, they don’t understand the nature of the crisis, or what to conserve.
Consider Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the largest conservative youth group in America. “I have loyalty to ideas,” proclaimed young master Kirk.
Of course I love the Grand Canyon, I love the Rocky Mountains, and I love Boston, and I love Chicago, but if all that disappeared and all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America.… America is just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with the specific place, that’s just not what it is.
Imagine that as flames were engulfing your house, your neighbor walked over and said to you, “Your home is just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with the specific place, that’s just not what it is.”
This is, however, somewhat unfair to Charlie Kirk (who is no relation to Russell Kirk, by the way.) The ideas Charlie Kirk has in mind, as he explains on other occasions, are the freedoms and rights codified in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.
Charlie Kirk—like Jonah Goldberg—wants to conserve the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These are both practical documents. One is an ordinance of secession from the British Empire, the other is a legal document (a list of laws and political compromises made back in 1787).
This would be like prioritizing the conserving of an important lawsuit which your grandfather filed. It doesn’t really tie you directly to your grandfather, even if the result of the lawsuit was to help you financially.
Now consider Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire media empire, one of the largest conservative media companies. In December of 2018, Shapiro interviewed political commentator Tucker Carlson. Carlson caused a kerfuffle by saying that certain free market innovations—such as the use of automated delivery trucks—should be restrained by government policy to conserve middle America’s way of life. “Capitalism is great,” said Carlson, “but there is no Nicene Creed of capitalism.… It is a tool humans use to make money.”
Shapiro, during the ensuing kerfuffle, posted on Twitter (in a since-deleted tweet): “Anyone who denies the principles of capitalism is not a traditional conservative.”
Shapiro wants to conserve the tools of wealth getting. When the house is on fire, this brand of conservative apparently reaches for his tools, and maybe some financial documents.
Let’s consider Marco Rubio, the current Secretary of State.
While running for President in 2015, Rubio said that young men studying philosophy would be better-off focusing on welding. Technical training in welding, Rubio argued, would yield a greater monetary payoff than “contemplating the cosmos.”
“Welders make more money than philosophers,” Rubio said. “We need more welders and less philosophers.” [I think he meant fewer philosophers.]
This is like prioritizing the conserving of one’s work tools, while deliberately leaving behind, to perish in the flames, the things that actually tie oneself to one’s heritage. The practical tools of money-making are to be saved, as the scrapbook, the family Bible, and various generational heirlooms burn.
Today’s supposed conservatives do not care to save anything that links us with our patrimony. Such things are impractical; and today’s conservatives want to save practical things: legal documents, tools, and financial records.
When they urge us to focus on “ideas” instead of “identity” they are urging us to abandon the source of identity: meaning, culture. Let culture go up in flames, so long as we save our careers!
This is not the conservatism of old.
“Every genuine conservative retains some affection for things traditional,” writes Russell Kirk. And “tradition is concerned principally with man’s cultural world.” Kirk explains that tradition “joins the individual with the generations that are dead and the generations that are yet to be born” (“The Question of Tradition,” The Paleoconservatives).
What does a true conservative save when his home is on fire? What would you save if your house were on fire?
What did Aeneas take during the burning and sacking of Troy? He took his father, his son, and the household gods.
A true conservative saves his family: his parents, wife, and children. He reaches for the family scrapbook long before he even thinks of his car, his tools, his financial records, or even his wallet.
The scrapbook is filled with pictures that remind him of who he is: a son, a father, a husband, an uncle, a Christian, an American, a man. They give him his sense of identity.
As Western Civilization burns, how do we save Western Culture? How do we save those more noble, impractical things that link us with our patrimony and give us an identity as Westerners?
I say: through liberal education.
Liberal education is akin to the family scrapbook. It passes on the perennial philosophy, but it also passes on Latin and Greek, medieval architecture, and Homer and Shakespeare. What else does this? What other institution conserves such things?
Liberal education is the only thing left that provides a means of meaningful conservation. That is enough reason why conservatives MUST support it.
There is, however, another reason that conservatives should support liberal education. It becomes apparent when we consider who set our house on fire.
Who, in this analogy, set our house afire? A particular group of people called “liberals”—that’s who set our house afire.
This may be confusing. I was just defending liberal education as a tool for conserving our identity, for saving the most precious parts of our identity from the fire, and now, I’m telling you: Liberals started the fire, they’re burning down Western Civilization.
Liberals Are Burning Down Western Civilization
The word “liberal” is used in many ways.
Liberals are a group of people who denounce every part of man’s true identity as an arbitrary hindrance to his ability to craft his own identity as conceived entirely in his own mind. [Every man an ideologue!]
Man, says the liberal, should not be hindered by all these things he didn’t choose. Therefore, man must be liberated from such things. The liberal seeks to “liberate” man by deconstructing and dismissing his identity; in our analogy, he’s burning down our house.
The liberal has been effective because he seized control of an important institution: the school (the place of formal education).
“The purpose of genuine education as understood by liberalism is, precisely, to liberate the mind from the crippling hold of custom and all non-rational belief,” writes the conservative philosopher James Burnham in his magnum opus, The Suicide of the West.
Burnham describes the liberal vision of schooling where “the child approaches the altar of education in all his spiritual nakedness as a purely rational being, shorn of color, creed, race, family and nationality.”
Inherited folkways, family traditions, and religion are considered by liberalism to be superstitions that obstruct the purely rational being from crafting his own identity.
Burnham’s use of religious imagery—”the altar of education”—is intentional. For “the school is liberalism’s church,” as Burnham explains.
Just as Catholics consider the Catholic Church as means to achieving paradise in the next world, so do liberals consider the school as means to achieving paradise in this world.
Liberals—according to Burnham—do not believe there is any defect in human nature—such as original sin—therefore, every societal problem can be fixed via education. “Liberals believe that man is born ignorant, not wicked,” writes Prof. J. Salwyn Schapiro (Liberalism: Its Meaning and History)
This means we can eliminate poverty by teaching young men how to make money via technical training. We can, likewise, eliminate violence via education. We can eliminate greed via education. Prisons can be converted into schools and the police can be abolished.
The liberal, in denying any inherent defect in man’s nature, buys into the perfect-ability of man. The means of achieving that perfectibility—heaven on earth—is formal education.
This is why young liberals are more eager to go into teaching than young conservatives.
Here, we see yet another reason conservatives should start focusing on the academy. By recapturing the academy, and restoring liberal education, we can conserve our identity, and we can diminish the most powerful tool that liberals have.
Liberal education is the solution to education by liberals.
Liberals use schooling as a flamethrower to reignite the fire engulfing our house. If conservatives can lead some families away from these schools into liberal arts schools, they can both blunt the flame and rescue something precious from the fire.
Conservatives Don’t Understand How the Fire Started
The big problem: Today’s conservatives do not get it. They fail to see who started, and perpetuates, this fire.
They would have you believe that a small group of eccentric radical intellectuals from Frankfurt, Germany, migrated to the U.S. and conspired to take over American universities and turn them into the radical institutions that we know today. That’s the popular explanation given by today’s conservative thinkers.
Christopher Rufo—a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and advisor to Governor Ron DeSantis—is one of the proponents of this Frankfurt School theory.
Such elaborate conspiracy theories bear some truth, but they draw attention away from the destructive nature of liberalism, which is a much larger cause of the ongoing fire.
Today’s so-called conservatives favor such conspiracy theories because these conservatives are accustomed to thinking ideologically, and conspiracy theories allow them to do that. A conspiracy theory is an idea held in the mind; the conspiracy theorist uses this idea to explain everything he finds in extramental reality. He cares more about the theory (or idea) than reality.
Ramesh Ponnuru says, “Conservatives care about ideas. … They run their ideas up the flagpole and see who salutes.” They care about ideas—not identity.
Ideology traps man in his own head, it blinds him so that he cannot see his own identity, nor can he see who is destroying it.
Today’s liberals are ideologues. Liberals have always been ideologues. Today’s so-called conservatives, however, are also ideologues.
This is a problem for true conservatives who wish to conserve identity. The Western world is plagued with ideology and ideology is the enemy of identity—and therefore the enemy of true conservatism.
The Negation of Ideology
“Conservatism, says Russell Kirk, “is the negation of ideology.”
Kirk is referring to the activity of conservatism. That activity entails negating or nullifying ideology.
In the sea of ideology—in which today’s conservative finds himself—there exists one institution that actively negates ideology. It does this by introducing students to great Western thinkers who understood that everything in the mind originates in the senses—and not the other way around.
This institution is… liberal education.
The final reason I offer as to why conservatives must support liberal education is that it cultivates a certain intellectual habit within the student.
Liberal education—according to Russell Kirk—gives the student a “philosophic habit of mind.” Kirk borrows this term from Discourse Five of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of the University.
Remember: The ideologue starts his thinking at the wrong end. He starts with his conclusion—his isolated idea—and he looks for things that confirm his isolated idea.
By contrast, a man with the philosophic habit of mind begins his thinking by gazing at things in reality, he wonders about them, then he reasons about them, and then he arrives at a conclusion—some new knowledge.
The philosophic habit of mind is rightly ordered thinking. A man whose thinking is rightly ordered will not fall into ideology.
Such a man notices what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” These are enduring parts of the human condition, rooted in human nature. They include identity.
A man endowed with the philosophic habit of mind knows and understands his identity; he knows when it’s under attack, and he can see who is responsible.
The Three Reasons
There are, then, three reasons conservatives must support liberal education:
- Liberal education conserves our identity.
- Liberal education undermines those who seek to destroy our identity.
- And liberal education lifts the ideological blinders that keep men from recognizing and defending their identity.
The task of conservation, in our present day, necessarily entails supporting liberal education. Those conservatives who do not support it will fail to conserve our Western identity. That is to say: they will fail to conserve anything significant, no matter how many tributes they pay to some abstract ideas of “freedom” or “liberty.”
The words of the great Southern conservative Andrew Lytle come to mind—as he writes in his memoir,
To lose your language and your god surrenders all that you are, no matter how many grand abstract words like liberty try to reassure you that you are something. Or that you have something to lose. (A Wake for the Living)
A Country Worth Dying For
You can tell a lot about a man by what he saves when his house is on fire. You can tell a lot about a man, also, by what he passes on to his posterity.
Mainline conservatives intend to conserve the tools of money-making so that our posterity may achieve a comfortable material existence. They intend, also, to conserve nearly every legal tool that enables individuals to define their own identity.
Anyone who dares restrict wealth getting—or fails to adequately sacralize their abstract idea of the day—is excommunicated by the doyens of Conservatism Incorporated.
Mainline conservatives merely intend to conserve liberalism in an earlier, less-radical incarnation, but we have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
What begins with severing man from generations, ends with severing man from genitalia. What begins as a project in moderate, classical liberalism, ends in National Review editors singing paeans to the virtues of drag queen story hour.
Conservatives can reject such a future by reasserting identity. The best way to do that is to reclaim, and champion liberal education.
The late, great Prof. John Senior warns us that,
“When a nation takes nothing but material success as its measure of value, it is led by the mean mediocrity which has us in its grip, stifling all initiative as we await the more effective aggression of foreign powers motivated by deeper loves and hates, who are willing to sacrifice their comforts and even their lives for what they believe.” (The Restoration of Christian Culture, “A Final Solution to Liberal Education.”)
What sort of country would you die for? An economic zone? Would you give your life for a country without a common heritage, void of any attachment of kith and kin, or any attachment to patrimony? As Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:
“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds…
for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods.”
This essay was first delivered in March 2025 at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan.
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