The Hitler Question in Education.

The twentieth century has proven that the liberal arts cannot prevent civilizational slide into barbarism, but can only add a unique horror to man's native capacity for the brutal by embellishing it with the grinning death-mask of gentility. Having played Schubert beneath the gas chambers, why do we continue to educate? Would it not be better to control men, firmly and technocratically, rather than continue to naively hope that the educated mind will freely resist its natural inclination to evil?

The great, possibly counterfactual enterprise of education rests—for me—on three ideas. They are hopes, not certainties. The first: that a nation whose people have been educated to be free citizens of an equal polity will be conditioned, as a group, to create just laws and institutions whose strength and resilience will be sufficient to resist our cyclical and apparently irresistible urge to salt the earth and reduce ourselves to dystopia. The second: that though we may be defenseless against this special mania and addiction of mankind, this brutality, we have been given a flabbier enemy to resist: if the 20th century was an abbatoir, the 21st promises to be a squalid room lit only by a flickering television and a blinking modem. Man is naturally violent, but he is perhaps not naturally empty; the humane letters, whose sole function and great merit is to grant the man-animal a soul, a personhood, a core resistant to distraction, parochialism, smallness of being: these are our study in the dream of a mankind brightly lit, house to house, doorway to doorway with inner life. We educate to create humanity where there would otherwise be consumers, implements, data points, the impersonal activities of massed reaction and impulse. Last: that even if none of this is true (and it may not be; our institutions may be feeble, human history may indeed be Hitler history, the vast majority of mankind may be incapable of attaining real self-awareness; our hope rests on something feebler than conjecture, a thing more akin to magical thinking or solipsism) nevertheless to educate is to cultivate the only transcendent good within our grasp and within the power of pessimism to imagine realized—that it is a thing like praying, a liturgy possibly without recipient, a cyclical rite to the divinities of man's better nature.

A meditation.

Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski is giving herself a sprain proclaiming in the wilderness about secrets squirreled out of Soviet archives and now freely available to the media, if only anyone gave a damn. Lamentable that she's wasting her breath.

I don't think there's real hope of turning back the steady slouch of things to that earlier politics of the manichee. Yes, it served us well until Vietnam and the New Left—or served, at least; there was a mechanism in place, and though it gave us the House Committee on Un-American Activities it also gave us moral purpose, that supreme fiction so dangerous and ennobling. (But we are deadly afraid of moral purpose; after all, the fascists had moral purpose, and the fascists still have their boot on 20th century thought—we're like those damaged twentysomethings who were harassed as children and now can think of nothing else.)

But of course it's only dangerous, not ennobling—well, at least that's where my mind goes with it, inevitably, but who knows? I grew up in a university.

Athens: not really democratic. (Corollary—Persia: not really so bad!)
Augustus: autocrat. (Maecenas: toady. Vergil: deeply morbid.)
Marcus Aurelius: platitudinous.
Crusades: brutal & unnecessary & genocidal.
Oliver Cromwell: autocrat.
Pilgrims: vicious & genocidal.
Settlers: genocidal.
The Raj: venal & brutal & racist.
Old Dominion: venal & racist & vicious & brutal & unnecessary but not genocidal.
Cold war: propaganda scheme (plus red scare).
President Bush: buffoonish & venal & racist.

Fine, you win, you win. I can't think at this point of a broad moral impetus that didn't go terribly wrong, at least if it wasn't disingenuous to begin with. My heroism, O sages and hierophants, is well broken. Mazal tov. But I don't believe you.

Crying out for the mos maiorum, that ever-receding Good Old Way—it's never really a puritanical exercise, I don't think. I don't buy into the very popular narrative of the power-hungry hypocrite, that famous and imaginary would-be tyrant with his fingers in other people's pastry (from theatrical to reproductive)—anything that easy and that convenient must be false. Reality is dense, and human beings are the densest part of it, swept around like seaweed in the wash of their own logos. After all, the mos maiorum recedes in front of you like Aeneas' Italy, nightmarishly further away the faster you chase it; go back in time and your reverend father's world is crumbling, too, and his father's father's. When a flippant person discovers this truth for himself he'll inevitably snigger about how, ah, clearly it's a question of disposition, or a kind of power-play, or just open delusion, or revanchist moaning: I've heard that enough times, G-d knows it.

But he's right in a sense—it is a question of disposition, but not in his terms. Conservatism, political and cultural, begins in human loneliness. It's not a question of forcing other people into virtue, or really even trying to slow a real civilizational decline; it's the terrible realization that other men are not like you, that your concerns are different, that you are wherever your thoughts are and that is very far indeed from the soul sitting next to you in the lecture hall—no, decline isn't a falling-away from an old gold standard but a declension from yourself, from the fragment of the mind of G-d you hope is in your breast, nominative to vocative: me, of me, apart from me, to me, Ah, O other, o hysterical man.

It's a longing for human companionship, for the impossible Zion of sharing your mind—really sharing it, sacred heart's longing finding answer—with your brothers. Conservatism is the agonized cry for that lost city of G-d where your worldview is not at issue, never part from your fellow man in the knowledge that no amount of argument could bridge the impossible gulf between you—for the city where no man goes out into the world alone.

But all this is true of the progressive mindset, too, only with different aims, different anxieties. The loneliness is the same, and so is the echo-chamber comfort of ideological purity. Think of the repulsiveness of commentators on Jihad Watch with their frog-chorus of agreement: you want that impossible unison with such an agony of wanting that you turn to vicious extremity and the party line, to a deranged ideological monomania that drives all things out of mind. Or think of greenpeace protesters, or raw foodists, or any other fragment of our ruined civilization—fellowship at the cost of penury, inertness, grimace. (But not ruined, I have to remind myself: Always the same, always the old balance, always the same mess. This is the truth, but I don't believe it. Yet, I mutter like Galileo, it declines.)

For a moment in American history we were confronted with such an unimaginable evil that it was possible to form a broad cultural coalition—and of course people were ruined by it, Jews, homosexuals, the innocent idealists of the left who didn't know any better because they loved the Idea and as such sinned in ignorance. But you can't go back, at least not now: no amount of journalism will save it, much to our dismay; the dog won't hunt, brother.

Down into the yellow-peeling onionskin of the dregs of time.

No, at heart we curmudgeons and antiquarians and other misplaced dreamers are waiting for Saul to die in his sin and the coming coronation our David, that cultural climax more beautiful and impossible than Michelangelo could have imagined. We want to see a society, a president, a king after G-d's own heart, and yet at this point in history—this postmodern hysteria, perpetual, nerve-wracking, labyrinthine—we could never acclaim the David of our heart's hunger.

Because we can't stop thinking of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines—even Amalek.

And it drives us to derangement.

On preservation.

A few books on the Alhambra recently crossed my desk at the library and I had occasion to page though them for a few hours. My initial pleasure was short-lived, though--I was almost immediately struck by the emptiness of this structure. I mean, physical emptiness: not just cleared of tourists for the sake of the photo shoot, but the simple vacancy of the rooms. This sprawling palace complex, probably the most noble thing ever produced by an autocrat's wealth, is now populated only by the same mass-replicated curule chair. Even the gardens are empty: there aren't any myrtles in the Court of the Myrtles, the only thing left in the Court of the Lions is a solitary shrub; the garden complexes themselves are that unfortunate in-between state of unloveliness that seems to go hand-in-hand with historic preservation, neither left barren nor really cultivated--half ramshackle, half sterile.

Placeholders. That damn chair for the extinguished bustle of a cultural center, one piece of furniture standing in for all the beauty and squalor of inhabited space; boxhedges for myrtles, gardens filled with shrubs and halfhearted perennials, any plant will do because nothing will really do, will it? Meanwhile the golden glory stretches upward into arcaded filigree and yes, the walls are beautiful, yes, the palace is preserved in honey for us to wonder at--but this emptiness, this condition of being a vacant shell, it rankles at me.

Recently I was in Wales with my spouse and had occasion to tour Cardiff castle. Different sky, same story--the library was filled with bound bureaucratic transactions, "Aristotle" and "Bacon" painted in roundels over shelves stuffed with Transactions of the Cardiff Planning Commission. There was an open-air garden in one of the towers with a tiled basin in the middle; under the plastic-sheeted compluvium were three empty bronze flower pots and a dry fountain.

But why put real volumes in a library no one will use? Why endanger the architecture with a troop of gardeners and their watering cans? Why crowd the backpackers touring the Alhambra with roped-in pillows and ersatz orientalism? At least emptiness is honest, points you to the . See or shut your eyes, said reason peevishly.

There's no wrong here, no failure, just the same old unending futility of things.

Cf. "Childe Roland," XI; Kohelet 1 (As always, much nobler in the KJV).

A realization.

I have spent years feeling old around undergraduates. Tonight I realized with a shock: these are people utterly untouched by Greek or Hebrew civilization.

No perspective or proportion; no abstraction and no holy terror. And coupled with intelligence? There's nothing worse.