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.

How small a thought.

I've been reading a lot of Auden lately. His "Epigoni" runs through my mind as I drive between my university and DC; it treats the late Latin scholars on the eve of systemic collapse, their cultural diversions, their anxiety at the end of empire in the West. He speaks to my condition as an academic and the fragility too near to my vocation to be relinquished or ignore:

No point pretending
One didn't foresee the probable ending (10)
As dog-food, or landless, submerged, a slave;
Meanwhile, how should a cultured gentleman behave?

It's my dilemma, the dangerous poles of my life, the mandarin and the political animal--how should I behave? How can I? It's an impossible dichotomy. My life is divided between UVA and the capital, the classics and realpolitik, between a fading discipline and a power in decline. This tension, this double consciousness, has defined my self-concept and my anxiety throughout my adult life. Do I become a cultural conservative--that loud and bloody-minded creature--and lose my culture? Or do I live in mandarin quietism, tending Auden's garden of rhopalics and anacyclic acrostics, and plead nolo condendere as the republic degrades into something huge, shapeless and vile? Is it possible to be both cultivated and politically relevant?

My disposition is modernist; that feeling of hopeless fragmentation and irrecoverable loss probably prefigures my tastes rather than proceeds from them. I'm not even convinced that cultural relevance is still possible, not anymore, not in the postmodern period--but maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the treason of the clerisy can be mitigated, and maybe--in part--by me. Tyrtaeus writes that a man is unwelcome in his poems if he has every excellence except a fighting spirit; I understand this. I talk about uncertainty, but at the end of history I can't accept the hard alternative, can't concede the city of G-d in the name of graceful quietism. The answer is neither Roger Kimball nor the glass bead game: whatever my acceptance is worth, I accepted a moral stake in that answer when I entered the academy.

We came in our benched ships, carrying English common law and the humanists' genius for the misuse of classical antiquity; we spun wildly off course as our intellectuals turned the 20th century into an abattoir. Now, at the end of the postmodern period, we've run aground on the edge of a dark continent and have bought an oxhide with the murdered Jews of Europe. So monoculture is over; that was the cost of the Shoah, of empire, of the European civil war 1914-1989. So we--if that "we" means anything, now--we who loved liberty as an abstract and now must enact it in the marketplace of ideas, first as practice and only then as virtue ethics, we who have inherited the barbarous efficiency of Rome and self-immolating democracy of Athens, the mixed constitution of the American polity and the terrible abstract G-d of the second temple (Ark absent, kodesh haKodashim blown open, and Titus on his column)--we, whatever we are, whatever I am, are a faction, a small faction among many others, in possession of an oxhide on which to found a city. Well, the Carthaginian trick is old. We have knives unrusted in our keeping. I'm here to cut a strip of my own, if able.

I like using the byrsa as a metaphor because I think the project of liberalism in the 21st century will be one of roping-around and roping-in, a process of coalition-building in a disintegrated culture. I come from a double background, Classics and English literature: I'm a hybrid, not really a reception-studies classicist and not really a philological critic, either--so my sympathies are ecumenical. The humanities need a course-correction from economics and history; classically liberal policy, and policymakers, will be better able to achieve their goals in partnership with the legitimating voice of literary humanism.

The contemporary Republican party is a frustrating example of economic liberalism become illiberal and neurotic in separation from humanist convictions, its other systemic flaws and irrationalities only irritated by populism and the religious right; meanwhile, huge swaths of the academy fester in its long-standing romance with philosopher-kingship, casting a schizophrenic eye over the 20th century as they radicalize in toxic secession. I study classics in order to rope-in the modernism I love, to retie the frayed cords of continuity in the western literary tradition and claim it, or reclaim it, and in so doing reclaim them both; I do that because I love it, and because I believe that a free society begins in the republic of letters as much as in equal laws. Isonomia begins in the constitution--eunomia, the contemplative soul.

.שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.