Acton University, a Good Idea

When I traveled through Medicine Bow, Wyoming, I got to see the desk where Owen Wister wrote down some of his greatest ideas. I stayed in a hotel across the street from where he used to sit when he was writing up his masterpiece, a novel called The Virginian. In that book, he wrote:

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man. For by it we abolished the cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little men artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, “Let the best man win, whoever he is.” Let the best man win! That is America’s word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

Right now I’m studying under a professor who has studied under Alasdair MacIntyre, another man with great ideas. In his After Virtue, he distinguished two ways of dealing with people: We can treat others as ends in themselves, the way we ought to do, or we can treat them as means to our own ends. Treating people as means is a kind of manipulation; you have your end in mind, and you make use of whatever emotional, psychological or cultural powers you can find to cow people into falling in line with it (you know, like Obama’s presidential campaigns). Treating people as ends, on the other hand, consists in presenting reasoned arguments, appealing to “impersonal criteria,” and letting people decide for themselves whether they think your arguments are valid (the way we try to do here at the Intercollegiate Review).

There will always be lousy people in this world. But the genius of our democracy was to cut a little chunk out of the world where lousy “little” men couldn’t get much power to rule people as means to their own ends, and great men could only wield the power of influence, by appealing to “impersonal criteria.”

But now we’re living in a time when men with great ideas are ignored, and a lousy, small-minded, conventional, mediocre, academic bureaucrat and “blatant Marxist radical” has been elected into the “highest office of the land.” In the beginning it was not so, and I think now’s a good time to remember our beginnings. And I’ve discovered a way to do just that.

I was recently accepted to the Acton University. From June 18 to 21, a bunch of us will gather to discover just what makes true Americans tick, and what to do about the things that tick us off. The Acton University will offer courses on the Founding Fathers, and all the Christian, economic and philosophical ideas that got our country going, ideas that will keep us from disaster if we put them into practice once again. Just take a look at the course list and I’m sure you’ll be inspired to find out more. It’s a good idea.