Education in the Ruins

“It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western Civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flower-pot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there one was something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thoughts to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.” -Whittaker Chambers, Witness

What does it mean to be a conservative and an undergraduate at one of America’s venerated institutions of higher education? It means, in my experience, to be in many ways like the disillusioned Dr. More in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins: an anachronism, subject to fits of apocalyptic hysteria, torn between the varied pleasures and social expectations of a little world isolated in large part from the perspectives and exigencies existing beyond its borders –– in the case of my Yankee institution persisting in the heart of the South, this isolation is all the more remarkable.

How then does one remain grounded and sane in the midst of it all? The only good way, I think, is to realize that one has obligations that extend far beyond grade point averages and student organizations. As fellow IR columnistAmanda Achtman intimates, one’s conservatism is a tendency, a disposition, and this disposition (being, in my opinion, a manner of blessing) entails certain responsibilities.

The conservative must not just be a creature of sentiment, he must also be an active agent of conservation; he must conserve, and that habit of action and memory must begin as early as possible. One may think Whittaker Chambers overly dramatic or pessimistic, but he had intimate knowledge of what life would be like after the death of Christian civilization: a thing much more real and horrible than even Orwell’s vision. Someone must remember how to read Homer without Freud, Henry James without Lacan, T. S. Eliot without Zizek. The conservative must grab hold of these relics against the day when, like Bradbury’s Granger, the time comes for him to come out of the forrest and rebuild the city with memory.