A Dignified Retreat

Shortly after IR’s launch at the start of this month, a friend graciously reposted via Facebook my article about Yale’s Sex Week, commenting on the heartening phenomenon of “students fighting to take back Yale.” While flattered by the accolade, I couldn’t help wondering: Is that the goal? Sure, I would love to see Yale (and American academia generally) revert to being a bulwark of civilization rather than the bastion of perpetual subversion that it presently is. On the other hand, can this be anything more than a quixotic dream?

Conservatives, in my opinion, should recognize substantial battlefields of the culture wars as lost. I am reminded of another friend’s prestigious Manhattan high school, where 90% of the students identified as liberal and socialists outnumbered conservatives among the remaining tenth. The typical American college, especially if it is one numbered among the “elite,” is not so much different, except that the damage has gone far beyond mere political imbalance and become a thoroughgoing cultural unhingement. There simply is no healing the profound academic, social, and aesthetic rot that has set in at the heart of the academy. This is not because conservatives aren’t trying hard enough or aren’t marshaling arguments compelling enough. It is rather because of the overwhelming inertia of culture. As conservatives know, or ought to know, cultures are not merely regional clusters of autonomous, free-thinking, and rational individuals. They are, instead, ongoing processes of moral inculcation and soul-shaping whose effects–for good or bad–can hardly be overstated.

The average student at an American college or university has had his mind so profoundly shaped by the assumptions of contemporary liberalism that his conversion to an alternative mode of thinking is improbable at best, unthinkable at worst; and the matter is aggravated by the campus culture’s typically uncompromising allegiance to a form of hegemonic liberalism more radical than but logically contiguous to his own. If the prospects for individual conversion are so dire, then how much more chimerical must be the hope of effecting a cultural transformation?

Of course, none of this means that quietism is the only defensible course of action. It does mean that one should be realistic in assessing the prudence of resistance and in estimating its likely effects. Conservatives should indeed bear witness to the truths of the permanent things in the midst of those intoxicated by modern fads, but they should not expect anything more than perhaps to plant the invisible seeds of truth in an individual soul here or there. Nor (and this is important) should they underestimate the real demoralization that comes from constantly kicking against the pricks. It is a rather low proportion of people, even among conservatives, who relish perpetual conflict; most of us need the support of a robust culture, characterized by shared values and ideals, in order to keep ourselves existentially afloat. The priority, then, should not be storming the bastions of liberalism so much as buttressing such relatively conservative cultures as do exist in those overlooked parts of America whose way of life is lost in the din of our overloud metropoleis.

A quixotic offensive is often more alluring than the hard, diligent work of retrenching and fortification. But it is the latter task that offers a surer hope for keeping the true, the beautiful, and the good alive. Not infrequently does the virtue of prudence call for a dignified retreat.