Conservatives aren’t cookie cutters
In Nashville, Tennessee, at the beginning of February, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute was again defying convention. With cold Northern winds whistling around the Corinthian columns of the Tennessee state capitol, hardly a block from the historic Hermitage Hotel where we lodged, fourteen of us undergraduates were busily engaged in debunking a common contemporary myth.
Which myth, you ask? The one that says conservative undergraduates think like cookie cutters that have never quite made it out of the dollar store gift box.
Organizations like ISI and Liberty Fund, Inc., host a number of undergraduate colloquia every year to provide conservative undergraduates the opportunity to engage provocative texts and one another over issues related to the Western ideal of ordered liberty. ISI gleans the participants from honors programs and faculty recommendations, sends them to historic hotels in the culturally rich centers of the US, and listens as they not only step outside the box but analyze what it is made of.
At the colloquium in Tennessee, the box-defying issue was Western civilization itself. The first item on our agenda was to decide exactly what that meant.
Our readings on the topic were as diverse as Jared Diamond, Carroll Quigley, and Christopher Dawson. Our backgrounds were as various as St. John’s College and the University of Texas. Our sessions took up a total of nine hours over two days as we discussed the roles of religion, technology, inventiveness, receptivity, philosophy, globalization, and the arts in shaping a civilization.
Some of the questions with which we wrestled were intensely practical. Should we measure the success of the West by its standard of living, or rather, by how Westerners spend their leisure time? Is a poor civilization that produces beautiful music superior to a powerful civilization that produces airplanes and guns? And just what is a civilization in the first place?
Some questions were of particular interest to those of us who were theists. Is Western civilization defined by Christianity? Can the West survive widespread secularism? We discussed at length the possibilities of an integration with the Muslim world. Some thought an influx of Islam would weaken the West qua the West. Others thought it might rejuvenate the West and instigate a new flowering of creativity and promise.
We never agreed exactly upon the solutions to such problems. Those among us with majors in economics or the sciences tended to favor an economic and technological evaluation of civilizations. Those of us majoring in the humanities tended to evaluate civilizations by their philosophy, religion, and art.
We all noticed that the economic and humanistic criteria do not always coincide.
On the second day of the colloquia, we asked ourselves when “Western civilization” may have reached its zenith. Was it during the Middle Ages, under the flourishing of scholasticism (which had resulted from contact with Arab Muslims)? Or was it the Baroque era, when the West lavished its capital on churches and the arts as if to symbolize its preoccupation with the “higher faculties” of man?
We debated whether we are still awaiting the zenith of the West as one of the participants in a globalized economy of free markets. We also debated whether the West’s slow loss of religion weakens its moral fiber, and whether it might crumble from the inside at the onset of hyper-religious enemies.
The complexity of the issues at hand, of course, did not prevent us from enjoying the city of Nashville and its own participation in Western history and civilization. A small group of us walked to Vanderbilt University, former stronghold of the Southern Agrarian movement and home to John Crowe Ransom, proponent of the New Criticism. It was here that Ransom and the Southern Agrarians turned the young liberal Richard Weaver into the deeply reflective conservative who authored such classics as Ideas Have Consequences and Visions of Order.
Near the Vanderbilt campus, Centennial Park boasts a replica of the Pantheon. Across town, the Doric and Corinthian columns of the capitol building cast their long shadows across a memorial square commemorating the world wars and Vietnam.
Beside the capitol stands the state’s court building, likewise supported by Corinthian columns, in silent witness of the Federalist separation of powers. Near the capitol stands a statue of President Andrew Johnson, in appearance more reminiscent of Edmund Burke than Caesar Augustus.
During our closing session on Feb. 11, someone suggested that we in the United States are the product not of one but of five different ways of living. From the Greeks and the Romans we inherit philosophy and art; from the Germanic tribes we derive our law, diet, and dress; from the Jews and the Christians, we imbibe our religion and morality; and from the harmonious combination of all five, we receive our unique government and cultural vision of reality.
“When all five of these elements are flourishing,” someone suggested, “we can say that our civilization is nearing its ideal. But when one of these five fails of its full potential, doesn’t the civilization as a whole fail and begin to decline?”
“What about other religions?” interrupted a Classics major. “Is there room for Islam?”
On Sunday, Feb.12, as a blizzard was raging around the Victorian gables and colonial balconies of New England, the fourteen of us said our good-byes and dispersed to our separate niches in what we all agreed was a great, diverse, and declining West.