Well, first off, let me endorse especially the concluding paragraph of Pete’s fine advice to Cruz below, which, of course, he’s highly unlikely to take. Bernie Sanders, at this point, really does sound more like Reagan than Cruz does.
And please come hear me speak at the University of Dallas tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. Here’s something I might say:
One reason we need higher education today is that we live in a very untraditional time. That is both good and bad. In a certain way, we are all displaced persons. But every Christian knows that the experience of displacement is part of the truth about who we are. Before we can be at home with our homelessness, we have to know that it is not our true place in this life to be completely at home. Sure our techno-liberation has made us more displaced than we need be, but it would be just as bad, in a different way, to have too strong a sense of place, to be too much at home.
Because we live in a very untraditional time, we can not help, as Mark Henrie explains, but experience nostalgia for this or that more traditional or less displaced point in the past. Higher education should discipline our nostalgia by informing it or making it intelligently selective. When we long for the classical polis or the medieval village or the heroic liberalism of our Founders or a secure place on Wendell Berry’s farm or to be Southern ladies and gentlemen irascible enough to be easily provoked to secede or the period before entitlements had produced degrading dependency or the strong family values of the 1950s, we do not long for everything about the way of life we imagine, with some evidence, existed at that point in history. We do not to want to go back to Athenian or Southern slavery or the unrelenting drudgery that was much of the subsistence farming of the past or the degrading civil theology and lack of privacy of the polis or the disfranchisement of women or ancient and medieval dentistry.
To be a conservative, actually to be anyone who lives in our times, it is impossible not have longings based on the experience of being deprived, just as it is equally impossible not to acknowledge that these are not exactly the worst of times in every respect. We do not even really live after virtue. We see virtue all around us if we just look, and in some ways virtue is more needed than ever. People are still privileged, and they are still often admirably responsible.
Nobody really believes that these are simply either the best or the worst of times. When we watch the fascinating but condescending show Mad Men, we have to admit that privileged people not so long who irresponsibly smoked and drank martinis and never exercised were crazy, and the ways they treated women and blacks and gays was cruelly unjust. Thank God or History we’re not like them! But then we also notice they were pretty classy, not as fearfully risk-adverse as we are, knew how to dress, knew enough about language and culture to be surprisingly creative, had loads of fun (even or especially at work), and could loosen up enough to have unprotected sex and so a decent number of children. We really should be more like them.
The only way we can really come to know who we are is to encounter various ways of life that have shaped life today as displayed in great books — in real books (and, okay, in very recent times real films). If you do not read the books for yourself, you will not really know what the alternatives are, alternatives that in almost every case remain alive or somewhat alive today.
Let me just mention nine of those possibilities. These possibilities are not simply possibilities, because each of them really does express part of who each of us is. So they are not, as sociologists say, roles we play but real features of who we can not help or almost can not help but be.
Here is the list, which is not meant to be complete: Each of us is, in part, a devoted and loyal citizen (a Spartan); a free mind (a Socrates); a moral and rational person secure in his or her place (a Stoic); a free being who works (a member of the American middle class — or bourgeois in the good sense); a restlessly autonomous being (a feminist or a technophile); a social, familial animal (the animal described by neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychology); a friend; displaced or wandering; as well as a free and relational — meaning loving and charitable — person (a Jew or Christian).
This is not the place to explore all those possibilities. But maybe a beginning of the reform of liberal education could at least have them in mind. Only if higher education intentionally connects human privileges with human responsibilities can it reasonably hope to justify what it costs in time and treasure in our techno-enthusiastic era disciplined in so many ways by the dynamic realities of the 21st-century global competitive marketplace.
The point of higher education is to explore these possibilities as they exist in the texts of our tradition and in ourselves. The truth is, thank God, not all possibilities are open to us. If they were, life would be hell, because we would be stuck with no guidance at all about what to do even this afternoon. We see that hell displayed in the philosophic film Groundhog Day. We also know that the future paradise described by Karl Marx in one way and the transhumanists in another is the same kind of hell. The world in which we will perfectly unobsessively be able to do what we please whenever we please, where we are totally free from natural necessities and relational love, would reduce each of us to either a kind of anxious paralysis or a kind of mind-numbing total immersion in diversions. In either case, freedom would be the degrading freedom from the dignity and joy of being defined by both privileges and responsibilities.