How We Got Here

November 15, 2017

I’ve been wrong.  Wrong about so many things.  Wrong in what I felt was important, wrong in how I thought about other people, wrong in ways I approached difficulties in my work and my life.  Eventually, however, truth would win.  Reason and rationality would take hold, and a more circumspect path would appear.  But walking such a path is difficult and lonely.  One must accept one’s own faults and failings; one must embrace the idea that learning does not stop with the final bell, and that the forward progression of humanity and its circumstances requires vigilant and critical pursuit of knowledge.  We once prided ourselves in this.  William F. Buckley was for decades recognized as our leading conservative intellectual, a relic long forgotten by those who wear our brand today, who presciently wrote, “Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.” 

We stopped seeking her some time ago.  Our intellectual elites are subject now to derision in a farcical quest for piety, purity, and loyal obedience.  We are thinkers no more.  We are willing to countenance brazen transgressions that once disqualified other nations and their leaders from sharing our stage, as our nation slides toward theocratic autocracy, and a slavish devotion to an odd freedom that demands uniformity.  Asimov observed that, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” 

It is not.

The pillars of achievement on which we place our abundant pride were not built on willful ignorance nor a version of truth confined solely to our notion of it.  We find ourselves in a state where our chosen color cannot be questioned.  We find ourselves in a state of warring tribes, one side versus another, many not even understanding why we fight.  We swap what were once policy disagreements for emotionally charged cultural resentments, in a bizarre emotional frenzy of old hatreds based upon perceived slights and advantages, fed to us by a constant media stream in which we ourselves are the product to be consumed, along with our resources and our votes.  Buckley considered those who stoked the flames of racism and resentment unworthy of the conservative moniker; he decried "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable” of which we witness so much in today’s discourse.  We find ourselves in a place where no moral bottom exists, where we will sooner rationalize behavior we once found without question beyond the pale, rather than admit one of our own might be unworthy.  The fortitude to seek and to question is the true source of strength.