Yesterday marked William F. Buckley, Jr.’s centennial. We should celebrate the anniversary because many owe him a debt of gratitude—Buckley was far the most politically influential conservative from the mid-century onward. Such anniversaries offer us a much-needed opportunity to recur to origins.
We should look back to Buckley for two reasons. First, he founded National Review, one of the few important publications of the conservative movement. We should be thinking about foundations at this moment, so that we learn to see opportunities where the consensus holds there is only a cultural wasteland.
Second, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book started the public attack on elite liberal relativism that has marked conservative intellectuals to this day. In his debut, Buckley presaged the moral and intellectual collapse of academia in the late ‘60s and many of the arguments associated with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind.
But Buckley was more practical than Bloom. In God and Man, he called for a political attack on academia similar to that now mounted by the Trump administration and other Republican executives. Those who advocate today, as I do, that state university systems should be governed by state legislatures, can refer directly to back to Buckley. As a man of action, youthful, impetuous, Buckley is apt to remind us that young men and their longing for nobility are not going to be satisfied by a soft “value pluralism”.
One more remark before I turn to the major questions in Buckley’s attack on the mid-century university. In his preface to the 25rh anniversary reissue, he comments on the often hysterical denunciations to which he opened himself by writing as honestly as he did. None of Yale’s defenders against Buckley had any idea what was coming. The respectable, the applauded, the authoritative figures of academia, from professors to university presidents, were blind. That’s perhaps the most sobering thought called forth by Buckley’s story.
Buckley’s analysis of the university focuses on religion, academic freedom, and economics. Religion, he claims and tries to document, is largely absent from an institution that maintained piety as a pious lie. The modern university is inherently inimical to religion. It is obvious to everyone nowadays, it was obvious to more serious or sensitive people in Buckley’s day, it was obvious only to the more discerning in Whittaker Chambers’ time at Columbia in the ’20s. But even for unbelievers, the catastrophic consequence of the dishonest, not particularly thoughtful abandonment of religion is the abandonment of any way to think about soul, hence about the problem of educating students.
But whereas direct attacks on religion, according to Buckley, were not frequent, attacks on market economics were systematic. Indeed, they formed the explicit teachings in the economics manuals used to train and indoctrinate the American elite. In short, the elite education of the post-WWII era, the moment of American worldwide triumph, attempted to repeal most of the principles on which America was founded. As Buckley points out, the policies proposed or demanded by Yale professors—central planning of the economy, confiscatory taxation, indeed the abolition of wealthy families through death taxes—would also be the end of elite universities. Crass as well as enlightened self-interest, one might think, would have prevented such madness. Yet, according to Buckley, it was triumphant:
“For where public criticism is vocal and intense, it is because the minority has offended the majority. Even discounting the disproportionate addiction of the collectivists to propagandize their doctrines at every opportunity, I am forced to conclude from my experience with the Yale Daily News through several years, and from other evidence also, that at least at this college level, the great transformation has actually taken place. The conservatives, as a minority, are the new radicals. The evidence is overwhelming.”
We must look with some interest, therefore, on the professors that Buckley confronted. Having abandoned responsibility for the souls of the young, educators advanced a claim on the property and institutions of the whole country. Both as experts in economics, where they admit no disagreement, and as aspiring demagogues, where they pretend to unique ability to decide popular opinion, these underpaid figures whom the country generously ignored, were burning with ideological passion. Communism, in seemed, was more tolerable than Friedrich Hayek.
Mostly, Buckley argued, this madness was concealed behind the claim of “academic freedom”. He distinguishes, sensibly enough, between teaching and research. The former should be reasonable and moral, not an opportunity to propagandize a captive audience. Only the latter can be free. After all, the modern university is all about research, producing new knowledge. That can be done nowhere else, so research is free in the sense of being self-regulated.
For my part, I’m still doubtful that this is reasonable. Look around and see whether there are any great scientists and much knowledge produced by people who have talked this way for generations. But even if it were reasonable, it’s not obvious that what applies to chemistry will also apply to politics. Nor, on the other hand, is it clear what qualities are needed to teach in the humanities or social sciences.
I’ll take my favorite example: Shakespeare. What qualifies someone to teach Shakespeare? Familiarity with the English language and the plays and poems are required, but cannot be said to suffice. Good taste would also be necessary. But without knowledge of history and geography, of political regimes and the fundamental human problems, how could one speak intelligently about Julius Caesar or King Lear? If one were to discuss the Civil War, a similar problem would recur, perhaps made more difficult by the absence of agreement on a great author who might guide the study. In short, academic authority is very hard to establish outside of the theoretical and applied sciences.
Buckley largely avoids these fundamental questions. He cautiously takes for granted the popular opinions of his youth. A hundred years later, that consensus no longer obtains. Buckley focuses his attack on the deceptions perpetrated by these very authorities, who hide behind “academic freedom” to avoid responsibility to students and alumni, not to say to the whole country. Today, they’re no longer hiding.
But don’t professors have a claim to authority? If education is good and the highest education belongs to the academics, aren’t they to be obeyed? Shouldn’t they rule without consent, i.e. without paying attention to the disagreement of the unreasonable? To address those questions, we need to look beyond God and Man at Yale. They are the matter of Plato’s Republic, which seriously considers whether philosophers are entitled to rule.
I think Buckley did not take seriously this hard core of the soft relativism he decried. He’s reluctant to attack the political claims of the university, perhaps because he is worried his audience wouldn’t agree with him with sufficient consensus and conviction to carry the day. If Progress ends up with the Yale of his day, never mind the Ivy League of ours, then surely it is self-refuting. Dangerous thoughts follow from that possibility, however.
Since Buckley, many other young men have become indignant at the obvious indignity of higher education. But they were neither gentlemen nor pious Christians like he was. Without those restraints, radicalism tended to yield an uneasy mix of violence and hedonism. Academics who had long had contempt for external political and moral authority proved unwise and unmanly, unable to do anything but join the madness. Soft relativism again gave way to something harder, more barbaric. We live with the consequences of that transformation.
Buckley’s reaction to the collapse of Progress was to found NR, that is, to attempt an alliance between the monied, like his family, the learned or talented, including many of the magazine’s contributors, and the intelligent middle-class Americans whose votes and character could save America from takeover by an ideological America. He knew that this was a rearguard action. A losing battle, but not a lost battle, much less a lost cause. Perhaps we would best honor Buckley by picking up where he left off and winning the battle he so nobly engaged as a young man and so steadfastly waged throughout a long, distinguished career.
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