A guy I knew in college once told me, as I struggled to make a point in a dorm lounge argument, that I had “the verbal acuity of shampoo.” The put-down was so devastating that it immediately ended discussion. I think of the line nearly every time I fumble for a word or write a bad sentence.
This was at the University of Chicago, which has a culture of argument. Some of the arguments are dead serious: In its commitment to free expression, the university has repeatedly stood up to inveigling plutocrats, investigating politicians, cancel culture commissars and encampment bullies. Some of them are not so serious. Every year since 1946, the university’s greatest scholars have debated the universe’s dumbest subject: whether latkes or hamantaschen are the better Jewish food. (Latkes, obviously.)
As undergraduates, we were conscripts in this culture. This wasn’t particularly political. I can remember witnessing only one tiny protest — against Douglas H. Ginsburg, the circuit court judge, of all people — in my four years at the college. But nearly every undergraduate could not avoid reading the classics of Western thought. Far from being a form of ideological indoctrination, it was an antidote to it.
What is the soul of the Western tradition? Argument. Socrates goes around Athens investigating the claims of the supposedly wise and finds that the people who claim to know things don’t. The Lord threatens to destroy Sodom for its alleged wickedness, but Abraham reproaches and bargains with Him — that for the sake of 10 righteous people He must not destroy the city.
In both traditions, Athens’s and Jerusalem’s, the lone dissenting voice is often the heroic one.
To read Western philosophy and literature was our chance to understand these dissents. Where did the anti-Federalists differ from the Federalists, or Locke from Hobbes, or Rousseau from them both? The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading. Reading Marx didn’t turn me into a Marxist. But it did give me an appreciation of the power of his prose.
I came to Chicago when Western civilization courses were falling out of fashion at other universities, as was the idea of a core curriculum, as was the idea that underlay the core: that there was a coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we had arrived at our governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.
In place of that idea, higher education in the United States has generally opted for a kind of consumer-driven relativism. Students are no longer treated as promising minds in need of becoming acquainted with a great tradition. Instead, they are viewed as credential-seeking customers, entitled to an à la carte education. If there is one overriding belief, it is that identity — racial, sexual, religious and so on — is an inviolable aspect of self that can negate any argument that seeks to question or discomfit it.
All this has happened in tandem with the digital transformations of this century, which have further pushed us into personalized bubbles of ideology and information. The effect of the new technologies has generally been terrible for our health, psychological as well as political. But I don’t think it would have been as bad if we hadn’t first given up on the idea of a culture of argument rooted in a common set of ideas.
Which brings me to Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, to my way of thinking, was not a real conservative, at least in the American sense. The point of our conservatism is to conserve a liberal political order — open, tolerant, limited and law-abiding. It’s not about creating a God-drenched regime centered on a cult of personality leader waging zero-sum political battles against other Americans viewed as immoral enemies.
As for Kirk’s style of argument, owning inarticulate liberal kids in mass audience settings for the sake of producing viral videos isn’t real engagement, much less education. Did Kirk ever lose an argument, at least in his own mind?
Still, Kirk was out there, making arguments, inviting discussion and taking brave risks. Like few others in his generation, he offered a sharp and defiant voice against the tut-tutting illiberalism of today’s campus progressives. Young men thrilled to his message, in part because they were tired of being told that their masculinity was toxic or that their race was guilty or that their civilization was evil. Without the excesses of the left, Kirk would never have become the phenomenon he was.
It’s too bad that Kirk, raised in a Chicago suburb, didn’t attend the University of Chicago. It wouldn’t have hurt getting thrashed in a political debate by smarter peers. Or learning to appreciate the power and moral weight of views he didn’t share. Or recognizing that the true Western tradition lies more in its skepticism than in its certitude.
But the larger tragedy by far is that it’s America itself that’s losing sight of all that. In the vacuum that follows, the gunshots ring out.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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