The Virus in the Faculty Lounge
Many of our strongest voices have decried a new tribalism. They call out those who spurn the emphasis on merit that has driven Western civilizational success and who choose identity in a victimized race or ethnicity as the criterion to drive promotion and empowerment.
Speaking in academic jargon understandable to few and of interest to even fewer, the thought that has prepared the ground for this change escaped broad notice for decades. “What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a Deconstructionist?” went the droll riddle. The answer: “An offer that you can’t understand.” It seemed even to the few in the mainstream of America who knew what deconstructionism was that it was an exotic flower fueled by the hot air of a few professors speaking only to each other — nothing to worry about.
But the faculty lounges and lecture halls turned out to be like the Wuhan lab. The mind virus that had been formulated in the English department was spliced onto New Left Marxist ideology and suddenly, the influenza of communism had turned into the COVID of intersectional wokeism. What was at first an arcane nihilistic approach to literary criticism metastasized into a political movement to deconstruct the whole of Western civilization.
The old Marxism could never overcome the empiricism that drove the free West. Melding medieval rationalism with a disciplined observation of the actual world we live in and with a cultural commitment to seek best practices from wherever they may be found, the West built an economy that has created more wealth and lifted more people from poverty than all of previous human history. Simultaneously, it embraced constitutional governments and political freedom, and the politics and economics formed an unbeatable organic synergy.
In place of that, Marxism offered a medieval system of a priori truths that brooked no dissent and sought no correction from a world that steadfastly refused to reward its true believers with the workers’ paradise its dogma promised. The system survived only because of its scientific development of political repression on an unparalleled scale. But even that failed. By the end of the ’80s, the whole system seemed to be on its last legs, having failed the test of history.
But the mind virus released from the English and politics departments turned things around. It did not try to do the impossible — it could not help Marxism make a better society than the free West. Instead, virus-like, it tried to undermine the West from within. Knowing that the biblical foundation of the West teaches that all human power must subject itself to moral guidance, the mutant Marxist strain has gotten past the system’s defenses by mimicking morality. But once inside the defenses, it turned into a toxic quasi-moralism that blinds the disease carrier to the historical evidence of the West’s centuries-long march of moral advancement. It does so by freezing history’s flow, preaching that all evident flaws are permanent and irredeemably damning. All it sees of American history is slavery, racism, and xenophobia. Therefore, it can only be cured by destroying it.
When a society is damned, then there is no need to look at its motion, at the development of lives, at the process by which individuals find out what works and learn to choose it. We are back in the Middle Ages once more, except this time, there is no deep religious belief in redemption, but only of endless quest for a penance that cannot be achieved, even after the required surrender of every benefit as an unearned and undeserved privilege.
The West has thrived on achievement, the result of applying empirical standards that point out where change for the good can be found. But the static truth of the dogma of Marxism 2.0 offers no way forward. Woke intersectionalism filters out as irrelevant everything except that which is immutable about us — our race, sex, and ethnicity. (That it has also embraced the trans belief that sex is mutable is a contradiction of the sort that the dialecticians of Marxism love to embrace as a sacramental mystery.)
The woke virus is now widespread, doing its best to break down Western civilization into a constant war of groups exclusively identified by inherited and unchangeable traits. It is this new cultural acceptance of this identitarianism that critics call a new tribalism.
The main line of our Western tradition teaches abstract ideas grounded in communities, in real people.
And by and large, the criticism is well-considered and powerful. To take a good example of such a critic, the remarkable Victor Davis Hanson (may he have a speedy and complete recovery!), his eloquent defense of the inductive method in thinking and of Western freedom in economics and politics is powerful and effective. When he lights into tribalists, he is always attacking those who devalue merit and substitute irrelevant considerations that have nothing to do with getting the best person to do the job or any similar practical achievement.
Therefore, best not to quibble with the word “tribalism.” But the natural connections of family and tribe do have a necessary role. When our Western civilization has been most successful, it has honored the role of the family. We have a recent example of civilizational failure in the catastrophic damage to the black family that resulted from the Great Society’s incentivizing unwed births. It is no secret that the left has always felt that government technocrats can run lives better without the messy old family in its way. Empiricism says otherwise, but when we are deducing from dogmatic premises, to embrace reality is to be a heretic.
The family is something that does not change. One does not choose one’s parents, and absent adoption or the willingness to mess around with the unborn, we do not get to choose our children either. This is part of our humanity. Much of life is not chosen. In religious terms, to go deeply, and in a way embraced by Washington and Lincoln, there is an active Providence in the world that is greater than we are. But in the tradition that comes from Jerusalem, that overarching Providence does not preclude freedom — it is freedom’s condition. By knowing and accepting what we cannot change, we are free to focus on what we can.
Biblical Providence embraces our freedom, at the very least, to turn away from evil and choose good and to embrace the possibility of redemption as the key to a good life.
Genesis shows us that we can think of a tribe in the best way — but it requires commitment and extended effort. A group of brothers — Jacob’s 12 sons who erred grievously and then redeemed themselves — find the way in which their own small identities form a subsidiary but absolutely essential part in a larger identity — that of the whole people. They would continue to play a role as a counterbalance to the overcentralizing tendencies of powerful monarchs. They also played a negative role which would on occasion reduce the the national union to chaos.
Many eloquent voices at America’s founding embraced the biblical model. One example is from former Harvard president Samuel Langdon, who campaigned from the pulpit for the Constitution’s adoption in the summer of 1788. In a sermon titled “The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States,” Langdon stated that “instead of the 12 tribes of Israel, we may substitute the thirteen States of the American union.” He said that the tribal governments in ancient Israel attended to their local affairs and maintained the peace much as the Constitution reserved the rights of the states to do under the delegated authority of the national government.
In the struggle in America today, though, the tribal is even more relevant. In an essay written more than three decades ago, Kentucky native Wendell Berry reflected on the ever-deepening divide in American life between those who seek a larger and more powerful government and those who seek with equal fervor the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness.
There seems to be no compromise between these two positions, each of which is passionately held by millions of Americans. But deeper thought and reflection on our own lived experience reveal a mediating reality.
Berry writes:
The indispensable form that can intervene between public and private interests is that of community. The concerns of public and private, republic and citizen, necessary as they are, are not adequate for the shaping of human life. Community alone, as principle and as fact, can raise the standards of local health (ecological, economic, social, and spiritual) without which the other two interests will destroy each other.
Community is rooted in place, in the affections of families and friends, things which technocrats devalue and mock. We can see, if we embrace the empirical outlook, just how true Berry’s last sentence here is. We hear day after day from those who set before us the horrific image of impending civil war to underscore the gravity of the conflicts dividing our civilization and our nation.
Berry’s argument rests on a truth we can all see. The beliefs in governmental primacy and of individual primacy are abstractions. Abstractions are powerful but they have significant shortcomings. Their power is attested to by their fervent advocates, many of whom are willing to go to war rather than compromise their allegiance to them. And where lies that strength, there lies weakness — the brittleness of people whose ideas that are not constantly submitted to the test of beneficial application in the real world. Stuck in abstractions cut loose from actual life, the ideologues refuse to imagine anything real or true beyond their limited grasp.
The main line of our Western tradition teaches abstract ideas grounded in communities, in real people. Real people in real life know they need both firm principles and the test of those principles in the wondrous real world. If we have the humility to accept the test of reality, we can have confidence that our principles are not merely an intoxicated brew distilled from our own ego.
Nature requires our acceptance and our respect. That respect is meant to carry over into our ideas and principles, keeping us from turning into messianic tyrants. Our genetics, our kin, are given to us as gifts. Without them, all our great structures of government and society topple and fall. But ideas and principles that respect and honor their divine origin in the families and natural associations of people bound together by land and history can bring us to a new order of the ages, as our Founders put it — age-old and ever new.
Both the immovable given in our lives and freedom are gifts of God. The tribe and the nation as a whole each have their place in the integrated whole — a nation under God. Our triumph, our redemption, requires we embrace both, with heartfelt gratitude to their Giver.
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