Archives for June 2020

What to the Woke is the Fourth of July?

But another day, merely. Like that by which it was preceded, and that to which, with the setting of the sun, it too shall yield, the Fourth of July is just another twenty-four stretch of hours, a duration of time of which, in the sad history of this cruel and unjust land, each year absent a revolution has so intolerable an amount. For the impatient radical, indeed, the only kind of radical, whose uniquely restless character has no opposite type, such days can be interminable, such holidays a bore.

If the Fourth fails to arouse in the soul of the Woke the burning heat of his disdain, if it fails to bring to a boil the simmering bubbles of his agitation and vent, if, rather, it succeeds in evading the acuity of his tireless detection and his fervid pursuit, it might be neglected, it might be ignored, as though it were just any other day. It is meaningless, to this comrade of the Woke. He sees it not as a day to which any special import might be affixed, a day of which, as a ungrateful son or daughter of this land, he might, in some alternative world, be dutifully conscious. He sees it as nothing, or worse than nothing, if, upon its arrival, he sees it at all.  

In some regard, detached from the founding mythology of which this particular day is symbolic, cast aside from the vital tradition or our birth of which it’s a reminder, I suppose it is but merely a day. As a day, that hour at whose arrival we declared our independence from the Empire of Britain and its Hanoverian king, that moment, as a nation, when we dared to free ourselves from that haughty reign under which, for centuries, we complacently toiled and suffered, is hardly distinguishable from the three-hundred and sixty-five others of which it’s a mean and contemptible copy, a calendar of a nation’s past and passing hours amongst which, with little left to redeem its fleeting significance, it quietly sits and rests. It is, I might say, a nihilistic approach to time, an unstructured blot of an ever-present now around which there’s little meaning.

Yet, unlike those above, many in the camp of the Woke won’t fail to perceive this day, and the invidious feelings of which, through the duration of these many years, it’s still sharply provocative. It’s a day over whose remembrance artificial blood is still drawn, about which bruises are still felt, a day forever puncturing the gossamer hide of the progressive spirit. Most of this camp’s devout and preening members, a group by whose political sapience and braying verve we gentle-spoken, simple-hearted people can’t help but be somewhat scandalized, agree that the Fourth of July is to be condemned. It is to be anathematized and rejected in the swell of the religious fervor of the woke-man’s wrath.

Doubtless, as every Woke congregant in this newfangled diocese of decorum will agree, the Fourth is not a day about whose summer advent we normal, slightly-conservative or moderately-liberal Americans ought to be even remotely jubilant. We must suppress our glee, stifle our cheer, incogitant and selfish souls that we are. We are apostates, having failed to baptize ourselves in the suffocating knowledge of the Woke. Not of droplets, this is s a baptism of complete immersion. Outside the walls of this socialist, secular church, unaware of the liturgical calendar by which the left counts its days, we don’t know that this is not a day to which, with the singing of our anthems, the visiting of our veterans, and the waving of our victory-laden, star-spangled flags, our frenzied veneration ought not to be extended. In fact, much diminished should be its esteem, and much greater the degradation to which we should all contribute a bludgeoning hand.

In the raging mind of the Woke, assuming—with the guiding hand of evolution’s soft touch—the intricacy of such neuronal circuitry actually exists (a notion of which, after viewing its arrant hypocrisy and listening to the vacuity of its public decrees, nothing less than a thorough MRI scan of the brain would be fully confirmative), the Fourth of July is not a day to which that exalted prefix of “holy” ought to be attached. So far as the leftist legions of the Woke are concerned, and concerned they most vociferously are, the Fourth of July should be stripped of that mighty epithet, that venerable title, to which, in their opinion, it has no further claim. There is, in their exasperated yet, so far as I can tell, feverishly misguided opinion, nothing at all “holy” about the Fourth of July. (Indeed, in the opinion of this Marxist and, by extension, anti-religious group, there’s very little in this world or, for that matter, that by which this one might be followed, that could be deemed “holy” at all. Perhaps, then, it’s no grave affront to strip the Fourth of this lofty designation?)

It is, in their opinion, a day to be desanctified and brought low, shorn of the numinous merit before which, for far too long, we ignorant and racist Americans have humbled ourselves and bowed. It is undeserving of our annual observation and the cheerful respect with which, come the first week of July, we’ve always happily received it. It is a day, like a sin, of which we should be purged.

To the Woke, its abolition—like that of the police forces for which, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and others, they have nothing but reproach—would be a preferable treatment of this once holy, now evil day. It should be repudiated, re-written, if not forgotten wholesale. Infrequently, it might find its way into classroom instruction. Having long ago secured its grip on public education and the curricula to which its submissive, this is an inconvenience for which it’ll be fully prepared. When done so, it should be taught only in relation to America’s moral captivity to its systems of racial bias, genocide, and ethnic abuse. It’ll be used as further proof of America’s horrid cupidity, a desire for wealth atop which its Founders’ specious cries for independence and “self-evident” truths were conveniently draped. It should be considered with opprobrium, never approbation, and the students will be immunized to any distasteful version of the truth.

If the Woke gets its way, and, based on the list of its recent achievements, it should have no expectation that it would not, the Fourth of July must announce itself with the help of an asterisk, as if to question its very own legitimacy, of which, as previously stated, it clearly has none. It mustn’t attempt, on its own, to escape from the context in which, if one’s properly to become “educated” in the Democratic way, it must be placed. It should be found in the margins, never in the body of the text. That precious and copious space in which our national origin story is to be re-written, that tabula rasa of revolutionary ideals, is reserved for the scribblings of our specious new “1619” project. That, as opposed to fact, is the new, genuine “history” of the bien pensant. It’s the world according to the Woke with which, if we’re to preserve our social standing, we mustn’t dispute. The Founding as we know it, and the Fourth of which that totality of events is emblematic, should be abandoned in favor of a richer narrative with which the Woke’s half-baked historical fantasies better concur.

And so, I ask again: What to the Woke is the Fourth of July? A day, merely, though certainly not one to which the epithet of “holy” ought to be affixed. The day is rather demonic than democratic, evil than deserving of exaltation. It is abhorrent, not American, and we ought not to bother ourselves with its annual Julian celebration. We ought to think, instead, about our “original sin”, of whose originality we were but the most recent inheritors. Listen, and this mob of moral outrage and superficial virtue will tell you so. Listen, and it’ll shake the stolid resilience of your once indomitable national pride. Listen, and hear the fireworks of Independence Day dissipate in the wind.

“Let these statues stand”.

Weighty and lapidary, simple and direct, it’s infrequent at this hour to find in our language four words of commensurate strength, of equal concision, by which the dizzied passions of our mind, the blind reactions of our soul, are to be arrested. In most other circumstances, when thin rather than substantial words touch the gentle opening of our ear, when other phrases innocent of depth and shorn of meaning are bandied about, we’re easily able to resist the impact of their force. They haven’t the potency of eloquence, the brevity of wit, in whose presence we feel our minds quiver, our bodies go limp.

Yet, on occasion, a string of four words, such as “Let these statues stand”, such as “Let my people go”, when exclaimed with authority at a moment such as this, succeeds not only in slowing, but in completely arresting us in our tracks. These are declarations announced with resolution and with force. These are the words on which movements and epochs hinge. Peremptorily, such words halt us in the blind thrust of our furor, in the whirling haymakers of our conceit. They help us in the recovery of our shared path, a unified road from which, because of our misguided rage, we’ve inattentively strayed.

Unfortunately, however, this recovery isn’t always so long lasting. It returns us to ourselves, to the nation and the people by whom it’s made, to the diverse and happy neighbors whom we so love, and who love us back, for but a short period of time. Just as quickly, it’s gone. It tempts us before leaving us, in the process throwing us into the fresh onset of a renewed, and preferably conspicuous epileptic fit (what good, after all, is a malady of conscience if not filmed and broadcast for the viewing world to see?). We are, alas, bereft of our intelligence and crazed once again. We are, to borrow from Dante, the first words with which his great poem begins, left once again in a “dark wood, wherein the straight road no longer lay”. He, thankfully, retrieved it with the unperturbed help of Virgil. We have no such leader beside whom we can walk.   

For the past few weeks, though really, if we’re counting, for the tumultuous recent decades by which this present hour has been preceded, we’ve busied ourselves with upheaval, irrationality, and—to use a borrowed but deliciously appropriate term—bouleversement. Decadent and idle, victimized and aggrieved, we’ve become a people inflamed by the heat of our angry and smoldering thoughts. We’ve become bound to a burning spirit to which the cool breeze of reason, that gentle zephyr of equanimity and thought, is unsusceptible. We are the self-immolators, the pyromaniacs, the Promethean malcontents to whom that hottest of elements has been given with neither instruction nor restraint. Thus endowed, we’ve used it to set on fire the house we call home, the nation in which we live. We’ve substituted for our reason—that gift by which, not so long ago, we were distinguished from the lowly station of the beasts—our emotion. The former has become a forgotten vestige that once, albeit very long ago, likened us to god; the latter, a dangerous and flammable spark over which we haven’t the slightest control.

It is, in some ways, the climax of a movement whose strength has accrued through the years. It’s originally slow, now swift crescendo has brought us to this point of ultimate conflagration and distress. The radicals by whom, for one too many a complacent semester, we were entertained in the academy and the abstract, are now playing out their philosophy with relish in the field. They’ve made the great leap from orthodoxy to orthopraxy, from thought to act, and are demonstrating with glee the horrible consequences of their nimble feat. Their current commitment to the toppling of statues, the arrant iconoclasm to which, with neither discrimination nor tact, they’ve savagely devoted themselves, is all the necessary proof of this.

The plague of COVID-19, it seems, has lapsed; no health official, with all his prevarications and data-driven graphs, would have me otherwise convinced. Throughout these long and hard months, a time during which the crude statistics and basic science have often been ignored, his authority has been vitiated, his esteem weakened in the public eye. What we see before us, now, is the disease of Philistinism, a plague most assuredly on the rise. Along with that plague, to which the depraved mind, as opposed to the enfeebled body, is always prone to succumb, are the following ailments: nihilism, racism, post-modernism, and Marxism. The first is no worse than the last, each being nearly equally as bad. And it’s with vigor and with malice that they’ve arrived. The lot of them is here, pervasive, and menacingly real.

How, you might ask, will they journey from one place to the next? Is not the robust frame of America immune to the indecency of their assaults? Is not America’s heart and constitution equipped to combat the ideological fury of their punch? Is not her fortitude the envy of the civilized world, an audience before whom, with feet planted on this stage of Earth, she assertively stands and struts? Is hers not a continent of pachydermatic skin, a land draped in a hide through which no pseudo-philosophy has yet penetrated with any sense of ease? Are not her citizens the strongest and sturdiest of them all, a people too holy to be made—without any hope of redemption—to feel as though they live interminably in sin?

I’m no longer so confident that they are, but those very same radicals of whom I made prior note, that group intent on the complete destruction and remaking of this once noble land, will be the inebriated, gratuitous vectors by whom those nasty ideas are spread. They’ll be the ones (with no small help from the venality of our governing class) by whom our country is to be threatened, imperiled, and possibly killed.

And so, I repeat, “Let these statues stand”.

These were the four words of the great political idealist, the intrepid Italian nationalist, and the staunch democratic crusader, Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini, like his contemporary Giuseppe Garibaldi—himself a dauntless international hero with whom, for many years, Mazzini so valiantly worked—is a person unbound by history, a towering figure who stands above the pages of time. He, perhaps more than any other statesman, king, or pope (three titles between which, for a long stretch of time in that region of the world, no thanks to the spurious Donation of Constantine, little differentiation existed) set in motion the process of the unification of Italy, the binding of that fragmented state for which, to this day, a proud, happy, and cohesive people remain sincerely grateful.

Yet for all his commitment to progress and his liberal pursuit, for all his revolutionary democratic zeal, he was, like Edmund Burke, an aesthetic conservative at his core. He knew that which was beautiful, and stood in awe before the sublime, without losing sight of his hope for the future, and his reverence for the past. Throughout his delightful essay, “Byron and Goethe”, to which I urge you to devote a well-spent hour of your time, this much is made clear. In it, toward its grand peroration and memorable end, Mazzini mounts a defense for the preservation of old statues, an apology of whose relevance—at once prescient and gripping—I hardly need make mention.

He assumes, as his position, the anti-iconoclastic stance. This is a posture at which, automatically and reflexively, every spray-paint-wielding, rope-slinging, statue-defacing, history-hating Millennial might cringe. In our own day, so less empirically troubled than was his (he lived, one might note, through that famous “Springtime of the Peoples”, a truly continental age of tumult from which no corner of monarchical Europe was successful in hiding. It was the vernal, though lamentably unfertile, revolution of 1848, an event out of which the fame of Marx arose and the remnants of Italy hobbled), such a position has come to be seen as a contrarian one. All the more reason I’m attracted to it, and all the more reason I’m attracted to him.

“Let these statues stand”, says Mazzini, with the moral immediacy and unconcealed grace for which he and his published works are so justly renowned, “The noble monuments of feudal times create no desire to return to the days of serfdom”. We might say the same of our own society. We might refer to the institutions of racial bias, of the bondmen’s trade, of the rank servility out of which, with no shortage of bloodshed and strenuous effort, we were finally raised. In the opinion of Mazzini, and in that of my own, there is, in one’s sober observation of a statue, no risk of backsliding into the benighted follies of our past. This is not a descent about which the visitor of said statue, one curious of its lengthening shadow and the discomforts of its meaning, ought to be concerned, so long as he’s properly enlightened and free. So long as he’s apprised of the context out of which it was hewn, so long as he’s aware of the repercussions of its continued pose, he ought to be left in his solitude to study it, to know it.

By looking back upon one’s history, by examining and appreciating that which is old because it is old, one does not, by necessity, renounce his aspirations to present progress. One doesn’t retreat beneath his covers as the age of reform dawns, doesn’t shirk the distant calls of a future beckoning for his work. Far from it; he retains them still, and with ardor does he hasten himself from his bed to the bedewed blades of the field, a landscape in which he’ll see to their tending and their growth. Indeed, reflection on the past is a precondition to that lofty title of progress, for which so many of our young strivers so vociferously yearn. In fact, as Mazzini points out, “Those only should dare to utter the sacred name of progress, whose souls possess intelligence enough to comprehend the past, and whose hearts possess sufficient poetic religion to reverence its greatness”.

Mind you, it’s not Mazzini’s enjoinder that we must reverence the “all” of the past; not all of it was great, of course, but that which was, must be recognized as such. It must be exalted, and we mustn’t hesitate in our distinction of the great from the good, and the good from the bad. These are traits, marmoreal and cold, by which every statue, like every person, is by the time of his death encumbered. We must read in their lineaments both their contributions and their blames, both their glories and their faults, by which the accuracy of our measurements and the commitment to our aims might be better informed. We must do so with the acuity of our reason and the penetration of our gaze, but we must never erase them merely for being harmful to the eye. That is not reason enough to wipe clean the world of its images, to dispossess a nation of its stories. Even in their ugliness, even in our reproach, they ought to be studied and read—if they’re never again to be celebrated. They demand not censorship, but scrutiny, not extirpation, but context.

I fear, however, that in this moment of civil frustration and urban unrest, the nuance of this discernment is being left unexercised by the mind of the crowd. I’m not so sure, based on the radicals’ defacement and toppling of such luminary men as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Christopher Columbus (with whom, one might add, Mazzini shared a Genoan place of birth), that they have “intelligence enough to comprehend the past”. Rather, in dispiriting fashion, I think they have just the opposite: ideology enough to blind them to the subtlety of its truth. As for the possession of hearts with “sufficient poetic religion”, I very greatly doubt that those throwing incendiary bombs while chanting, “No Justice, No peace” are endowed with that kind of delicate aestheticism, divine thoughtfulness, and artful spirit.

These naughty and aimless radicals, these sons and daughters of Marx, lack the ability to revere the true and nourishing soil out of which they’ve grown. Gazing down and back upon it, that earth upon which, with dismissive foot, they stomp and tread, they seek its deracination only. They come into possession of the “destructive instinct”, an impulse quite less than human, and one rather nearer to the brute. In the words of Mazzini, if he were to assess this troglodyte class, if he were to examine this group upon which the refining influences of culture and history have left no impression, he would observe that there is something “hard, repulsive, and ungrateful in their destructive instinct which so often forgets what has been done by the great men who preceded them, to demand of them merely an account of what more might have been done”.

Sure, Jefferson might’ve been the great author of liberty, the divinely-inspired democrat from whose conflicted soul in 1776 that most eloquent of political documents leapt; sure, he might’ve been that most brilliant of promulgators of early American thought, a philosophy in whose likeness the rest of the “Old” world—now startled by the New—endeavored to re-fashion itself; sure, he might’ve been the epitome of a president, tactful and sharp, broad and lean, to whose lofty stature and mental reach all his countrymen had aspired; sure, he might’ve been the paragon of patriotism, the champion of cultivation, and the recipient of both domestic and foreign renown, but—led by the wisdom of the mob and the destructive instinct by which it’s propelled—more might have been done by him. He might have, with greater alacrity and seriousness, confronted the hypocrisy with which he lived. It was the same hypocrisy for which his slaves, as slaves and not freedmen and women, died. He might’ve addressed the fact that he was a liberty-loving owner of slaves, two notes in a life’s chorus beneath which a glaring discord buzzed. He might have silenced this unmusical, strident aspect of his life, but he failed to do so in a meaningful way. Not even the euphony of the Declaration of Independence can deafen us to this fact. In it, he spoke of truths that were “self-evident”, gifts bestowed to all by nature, but he appeared himself to be completely self-unaware.

Because “more might have been done” by him, he’s diminished in the estimation of our thought. He’s no longer a Founding Father, but a rebarbative master of slaves. The former is a title of which, with the assurance of our modern scruples, he’s been incontrovertibly stripped. It won’t soon be re-applied, and there’s nothing from his grave he can do. The latter is the designation by which, henceforth, he’ll forever be known. The moral superiority on which we pride ourselves has no trouble looking back and reducing him in our retrospective view. We are immaculate and progressive; he is incorrigible, sullied, and old. We demand only “what more might’ve been done” by him, while neglecting those accomplishments of which we are the joyous inheritors, for which he’s considered to be great.

The same might be said of Washington, of Madison, of Sherman, of Grant, of Roosevelt, of Churchill, of Columbus, of Vespucci, and of all those once-cherished icons upon whom, with iconoclastic zeal, our collective odium has since been poured. Yet are we, like them, not also susceptible to the pock-marks of life and its faults? Are we not also the products of our age, a time upon which, years from now, a future generation will look back in disgust? Are we, in the words of Mazzini, “so free from the evil reflected in them as to have a right to condemn their memory?”  After all, “that evil was not introduced into the world by them. They saw it, felt it, respired it; it was around, about, on every side of them, and they were its greatest victims”. Knowingly or not, victims they were.

These men, despite their perceived shortcomings, were figures of genius. This is beyond dispute, and geniuses they remain. They do so despite their lack of inclusivity, their narrow chauvinism, and the moral blindness by which their age was defined. Yet, again quoting from Mazzini, genius has, from the earliest times, “been made the scapegoat of the generations”. There’s no easier move than to condemn the clever. Intent upon avoiding our own responsibilities and the present troubles to which we still lack answers, these scapegoats of genius appear to us a most welcoming flock. We thrust upon it our guilt and our ire, and pour out its blood on the altar of the hour.

To conclude this two-part submission, I’ll allow Mazzini once again to talk; his eloquence far outweighs and overwhelms my own. It is not, he said, by deposing Washington or Jefferson, or any of the heroes aforementioned, that “we shall destroy either skeptical or anarchical indifference among us”. It is, rather, “by becoming believers and organizers ourselves” that this task will be achieved. Let us believe in the truth, contend with our history, and preserve and organize the waning brilliance of our mind. In so doing, anarchy will be dismayed and noble liberty will rise again. But, it will only do so if we “revere enthusiasm, the fatherland, and humanity; if our hearts are pure, and our souls steadfast and patient, the genius inspired to interpret our aspirations, and bear to heaven our ideas and our sufferings, will not be wanting”.

Let our genius not be wanting. Let our hearts be pure, and our souls forever patient. Let us have intelligence enough to comprehend the past, and sympathy enough to forgive the faults of which it’s guilty. Above all, though, let these statues stand. Let them stand, and we might not fall.

Aroused by the divine message of which, though late in life, he was the unexpected recipient, stirred by the grand endeavor to which, if only to disprove the claim of the Delphic priestess, he was thereafter committed, Socrates sought provocation not as an end, but as a means. To put it yet another way, in terms by which the more elegant eye might be appeased, that most profound of all European thinkers, that consummate gadfly of Greece, sought not tumult for its own sake, but as an avenue toward his loftier, philosophical end. He knew it to be the only method by which the sleeping intellect of his beloved city, now a decadent and morally languid place, might be stimulated once again to think. He sought provocation not because he was an aimless philosophical brat, one bored by the abstract readings of his dusty metaphysical texts, but as a man hoping to know and, by knowing, to improve the lot of his fellow, thinking man.

The Athenian intellect had, in many ways, become earth-bound and stale; the query to which it hadn’t yet an answer, yet from which it couldn’t very well deviate, was the elemental nature of things. Those by whom our novel Socrates was preceded, that hoary class to whom—in humbling deference to the toad-faced sage—the name of “Pre-Socratic” still applies, busied itself with the fundamental essence of the world, be it water, fire, soil, or air—or something entirely infinite and unseen. Despite all the academic bickering, in which everyone from Thales to Anaximenes to Heraclitus was so breathlessly engaged, this had become a dead and unfruitful question, an avenue to which, at least until the age of quantum physics, there was no foreseeable end.

Socrates’ task, whether or not it was initially recognized as such, was to see beyond these petty questions of the cosmos and the substance out of which it had grown. He wanted to return to a place of priority the investigation of man and his conception of virtue, justice, truth. In so doing, the mind was to be revivified and the soul reborn. Socrates, practitioner not of medicinal arts, but of those of philosophical pursuits, was to give to the suffering body of Athens new life. He wanted, if only to regain the pulse of its once-tympanic heart, an effort toward introspection, questioning, and discourse—those very things by which old dogmatists and their dead beliefs are always freshly imperiled. In refusal of them, and in conquest of the higher ideals to which he aspired, Socrates wanted goodness, beauty, and truth—that trinity to which virtue and wisdom are forever attracted, by which the conscience of a people is enlivened from one century to the next, over and repeatedly again.

He wanted to discover an essence that would abide, not an appearance that would be prone to shift. He wanted nothing of the exigencies of the moment, from which the glib and malleable sophists, now infecting the young minds and credulous strivers in the agora, seemed outlandishly to profit. Nor did he want to feel on his back the changing currents of the wind, up into which so many of his weightless friends and colleagues were so effortlessly swept. He wanted, instead, that which was veracious, sustainable, and ideal. He wanted a wisdom untroubled by the importunities of those forces which are appealing, within reach, but ultimately false. To attain this end, to purge his city of its unenlightened thought, to redeem an Athens overcome with preaching, haughtiness, sophistry, pomp, and, above all, ineradicable conceit, Socrates, the great philosopher, had to be free to inquire, to challenge, to provoke.

And so, he introduced to the world the Socratic Method—a method of which, despite all the novelties of our teachers’ forays into the rough-hewn plots of their chosen pedagogical fields—the better class of our university professors still make such profitable use. The method, as conceived at its earliest stage, was meant to be provocative, so far as provocation can be understood to be meaningfully constructive and good. Sadly, too many failed to see it as such, and its use, especially when employed by its founder, was seen to be an unmitigated bother. Doubtless, it’s for this reason that its chief practitioner, our gallant and percipient Socrates, was hastened to so premature a death. He was brought to a capital punishment to which, despite the eloquence of his apology, a democratic jury of his peers agreed to sentence him in the seventieth year of his age.

Alas, with the quiet encouragement of a sip of hemlock, that most poisonous and persuasive of herbs, Socrates died a few days later. As it turns out, few mortals, still fewer philosophers, reveal themselves to be immune to that toxic combination of acrid alkaloid and grave-digging tannin for which that most convenient and potent plant is renowned. And so, Socrates died, but the method of which he was the originator, and to which, for all time hence, we still affix his name, survived well beyond the quiet exhalation of his last breath. Naturally, it was carried forth through the ages, passed from one provocative generation to the next by the name of the Socratic, or the Dialectical method.

The latter term refers simply to the fact that the method was conversational. Literally, that’s what Dialectic means in the original Greek from which we receive it. However, as is always the case with that language and the culture around which it was built, the term carries with it further meaning. Dialectic wasn’t conversation merely, as if applied to the quotidian and boring type of prattle in which, day in and out, we all partake. Much deeper and more ornamental than that, it referred to the art of conversation, the chiseling of discourse into lapidary form. Each movement of the tongue was akin to that of the brush; every wetting of the lips, a dab of the paint on the board. Gesticulations in the air were as though strikes on the marble, and one’s eloquence was used to build his edifice of thought.

Dialectic, as invented by Socrates (and as preserved by that devout amanuensis upon whom the sage had so lasting an influence—namely, Plato) was, at its root, an artful form of conversation. It was cleanly honest and openly logical, without need for obfuscation and concealment of intent. It was pithily scrutinizing and penetratingly sharp. It maintained its form from beginning to end—an end at whose summit a higher truth was to be found.  It was, as all good conversation ought to be, an effort in reciprocal exchange, a display of “give-and-take”. It was an act of parry and thrust, of charge and retreat—always carried forth with the valiant and amicable motivations shown by both sides. It was, when best and most effectively used, an inter-penetration of thought, a seeding, reaping, and re-planting of ideas by which a richer, heartier understanding was cultivated to grow.  

Dialectic is the process of teaching by questioning, yet seldom is the role of “questioner” or, as it’s known, “teacher” so clearly defined. Unwittingly, by giving and receiving questions, one to the next, both parties will, in varying degrees, spend time as both teacher and student. They’ll do so with neither reproach nor derision, accepting, in turn, the humble or elevated station in which, in ephemeral fashion, they’re to be honestly placed. They’ll neither be reticent or peremptory in their offer of a response, knowing both are to benefit from its utterance and reception. And so, they’ll enjoy the exercise of the brain and all its inexhaustible faculties in a vigorous and exciting way.

Dialectic employs what you might call a “bottom-up” approach; it begins with a humble definition of a term—or a grasping attempt at a definition—a word to which you’ll often return, of which you’ll make frequent use. This is the term without which, despite the precision of your blueprints and the zeal of your joined exertions, no linguistic structure can stand. Without this foundation, one can’t hope to mount the high altitudes of truth, a perch from which the grandest of vistas are to be seen. Dialectic is an accrual of knowledge, upon which further knowledge is ingenuously built. It is, in this way, collaborative and concerted, organic and harmonious, inclusive and strong.

That which is opposite to dialectic and, in my opinion, far inferior, is didactic. In a word, it’s all that dialectic is not. Didacticism, while smart, is intolerably stiff. It hasn’t the lithe and necessary movement in its bones, the graceful sinuosity in its wits. It towers like a burly statue, cold to the touch. It lacks the easy, happy “play” in its joints, the lubricant-smoothed surfaces upon which, with agility and poise, the dialectic pivots and turns. It is inflexible to the changes of its environment, unappreciative of those influences by which it might be bent.

It is authoritative and exclusive, stuffy and proud. It is reliant on one, and only one supreme professor of knowledge, a master from whom all wisdom is to be received. It is, quite literally, de haut en bas—an approach to teaching from high to low. It doesn’t build, one rock after another, to strengthen the beautiful mountain of knowledge, a heap along which, to and fro, the sweat-filled dialectic denizen lumbers. It rather beckons with cool complacency from the height of its unchallenged stoop, an unattainable place atop which, with scornful certitude, it stands and preaches to all. It’s an acme to which, despite all fervid climbing, all commitment, and all learning, few are ever granted entry. Only the elect are allowed in, and the elect are narrow.

One, the dialectic, is hospitable, brilliant, and warm. It is welcoming, above all, to that diversity of opinion, that multitude of perspective out of which real democracies, such as ours, are born. It exudes, in the eloquent words of Oscar Wilde, the “Oxford Temper”—the ability, as he described it, “to play gracefully with ideas”. That is its chief characteristic, the attribute by which we’re all charmed. And so, marrying grace with playfulness, sophistication with fun, the dialectic is the best of conversational affairs. It is the noblest relationship between man and woman, woman and man, thinker and thought.  

The other, the didactic, is, in comparison, a loveless mariage de convenance. It lacks the heady stimulation, the weighty amours of the former’s pursuit. While it might be productive of truth, it will appear as though a spurious and distant child. It is rather moralizing and chaste, than romantic and free. It is somewhat barren of love, that sentiment by which learning is forever inspired. The didactic, intolerant of temptation, has that sobering effect. It is far less dexterous, far colder to the touch and to the spirit. While the dialectic is warmth, youth, and exuberance, the didactic is frigidity, tyranny, and an uncompromising bore.

The American mode of conversation, the manner of speaking upon which this ever-so voluble nation is based, is the dialectic. It is our national language and our tongue, the octave to which our collective ear is tuned. We know of no other style, and would speak in no other form. Every other tongue is distant, and we like them not. They are barbaric as were barbarians to the Greeks—a horde uncultured in the subtle arts of conversation. We hear not their didactic calls, preferring instead to speak equally and magically amongst ourselves.

And, like that mythic Socrates, we too are a provocative people, and that’s how a thinking people, a democratic and a republican people, a free and a prosperous people, ought always to be. There is no other way, nor, if there was, would we pursue it. This is our native endowment, an abiding gift for which we have that nonpareil class of founders, its lofty ideals and their imperishable language, to thank. This is the peculiarity of our western spirit, the hue by which our blood is colored. We cannot drain it from ourselves, and we won’t soon be opening our wrists.

Thus, I conclude, combat the didacticism of our age. Do so irrespective of its source. We are, and always shall be, a proud and dialectic people. Let no one tell you otherwise. The didactic, ever pernicious, may come from many places. It may come from the intelligentsia, the journalists, the moralists, or wherever. Reject the vain assurance of its crude temptation. Rely on the elegance of dialogue instead. Embrace, with me, with all, conversation and provocation–though never solely for provocation’s sake. Cleave to the dialectic, Socratic method. Color your discourse with the genius of his Grecian spirit, to which you’ll add the highlights of your American soul.

Dialectic your journey, provocation your means. The end is the enlightenment of your mind, the liberty of your speech.

“I do not loathe ideas which go against my own”. So said Montaigne, thus repeat I. He, in typical Gallic fashion, was not only accommodating of that diversity of opinion by which, as a thinking and open man—in an age just beginning to open and think—he’d doubtless be confronted, but positively welcoming of the variegation of its changing hue. He thought of ideas, to which his own might’ve enjoyed but little fraternity, not as alien brigands indiscriminately to be condemned, but as happy guests warmly to be received. His house, into which all comers might’ve gained entry, was as commodious as the breadth of his soul. Both flaunted atria in which limbs might be stretched, both provided rest and stimulation.

Though of a distant origin, uttered in a cadence unfamiliar to his own—which was, to note, a Parisian patois memorably sprinkled with Latin—foreigners arriving in the one or the other would be met there with scrutiny, of course, but not with that alone. Rather, the delights to which they’d soon be treated, the feelings of which they’d now partake, would include the divine graces of hospitality, empathy, and all the embraces of a broad and intellectual life. This was the enticing quality of the Montaignean soul, of the humble man in which so large a presence was embodied.

He saw contrary ideas, those to which his own were opposed, not as a man unaffected by art, but as the most sensitive of sculptors (for, with the lapidary might of his chiseled eloquence, and the marbled strength of his scribbling hand, a sculptor he was). He saw on the canvas of conversation upon which he gazed not blotches to be erased, but special dabs of paint, all deserving of closer inspection and further use. In the perception of his eye, to whose acuity there’s yet been born no equal, every curious and well-considered marking, every accent of touch, was a sparkle by which his own intellect might be better colored. In all thought, there was merit, in all opinion, value. He, a man, was never to be a monochrome. He was too brilliant for the old tedium of “black-and-white”. His palate was too omnivorous, his taste, too exuberant, and like a latter-day Joseph, around whom that refulgent jacket was so fatefully draped, he dressed his philosophy in the colorful ideas of all.  

You can understand, then, why I go about repeating Montaigne’s message without a hint of shame. He is the liberal ideal, the freest and most unconstrained of thinkers, to whom a fettered soul, such as mine, such as ours, can aspire. Thus, that wisest of all Frenchmen, that subtlest of all minds is, before any other, the sage from whom, with little wayward listing, I’ve taken most, if not all of my philosophical instruction. While I might deviate, here and again, to pick from the budding genius of one thinker or another, to taste of their distant satellites and fruits, his is the sun, the universe’s center, to whose flowering radiance I always return. They are but ornaments by which his trail is accented, rest-stops in which one dallies, but never stays.

His is the mind around which—with cosmic and literary devotion, with philosophic and planetary glee—all others, including myself, have gathered in unison to revolve. It is the picture, when stretched sufficiently broadly on a welcoming canvass of sky, of an eloquent and delicious motion, a nimble and contemplative jaunt. It is the dance of those minds unafraid not only of themselves, but of all others, a group, in both cases, of which Montaigne is the leader. He is orchestrating the gait of this troupe, of this exuberant and inquisitive class to whom no exertion of the spirit is found to be detestable. So too, without its knowledge, is he leading the opposition, that party to whom he extends so sympathetic a hand. All are improved by his efforts, whether they know it or not.

It is, in every way, a stelliferous and blinding sight—a most hospitable gathering of thought. It is the place in which, in a liberal and conversational world, in a firmament dominated by variety and ideas, one most certainly wants to be. That is Montaigne, that was America. Both are roads to which countless followers have been attracted, gilded realms upon which many have wished to settle their homes. Thus, his is the path to which, lit by the globes of his enduring brilliance and the guiding attention of his hand, I’ve determined to commit my own. It’s a commitment America will have to earn once again.

In so doing, one must follow Montaigne’s precept, must build himself in the mold of his pure and abiding example. One must not, for the mere sake of their contrariness, “loathe ideas which go against” his own. That would be impotent, blinkered, and coarse. That would be undeserving of the title of “man”, and—more distressingly still—unequal to the sublime heights of the Montaignean spirit. Rather, one must embrace those divergent opinions, must “play gracefully”, in the words of Oscar Wilde—himself an inheritor of the lessons of Montaigne—with those ideas with which his own find no immediate kinship.

One must embrace and consider all ideas. He mustn’t conform, as though overwhelmed by the power of an involuntary response, to the prevailing, chattering class—the complacent bien pensant from which so much bland tripe is regularly disseminated. Instead, one must combat, until the exhalation of his last dying breath, the homogenizing influences by which his ideas become, between his mind and its neighbor’s, indistinguishable. A lack of diversity in thought amounts to a lack of vivacity in life, the former often inducing the latter. It’s a cycle for which, outside of death, there’s yet to have been discovered a remedy. That is the making of a stagnant pool, the sagging of a bushel laden with an ugly crop. One cannot hate that which is contrary, merely. One cannot dispose, without first tasting, that which is foreign to the blunted idleness of his tongue. One must drink the juices of all, and savor their influence as he will.

One mustn’t be hesitant in his approach toward an alternative opinion, a seemingly outlandish idea to which his own, however vehemently held (and however unsusceptible to persuasion) might be fiercely antipodal. There mustn’t be timidity and shyness in discourse—all must be intrepid expositors of their thoughts, must be unabashed orators of their lips. One must be “so far from shying away when others’ judgments clash with mine, so far from making myself unsympathetic to the companionship of men because they hold to other notions or parties, that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by nature is variety—even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms—I find it much rarer to see our humors and purposes coincide”.

Let them fail to coincide. Let their malleability re-shape us, but let their craftsmanship never leave us wading in the same image twice. Let us, all divergent and all new, join together in unison, on this and this point alone: we are not, nor shall we ever be, the same. This is our shared declaration, our distinctly human plight, a singularity in which, without exception, we all can participate. We are not the same. Our minds, and the opinions of which they are the authors, are so radically different, one from the next. So much the better. Nature, wiser than wisdom and older than age, would not have them be so, and so they shan’t be. Variety, truly, is that vital condiment, that dab of mustard by which the flavors of life are so deliciously spiced. It’s responsible for that sapidity, for that unique tastefulness of which we Americans, constantly hungry, can’t get enough. As such, “In the whole world, there has never been two identical opinions any more than two identical hairs or seeds.” Rather, “Their most universal characteristic is”, Montaigne concluded, “their diversity”.

This is diversity out of which, in the undying words of E pluribus unum, our American unity is to be found. We must neither neglect nor abuse it, as lately we’ve done. We must make, once again, a deity of our diversity, and treat it with the reverence and awe, the supreme gratitude of which it’s so richly deserving.