I hesitate to call this summer’s racial convulsion a conversation (so often, we’re told, it is time for one) because of how little the participants seem to be actually conversing. But it is clear the disobedience on display, civil or not, is an extrusion of an idea, an idea made of—and transmitted by—words. It’s as if the tête-à-têtes of a million thin-skinned, web-surfing adolescents have suddenly assumed physical form, a gestalt of feeling and aggrieved enthusiasm hell bent on immanentizing what the late Roger Scruton called a “culture of repudiation.” They may be naive, even dangerously naive, but they understand: the seeds of their spittle-flecked discontent must be sown offline.
Vox audita perit littera scripta manet—the heard voice perishes, but the written letter remains. Though we have certainly inherited much of the wisdom of ancient Rome (despite our disregard of Latin), so too has the West mimicked her folly. Countless histories cast blame for the empire’s collapse at the feet of a decadent elite, who orchestrated an overzealous colonial enterprise—from which the seeds of misrule blossomed into revolutionary violence—and corrupted its novel political institutions at the expense of its citizenry. Sound familiar? And yet, the written letter remains. Its supposed primacy over the oral tradition hasn’t impeded our own civilization’s decline into a state of primeval angst and self-abnegation. Is the West still captivated by the maxims of antiquity and ignorant of the fate that befell it?
Vox audita may have the disadvantage—in the long-term—of being ephemeral and forgettable or misconstrued, but “in the moment” of old-fashioned analog communication between persons it has indubitable utility and clout. Imagine Paul Revere romping through Lexington to deliver his warning—”The British are coming! The British are coming!”—via the mail. Or if, instead of mounting a podium at Brandenburg Gate to implore Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” President Reagan had reserved Peter Robinson’s immortal line for an op-ed in the Washington Times.
In times of crisis there are few instruments of communication like the human voice. Why is it, then, at this perilous hour the most powerful defenders of the American project and its republican ideals are absent, content to espouse the virtues of liberty in pixels and ink? How many champions of freedom in state and federal legislatures cried out beneath the defaced figures of our founders as mobs of vandals wrenched them from their pedestals last week? How many patriots, in celebration of our independence this past Saturday, roused crowds of constituents into song, into renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” or “Amazing Grace”?
Words beget action, or should. What the organizers of the Left’s serial campaign against injustices, real and imagined, understand—and what the Right emphatically doesn’t—is the impotence of littera scripta as an offensive measure. As a catalyst—for activism, agitation, violence, whatever is en vogue—it is superb. For intellectual criticism, slow ideological re-education and the dissemination of ideas across time and distance the medium is probably nonpareil. But it withers in the urgency of now. Conservatism, which R.R. Reno of First Things says is “a form of public engagement more like sentry duty,” is intrinsically defensive (of tradition, of the given) and, in a sense, naturally amenable to the “old ways.” It is contemplative, too—more Mary than Martha, surely. A philosophy, foremost.
But there is a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to tear down and a time to build. Conservatives, if they wish to bequeath to their children the world they inherited, must speak out and up, and not only in type. Alert the sentries, yes, but also arm an infantry. “We have to show up,” says Kevin D. Williamson of National Review. Indeed, we have to do the hard work of changing minds and teaching—with our mouths, unabashedly—the story of American exceptionalism.
In his opus, The Magic Mountain, novelist Thomas Mann suggested, “It is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience.” It should be the new task of conservatism to reengage with the youth, to demonstrate the recklessness of their servility to the disproven ideas of the authoritarian Left and win their impressionable hearts, to reorient said obedience to the principles of freedom. We mustn’t be fearful of exclaiming—of testifying—in the public sphere, “This is what I believe!”
Britain’s Daniel Hannan offers a model of courage from beyond the Atlantic. In a 2013 debate of the merits of socialism at the Oxford Union Society—why, by the way, do we no longer really debate in America?—Hannan mounted a vigorous defense of capitalism and its progenitors, his people, the indigenous British. His voice quick and trembling as time expired, forefinger high and vertical and face red with passion, Hannan asked those in attendance—in a scene worthy of the movies—to, “remember what nation it is whereof ye are.”
Let us not also forget, as we chart the course of conservatism stateside, three oft overlooked words near the close of Reagan’s aforementioned speech in Berlin: “Beliefs become reality.” Like Rome before us, we neglect them at our peril.
Image: Panini, Giovanni Paolo. Capriccio with figures at the Roman ruins and the Arch of Constantine. 1731, private collection, Piacenza, Italy.
Impolitic 