a time, but socially worse. They lacked epistemological modesty.
It occurred to me that this was exactly what Burke warned about. I went back and read Reflections and was transfixed by it. I didn’t buy everything Burke was selling, but I now began to see some wisdom in this thing called conservatism.
I reached out to Buckley and asked him if the job offer was still on the table. It was. Before long I was working at National Review. Suddenly I was enveloped within a movement of people that was as committed to ideas and revolutionary change as the Marxists I had read about in college. In fact, many of them were the same exact people. The modern conservative movement was largely started by former Marxists who had been mugged by reality—Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Irving Kristol, Max Eastman, and on and on.
They carried the residue of their earlier stance. As Kristol, citing Trotsky, put it in his book Neoconservatism, “Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.”
It took me a few decades to find out what kind of conservative I was, but eventually I realized that I’m a Burkean conservative. The core of what I think is true is contained in Burke’s Reflections. I don’t doubt the power of ideas because that book changed my life. By naming a philosophy, it called into being some knowledge that was latent within me. It has become a foundation for how I view the world. Ideas have consequences.
When they were old and near death, I asked both Friedman and Buckley if they felt content. They had each changed history in ways more profound than they could have expected when they set out. Did they feel they could rest now and be at peace? Neither man even understood what I was talking about. There was so much for them left to do. Until the day they died, they pushed ideas, lived for ideas, and tried to bend the world a little in the direction of their ideas. They were examples of what intellectual commitment looks like.
How radical they were, at least when they started out. There was almost no one in America who agreed with them at the time. But hundreds of millions would eventually. There is something beautiful about somebody who stands against the tides on behalf of some idea and yells Change!
I think back to my college years and am so grateful for a university—the University of Chicago—that gave me the open stacks where I could find The New Masses, and had the gall to force me to read a book that at the time I truly hated. A school can transform a life.
THE HUMANISTIC IDEAL
American higher education has evolved over the decades. For the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, most universities believed in something Anthony Kronman of Yale Law School calls the “humanistic ideal.” This ideal held that a university’s purpose was teleological—to help answer the ultimate questions of life. To put it more bluntly, the purpose of a school was to shape the students’ souls.
“Character is the main object of education,” said Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke a century ago. When J. F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of the Stowe School in Vermont, was asked in the 1920s about the purpose of his institution, he said it was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”
It did that by exposing students to excellence. “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character,” the British educator Sir Richard Livingstone wrote. “More often it is due to an inadequate ideal.” So one job of a teacher was, in this educational model, to hold up exemplars. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,” a Spartan educator put it. When the students emerged from school they would have had at least some contact with the best things human beings have thought and done.
Since then, of course, universities have become more diverse and pluralistic. We’ve realized there can be no single ideal for how to live. The pace-setting universities gradually dropped the humanistic ideal and adopted what Kronman calls the “research ideal.” Bodies of knowledge such as biology, literature, and history were divided up into specialties and