I wish respectfully to raise a strong objection to Clyde Wilson’s analysis of the culture war in his July View: “The culture war is not of our choosing.  We did not seek it or declare it.  We really only wanted to be left alone to live by our patrimony in the normal human way.”

This self-defeating desire to be “left alone” goes a long way in explaining why our heritage of European-derived Christian and classical civilization lies in virtual ruins.  Invalids want to be left alone.  Heroes rise to fight another day—striving out of an ineradicable sense of life’s obligations and mutuality.

Western man’s sickness may be, in part, the result of the loss of an aristocracy and the decline of heroic virtues of obligation and self-sacrifice.  But that doesn’t say enough.  The heroic virtues perished at Appomattox—or Ilium—if not the Garden of Eden.  But what meaning do they have now?  What is the translation of the heroic virtues in a society such as we have today—the proletarianized unisex masscult?

The real failure of Western man is the failure to think through all of the forces assaulting him—the failure to be loyal to thinking for its own sake.  It is, above all, a failure of imagination and feeling, but it has accelerated since the time of Descartes through reductionism in science, literalism in religion, and materialism and nihilism in philosophy.  We need heroic thinkers to break these bonds asunder and set a new standard of the integration of intellect and soul.

Such a task is not one for people who just want to be “left alone.”

        —Caryl Johnston
Philadelphia, PA

Dr. Wilson Replies:

I agree that we certainly need leadership, and the fact that we lack it now is one of many signs of crisis.  A healthy society lives without need for constant correction by the state.  That is what I meant by “we only wanted to be let alone” to live in the normal way.

The crisis of our culture is in part caused and magnified by what I have elsewhere called the “Yankee Problem”—that strong streak in the American national character that refuses to leave other people alone and is unconscious of a distinction between society and government.  Much of the deterioration of the American cultural fabric is the result of the knee-jerk impulse to employ government power to correct alleged imperfections in natural society—at home and abroad.

Instead of celebrating leaders who preserve and protect our society, we celebrate those who claim always to be busy using us to make ourselves and the world better.  Bob Dole said his greatest accomplishment as senator was the Americans with Disabilities Act—i.e., the federal takeover of every piece of land used for parking in the United States.  President Bush tells us he will use our blood and treasure to foment democratic revolution throughout the universe.  The state is at this moment telling the culture that it must respect sodomy.  Civilized people, in such a regime, prefer to be left alone.