Two challenging words of the title of this essay stand somehow between us and ourselves, so that we will have to get around the distortions unnecessarily presented by minority and culture in order to see the freedom and even the substance that is closer than we are ordinarily able to perceive.

The lesser is minority, a simple word but nevertheless a deceiving one, for it has taken on associations that limit its obvious usefulness.  All I want to indicate by minority is a group of whatever kind, less numerous than the majority.  As for majority, that also is a word that must be addressed—and soon will be.  Now what I don’t mean by minority is any of its contemporary vibes, as a euphemism for racial, ethnic, or class categories.  Indeed the word minorities is often used absurdly today to mean various individuals of a certain kind—African-Americans, for example.  Or we routinely hear the bizarre phrase “minorities and women,” as a definition of diversity or involving quotas.

A word more, then, if I may.  We should remember that a minority is not at all necessarily a small group: A minority might be 49 percent.  A mere plurality can determine an election, and that could be and has been less than half of the whole, on numerous occasions.

But now we need to address the deceptive simplicity of majority.  This is a word that is fraught with unction—it has an overtone that I can only describe as religious.  And the sanctimony that the word connotes is part of the problem, for though majority seems to denote the consensus or the middle ground, or reasonable public opinion—as perhaps it did generations ago—the majority, or a majority today, is not much more than a polling abstraction.  There is no majority unless we are satisfied to accept the crudest of behavioral reductionism.  A multiplex theater does not suggest that there is a majority, nor do more than 500 channels of television.  The segmentation and regimentation of markets and people says a lot about manipulation and advertising, but nothing about a majority in the obvious sense of the word.  And since majorities are so fleeting and often so small, there is no logical necessity for “democracy.”  Modern polities are split down the middle on everything—this is true in the United States, in France, and in Israel.  Logically speaking, this suggests that a return to monarchy would be justifiable, much more efficient, and less bothersome as well.  And our own President has in effect indicated that he agrees with this line of thought.  Yes, but before I was interrupted by that outburst of truth, I was indicating that there is no majority except as a matter of political ritual.  The majority in our nation today is a polite fiction only— a point to be kept firmly in mind, for otherwise our thinking would be warped by misleading and intimidating usages.  So since majority is virtually meaningless, we can see that a minority is a group, but also that there need be no deprecation in such a usage.

So much for the minority report—but what about culture?  A big roomful of books would only be the beginning, should we undertake a thorough exploration of all the applications and possibilities of culture, but such all-inclusiveness is mercifully unnecessary.  I think for our situation, culture means both cultivation, as in manners and knowledge, and appropriate expectations, as in agreed purposes.  We can neglect for the sake of argument the anthropological meanings of culture, and the vulgar or trivial abuses of language, such as “rape culture.”  Matthew Arnold is good company here.

Now we need examples that will suffice, so that concrete images give us some grip on culture itself.  The tradition of American associations is a useful reference point.  Is a ladies’ sewing circle an image of culture?  I say that it is.  It involves knowledge, practice, and neighborliness, as well as agreed purposes.  From such a group we might expect that more might develop, as historically some of the energy of reform movements and even salons evolved from such associations or examples of minority culture.  An analogy with men’s groups would be easy enough—associations of skills or interests, debating clubs, sporting groups, chess clubs, and so on.  Working out of churches and other groups more than two centuries ago, the webs of relationships gave us or created our nation.  Before that, Benjamin Franklin with his “Junto” gave us a model of how homemade and how sophisticated and how effective working from the ground up could be.

Franklin’s incomplete Autobiography is best seen as the account of his education, and how he institutionalized his education so that others could have the experience he did.  He loved to read and write, to analyze and to argue, and to do so in company so he could learn as well as impart.  His friends and he organized their time and space together, sharing their books.  (This male salon was the seed of what is today the American Philosophical Society.)  Franklin saw that when civic improvements were needed, the advocate had to provide a vision of the financing as well as the thing itself, whether it was a battery, a fire department, paved streets, education, or whatever.  The man who loved books and argument founded not only a lending library but the University of Pennsylvania, just as a younger man who had the benefit of college education at William and Mary was the founder and architect of the University of Virginia.  Jefferson’s dining table and his casks of French wine were a salon in themselves, as was his extensive correspondence.  Franklin learned from the bottom up.  Apprenticed as a printer, he worked at the center of information and made himself into a satirical journalist, a philosopher, and a scientist.  Jefferson learned from the top down but, like Franklin, was always a student.  Both of them made sure that culture was where they were, and both of them loved France in her cultural essence, not as a superficial matter of politics.  And if that is not a cultural marker, then I don’t know what is.

I think that still today, even though the world has moved on—our euphemism for declined—we could do worse than organizing a debating club like Franklin or, like Jefferson, pouring fine wine for guests.  They were politically engaged when that was both philosophical and social—and they respected those bounds.  Though tempted by extremes, they preferred small-scale leadership rather than the ideologically grounded, hubristic gnosticism of today.  I might further suggest that the Constitutional Convention of 1787, flawed though it may have been, was and is an heroic image of a delegated national salon.  Though the historic truth was denied by Abraham Lincoln, the nation came from the states, and the states from the various creative societies of the towns and the hinterlands.  Associations, educational and religious institutions, and social practices were the bases of culture in the young republic, and if they no longer are, then they can be again.  The people, the need, the opportunity—even the provocation—are there.

I readily concede that Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams and Randolph of Roanoke and many another were extraordinary and idiosyncratic individuals.  And I readily concede that, later on, the traditions of utopian colonies in America made their mark, most of it in terms of folly and failure.  There was a time when so many distorted cults sprouted like mushrooms in a meadow.  I frankly admit that something like the bold spirit of William Lloyd Garrison, though impressive for its brass, was also a bit excessive in its politics.  Garrison demanded 100 percent of what he wanted and, after extensive bloodshed, got every bit of it.  In a sense that wasn’t politics at all, and it has left us with an ineffable inheritance, so that there is an eternal mysticism about the plainest of matters.  “His truth is marching on!”  So we sing, though today’s youth have never heard of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry or the Secret Six.

But what would be the appropriate reaction to the Temperance Movement, after all, or to the Feminist Movement—drunken rapture, perhaps?  Margaret Fuller was memorably the editor of The Dial and a credentialed Transcendentalist and even an international provocateuse.  We remember her for herself and for her connection with Emerson, and we remember the community of Concord and the loose but vital assembly of Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville and others.  The central story of American literary Romanticism is told through and by and about them, and it is one of interlocking inspirations and performances, of philosophical engagement, and of a local habitation and a name.  For them in their individualities, culture was biblical, it was Greek, it was Latin, it was Gettingrman and English and French and Italian.  But culture was also what you made on native grounds, from native material.  America’s political independence became a cultural independence, necessarily.  We proved it before to the Europeans; today, the task would be to prove it again to our skeptical selves.  Today, in order to be authentic and productive, culture would have to be independent of the mass media.

The politico-cultural adversary today is not German philosophy or fiction, or English precedence or French models or Italian forms.  The problem today is the monster in the living room, not the freak in the basement.  As we walk down the sidewalk, we hear the sounds of loudspeakers of spurious authority; through the screen door of summer, we see the flicker of the screen.  In the American home, conversation is silenced—we have the monologue from the television or far-seer.  The noise of Manhattan and Washington and Hollywood is heard in the land, and rarely any other.  We take dictation and call it liberty; we listen to noise and call it music.  Franklin and Jefferson both loved music and played the violin—they made their own.

Masscult has overwhelmed traditional cultures of all kinds, and the internet has become the obsession of global youth.  They are the future, and one thing they are not much interested in is education as we had known it even a decade ago.  I suppose that the alienation of youth by the digital process is the biggest problem that the world faces, and the worst—not counting the politicians who exploit the confusion of youth.

We need to get our ducks in a row, and the place to begin is at home.  The masscult of bad music, bad food, and worse everything else is easy to avoid if it is recognized, and from that everything follows.  It is a matter of education—which is much too important to be left to public schools and the teachers of today.  And to concede to the federal government more authority and more control over the curriculum of the nation’s children is more than sinister.  The government wants billions, even trillions to impart less and less.  Breakfast for inner-city kids, pre-K for four-year-olds—the monstrosity is apparently necessary to feed the beast.  There isn’t anything the government doesn’t want to control, except what it is supposed to control.

The homeschooling movement of today is but one natural place to begin to develop new webs of connection and social solidarity.  From such a movement we can see a basis for new forms and renewed appreciation of traditional values and culture.  We can see it in the cultivation of historical knowledge, of literature and languages, of mathematical and scientific concepts, and even of political science, philosophy, and religion.  That is culture and the study of culture, and young people would find it of tremendous advantage, because it isn’t taught in the contemporary curriculum, dumbed down as it is for the servile mentality of the passive consumer, the client and victim of government.  What we need is less talk about equality and more about excellence, which can only be known through notable examples.

A new Minority would be devoted to common goals and practices, and to the good manners that are necessary to maintain the group.  The study of culture and the education of youth would unite a community and prove the benefit of voluntary cooperation, of ordered liberty, rather than the top-down authoritarianism of contemporary government.

Such new Cultural Minorities could lead to a renewed respect for local self-government.  And such new Minorities could show that New York, Washington, and Hollywood don’t have so much, if they don’t have national support.  Specific places spring to mind: There is plenty of can-do spirit and spunky independence in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  There is much of it in Upstate New York and parts of New Jersey, and all of that is just in the Northeast.

I don’t want to emphasize geographic commonalities too much—the values are the most important thing.  But clearly, in the Midwest and the Far West, and in the South, there are many regions and people who speak the language of the values I have outlined; and who understand as well that a band of like-minded people have a natural economic commonality as well as a shared vision.  That would also be something to build on, a base broad enough to have a sustainable future.

Those who realize that a “reality” based on empty images and empty words is no reality at all have already identified themselves as part of a Cultural Minority—perhaps an unrecognized one, even by themselves, yet even so, a real one.  The empty images of modern technology can feed no stomach, though they do go well with the newly decriminalized drugs the politicians are offering as “freedom.”  The empty words of contemporary politicians—as has been demonstrated in the 21st century—are worth even less than the paper dollars they print by the bushel.

The return to a world of norms, to substance, to culture rather than gaseous evasions, would constitute a spirit of recovery and revival.  If we had our values in order, and the education of the young in order, then the sources of disorder would be manifest.  Because today, the enemy of proper order—and by “order,” I don’t mean regimentation—is the government that is ostensibly responsible for maintaining it.

Dr. Samuel Francis, late of this journal, called it anarcho-tyranny; and he was right, as well he should have been.  After all, he was a Cultural Minority himself—a Majority of One.