Disintegration or Totalitarianism?

Whenever a society reaches a certain level of satisfaction in its technological progress such that it ceases to be inventive—when necessity is no longer forced to give birth to invention—it can do little else except expand its accumulative achievements into every corner of society. 

In 1982, Donald Cowan observed this about America. The former president of the University of Dallas noted, “when the task of building culture and not civilization dominates—an extreme danger arises. To cease expanding is to risk disintegration.” Although Cowan is describing modern America, he does so with Rome in view. In part, this is also something Frederick Jackson Turner seems to be addressing in his essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” published in 1893.

A society that is no longer building civilization, has to build culture instead. This can only be achieved through revolution—out with the old mores and in with newly invented ones. Yet, this sort of cultural innovation cannot go on for long. It will inevitably give way to one of two extremes—disintegration, or civilization’s temporary savior, totalitarianism. 

Disintegration is what it looks like after Rome has fallen to barbarians but before medieval culture has emerged. It is the dark age where the commonwealth no longer possesses sensus communis, a working economy, or a functioning civil magistrate. Man must live in a constant state of war—living a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The alternative is totalitarianism, Hobbes’ Leviathan, an efficient but oppressive planned society that averts the chaos in the disintegrating state by imposing extreme law and order. 

The answer to this dilemma of disintegration or totalitarianism—and it is a real crisis in our day—is to raise up a generation of imaginative and moral leaders. I’m convinced, this can only be accomplished by liberally educating them. A person with a liberal arts education is a person who knows the past, and knows it well enough to guide society into the future. Unlike Edmund Burke’s “flies of summer,” who have no connection to an inherited past or to an imagined future, the liberally educated persons possess real cultural equilibrium.

But to educate the next generation in the liberal arts, we need educators, men and women of letters who know and own their duty as teachers. Perhaps, Russell Kirk said it best when he noted,

The creative writer, the critic, and the teacher of literature are heirs to an ancient civilized order. If they fail in their normative duty, or if they betray their culture to the ideologue, they do not get off scot-free. They pay with their lives, sometimes, for their dereliction; always they pay through the loss of their freedom. An inhumane social domination, treating literary men as servile propagandists—or as enemies who must be extirpated—succeeds to the order of the permanent things.