Education in Great Tasks

"In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak..."

Introduction: Notes on the Problem of Contemporary Education

I talked with a new friend today and at one point he said (paraphrasing): “Wealthy people who live on the coasts send their kids to Montessori school, then to a competitive private school, and then hopefully to a top ten university. But along the way, these kids never receive an education that transforms them.” They receive an education that prepares them to be obedient; that narrows their historical, moral, and political imagination; that deracinates them; that makes them sneer at great men of the past; in short, they receive an education that shrivels their souls and leaves them without the vision required for great tasks.

MCC is an institution that seeks to impart knowledge; but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a place that will prepare students to take actions that will sustain the conditions within which serious inquiries can be made and great hearts can beat. To put this another way, I know many people with an education in great books, who are decent people and who truly love those books, but who did not have any of their moral opinions transformed by that education. They are at pains to make sure that everyone thinks that Aristotle and Nietzsche are somehow in agreement with all respectable views on women, slavery, race, etc. Such people can still learn something from Aristotle and Nietzsche, but their moral architecture is still fundamentally shaped by their regime and their time and place rather than liberated from them. And because this is so, such people will wittingly or unwittingly promote policies that ultimately erode the distinctive forms of political life. They talk about “political life” but happily cede decision making power to unaccountable experts in the World Health Organization; they vote for Joe Biden because Trump isn’t “presidential enough”; and they worry about universal human rights not being respected, without realizing that those rights come with more progressive baggage and propaganda each passing day (universal human rights are not the rights of the American Founders).

In sum, a person can receive a great books education and still be a handmaiden to those who seek to destroy them. There is a need to actively oppose those tendencies which threaten to dissolve the distinctive forms of political life like the nation state. As another friend put it to me, there is a need to impart something like “situational awareness” so that the great books education is not wasted.

The First Great Task: Negate the World State

The first great task of MCC students will be the negation or prevention of a universal and homogenous state from coming into being. “It is just fear mongering to say that nations will find themselves dissolved into some kind of technocratic world state." Really? Well the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojeve did everything in his power to bring about a world state: he helped to implement the Marshall Plan (making Europe a vassal of the US), he was involved in promoting the European Economic Community (now the European Union); he was a central participant in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), and he took a keen interest in encouraging the development of Third World countries. In other words, he helped establish and set in motion institutions that globalize the world and which point the way toward the dissolution of peoples and ways of life before the synthesizing and homogenizing acid of contemporary liberalism. Without invoking Kojeve’s name, Michael Anton sums up his thought and how it animates much of the left and even much of center right, in the edited volume, Who Rules? (pg. 46):

Our enemy—the idea of which I write—denies the existence of enemies. Like the devil, it is seductive and promises great goods. It preaches universal brotherhood, global unity, a ‘borderless world.’ Also like the devil, it has many names: liberal international order, rules based international order, new world order, neoliberalism, among others. But its truest name is “universal and homogenous state” (UHS). To speak more precisely, the UHS is the underlying philosophic idea; the others are epiphenomena, attempts to make concrete in deed what the UHS prophesies in speech.

In Strauss’ reply to Kojeve (his Restatement in On Tyranny), he argues that a universal and homogenous state will be very bad news for both philosophers and men who long for noble action.

In Strauss’s words, Kojeve thinks that a universal and homogenous state is simply the best regime, “the state in which every human being finds his full satisfaction if his human dignity is universally recognized and if he enjoys ‘equality of opportunity’…” (pg 207). But, as Strauss points out, Kojeve says that the work of negating all that stands in the way of the world state is that “which raises man above the brutes” (pg 208). Thus, Strauss argues that “there will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds” (pg 209) (a pointer back to his lecture “German Nihilism”). As Strauss also points out, Kojeve calls it a universal and homogenous state and not a stateless society. Which is to say, coercion will be still be required at the end of history in order to bring recalcitrant resisters to the world state into line (pg. 210); in other words, Kojeve tacitly admits that NOT everyone will find their satisfaction in the world state.

A universal state would attempt to eliminate the possibility of noble deeds and so too eliminate philosophy. The Universal and Final Tyrant will “be forced to suppress every activity which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the universal and homogenous state: he must suppress philosophy as an attempt to corrupt the young” (pg 211). Indeed, the Final Tyrant must go even further:

“he must in the interest of the homogeneity of his universal state forbid every teaching, every suggestion, that there are politically relevant natural differences among men which cannot be abolished or neutralized by progressing scientific technology. He must command his biologists to prove that every human being has, or will acquire, the capacity of being a philosopher or a tyrant.” (pg 211)

As Captain Beatty points out in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.” Kojeve’s view is egalitarian; Strauss insists—as the Classics did—that only a minority of men can become wise and that this is a natural difference. In other words, no amount of after school programs will turn a natural non-philosopher into a philosopher. Some men possess inborn superiority that under the right circumstances they will grow, intellectually, much much taller than other men. In Kojeve’s world state, the scientists will be compelled by force or through fear over the loss of status to come to conclusions that support the presuppositions of the regime. Does this sound familiar yet?

The final world state will seek to crush even the most modest efforts in the direction of thought. For we all know through common sense experience when we are around someone who is more thoughtful than we are; we cannot help but notice this inequality. The final state will seek to cut down the grass that grows taller, for that grass represents evidence of the world state’s false assumptions. And, terrifyingly, the “the Universal and Final Tyrant has at his disposal practically unlimited means for ferreting out, and for extinguishing, the most modest efforts in the direction of thought” (pg 211).

Is the world state here yet? No. But don’t you see tendencies all around you that point to the dissolution of the family, of citizenship, and of the nation? Philosophy, which is the attempt to understand nature and nobility, which is the beautiful and resplendent rejection of the fear of death as a binding necessity, are both well served in a world that is broken up into distinct parts, as opposed to any kind of world state or nationless world.

The Second Great Task: Build Beautiful Things with Your Friends

The first great task is a negative one; a resistance to the forces which stifle philosophy and nobility. The second great task of MCC students is positive: they will be founders of great enterprises. One reason that the eventual physical location needs to be relatively small is to create conditions in which most of the students are able to get to know one another. Of course, it would be insane to expect them all to become friends; friendship is discriminating and exclusive. But, if we are able to attract the right kind of students, they might all come to respect each other. Respect is the foundation of trust. And so, MCC students will trust each other as partners in the great tasks that they set for themselves.

Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships; MCC will be the school that launches a thousand friendships.

I have talked to a number of you through the audio discussion group and who have dm’d asking to talk, and I can say that EVERY ONE of those conversations have been worthwhile. You can feel very quickly when you meet a man who is animated by a similar task as yourself. The awareness of a shared task is a beautiful and good foundation for friendship.

Whereas I could be much more detailed on the great task of negation, I don’t want to say too much about the positive tasks the young men will pursue, because those tasks are up to them. Great men of vision cannot be a handed a pamphlet with a to-do list. Broadly speaking though, MCC students will be able to resist and overcome the pressures of decadence that our regime generates. They will be the flowers (or from the perspective of our elites the weeds) who grow up through the cracks of the suffocating concrete that attempts to restrain their growth. They will write books, start businesses, become politicians, win rifle contests, strive to understand nature, and find ways to perform noble deeds.

In a recent commencement address at Hillsdale College, Jordan Peterson told students that they are at a crossroads in their life. He suggested that to sin is to miss the mark; and that this is a fruitful metaphor for thinking about how people conceive of the world or of action. Some don’t know that they need to aim. Some don’t think that there is a target to aim at. Some think that all of the targets are equal. At MCC, we will aim to understand nature, promote noble deeds, and defend the nation state which makes both of these outstanding things possible.

This is too much to hope for, but perhaps one of them will even aim to do something like this:

“The man who dares to undertake the establishment of a people has to feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, the nature of man; of transforming each individual, who in himself is a perfect, isolated whole, into a part of a larger whole from which the individual, as it were, receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a morally dependent existence for the physically independent existence that we have all received from nature. In a word, he must deprive man of his own strength so as to give him strength from outside, which he cannot use without the help of others.

Rousseau’s Social Contract 2.7