As you probably know, I used to teach at the college level. I taught Political Philosophy at a small liberal arts college, and I admit to having a very soft spot in my heart for liberal arts education.

The justification for Liberal Arts is simple: there is more to life than mere production and survival. Human beings are rational, creative, artistic, and long not just for comfortable but also the elevated. You could call it “the good life,” a “life of virtue” (broadly understood), or any number of other terms, but the basic idea is that education should not only be a kind of training, but enlargement of the mind and soul.

Liberal has the same root as “free,” and in past times an education in the liberal arts was understood to be important to living life as a free person, where freedom is not just being able to do what your appetites demand, but rather having the capacity to choose the good. Freedom and living the “good life” were inextricably tied together, and the “good life” meant living in virtue as well as comfort. It entailed sacrifice, bravery, self-discipline–all the virtues that are now disdained.

That’s why academic freedom was always seen as vital to the quality of a liberal arts education. Even in the universities of olden times–and they go back a thousand years in Western Culture–people who were studying in university were given quite broad freedom to explore ideas outside the bounds of orthodoxy. These universities were religious institutions, of course, but in most cases most of the time students and “professors” had relative freedom in matters of thought. Less than in recent times, but much more than you would expect.

Academic freedom has almost evaporated today, as have the liberal arts. There are still puddles where once there were great lakes, of course. But in recent decades the room for dissent from orthodoxy has narrowed far beyond anything seen in centuries. We are in the midst of a less violent, but no less virulent, religious war over whether an orthodoxy can constrain our thought and our speech without limit. In such an environment there is no room for the liberal arts, because there is no liberty.

We all know the contours, if not all the details of what is being fought over. A new orthodoxy has arisen and it has captured the commanding heights of our civilization. It will brook no dissent. An Orthodox Christian cannot decline to wear a rainbow flag jersey without cancelation. An Art History professor cannot teach about art. A medical student cannot learn biology, or decline to participate in the murder of people they consider to be human beings.

All must comply. There can be no dissent.

Without freedom, there can be no virtue. There can be no real humanity. One must become a moral automaton, submitting to the higher authority no matter how corrupt or self-serving. With no virtue, there is only virtue signaling. “I am on the right side of history!”

At the core of this orthodoxy is a rejection of objective truth, of nature, and of course nature’s God.

The Liberal Arts exist because none of us can see the mind of God and know it fully. That is why we have disputes. We are imperfect, limited, ephemeral, while He is eternal and omnipotent. For the agnostics, of whom there have been many who are practitioners of the liberal arts, there remained Nature, which implied its own rules. There is health vs illness, truth vs error or falsity. Physics, biology, chemistry.

All of that is gone now. There is no truth, only my truth. There is The Science™, of course, but it is a construct of will, not some reflection of an underlying reality. Which is why Fauci could unironically say “I represent science,” despite making pronouncements that contradicted themselves regularly. The Science™ has changed, which only meant he changed his opinion.

The Science™ is what The Scientists™ say, without reference to some underlying reality. Because if there is an underlying reality, we cannot know it fully and must therefore engage in inquiry, dispute, admit uncertainty, and invite different points of view. And each position is tested against reality, not an orthodoxy.

What is distinctive about today’s orthodoxy is how rapidly changing it can be. It literally can change by the day, because what it consists of is the feelings of a class of people, not assertions about a reality itself. It is “my truth,” but the “my” in “my truth” is the chosen ones. We know who they are, because they are daily celebrated. They are the people who can do and say whatever they want while the rest of us must submit to their whims.

Economically these people are the Elite, and culturally they are the Alphabet people. Together they are the coalition who decide Truth™. The Alphabet people (BIPOC/LGBTQIA+) are the shock troops of the Elite, who don’t engage in the messiness of the protests and destruction, the cancelations, and all the grunt work. The Elite™ are the decision makers, the Davos crowd, who are I believe largely indifferent to the whims of the Alphabet crowd, as long as they keep us in line and docile.

We cannot have arguments or discussions with either crowd, because the Elite are utterly indifferent to what we think, and the Alphabet crowd has no set definition of truth or falsity, reality vs fantasy, because for them everything is will. Their will. Things are as they say. Period.

You probably have noticed that most of what I write about has to do with one or another of these two crowds in some way, because for the most part these are the people who own our civilization now. There are many people who are, if not fine with that, at least just want to be left alone. They want to avoid trouble, and rightly so. The trouble they invite through dissent can crush their lives.

But what is being sacrificed by ignoring the fight against these two malign forces in our civilization is, in the end, our civilization itself.

There are alternatives, to be sure. Most human beings have always lived outside Western Civilization. But I, for one, am convinced that Western Civilization has done more to advance both human well-being and humanity as a rational, creative species than any other. Not because it is flawless–surely it is not–but because it invites us to explore the limits of human achievement more than any other.

Western music, especially orchestral music, has no equal. Western science is unmatched. Western philosophy, when it existed, pushed the boundaries, and Western technology is what sustains 8 billion on Earth. What sculptures match the Renaissance artists?

There is much to admire in other cultures, and one of the wonders of Western culture is its embrace of the best from everyone and everywhere. The English language is a wonderful mishmash of languages, because we unapologetically embrace everything great. One of my favorite words is schadenfreude, and it is borrowed. Old English barely exists in our language because we borrow prolifically from everybody. There are only 4500 words left from Old English, out of hundreds of thousands. The rest is borrowed.

To steal a term from the Left, we “culturally appropriate,” and that is a good thing.

We can’t have discussions these days because there is nothing to discuss. Both because our opponents believe there is no inherent truth to which we can each refer, and because their purpose is to destroy us.

We are the bad guys. They are the good guys. That is how they see it, and there is no room for discussion. It is a battle of wills.

What can we do facing this? Look for allies in the fight. And the only allies out there are the people keeping their heads down avoiding the bullets.

But in recruiting allies we have to recognize that we face a massive collective action problem. Each person who picks up their metaphorical gun and joins the fight risks everything, while likely benefiting not at all himself. He is fighting for the people who are avoiding the carnage.

But he is fighting for something else, too: the future of civilization. Do we want the next generation, or the next after that, to be in the clutches of the Alphabet people and the Elite?

Benjamin Franklin captured some of this in his famous quote: “If you give up your freedom for safety, you don’t deserve either one.”

Do we deserve our freedom?