This Is Not Okay

A lot of things are not okay these days.  The water crisis that occurred over the summer in Jackson, Mississippi was not okay, according to a FEMA administrator.  The voting procedures used in certain state elections are also not okay.  The radical policies increasingly being pursued by school boards are not okay.  Some of Airbnb’s listings are decidedly not okay.  Gun violence is not okay.  Even in Canada it is the same – the harassment doled out to women politicians and the financial de-platforming of political dissidents are both equally not okay.

To be sure, all of these things are certainly not okay.  Some are really not okay, some others are really, really not okay.  But the least okay thing of all is the fact that public discourse in our times has so deteriorated to the point that all sorts of people who apparently wish to be taken seriously feel at ease describing the multifarious evils of human life as “not okay.” 

At this rate, we can hardly be more than a year or two away from moo-ing at one another when we disapprove of an act or a word of our fellow citizen.  Saying “this is not okay” to everything that strikes one as unjust or out of place is barely one step above the sort of noises certain ungulates make when a rival intrudes upon their territory.  It is the last degree of inarticulacy, the very last stage before the general abandonment of collective reasoning in favor of the general surrender to brute force.  It is on the level with the degenerate mantras of those who have flamboyantly tossed away all pretense of public reasoning - “transwomen are women!”  “abortion is healthcare!” - the final, aggressive embrace of anti-reason.

I never fail to be amazed by the inability of so many people to recognize the manner in which our culture’s near-total inarticulacy is implicated in its increasing degradation.  People hear moronic sloganeering like the kind I just quoted, and instantly blame some detested ideology.  But the cultural debasement that is the precondition for the prevalence of ideology is always left unaddressed.  It is only in the absence of any real standards of public reasoning that the cliches and mantras of ideology can take root.  Where men expect compelling arguments to accompany the advancement of meaningful social changes – where the norm of public discourse is the giving and taking of reasons - then the shouts and slogans of the zealots garner ridicule and detestation rather than acquiescence.

This is unquestionably the dynamic at work behind all those videos of fuming, puffy-faced college students threatening and screaming at speakers on campuses across the country.  These scenes are typically taken as evidence of the pernicious effects of ideology – of progressivism, of “wokeness.”  There are certainly that, but they are also certainly evidence of a generation of inarticulate boobies, who could not rub two premises together to make a conclusion if their lives depended on it.  The point is that they could never fall under the influence of the moronic ideologies they spout if they had been properly trained in a course of study rooted in the Trivium – in the arts of language. Educated persons simply do not speak and think like that. I have made this point elsewhere before (it cannot be made too often): these young people scream because they have never been taught to do otherwise.  Their impoverished linguistic capacity is the necessary condition for their susceptibility to the stupid slogans of the hour.

Obviously, our schools are deeply implicated in this national epidemic of inarticulacy, which means they are deeply implicated in the political and cultural degradation which has resulted from it.  Their failure to prioritize the arts of language – the forms of arguments, the structure of sequential reasoning, the marshalling of evidence – is now ramifying in incalculable ways through our entire political culture.  We no longer possess the intellectual resources to adequately navigate the complexities of history confronting us.  The intricacies of foreign affairs or the competing goods at stake in public policy are now routinely reduced to a handful of favored partisan cliches, since these are the only categories our public figures can command with their impoverished linguistic resources.  War, pestilence, debt, deprivation: all summon reflexive sloganeering in the place of considered reflection.  To put it bluntly, we have become too stupid to manage the challenges of our day and age.

So the reform of our schools is indeed an imperative if we wish to save our country from the worst effects of that stupidity.  But we must be clear on the manner of reform demanded of us.  Recent controversies in the political sphere have foregrounded the absurd ideological bent of the instruction in so many of America’s classrooms.  The misrepresentations of history and the perversions of modern sexuality currently getting rammed down the throats of children across this country have elicited a just indignation across broad swathes of the public, and initiated various policy responses intended to curb the worst effects of this malfeasance.  All of this is necessary and courageous work, long overdue.

But for those of us at work within the field of education, we must conceive of reform in much more fundamental terms.  We must be capable of distinguishing disease from symptom, and address our efforts to remedying the basic linguistic deficits that are the precondition for the spread of all this dogmatic nonsense.  Keeping that nonsense out of our classrooms is obviously a necessary step for improving instruction, but it cannot constitute anything like a complete or sufficient reform.  That lies in the conception and implementation of a program of study directed at the cultivation of those arts of language now so neglected by our schools.  Students subjected to such a program will never prove susceptible to the inanities of “wokeness,” or any other ideological agenda.  The training of the mind in grammar, rhetoric, and logic is the certain prophylactic against those inanities.  A school dedicated to providing that training will simply find no room in its curriculum for mindless mantras and political sloganeering.

So there is a temptation that classical educators must strongly resist, and it is the temptation to think that by banishing the progressive trash from our classrooms, we have made any fundamental reform in the tenor of modern education.  The failings of modern education lie much deeper, and our remedies must be applied at a much deeper level.  However much the political storms may rage outside our school buildings, inside, all our care should be for teaching our pupils to be articulate, well-read, thoughtful human beings, in the confidence that young people so taught will never grow up to serve the evil, stupid slogans of the day.