I am not talking of garden-variety “liberals” (actually, big-government statists, so long as that big government does not come down on them), who see Washington as a kind of taxpayer-funded supra-charity, dispensing goodies to the deserving poor and making sure chemicals aren’t dumped in the drinking water. Rather, I refer to the hard Left, the radicals, many of whom are now in power, who would remake (“fundamentally transform”)—wreck—the United States of America and, by extension, the civilization of the West.
On the other side are not conservatives per se, but those who see themselves in the role of conservators—preservers of the Western legacy who recognize that we should not lightly abandon a long, shared cultural tradition that, whatever its real or perceived faults, has been the primary engine of human moral, spiritual, social, scientific, and medical progress.
Therefore, I propose to look at the history of the Left–Right conflict (to put it in its simplest terms) not only in terms of politics but in terms of art and culture as well. If the Paleolithic cavemen who painted the walls of Lascaux kept precise, detailed, written astronomical records, we don’t know about them. But their symbols and images of animals and people, left on the walls of ancient caves in France, might well contain astronomic information—preserved via the medium of art. Via their paintings, they left us a nearly indelible image of their world. Looking at the vivid illustrations of bulls, stags, and horses—and even other human beings—we can begin to understand who we are in a way that science cannot teach us. The cave paintings are not only evidence; they are human interpretations of evidence, part of our shared heritage. Their artists were who we still are today. They are trying to tell us something.
Similarly, the worldview of the ancient Greeks comes down via the medium of poetry and oral narrative, later preserved in written form; and this slender reed of happenstance, subject to the vagaries of selection and preservation, is, together with Jerusalem, one of the pillars upon which rests the entire edifice of Western civilization. Legends they seem to us, but like the cave paintings, they are interpretations of phenomena, internalized by the artists and then re-externalized in the form of narrative—our ur-Narrative, or founding myth, from which all that is human in our society flows. We ignore the philosophical and moral significance of this patrimony at our peril and should never dismiss it as mere superstition or storytelling, somehow inferior to the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The writings are all of a piece, clues to our essence, messages in sacred bottles, washed ashore upon the sands of time.
They are stories of gods and goddesses and titans, but mostly they are stories of heroes. Humanity is inconceivable without heroes; we are not egalitarian members of an ant farm, shuttling from cradle to grave, indistinguishable from one another and easily replaceable. Not everyone can be a hero, but everyone can dream of heroism. Bravery has always been a cardinal human virtue, so great that it was embodied by none other than Jesus Christ, another foundational cultural pillar of the West.
In his book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jack Miles looks at the story of Jesus of Nazareth as the tale of the hero of the New Testament, complete with the happy ending of the Resurrection. As Miles write in his prologue:
All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and—no less important—other millions who never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday, “the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matt. 20:16)
The humbly heroic Christ—born into straitened circumstances of a virgin mother, a precocious teacher and rabbi who undertook a brief, three-year ministry that was both populist and political, who was captured through treachery, unfairly tried, tortured, and executed, and who returned in triumph over death—is the archetypal Christian hero, supplanting the Homeric heroes (Achilles, Odysseus) who did not give their lives for something larger than themselves, their families, or their tribes. But Christ, the Lamb of God, the Redeemer, Messiah, willingly fails in order to succeed, bestowing a gift upon a humanity that is still not sure whether it wants to accept it. His story—what used to be unapologetically called “The Greatest Story Ever Told”—resonates down through two thousand years of Western history, touching nearly ever major subsequent tale of heroism, from the Chanson de Roland to The Little Mermaid.
For what we—in an increasingly secular West—misread as a political argument is, in reality, nothing of the sort. It is a literary argument, if we define literature properly not as “fiction” but as the expression of the soul of a people, in this case, of all people. Politics (which for many has come to replace sports as the subject of rooting interest par excellence) is merely its secondary manifestation, the generally tiresome litany of regurgitated policy prescriptions and bogus campaign promises that residents of the Western democracies routinely encounter today. But where once in our culture raged religious arguments (whose moral underpinnings were never in doubt), today we are concerned not simply with the details of a system of governance and social organization, but with the very nature of that system itself. In fact, at issue is the essence of Western civilization and how it may be subverted to achieve a vastly different—indeed, opposite—end than originally intended. For one side has changed the meaning of the principal words in the debate, including “democracy,” “culture,” “civilization,” and “justice,” among others. The two sides speak different languages, but with a superficially shared vocabulary that serves as a means of deceit for one and confusion for the other.
Seduction, subversion, sedition—these are the tools of a creature we once called Satan, the Father of Lies, the loser of the Battle in Heaven. Yet he continues the fight here on earth with the only weapons at his disposal: man’s inherent weaknesses and zeal to be duped if the cause seems appealing enough. Chief among the weaknesses of Western man today are his fundamental lack of cultural self-confidence, his willingness to open his ears to the siren song of nihilism, a juvenile eagerness to believe the worst about himself and his society and to relish, on some level, his own prospective destruction.
Whether one views the combatants in the struggle between God and Satan ontologically, mythically, or literarily, God created man in his own image and likeness but chose to give him free will—a force so powerful that not even God’s infinite love can always overcome it. Thus given a sporting chance to ruin God’s favorites, the fallen Light-Bringer, Lucifer, picked himself and his fellows off the floor of the fiery lake into which they were plunged by the sword of St. Michael, and endeavors each day not to conquer Man but to seduce and destroy him. As Satan observes in Book One of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same . . .
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.
Satan himself, however, has no need for servants in Hell, as God does in Heaven; he is instead satisfied with corpses on earth. As modern history shows, the Devil has had great success and ample reward in that department. But he cannot be satisfied with his infernal kingdom. As in a Hollywood sequel, the body count must be ever higher, just to keep the antagonist interested. Damnation consists not in consignment to the netherworld, but in the rejection of the ur-Narrative—a willful separation of oneself from the heroic path for which history and literature provide a clear signpost.
As Milton writes in the Areopagitica, the poet’s seminal essay on freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” For Milton, the very absence of conflict was in itself contemptible, unmanly—inhuman.
This