Things look bleak for Western civilization: the precipitous decline in religious faith, the breakdown of the family, the hijacking by globalist organizations of the sovereignty of free nation-states... The crumbling, in other words, of the three pillars that keep a society grounded and stable: faith, family, and nation.
But our civilization has faced extinction before and emerged more glorious than ever. When the decadent Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD, Western civilization (such as it was at the time) entered a period many call the Dark Ages; that’s a gross misnomer in some important ways, but I won’t get into that here. The point is, it was a pretty dark era compared to the relative stability of Roman rule before and the flowering of civilization that came after. Chaos reigned. Literacy collapsed. The infrastructure of the Empire fell into disrepair. This period of history could easily have been a dead end for the cultural glories of ancient Greece and Rome. It could have been the end of the Judeo-Christian monotheism that was only beginning to transform the world.
My wife and I homeschool our children, and I teach courses to other teenagers in our homeschooling community. One of the courses is the history of early Christianity. I tell my students about St. Augustine of Hippo, the great Doctor of the Church who wrote the Confessions and the monumental Christian apologia titled City of God, one of the towering figures of Christian history who worked tirelessly to shape and spread the faith. In 430 AD, as he lay on his deathbed in the North African town where he was bishop, the barbarians were literally at the gates, besieging the city. He must have felt like many of us do now, that the forces of darkness were winning, that the fight was futile. More likely his faith and optimism were greater than mine, but in any case, things looked pretty damn bleak, generally speaking, for the future of the unique civilization born from the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem.
But the monks of the early Church kept the fire alive. For the next 500 years and more they persevered in copying and preserving the great works of the ancient world. They devoted themselves to spreading Judeo-Christian values and morality to a world of polytheistic pagans. They literally rebuilt civilization. It took centuries, but the seeds they planted blossomed into the period of the great civilizational bloom of the High Middle Ages, which saw the rise of universities and cathedrals, the growth of cities and literacy, the development of the scientific method and new technologies – including, eventually, the printing press – and much more. All because after the barbarians replaced the last Roman emperor on the throne, monks refused to let the light of civilization be snuffed out.
Our civilization has been under assault continuously ever since then and weathered many storms. But it is not invincible. All empires, all civilizations fall. What has been required at every turn and what it will take today, is for those of us who care, to keep the torch lit and to pass it on. It requires a cultural pride and conviction that we are the heirs of a grand historical narrative highlighted by the best of humanity. It requires passion and patience. As individuals we may not live to see the victory, and in any case the victory will only be temporary. The conflict between darkness and light will always be there. But our duty is to keep the fire alive.
Another course I teach is a Great Books class, and the last novel we read is Fahrenheit 451, by science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury. If you’ve read it or seen the movie, you may remember that it’s set in a totalitarian, near-future society in which the populace is manipulated through the distractions of hedonism and mass entertainment, through mass surveillance, and through the eradication of literacy. Sound familiar? This is how totalitarians control the people – by severing you from your cultural heritage, by rewriting the past, and then by wiping your minds of even the memory of the past. (You may recall that in George Orwell’s 1984 the past is constantly being rewritten to suit the needs of those in power and to keep the people focused on an ever-changing present.) With that connection cut, people are isolated as discrete individuals with no cultural identity to unite and uplift them. It makes them easy to control.
The hero of Fahrenheit 451, Montag, is a fireman. But he doesn’t put out fires; he and his fellow firemen confiscate books, which it is forbidden to own, and burn them – until a casual encounter with a stranger plants a seed of doubt in his mind, and he ultimately has a revelation about the connection between books, literacy, identity, and freedom.
Fahrenheit 451 may not seem like an obvious choice for a Great Books course, but I picked it because it’s timely and it’s one of the few dystopian novels that end on a hopeful note. In 1984, by contrast, protagonist Winston Smith eventually comes to love his submission to Big Brother. The totalitarians, the barbarians win. In Fahrenheit 451, Montag manages to escape the totalitarians of the city to the countryside, where he discovers a small community of people, of dissidents like himself, who are committed to preserving the literacy that the totalitarians have banned, the books Montag himself used to burn. They are committed to preserving not the physical books, but their stories, their ideas, their themes, the civilization they represent. The community is so committed to preserving these that it has turned itself into a living repository of the forbidden books by memorizing them. Each person chooses a classic book and memorizes it. They keep the words and the past and the culture alive in their memory. They refuse to let the totalitarians erase this civilizational legacy, and they pass that legacy down to the next generation.
I tell my teenage students and my children that they live in a time in which literacy is threatened, their extraordinary cultural heritage and identity are threatened, their future is threatened. The barbarians are not only storming the gates but already inside them as well. It’s a time of civilizational decline, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We are entering a new Dark Ages, albeit of a different nature from the one into which the early Christians were thrust. And I tell them their duty is to refuse to let the barbarians win, no matter what it takes. So I’m making my kids memorize War and Peace. Just kidding.
I tell my students and children that the only way for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful to endure and to prevail in this world is for them to embrace the responsibility of embodying and carrying those ideals and values forward. They must be like the community of dissidents in Fahrenheit 451. They must be the monks in a new Dark Age. That’s the responsibility of all of us who care about preserving our values, our freedoms, the best that has been said and done from ages past. In your own small way, do your part. Victory is not guaranteed. But without the pride and the will to fight and to maintain the light in the darkness, defeat is guaranteed.