The Reluctant Reactionary

I am in my seventh year of teaching.  I am youngish.  In terms of my education, I read old books early, attended a Group of Eight university, and completed a humanities degree.  The former did far more than the latter to deepen my mind and broaden my interests.  Early in the piece, I smelled something rotten in the state of higher education.  I was unsurprised to find a less erudite but equally off-smelling version when I entered secondary education as a humanities teacher.

It is off-smelling only to those who have noses to smell.  To the rest, who may quibble at times about falling standards and rampant illiteracy, the schools are working exactly as intended.  That intention is to sever a generation from the oak, to create the perfect postmodern novus homo, the continuation of the political and philosophical project of totalitarians, to quote Clausewitz, by other means.  It is only tangentially interested in the formation of a weltanschauung, of fortifying the mind, of nourishing the soul; and when these things do occur, it is usually by accident.  The typical modern humanities educator is part bureaucrat, part facilitator, part-spreadsheet, and wholly unconcerned with passing on what she has received – should she understand it at all.  He is the intellectual equivalent of a Vandal, squatting in the ruins of Rome.

I have no treatises to nail to the door, much less a manifesto for change.  I am aware of the millions of variables that enter any public thing, and know my perspective is limited, and the temptation to amplify the particular to the general is strong.  Where there are errors in my thinking, I welcome correction; I aim not to change anybody’s mind, merely share my insights and my position; I am not writing for publication.  Anecdote may not tell us everything, but it can tell us something.

I have chosen the title the Reluctant Reactionary, because that is what I have become.  I harbour no burning desire to join the commentariat or public life one way or another, and in milder times, might have enjoyed living without ever needing to take a side.  But we are living in the moral and intellectual equivalent of the Phoney War, which might drag on for another decade, another two, but will end eventually.  Ultimately, I am in the business of planting trees the shade under which I will never enjoy, anyway – which ought to be any teacher’s ideal.  My views are my own, and in no way represent those of anyone else – and certainly not my employer.

Hence my anonymity, and the anonymity of anybody I might mention.  Fear may be the product of a degenerate mind, as Virgil intoned, but courage in the thrall of rashness serves nobody, as Aristotle might have reminded him.  It is enough to say that I live in Australia, but what passes for education here might as easily be applied anywhere in the West.  The political climate is such that there are obvious dangers in this course of action, to my employment, my reputation, and even to my person.  I may not be nailing treatises but find comfort in simple words: ‘Here I stand.  I can do no other.’