RR Reno: Teaching and the Young

“But there is a deeper point that conservatives need to make. Our sense of instability, our feeling that everything is up for grabs, and our anxious insecurity has its most destructive source in the triumph of desire over restraint in contemporary culture. Divorce and serial cohabitation bring fluidity and change into the most ancient touchstone of permanence: home and hearth.

On this point, it seems to me that American conservatism must recognize the primacy of social mores over economic philosophy and foreign policy. We need to expand an old argument. A democracy depends upon citizens capable of ordered liberty. And a culture that seeks economic vitality and is committed to global leadership also requires citizens who can distinguish responsible autonomy from a life of anomic desire. We can endure the inevitable risks of marketplace and battlefield—but only if we have some confidence about the stability of the deeper, more fundamental things of life.

In our liberal constitutional system, and in our culture of live-and-let-live tolerance, it will be difficult for conservatives to shape a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority. But that’s what we need. Because functional cultural authority is the source of deep existential stability, the stability that will allow us to endure the economic and geo-political insecurities that our nation—one committed to vibrant economic growth and global leadership—must entertain.” RR Reno

And Leszek Kolakowski on teaching:

“You must know that nothing is good or evil, but I am teaching you that some things are good and some are evil, in order to induce in you conditioned reflexes which are useful for the maintenance of solidarity in communal life which is neither good nor evil but must be seen as good” [Kolakowski ‘The Presence of Myth’ p.25]

“The natural social self defense against education so conceived (that is an education which gives up authority or employs authority while at the same time proclaiming its fictitiousness) is understandable. Since an effective inheritance of values is always the work of authority, and every act of emancipation from authority may arise only in the name of values absorbed thanks to authority, a scientistic upbringing is therefore an absurd utopia.”