Do We Owe Loyalty to Institutions?

As for human institutions that have gone astray, my view is that they are only dead branches hanging on to the trees of education, religion, and society to which my real loyalty lies. I would rather the dead wood of such institutions be pruned away so that the true wood can grow.

I am nothing if not loyal to the past. I suppose it’s why I am a conservative. Like Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.” I have always been this way. I still keep in touch with my oldest friend. In an age in which most people don’t know anything about their families, I exchange emails with my second cousin’s wife, the genealogist, about details of my own family to which she has easier access. My children all used the wooden highchair built by my great-grandfather, in which my mother and all her siblings and my brother and I sat. The ice cream scoop I use is the one that I still remember my father using nearly fifty years ago when I was little. And when, as happened last week, an old shirt—29-years-old in this case—becomes too tattered for wear and must be thrown away, I lament it silently for weeks on end as I have lamented the destruction of homes in the neighborhoods in which I have dwelt.

I have always wished not simply to stand athwart history, as William F. Buckley did, and yell, “Stop!” I have wished to actually stop history in many cases, and occasionally turn it in reverse.

And yet, though I still maintain this frame of mind for many things—may the ice cream scoop remain forever!—this conservative impulse in me has been challenged seriously over the last few years, especially with regard to institutions. Our scattering and shattering times have turned my soul from a desire for universal preservation to a desire for the least attractive side of market economies: the creative destruction so lauded by Joseph Schumpeter.

When I see or hear a story of a school, college, university, publication, charity, or think tank being shuttered these days, my usual instinct is one of relief and often celebration. Their passings mean much less to me than my ratty shirts. In fact, I am often elated.

These reactions are not shared by many others. Well-intentioned academics, especially, often wail loudly at the closure of academic institutions or even of departments within them. “How can we give up on the liberal arts?” they intone. “Even if these places weren’t doing well,” they continue, “we don’t want them to die. We just need to rouse their faculty to come together and stop those administrators from treating their institutions like a business.” At the very least, how can I be so callous when people’s jobs are at stake?

On that last point they do have me. I feel sorry for those who have to get new jobs. Even if they are my enemies in pretty much every way possible, I would still want them to be able to make a living and feed their families.

That being said, however, I generally do not wish my enemies to make their living running educational institutions. Nor do I want those working at supposedly charitable institutions to keep at it when the actions they are proposing do not, in fact, achieve or aim at the true good of others.

Because I’ve been in the academic world so long, it’s the pleas for loyalty to these institutions that both exercise an immediate tug on my heartstrings and, by the end, usually have me most irritated. Last fall, petitions were being sent around about the terrible axing of many departments and institutes at Australian Catholic University. The initial reports sounded bad. The administration was getting rid of positions and stopping funding on a number of projects, especially those to do with medieval history. Medieval history gone? Were they canceling Saints Dominic and Francis?

A cursory digging into the institution revealed something very different. I discovered an article by Miles Pattenden, then a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at this very institution, titled “Lament for the Catholic University: Has ACU Abandoned John Henry Newman’s Vision?” Talking about Newman’s vision sounded promising. Yet when it came to the details, Newman’s vision was strangely truncated. No mention was made of the unity of truth, the circle of knowledge, or the necessity of theology in the university. Faith and reason were mentioned but only in the service of “wide-ranging engagement with those who lie beyond the reach of Church teachings.” That last bit gives a clue as to his real concern. Not anything Newman would be concerned with. Instead, it was the same dreary bit of left-wing academia that one can find anywhere.

“As yet incomplete research projects to be abandoned by the University, and perhaps lost to the world at large,” Mr. Pattenden intoned, “include pioneering studies on the concept of home and problem of homelessness, on the origins of conspiracy theory, on transgender Australia and Queer Medievalism, on AI safety, and epistemic humility. My colleagues work on understandings of gender, on stories of migration, on the entanglements of empire, and on ecologies of experience.”

After reading that, my inclination was to start a counter petition to have ACU make far deeper cuts.

The same goes for most of the other stories of the day. This week the wails began again for another legacy Catholic college cutting its liberal arts. Brief glances at the website show that the “mission” of the place has nothing to do with God, Christ, or the Church. A look at its “liberal arts” departments reveals the same-old, same-old newfangled fixations on race, gender, and “progressive” politics found in the vast majority of higher education institutions.

Another set of wails rose for a religious journal of the arts I read once upon a time that was announcing a cessation of publication. The last I saw it was at a conference a few years ago where its most recent and final editor appeared. Sample copies were included in the registration packet. Given my loyalist nature, I promptly pulled it out that evening in the hotel. Like so many other publications, its journey to wokeness was almost complete. “Why is this all about weird sexuality?” I wondered. My attempt to get through it put me, and apparently its remaining readers and donors, to sleep.

If I am in need of a sleeping potion, I’d prefer a thick stout beer. If I am in search of a journal of art that takes religion seriously, I’d prefer it to be religion dealing with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The religion of Race, Sexuality, and Gender has boring and incoherent readings; its teachings and commands are destructive.

The death of shirts and houses will always make me tear up. I will guard my ice cream scoop till death. But as for these human institutions that have gone astray, my view is that they are only dead branches hanging on to the trees of education, religion, and society to which my real loyalty lies. I would rather the dead wood of such institutions be pruned away so that the true wood can grow.

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The featured image is “The Destruction of a Church” (1787) by Hubert Robert, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.