Why Does It Matter?

"Diversity" is a quality much celebrated by the Left, or at least by the politically correct. But I have long suspected that it is a habit more actively practiced among conservatives. I thought of this the other night when my wife and I went to a small dinner party to celebrate a friend's 50th birthday. All seven of us were conservative. And though we ranged along that spectrum from Roman Catholic to Libertarian, we enjoyed a gratifying unanimity on certain topics--the folly of affirmative action for example. But on other important issues we were a veritable rainbow coalition of opinion.

Take religion. Conservatives, of course, are supposed to be "pro religion." And some of us were. But also among our number was a prominent conservative commentator who has made it her mission (one of them, anyway) to preach the gospel of radical secularism. Never one for half measures, she rejects agnosticism as a timid evasion. Like an anti-clerical Enlightenment firebrand, she advocates full-throated atheism, with the emphasis on the alpha privative: "against theism."

Then there was the issue of education, especially civic education. Conservatives, of course, are supposed to be big supporters of civic education. "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship," a recent report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's National Civic Literacy Board, offers a dire assessment of college students' knowledge of American political history. "America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions," it warns. "Overall, college seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2 percent, or F, on a traditional grading scale." And there's lots more where of a similar nature in this chilling report, grounded in a carefully controlled random survey of 14,000 students from around the country. It turns out that the things college seniors don't know about America's history and political institutions would fill a book--several books. Bad news.

Or is it? While no dinner conversation among conservatives is really complete without some head-shaking about the grim state of education, one of our dinner companions, an eminent military historian, was positively nonchalant about the issue. "What does it matter?" he asked, suggesting along the way that things probably hadn't been much better in the past. And even if the citizenry had been better informed in the past, he asked, what did it matter if the mass of Americans were ignoramuses about their heritage and political institutions now? The American economy was booming. Things in general seemed to be going pretty well. Ergo, he said (or words to that effect), it didn't matter that your average college grad was a bit fuzzy about who Ulysses S. Grant was, about the correct half century of the first World War, whether or not the Declaration of Independence was the political instrument that freed the slaves, or whether there was any real difference between the Federalist Papers and the Pentagon Papers. His own example, from a recent talk he delivered at the Citadel military academy, was a question from a student wondering whether Napoleon was active before the Battle of Agincourt.

"The Coming Crisis in Citizenship" demonstrated that civic knowledge led to civic involvement. "Greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship," it reported. So it followed naturally that "Students who demonstrated greater learning of America's history and its institutions were more engaged in citizenship activities such as voting, volunteer community service, and political campaigns."

We didn't talk about the ISI report at dinner, but I can well imagine my friend smiling at this conclusion and asking "So what? So lots of people don't vote or don't volunteer in their communities: why does that matter?"

One answer, I suppose, is suggested by an observation of Thomas Jefferson's quoted in "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship": "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be." Of course, Jefferson was wrong about many things, but was he wrong about this? Again, my skeptical friend would point to our robust economy, our peaceful streets, our contented (or perhaps he means "apathetic") citizen-consumers: if these are the wages of ignorance, why not?

There are several reasons. For one thing, it is by no means clear that Jefferson was wrong. Things are relatively tranquil, and conspicuously prosperous now. But what happens if that changes? What if Americans are called upon really to exert themselves, to face a fundamental challenge to their way of life, their basic values? How can they defend that way of life, those basic values, if they do not know what they are? Adam Smith once observed that "there is a deal of ruin in a nation." That is undoubtedly the case. But how much ruin should we tolerate before embarking on some serious reconstruction?

That is the practical, the utilitarian response to the question "Why does it matter?" But the deeper response has to do with the intrinsic value of political and historical knowledge. Not only does ignorance make us more vulnerable to tyranny, it also makes us less interesting: less spiritually and intellectually vibrant.

The stupefied creatures of Huxley's Brave New World are forbidden to read Shakespeare or other classics. Such works might make them think, which might make them dissatisfied. Instead, their political masters see to it that their every physical craving is exquisitely excited and then artificially sated. Is that happiness? Or is it a version of the "new servitude" that Tocqueville warned about, when he warned about the dangers of "democratic despotism"? "I have always thought," Tocqueville wrote, "that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind . . . might be combined more easily with the outward form of freedom and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people."

"Why does it matter?" My friend, I am sure, had a twinkle in his eye as he pressed that question. It made for good dinner table conversation, demonstrated how diverse conservatives can be in their opinions, and even--perhaps by design--led most of us to formulate anew our answers to a question we had, only an hour before, regarded as merely impertinent.