by Roger Kimball
Western civilization survives only if each generation rejects egalitarian vandalism and relearns its duty to preserve, cultivate, and pass on greatness.
A few days ago, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation bestowed one of its storied Bradley Prizes on James Hankins, a sometime professor of history at Harvard University, now at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and co-author of The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. (Actually, Hankins is the sole author of Volume I of The Golden Thread, which tells the story of the Western tradition from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC through the Renaissance. Volume II,
which picks up the story with the Reformation, is by the historian
Allen Guelzo.) This is the moment when I note for the record that, being
the publisher of these magnificent books at Encounter Books,
I have what is called in the trade an “interest.” But don’t take my
word for the adjective “magnificent.” The reception of these books has
been nothing short of ecstatic. Perhaps the most searching review is by Spencer Klavan and appears in the current number of The Claremont Review of Books.
Listening to Jim Hankins’s remarks at the Bradley event prompts me to
reprise a few thoughts about what we are up to with The Golden Thread. The
phrase names not only these two books but also a larger project that
Encounter is undertaking with several partners to change the
conversation about—well, I was going to say “about education.” But
really, it is about that vibrant thing that the soporific word
“education” designates, namely, opening the treasure chest of the past
in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.
“Greatness” is not a word you hear much in the once-hallowed halls of
academia these days. But that does not mean it is irrelevant to what is
supposed to be going on there. In the preface to a collection of essays
called Giants and Dwarfs,
Allan Bloom insisted that “the essence of education is the experience
of greatness.” Almost everything that Bloom wrote about the university (The Closing of the American Mind,
for example) flowed from this fundamental conviction. And it was just
this, of course, that got him branded an enemy of democracy.
In fact, Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic.
But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes
to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate
them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare,
declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.
As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the
habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of
cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this
means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works
from the woke grievance industry that rules us, works chosen simply
because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or
social minority. It means students who graduate not having read
Aristotle, Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even
worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly
as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism,
imperialism, and so on. A favorite recent example was the news that
Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, has
embarked upon the project of “decolonizing Shakespeare” in order to rid
the bard’s work and reputation of “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and
increasingly West-centric worldviews.”
“Gosh,” I thought, “has it come to that?” I am afraid that it has. In
many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike
regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment and look to
the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and
self-satisfaction.
The Golden Thread is meant to be an antidote to that bundle of
entrenched and debilitating pathologies. They are so entrenched and so
toxic that treating them effectively would be tantamount to a Gestalt
shift, a revolution in the Zeitgeist. And that is precisely the
ambitious task we have set ourselves with The Golden Thread.
Under the rubric of “The Golden Thread,” we are working to develop
curricula and various teaching materials to help bring about a
counterrevolution that is also a return to fundamentals. Again, phrases
like “curricula” and “teaching aids” are sleep-inducing, but the reality
they name is electrifying. We intend to embrace and rekindle a number
of subjects, from science and mathematics to economics, history, and
rhetoric. We have, I believe, made a spectacular start with a book that
is transforming our understanding of American history. I mean Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred McClay, a professor of history at Hillsdale College. Among other things, Land of Hope is a fitting contribution to the festivities surrounding America’s 250th anniversary.
Asked what the Golden Thread was all about, James Hankins emphasized
two things. One, the Golden Thread aims to help students and readers
appreciate “the fragility of civilization.” We want readers to
understand how arduous and painstaking the achievement of Western
civilization has been and also how quickly and easily it can be lost.
Two, the Golden Thread aims to awaken readers to their—which is to say,
to our—vocation as “custodians of the Western story,
responsible for its preservation, cultivation, and reform. We must be
gardeners,” Hankins said, “not engineers, working with ‘Nature and Nature’s God,’ not against.”
Most readers will have caught Hankins’s allusion to the Declaration of Independence
with the phrase “Nature and Nature’s God.” You don’t often hear such
talk among those currently entrusted with the care and nurture of future
generations of American citizens. I pause to note that the ambition
that Hankins names stands in the background of all we aim to accomplish
with the Golden Thread.
For now, though, I want to take up what Jim Hankins said about cultivation and becoming gardeners. It is consonant with C. S. Lewis’s observation
that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to
irrigate deserts.” As a prolegomenon to that process, let me say
something about three homely words: “seeds,” “threads,” and
“opportunity.”
Let’s start with seeds. I have often recalled my surprise the first
time I noticed the legend “cultural instructions” on the brochure that
accompanies packets of seeds. “How quaint,” I thought as I perused the
advisory: this much water and that much sun; certain tips about
fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps
the bugs away, but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen.
Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and
unseasonable frosts . . .
But the more I pondered it, the less quaint, and the more profound,
those “cultural instructions” seemed. I suppose I had once known that
the word “culture” comes from the capacious Latin verb colo,
which means everything from “live, dwell, inhabit,” to “observe a
religious rite”—whence our word “cult.” It can also mean to “care,
tend, nurture,” and “promote the growth or advancement of.” I never
thought much about it.
I should have. There is a lot of wisdom in etymology, the etymology
of which, after all, means the ἔτυμος or “true, genuine sense” of a
word. The noun cultura (which derives from colo) means first of all “the tilling or cultivation of land” and “the care or cultivation of plants.”
But cultura, too, has ambitious tentacles. There’s the bit
about observing religious rites again. And it can also mean “well
groomed”—the dictionary specifies that “hair” is meant—and also, more
generally, “chic, polished, sophisticated.”
It was Cicero, in a famous passage of the Tusculan Disputations,
who gave currency to the metaphor of culture as a specifically
intellectual pursuit. “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot
be productive without cultivation,” Cicero wrote, “so the soul cannot be
productive without education.” Philosophy, he said, is a sort of “cultura animi,”
a cultivation of the mind or spirit. “It pulls out vices by the roots,”
he said, “makes souls fit for the reception of seed,” and sows in order
to bring forth “the richest fruit.”
But even the best care, Cicero warned, does not inevitably bring good results. The influence of education, of cultura animi,
“cannot be the same for all: its effect is great when it has secured a
hold upon a character suited to it.” That is to say, the results of
cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care but also on the
inherent nature of the thing being cultivated. How much of what Cicero
said do we still understand?
In current parlance, “culture” (in addition to its use as a
biological term) has both a descriptive and an evaluative meaning. In
its anthropological sense, “culture” is neutral. It describes the habits
and customs of a particular population: what its members do, not what
they should do. Its task is to inventory, to docket, not to judge.
But we also speak of “high culture,” meaning not just social
practices but a world of artistic, intellectual, and moral endeavor in
which the notion of hierarchy, of a rank-ordering of accomplishment, is
key.
Culture in the evaluative sense does not merely admit, it requires
judgment as a kind of coefficient or auxiliary: comparison,
discrimination, evaluation are its lifeblood. “We never really get near a
book,” Henry James once remarked, “save on the question of its being
good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not treating, its
subject.” It was for the sake of culture in this sense that 19th century
British writer Matthew Arnold extolled criticism as—everyone knows the
famous phrase— “the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the
best that is known and thought in the world.”
Pursuing that ambition requires that we nurture and care for the
cultural seeds of our inheritance. It also requires that we appreciate
their flowering not only as individual blossoms but as a harmonious,
intertwined garden existing through time. What provides the unifying
links, the binding thread? It is worth meditating on the powerful
image of the thread in our tradition. One thinks, for example, of the
three fates in Greek mythology. Clotho spins the thread of human life;
her sister Lachesis portions out the thread to each individual. And then
her sister Atropos, the “implacable” one, decides when to snip the
thread and bring each life to an end.
Or think of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Ariadne
superintended the Labyrinth in whose corridors dwelt the Minotaur, a
ferocious creature that was half-man and half-bull. The Minotaur feasted
on a cargo of Athenian youths who were brought yearly to Crete as war
booty. One year, the hero Theseus was among the sacrificial offerings.
He resolved to kill the Minotaur and free the young Athenians. Ariadne,
having fallen in love with Theseus, gave him a ball of thread and told
him how to proceed into the labyrinth. Theseus tied one end of the
thread outside the entrance to the maze. After he met and killed the
Minotaur, he followed the thread back up out of the labyrinth. It is
worth noting that we call that ball of thread a “clew,” whence our word
“clue,” something that guides or directs us in the solution of a
problem or mystery. It is in this context that logicians speak of an
“Ariadne’s thread” as a technique for solving puzzles or problems that
have multiple ways of proceeding.
And this brings me back to the Golden Thread. One way of describing
our ambition is to say that we aim to provide an account of mankind’s
adventures in time. In part, that means retracing the steps and the
missteps that have brought us to our present journeys. In part, it is a
process of what Plato called ἀνάμνησις or “recollection.” We want to
deliver readers from the provincialism not only of place but what the
English writer David Cecil called “a provinciality of time.” We
Westerners feel we are “provincial” if we haven’t visited such important
cities as London, Paris, New York, and Athens. But Cecil points out
that “To feel ill-at-ease and out of place except in one’s own period is
to be a provincial in time. But he who has learned to look at life
through the eyes of Chaucer, of Donne, of Pope, and of Thomas Hardy is
freed from this limitation. He has become a cosmopolitan of the ages,”
Cecil says, “and can regard his own period with the detachment which is a
necessary foundation of wisdom.”
We believe that The Golden Thread can make an important contribution
to building that foundation. And this brings me, finally, the
opportunity to say something about the tantalizing word “opportunity.”
What is an “opportunity”? The dictionary tells us that it is “a set of
circumstances that makes it possible to do something,” “a favorable or
advantageous combination of circumstances.” The trick is to recognize an
opportunity when we encounter one.
The great German art historian Heinrich Wöfflin observed that “Not
everything is possible at all times.” He was thinking about the range of
artistic styles that were available to an artist at a given time. But
the point can be generalized. “Not everything is possible at all
times.” We are living through a yeasty and tumultuous moment in American
culture. As many commentators have noted, we seem to be experiencing a
sort of revolution in sentiment, a “vibe shift” that is as much cultural
as it is political. In such moments, many things that had seemed
insuperable yesterday suddenly seem possible. The ground for the seeds
we scatter is moist and fertile. It is an auspicious moment to bring
forth the Golden Thread because the culture is newly receptive to our
message of recovery.
That is the encouraging part. The admonitory part is that such
beneficent seasons do not last forever. Such opportunities are as
fleeting as they are rare. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,”
Shakespeare has Brutus say in Julius Caesar, “which, taken at the
flood, leads on to fortune; omitted all the voyage of their life is
bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now
afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our
ventures.” Wise words.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/17/the-golden-thread-and-the-defense-of-the-west/
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