The following is the transcript of a speech that I wrote and presented for Hillsdale College’s Edward Everett Oratory Contest this February. The contest’s topic for all competitors was “Individual Rights and the Common Good in American Education.” Speeches were to be ten minutes long and delivered entirely from memory. With this speech, I made it past the preliminary round to the semi-final round but was not one of the six students chosen to advance further to the final round.
“There persists in every man, however he may deny it, a scrap of soul.”((Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington, D. C.: Regnery History, 1952), xl, Google Books.)) So writes ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers in his autobiography, Witness. Chambers sought to explain the nature of communism and the mode by which a man escapes it. He describes how communists depart their institution only once they “see” the unique human soul present in each individual. This “scrap” of soul proves of infinite worth, for it connects a person to the Divine and to his fellow men. Whether in communism or elsewhere, those who preach the greater good and teach against the individual exhibit a dangerous “blindness.” Indeed, no real common good can emerge if collectivist forces trample the individual’s rightful humanity, inherent value, and moral duties. Thus, although American education ought to pursue the common good, it must do so by first cultivating individual rights in accordance with virtue and the Christian faith.
History surely judges that collectivist ideology destroys the individual and with the individual, humanity. This ought not to surprise us. As the Christian humanist Christopher Dawson relates in The Judgment of the Nations, we cannot ignore the “fundamental fact that man as a person possesses rights given him by God which must be preserved from every attempt by the community to deny, suppress, or hinder their exercise.”((Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 113.)) Inhumane actions follow such ignorance: both Naziism and communism subjugated individual rights and individuals to the public will through education and propaganda. Both pitted family and community against each other. Both witnessed extreme death tolls. When society’s mass education system eradicates God-given rights, it erases qualities intrinsic to the definition of Man. Just as cutting the base from a bucket renders it only a cylinder, cutting rights from a man renders him less human.
Undoubtedly, promoting the common good matters, but once “swollen to madness” in importance, it ends in blasphemy, to borrow language from C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.((C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1944), 44.)) Lewis also notes that “Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men.”((Lewis, Abolition of Man, 55.)) When groups of men claim superiority, even disguised as the common good, they suppose themselves gods and suppress others deemed lesser beings. This disparagement of some individuals acts against Nature: God formed man in His image, which means each man reflects and manifests the Divine in a personal and irrevocably valuable way.
Truly, those in education who principally advocate for the common good and against the rights of the individual misunderstand the nature of man. The virtuous pagan Cicero, in contrast, saw man’s nature clearly. To Cicero, man inherently and always has moral duties to his neighbors; in On Duties, he writes, “Nature too, by virtue of reason, brings man into relations of mutual intercourse and society.”((Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Andrew P. Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1887), 8, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/cicero-on-moral-duties-de-officiis.)) Following Cicero, we must believe that a well-ordered individual naturally contributes to society’s common good. The fear that the individual will by his nature ruin society proves precisely the opposite.
Given the vital importance of individual rights, how ought we to cultivate them while avoiding inhumanity and anarchy? Those of us taught classically by Aristotle and St. Augustine already know how: educate the young under the guidance of virtue and Christianity. If taught well in the American education system, the four cardinal virtues and the Christian faith work together like two wings of a bird to raise the good individual and, through that, the common good.
Educators must first teach prudently, selecting the right topics of inquiry to attune impressionable souls to the Good; a school would fail in Prudence, for example, if it immersed students in dark sorcery or infant sacrifice. Such forms of knowledge evade sanctification and invade unskilled minds. Rather, American education must teach time-tested truths about reality, the Divine, and man’s relationship to God. As students learn prudently, they develop Prudence and can govern their individual rights with a solid moral compass.
Regarding Temperance, education must emphasize individual rights moderately. While each individual is infinitely valuable, his rights merit precedence in finite areas. An individual never possesses license, only the natural rights and liberties proper to a created being. He cannot murder. He cannot enslave. He cannot trespass on another man’s property. In temperate promotion of individual rights, education must ward off individual entitlement just as much as it defends against common tyranny.
Such defense demands that American education must embody Fortitude. In a culture beset by attacks on objective truth and morality, all people require boldness to uphold the principles of God and virtue. Echoing Theodore Roosevelt, each person must be “the man who is actually in the arena,” fighting without end against evil forces of collectivism and inhumanity.((Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic” (speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, April 23, 1910), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbonne-paris-france-citizenship-republic.)) The question that each student, each teacher, and each American must account for is, “did I fight on the side of the Right?” There is no space—no sympathy—for lukewarm “hollow men” whom T. S. Eliot condemns when in the arena of American education and life itself.((T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1952, 56.))
Rather, American education must foster Justice. Synonymous to harmony, Justice constitutes giving each his due. Gandalf’s advice to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring illustrates Justice: “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”((J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 60.)) Each man holds duties given him by God, and he must exercise them as fits his role in life’s story. Christopher Dawson alludes to this necessity of Justice when he writes, “the true common good is ultimately defined and discovered from the nature of man with its harmonious co-ordination of personal rights and social obligations.”((Dawson, Judgment of the Nations, 113.)) That is, practicing Justice—or balancing individual rights and communal duties—aligns the particular man to the common good. By extension, American education ought to nurture Justice in each individual.
Few would dispute the usefulness of education in these virtues. Yet, cultivation of them alone cannot construct a good man with a perfectly human nature. Benjamin Franklin exemplifies this. Franklin once tried to practice all virtues, but he failed; reflecting on the vice of Pride, he writes, “even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”((Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), Section VII, Project Gutenberg.)) Who among us could claim otherwise? Any intellectual individual can still abuse his individual rights. To form individuals inclined to employ rights virtuously, Christian Grace and Charity must permeate education and society.
The Christian message that American education needs is simple: fallen man cannot achieve either lasting virtue on Earth or victory in Heaven without Grace. Regardless of their education, the most virtuous of pagans cannot grasp the fullest instantiation of the common good, that eternal one shared by Christian fellowship in St. Augustine’s City of God. If the threat of eternal Hell haunts men on Earth, then trumpeted individual rights prove hollow, and back-patting pride about the good of the community proves a mortal illusion. The good that irreligious men believe they hold in common can at best be a facsimile of the true Common Good, because they lack the unification of Christian Charity. John Milton supports this in Paradise Lost, stating of the virtues,
add love,
By name to come call’d charity, the soul
Of all the rest.((John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. B., 10th ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 2018, 12.583-585.))
Charity enlivens all other virtues; Charity forgives the errors that poorly exercised individual rights accidentally instigate; Charity directs each person to the ultimate Good in Heaven. To achieve the Common Good, American education must find its beginning in the Christian framework and its end in the creation of Christian character in its students.
By these proposed virtues—pagan and Christian—we see the ideal methods and aims of education in America. American education, unfortunately, deviates woefully from this vision, save for some institutions, like Hillsdale College. Yet, all is not lost, if we heed T. S. Eliot’s caution in “Little Gidding” that,
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time.((T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1952, 144.))
Listening to Eliot, we must scour history for lessons of right balance between the individual and the public sphere. Time devours nations—and time divulges solutions. The horrors that we find in past instances of the extreme elevation of the Collective above the individual inform us that the common good minus individual rights does nothing but denigrate the human soul. But, if love remains—if Christian Charity regulates all virtues—we can bolster each individual, and, in turn, cultivate the common good. And, if American education thus scaffolds the common good with individual rights, we can perhaps keep America from joining communism in “the tragedy of history” warned about by Whittaker Chambers seventy years ago.((Chambers, Witness, xxxiii.))