Max Planck observed that science proceeds essentially one funeral at a time:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

But our opposition has us at a natural disadvantage with bright young people because the young are characteristically susceptible to mere verbal reason — this being the realm to which material philosophers actively confine their discipline. Young people are naturally engaged in the acquisition of bearings with which to navigate the world into which they have been freshly cast; and those who are bright will of course wish for their mastery of reason to have uncontested authority in the suddenly-wider world around them.

Unfortunately these youthful debilities predominate among the pedagogues entrusted with developing the young, and professional educators are therefore more likely to indoctrinate students in their personal convictions than to help them past their youthful susceptibility to doctrine. Professor and commentator Walter E. Williams exhibits these tendencies in commending his personal values to the next generation:

Personally, I want students to share my values that personal liberty, along with free markets, is [sic] morally superior to other forms of human organization. The most effective means to accomplish that goal is to give them the tools to be tough, rigorous, hard-minded thinkers and they will probably reach the same conclusions as I have.¹

Note that Professor Williams locates moral superiority with an organizational form, not with the human beings corralled within that form. Thus we see goodness as the outcome of a particular logical structure imposed upon people, rather than seeing people as cultivating social structures for their comfortable habitation. And Professor Williams has unquestionably settled upon the inculcation of rational thought as the means by which his personal morality will be commended to posterity.

Professor Williams’ moral values are now comprehensively held in Conservative (née Trotskyist) circles; and the organizational forms of personal liberty and free markets are being duly imposed everywhere within reach of the United States military — this in execution of the foreign policies of, for instance, Miss Ann Coulter:

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.²

The most compelling substantive reason, from my point of view, is that Iraq should be a democratic, republican country, with individual rights secured by a liberal constitution. There is nothing we want to see happen in the Middle East that can be accomplished through talking around long tables festooned with bottled water and fresh fruit at Swiss hotels, that cannot be accomplished faster and more permanently through war.³

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.⁴

Maybe someone can explain to me how, exactly, conservatives are the aggressors in the culture war? In the conventional narrative of American politics, conservatives are obsessed with social issues. They want to impose their values on everyone else.⁵

Demonstration of commitment to conservatism’s moral imperatives obviously outweighs all other considerations, e.g.: the cultural receptivity an alien people might have for mores that, we might note, required centuries of preparation in the West; not to mention the impossibility of continuing the military expenditures required to sustain these imposts.

The West’s cultural output provides much with which to question the West’s future prospects, e.g.: Miss Miley Cyrus’ disposition of her personal liberty; or Goldman Sachs’ recent uses of the free market. Sophisticates in other cultures therefore rightly demand evidence that the West’s current values are likely to sustain Western civilization before peacefully accepting the imposition of our values on their societies. It is not the conventional narrative of American politics that shouts down conservatives, but the dysfunction of conservative institutions and values.

Ultimately, the West is fighting ruinous foreign wars against overwhelming indicia that its present values are in fact not the universals of human longing.⁶ Observations that might have counseled a bit of cultural humility are suppressed to protect certain convictions precisely because they have been arrived-at by tough, rigorous, hard-minded thinkers. But, as a wise Arab proverb has it, better a thousand years of tyranny than a hundred years of chaos.

The exquisite reasonableness of both personal liberty and free markets gives these organizational forms an essentially religious stature within conservative thought. When proclaimed from the pulpit, mere assertions that free-market capitalism and representative democracy are the best social forms vanquish any possibility of discussing their obvious futility in application to certain cultures.

This is simply jejune. The more mature formulation would be that a people are indeed fortunate insofar as their traditions, habits of interpersonal relations, and will to continue their way of life into the future are such as to make private property and other aspects of liberty acceptable risks to civic order. Though these conditions are presently approximated in our place and time, they are the tiniest of history’s aberrations; and are precarious even with us.

While introducing young people to the primacy of their rational faculties is sure to flatter their youthful vanity, youthful development might be better served through a realization that substantially all historical debacles were as abundantly supported in reason as those we are fast approaching. Perhaps the following compilation will direct a few adolescent minds toward some wisdom they are unlikely to acquire in school.

Ben Franklin:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

C. S. Lewis:

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

David Hume:

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.

Oscar Wilde:

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Will Durant:

Reason is lawyer to the will.

Leonardo da Vinci:

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Nicola Abbagnano:

Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

Samuel Butler:

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Arthur Schopenhauer:

Reason panders will.

Blaise Pascal:

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Thomas Aquinas:

Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Reason is always the servant of interests.

Martin Heidegger:

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

H. L. Mencken:

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.