Culture War, Whether We Like It or Not

Chronicles Magazine ^ | Feb, 2024 | Anthony Esolen

[budj]

Conservatives have failed to see that arguments do not matter. My whole career in the classroom has been guided by one principle. Namely, that it is my job is to introduce young people to the goodness, the beauty, and the wisdom of excellent works of literature, art, and human thought, without regard to any political use to which knowledge of these works might be put.

I detest when literature is wrenched away from its essence, which is to delight us in its teaching us about ourselves and the world, and is commandeered for one or another kind of gain. It is, I have always thought, to make the poets and the students into puppets, or, to change the metaphor, to make yourself a pimp and to hire out the poetry as a whore.

[budj]

We must know our enemy, and, indeed, that he is an enemy.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

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[Petrosius]

Our opponents [the left] were defined not by what they loved—they did not love Sanskrit or philosophy from the Zhou dynasty—but by what they hated. We assumed that someone might object to our spending so much time with Plato because Confucius was at least as important. But the enemies did not care for either Plato or Confucius. Their point was not to build but to tear down so that nothing would remain of culture itself, since maintaining a culture at all, as we see in Confucius, is inherently conservative.

[Vaduz]

The left has no culture only agendas they are their own weakest link.