All posts by bradbirzer

By day, I'm a father of seven and husband of one. By night, I'm an author, a biographer, and a prog rocker. Interests: Rush, progressive rock, cultural criticisms, the Rocky Mountains, individual liberty, history, hiking, and science fiction.
Republic of Letters

Why I Went to CU: An Interview

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An interview with Clint Talbott, Summer 2014.

Why did you choose a life in academe?

Two of the finest persons I knew as a child were my maternal grandfather and mother, both teachers. One Saturday, my grandfather decided to take me to the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in his hometown of Hays, Kansas.  He was always incredibly dignified.  As we drove onto the campus of Fort Hays State, he saw a parking spot reserved for “Professor” somebody.  He looked at me with his typical mischievous eye, and said, “Bradley, today, I think I’ll be a professor.”  Whatever reason, I knew that a professor was somebody of importance (who, after all, could be wiser than my grandfather?), and the idea stuck with me throughout all of my schooling.  I also had the great fortune of having a number of amazing teachers and professors, from grade-school Dominican nuns to some of the best lecturers and thinkers imaginable at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University.

How would you characterize the state of political discourse in the United States today?

Terrible.  Absolutely terrible.  But I must admit, I write this as a 46-year old jaded romantic who once would have given much of his life to one of the two major political parties.  

Political discourse as of 2014 comes down to two things 1) loudness and 2) meaningless nothings.  Oration is a dead art, and the news from CNN, Fox, and other outlets is just superficial talking points with some anger and show.  Radio is just as bad, if not worse.  As one noted journalist, Virginia Postrel, has argued, we probably shouldn’t take anything that someone such as Ann Coulter says with any real concern, as she “a performance artist/comedian, not a serious commentator.”  

Two examples, I think, help illustrate this.  Look at any speech delivered by almost any prominent American from 1774 to 1870 or so.  The speeches are rhetorically complicated, the vocabulary immense, and the expectations of a well-informed audience high.  To compare the speech of a 1830s member of Congress with one—perhaps even the best—in 2014 is simply gut-wrenchingly embarrassing.

Another example.  The authors of the Constitution expected us to discuss the most serious matters with the utmost gravity.  Nothing should possess more gravitas in a republic than the issue of war.  Yet, as Americans, we have not engaged in a properly constitutional debate on the meaning of war since the close of World War II.  We’ve seen massive protests, some fine songs, and a lot of bumper stickers, but no meaningful dialogue.

As a humanist, I crave answers for this, and I desire a return to true—not ideological—debate and conversation.  Academia has much to offer the larger political world in this.

If you were asked to summarize what you hope to accomplish during your year as visiting scholar, what would you say?

I have dedicated my own academic career to the study of two things: 1) the human person as a unique manifestation of universal truths in a culturally- and temporally-specific setting; and 2) the humanities as best understood through the classics of western (and, at times, world) civilization.

CU is already rich in all of this, but I hope to add to that richness and to benefit from the same.  No community can survive without a conversation with those of the present, those of the past, and those who are to come. 

The Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at CU-Boulder was created because of a perceived imbalance of perspectives among faculty; do you see this as an issue that should be addressed, and, if so, how should it best be addressed?

Though I grew up (in Kansas) vacationing in Boulder and the Boulder area, I have only been a part of the campus community on the day I came for the interviews.  Of course, I had a brilliant time.  Regardless, I don’t really know what the state of discourse is on CU’s campus.  I plan on being involved in as many discussions as possible, and I also plan on sharing those discussions with non-Coloradans through the website, The Imaginative Conservative (imaginativeconservative.org).  

And, of course, it’s an absolute privilege to be invited to be an additional voice in such a vibrant intellectual community of scholars as that in Boulder.  My voice, I hope, though will be that of Brad Birzer who happens to have strong conservative and libertarian leanings rather than as a libertarian or conservative who happens to be named Brad Birzer.

And, as much as I appreciate a relatively recent historical figure such as Barry Goldwater, I still much prefer Cicero and Virgil.

How do you view the value of higher education today, particularly given its rising cost and rising student-loan burden?

This is a terribly difficult problem, and, from what little I know of economics, so much has changed over the past fifty years due to strange incentives in funding, etc.  But, we also continue to specialize and specialize in our professions and disciplines to the point we can no longer talk across the self-imposed barriers.  A person might gain from this, but a society and the persons that make up that society do not.

I’m rather a devoted patriot of and for liberal education.  From Socrates forward, the goal of a liberal education has been to “liberate” the human person from the everyday details of this world and the tyranny of the moment.  Our citizenship, as liberally-educated persons, belongs to the eternal Cosmopolis, not to D.C. or London or. . . .

College-level education must return to the fundamentals of the liberal tradition.  Interestingly, this is the least expensive way to teach and to be educated.  The best education involves a professor, a group of students, a primary text, and three hours a week in discussion.

Given how readily available the texts of the greats have become through the liberation and decentralization of publishing through the internet, the complete writings of Plato are within reach of anyone with access to the web.

Real education does not have to be expensive.

This is in no way meant to discount professional education.  Training for engineering, law, the sciences, etc. is vital for a functioning and healthy world and happy citizenry.  

But, in our own titillation with what we can create, we often forget what came before and what will need to be passed on in terms of ethics and wisdom.  The best lawyer, the best engineer, the best chemist, will be a better person for knowing the great ideas of the past: the ethics of Socrates; the sacrifice of Perpetua; and the genius of Augustine.

Republic of Letters

Lecture: Cato, A tragedy

How Joseph Addison’s 1713 play, CATO: A TRAGEDY, fundamentally shaped American republicanism, the American founding, and, especially, George Washington.

A huge thanks to Christine Dunn Henderson, Mark Yellin, and everyone at Liberty Fund for such an outstanding edition of the play.

Please listen, like, share, and subscribe!

Republic of Letters

V for Vendetta

Throw together an English Roman Catholic terrorist from 1605, a 1930’s noir atmosphere, a damsel who is only somewhat in distress, a government that makes Ingsoc look humane, some psychedelics, some fortuitous but random evangelical proof texting of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, some references to the mass killings of the twentieth century, a bit of Ray Bradbury, Max Ernst, and Patrick McGoohan, a rather tame lesbian romance, a fictional 1980s that went exactly against what actually happened, and two young cocksure perfectionist English artists who wanted to avoid mimicking their American counterparts.   You probably still would not end up with the disturbing masterpiece that is V FOR VENDETTA.  J

A penny for the English guys.

Written in the first third of the 1980s but not published as a graphic novel until 1988, V FOR VENDETTA broke into the cultural mindset of the intellectual rising generation like nothing else.  

For someone growing up in that decade—with New Wave, Blade Runner, Reagan, Rush, New Wave, Macintosh, Red Rain, and Nuclear Winter—V FOR VENDETTA took the extreme desires and fears of a whole generation and made them into a coherent (mostly) tale.  

If John Hughes captured our most adolescent suburban libertinism, V FOR VENDETTA made them into our most terrifying libertarian nightmare.

The story, written jointly by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, takes place in the late 1990s.  In 1983, a Labour government replaced the Tories, kicking out the American nuclear missiles, thus leaving the U.K. free from destruction.  Soon, the Americans and the Soviets went after each other, leaving America, especially, in ruins.  

The resulting economic turmoil in Europe led to the rise of a National Socialist/Fascist government in Britain.  Though the leaders personally gave into every lewd pleasure in and out of the bedrooms, they outlawed homosexuality, non-whites, and non-Protestant Christians.  Those who weren’t deported or executed found themselves in prison camps, the playthings of progressive eugenicists, willing to see the body contorted in every possible manner to “perfect the race.”

Under the slogan “England Prevails,” the fascists maintain control through mass surveillance as well as through armed thugs known as “Finger Men” who have the power to kill, rape, and pillage at will, all in the name of England.  Signs litter the streets with the hypocritical propaganda: “Strength through Purity; Purity through Faith.”

Of the internment camps, one of the most brutal was the Larkhill Settlement, out of which emerged the anarchist anti-hero, V.  The authors intentionally keep his identity hidden, as he represents an idea more than an individual person.  Still, the reader does come to know that V had been interned and had survived the experiments.  In some way, never explained, the experiments made him more human than human, endowing him with extraordinary powers of resistance to bodily harm, astounding concentration and memory, and near perfect agility.  It would, however, be better to describe the final product of the experiment as the creation of a Batman rather than a Superman.  The only one of the test subjects to live, V gained the favor of his captors, set the camp aflame, and departed.

The main story takes place years after the destruction of Larkhill.  Now, one by one, every person who ever worked at Larkhill is being systematically murdered.  Though, the more appropriate term would be “assassinated.”  V, of course, is proudly the killer.  He not only kills his victims, but he does so with immense poetic justice.  Each person assassinated—reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno—dies according to his or her vice.

Film

A Story of Friendship: Star Trek

As young children, my older brother and I watched the original Star Trek series on Saturday mornings.  We weren’t big TV watchers as a family, but Star Trek was special.  To make it even better, it was the local PBS that aired Star Trek, presenting it free of all commercials.  

Every Saturday, Todd and I awoke very early and watched the rerun for that week.  This would have been around 1975, almost a decade after the show first aired.  After each episode, Todd and I would talk, always mesmerized by the possibilities of space, life, and a billion other things.  How much of the galaxy had this crew explored?  Were they the modern Lewis & Clark?  What happened when someone transported from one place to another?  How smart were the computers?  Were the Klingons the Soviets and the Romulans the Chinese?  Or, maybe the other way around?  Why did we only see the military aspects of Starfleet?  What about the colonists, the pioneers?  How did time travel work?  If the Enterprise found itself sent back to Earth, why did it happen to arrive the same year the show was being filmed.

Pretty serious stuff for an eight year old sitting with his much admired thirteen year old brother.  

I had no idea at the time, but the show’s founder and creator, Gene Roddenberry had actually described Star Trek as a “wagon train to the stars” when he first shopped it to studios.  It would be set, though, on the space equivalent of an aircraft carrier, a mobile community as diverse as Gunsmoke’s Dodge City, he continued in his show treatment.  The crew, roughly 203 of them, would be as diverse as possible, asserting that racial prejudice and ethnic strife would be things of the past in the non-specified time of Star Trek.  Only later did the show writers decide it took place in the 2260s.  From its beginning, however, Roddenberry’s Star Trek represented a brash Kennedy-esque liberalism, a confidence that America could teach the world the principles of civilization, tolerance, and dignity.  [Sources: Whitfield and Roddenberry, THE MAKING OF STAR TREK (1968); and Paul Cantor, Gilligan Unbound (2003) and The Invisible Hand of Popular Culture (2012)]

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Faith, History, Philosophy

Christopher Dawson: Preparing to Fight Modernity

Too sickly to fight in the Great War, Christopher Dawson volunteered for civilian duty and spent roughly fourteen years reading and drawing up ideas to prepare for a career in writing.  He had received a profound mystical vision on Easter, 1909, while visiting Rome.  In that vision, the nineteen-year old Anglo-Welshman believed God had commanded him to record the entire history of the world, showing him all times and all peoples at once.  Determined to live up to what God had asked him, he began building upon an already solid liberal education.

During these years, he kept extensive notes and journals influential writings included in his notes came from the significant historians, anthropologists, and thinkers from every school of thought from his day.  Generally, he took notes in the same language as the original texts, and he delved deeply into Plato’s Laws and the various writings by Aristotle, Xenophon, and Heraclitus.  In his journals, now residing at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, one can see vividly that Dawson readily moved through a variety of languages including English, French, Greek, and Latin.[1]  

In the same notebook, presumably after reading the above authors, Dawson concluded tellingly: “All the events of the last years have convinced me what a fragile thing civilization is and how near we are to losing the whole inheritance which our age might have acquired [sic] enjoyed.”

In addition to his voluminous academic and scholarly reading, he also devoured wht works of Jane Austen, Henry David Thoreau, P.J. Wodehouse, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, R.H. Benson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a huge selection of science fiction, historical fiction, American westerns, and English detective stories.[2]  G.K. Chesterton, especially, influenced Dawson, as the latter regarded him as “one of the greatest champions of Christian culture in our time.”[3]  Chesterton’s most influential work on Dawson was his epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse [read from this?].  This poem, perhaps the most significant call to arms for twentieth-century Christian Humanists, equally inspired C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Russell Kirk.

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Republic of Letters

Christopher Dawson and Johannine Divine Madness

March 29, 2007

[Thanks to Phillip Carl Smith, the Orestes Brownson Council, and ISI for the invitation to speak at Notre Dame; it’s always a great pleasure to be here at Our Lady’s University; as was mentioned in my bio—I lived in Zahm for three years back when Fathers Tom King and Bill Miscamble were the rectors.  This past August, my wife, family, and I came over to the college for a day of research.  It happened to coincide with the arrival of the students.  As we pulled into the visitor parking lot by the library, my wife noticed a sign for Farley parking.  It said, “Farley, protecting its residents from Zahm since 1973.”  My wife hasn’t let me forget this.

I also want to thank Kevin Cawley, an amazing archivist over at the ND archives]

To put it simply (and perhaps a bit “simplistically”—but I prefer to think of it as “with fervor”), Dawson was one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, certainly one of its greatest men of letters, and perhaps one of the most respected Catholic scholars in the English speaking world.

“For Dawson is more like a movement than a man,” his publisher and friend, Frank Sheed, wrote of him in 1938. “His influence with the non-Catholic world is of a kind that no modern Catholic has yet had, both for the great number of fields in which it is felt and for the intellectual quality of those who feel it.”[1]  

Additionally, prominent American Catholic colleges began teaching courses on the thought of Christopher Dawson and other figures of the Catholic literary revival as early as the mid-1930s.[2]  

In 1933, the American Catholic journal Commonweal stated that “the writings of Christopher Dawson demand the thoughtful attention of all educated men.”[3]  

Six years later, the Jesuit journal, The Month, claimed that to “commend Mr. Dawson’s work is unnecessary; nothing that he writes could be unimportant.”[4]  In 1949, Waldemar Gurian, a refugee from the Nazis and a professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote, Dawson’s “very ability to make brilliant understatements and to display without pride, as something self-evident, his extraordinary broad knowledge make his synthesis particularly impressive.”[5]  

In 1950, the English Dominican journal, Blackfriars, claimed “that Mr. Dawson is an educator; perhaps the greatest that Heaven has sent us English Catholics since Newman.”[6]

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Republic of Letters

Russell Kirk’s Beauty and Civilization ~ The Imaginative Conservative

We built only for the moment, not even for the future, as we eradicated the past.

The loss of manners, he especially decried, had coincided, necessarily, with the loss of beauty in society. Nowhere, it seemed, did anyone take decorum seriously—whether in one’s soul or one’s society. If order in one’s soul leads to order in the commonwealth, disorder in one’s soul leads to the disorder in the commonwealth. The totalitarians of the present age, Kirk feared, wanted to control not only the present, but also the past and the future as well. “The totalists say that the old order is a corpse, and that man and society must be fashioned afresh, in grim fashion, upon a grim plan,” he wrote.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/01/russell-kirk-beauty-civilization-bradley-birzer.html

Republic of Letters

The Gray Eminence of Christopher Dawson

Without going deeply into Dawson’s thought—or any aspect of it—in this post, it is worthwhile cataloguing how many of his contemporaries claimed him important and his scholarship and ideas for their own.  This means, consequently, that while most Americans—Catholic or otherwise—no longer remember Christopher Dawson, they do often remember affectionately those he profoundly (one might even state indelibly) influenced.  The list includes well known personalities such as T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.  

In the world of humane learning and scholarship in the twentieth century, Dawson was a sort of John Coltrane.  Just as few non musicians listen to Coltrane, but EVERY serious musician does, the same was essentially true of Dawson.  And, yet, as with Coltrane, Dawson did enjoy long periods of widespread popularity and support in his own lifetime.

“For Dawson is more like a movement than a man,” his publisher and friend, Frank Sheed, wrote of him in 1938. “His influence with the non-Catholic world is of a kind that no modern Catholic has yet had, both for the great number of fields in which it is felt and for the intellectual quality of those who feel it.”[1]  As evidence, Sheed could cite much.  By the early 1930s, while Dawson was still in his early 40s,  American Catholic colleges began teaching courses on his thought, tying him to the larger Catholic literary movement of the day.[2]  In 1933, the American Catholic journal Commonweal stated that “the writings of Christopher Dawson demand the thoughtful attention of all educated men.”[3]  Six years later, the Jesuit journal, The Month, claimed that to “commend Mr. Dawson’s work is unnecessary; nothing that he writes could be unimportant.”[4]  In 1949, Waldemar Gurian, a refugee from the Nazis and a professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote, Dawson’s “very ability to make brilliant understatements and to display without pride, as something self-evident, his extraordinary broad knowledge make his synthesis particularly impressive.”[5]  In 1950, the English Dominican journal, Blackfriars, claimed “that Mr. Dawson is an educator; perhaps the greatest that Heaven has sent us English Catholics since Newman.”[6]

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Republic of Letters

Getting to Know Russell Kirk (2015)

At the beginning of his Histories, Herodotus notes that a normal person enjoys 26,250 days in his or her life, no day ever exactly like another.  I’m not quite sure I want to count how many days I have left, assuming I could even know such a thing. It’s certainly very wise of the Good Lord not to let us know such things.

Still, as I think about my own days, some wisely spent, others squandered, I have only a few serious regrets.

One of my two most important—at least as it hovers over my being—is that I never actually met Dr. Russell Amos Augustine Kirk in person.  I had the opportunity several times, but I never took advantage of these.  There are lots of reasons why this happened (or, as the case really was, failed to happen), but they really all came down to the same thing—I took too much for granted while in my 20s.  I seemed invulnerable as did those I loved and admired.  As one of my other heroes, Neil Peart, once wrote, “We’re only immortal for a very short time.”  My immortality seemed rather assured as did that of those whom I respected.  Strange considering my own father died when I was only two months old.  Yet, that happened before I was conscious of the world, and the whole story of his death had much more mythical significance than real influence.

Life has a funny way of teaching us each the lessons we so painfully need to learn, and I was rather shocked in the summer of 1994 when I heard that Russell Kirk had passed away.  I was only 26, but I knew I had missed my chance to meet the great man, a man I had studied intensely for about six years at that point.  

My own upbringing in a Goldwater household was rather ecumenical, at least toward things of imagination and what might generally be called of or on “the right.”  I never had a leftist/liberal phase, as liberals, right or wrong, always struck me as somewhat totalitarian in views as well as personality.  As a child and young man encouraged by my mom, I read everything I could get my hands on, and Kirk was just as important in the big scheme of things as, say, Hayek was.  I wasn’t desirous of being only an Austrian or only a paleo or a libertarian or whatever the divisions were in those days.  I just wanted to read everything that seemed interesting.

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