"HEY, JOHNNY, WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST?":

[W]hat if modernism itself is the dead thing? Again, we are arguing a question of fact. The most remarkable thing about modernism as an ideology or even an emotional attitude is its destructive hatred, envy, and violence. Chairman Mao and his Red Guard battled to obliterate the "four olds": old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. They steeped China in blood.  

American proponents of a "living Constitution" do not really believe that that written law says what they wish it would say. It simply does not matter what it says; and, by the abortion license, it has steeped America in blood. The old Soviet Union, reeling inconsistently between veneration of and hatred for ancient Russian culture, sent authors and artists to the gulags for being "reactionary," for committing the dreadful crime of dragging their feet as the nation was marching forth into the glorious future.

Of course, people devoted to tradition can be bloody and warlike too. Think of the ancient Romans. Think of the Sioux and the Apaches. Think of the Zulus. But modernism is hostile at its heart. It is defined by opposition, and what it opposes is a deeply human thing, a natural good. Man does not live merely in time, like a tree or a dog. By his imagination and his memory, he seeks to grasp time at both ends, to transcend it. 

The dreadful curse of the Old Testament is that a people's place will know them no more. That curse is modernism's demand. If I say, "You are graduating people with degrees in English who do not recognize the name of George Herbert," the modernist response is to shrug and say, "So what?" or to cock the head and say, "Exactly."

But there is a terrible self-contradiction here, one that many people have noted. You cannot consign your forefathers to irrelevance without instructing your son to do the same to you. The blade turns against the hand.

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