What Happened to Greatness?

Alex Priou, the author of “How to Be an Elitist,” is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Austin (UATX). In a decade that will witness the closure of many colleges throughout America, taking part in the founding of a liberal arts school during this time of demographic free-fall is praiseworthy. Alex was asked to write an essay for his students — and potential students — with the intent to “encourage young people to demand more of themselves than our regime typically expects.”

Glenn Ellmers, the Claremont Institute’s Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, is also a political theorist. He is at once both a fellow-traveler of Alex’s and, in this case, a friendly critic. Both men take seriously improving the education of young Americans. In the main, there is little of fundamental importance with which either would disagree.
 
Alex’s point of departure is reminiscent of Tocqueville’s observation near the beginning of his Democracy in America. Namely, the social stratifications of the old world, for its attendant anti-democratic issues, encouraged an aristocracy of both class and mind. As waves of democracy eroded these old modes and orders, Alex correctly observed that “the sensible, natural hierarchies to which they appealed” have too departed.
 
In its place we find a “collective aimlessness” and a “general lack of seriousness in the ends we allow our most precious resource, the young, to pursue.” This has not been lost on great thinkers like Winston Churchill and Leo Strauss. The young, we might observe, are perennial targets of the old. Athens was not exactly without its dissolute youth. And so we might be tempted to say that this is not exactly a new problem.
 
What is new, however — and what may place the West of today in a more precarious place than previous generations — is the seeming disregard or, more charitably, forgetting the centrality of greatness for the health of a regime. While the ruling classes in Rome and Athens may have drifted off from the scent of luxuriant oils, the ruling classes retained, or at the very least could call upon, young people who strove toward excellence and greatness. Alex worries that we lack the educational and cultural foundries today to even produce a few of these men. Here he puts it bluntly: If “we have taken no trouble to prepare our leaders for greatness, then to whom will we turn in our hour of need? Will nobody be there?”

I’m sympathetic to this point of view. But I do wonder one thing of Priou: At what point did the rot set in? Did it begin as the aristocracies of old began to crumble? Did the rot grow during World War II? It certainly seems it did. So perhaps greatness fell by the wayside in only the very recent past. Did Allan Bloom have the period pegged correctly in the Closing of the American Mind? Precision here is important, for it gives us clarity into the conditions that allowed for greatness’ departure. It also gives insight into the counter-conditions needed for a revival. Alex is helping lead the revival. Indeed, we owe him thanks.

Glenn Ellmers, for his part, chose to focus on other particulars in Alex’s essay. He is less concerned with the “couch potatoes glued to their screens” as the “most dangerous enemies of excellence, but the intellectual and cultural elites.” For Ellmers, it is, today, the so-called ruling class — the intellectuals and academics — from whom the young need saving. It is precisely the cohort empowered to teach our young about greatness that get it so perversely wrong.
 
Ellmers makes an interesting, paradoxical point here that is worth recalling. Their rhetoric notwithstanding, the present-day ruling class is not more egalitarian than their counterparts a hundred or so years ago. As Ellmers contends, the “ruling element of our regime stopped believing in political and legal equality some time ago.” To be sure, I doubt the ruling class ever believed or paid much more than lip-service to political and legal equality. And indeed, human nature seems to counteract this nice story we tell ourselves. We like distinctions, love honor (howsoever ill-defined now), and strive for a version of greatness — as confused as that version may well be.
 
It’s across this point that Priou and Ellmers touch. Both agree that that greatness is necessary, both agree that it needs reviving or a definitional corrective, and both agree that the guardians of our virtues, greatness in particular, must be motivated by pure intent and clear-sightedness. That both men remain happy warriors in the academy and the larger intellectual arena gives me hope for the future.