The classical undergraduate humanities curriculum in America was destroyed and replaced over the course of the twentieth century. The destruction is usually blamed on postmodernism in the 1970s, but the replacement was already well under way by then. Neither the attackers nor the defenders of the old curriculum can (or will) explain what happened and why.

Allan Bloom's essay "Our Listless Universities" (the 1982 essay later expanded into The Closing of the American Mind) is the most famous attempt at a defense, and it reads at first as though it has no argument at all: it asserts the superiority of the Western Tradition and the badness of rock music without much visible reasoning. But if I relax my eyes and let the nearby details blur, a latent argument floats into focus. Bloom identifies a certain kind of value relativism, imported from German philosophy (he mentions Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger) as the solvent that removed the American university's commitment to truth.

Bloom's essay is trying to say "America is over, let's think through rationally what to do next" in a way that makes mainstream conservatives feel like he's on their side and should be funded to stick it to the libs. It produces the sensation of allegiance to the Western Tradition, not the grounds for it. Naturally this involves writing some connotative checks it can't denotatively cash.

But why couldn't the old curriculum be defended on its merits? The roots go deeper than Bloom or his critics acknowledge.

In 1066, soldiers following a man named William conquered the island kingdom of England. He now had to govern a country whose customs he didn't know. His solution, refined over the next century by his successors, was to send royal judges around the country to settle disputes. These judges had no code. They had to figure out what the local rules were, case by case. The rules varied from shire to shire and sometimes contradicted each other, so the judges reconciled them, and over generations their decisions accumulated into a body of law common to the whole kingdom. By the early 1600s, this system was old enough and robust enough that Chief Justice Edward Coke could tell King James I to his face that it was superior to the king's own judgment. ^[1] What had begun as a practical expedient for governing a conquered country had, over seven centuries, staked its authority on a claim: that the norms people actually live by, when reasoned through carefully and reconciled, converge. ^[2]

A tradition seven centuries deep does not die of exposure to Nietzsche unless something has already compromised its foundations. Antinomianism is the rejection of binding law or standards as such: the position that rules are external impositions to be evaded, abolished, or transcended rather than discovered principles to be understood and followed. ^[3] The American Puritans were explicitly worried about it, just as Luther had been in Germany. The first crisis of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the Antinomian Controversy, ended in 1638 with the trial and banishment of Anne Hutchinson for claiming that grace freed the saved from moral law.

In America, the credibility of the Common Law suffered a decisive blow around the time of the Civil War, when it failed to address the issue of slavery through legal mechanisms, and Americans resorted to war to settle their dispute. This was a delegitimating crisis, but it took a generation for America's governance institutions to be captured by a new antinomian ideology annealed by the war. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose major work begins with The Common Law in 1881, argued that law is prediction of what courts will do, not discovery of pre-existing principles. His Legal Realist heirs in the 1920s and 1930s completed the displacement of Common Law reasoning. ^[4] The result was Pragmatism: ^[5] a framework that retained the forms of lawful governance while abandoning the principle that law is discovered rather than made anew each time a court sits. ^[6]

Liberal systems had clearly delivered the goods to many people, including most of those the state depended on for high-skilled work, so the state still needed the legitimacy that liberal humanism provided. Progressivism, a species of Pragmatism accommodating a rising state with legacy commitments to accommodating socially liberal preferences, was naturally happy to mimic liberal humanism as long as there was demand. The forms persisted long after the substance was gone, and the persistence of the forms is precisely what makes people feel the substance must still be there somewhere.

Pragmatism is constitutively incapable of defending anything on principle, because it has replaced the concept of principle with the concept of what works. A society that runs on Pragmatism will hand over anything it is not currently using to anyone who asks with sufficient force, because it has no grounds for refusal that it can articulate even to itself.

When I first learned about the Kent State shootings, it was from my father, who described them as students protesting somewhat disruptively in favor of more electives and fewer required courses. More than a decade later, I learned the mainstream story: that on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers shot and killed four students during a protest against President Richard Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia. But now I wonder whether my father was on to something, and misremembered insightfully. Leftists challenging the legitimacy of the war machine were not able to win the concession of stopping the war, but the basically Pragmatist authorities were relatively willing to alter curricula and abandon a liberal humanism they never really cared about.

Conservative critics like Bloom play up the idea of esotericism and the inherent seditiousness of social criticism, creating the impression that what you see probably isn't all there is: if the social analysis is the smoke, maybe a plan to improve things is the unseen fire. But when I showed up at the Committee on Social Thought and carefully, delicately asked what was going on, they were just academics who write papers. ^[7] I had to escalate the directness of the question a few times before I got a clear answer; I'm not the sort of idiot who wouldn't at least try to flirt first in such circumstances. And while it's technically possible that I failed the initiation into a cult with genuine mysteries, the evidence seems more consistent with the hypothesis that there's no plan to do anything except keep reading and writing, and occupying comfortable positions among the elite in a crumbling society.

Sometimes you have something true and dangerous to say. Esoteric writing is the classical solution: you hide the truth in the text itself, so that careful readers can find it while careless or hostile ones see only the surface. Maimonides is Strauss's central example. In Guide for the Perplexed, the "esoteric" heretical meaning is the one you get if you ignore what the words are trying to make you feel and follow the arguments literally. ^[8] Spinoza says basically the same stuff centuries later, just without the mood lighting, and everyone totally loses their shit. When people despair of being heard, sometimes they just keep their private views private, and say what people want to hear. This is exoteric writing. The ideas of exoteric and esoteric writing are often confused, but they are not the same thing. The esoteric writer entrusts the truth to the text; the exoteric writer withholds it. And sometimes, the impression of hidden depth is nothing more than an artist's trick.

If we're to deal with these problems, we have to think through where we are, how we got there, and where we'd like to be.

This essay developed from a Twitter thread with David Chapman.

1. James objected: if the law is founded on reason, why can't I, who have reason, judge cases myself? Coke replied that the law required not natural reason but "artificial reason": the accumulated wisdom of centuries of careful adjudication, which no single mind could replicate. James nearly struck him. Coke, on his knees, quoted the thirteenth-century jurist Bracton: the king is under no man, but he is under God and the law. Blackstone systematized the tradition in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), which became the foundational legal text of the American colonies. ↩︎

2. This is structurally the same claim as Eliezer Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition: that human values, under sufficiently careful reflection and mutual understanding, converge rather than diverge. The Common Law tradition can be understood as a seven-century empirical test of this hypothesis. ↩︎

3. Antinomianism as a recurring pattern in Western Christianity, and the Calvinist response to it, is developed at length in "Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency". For more on how anti-normativity functions as a self-undermining commitment, see Jessica Taylor, "On Commitments to Anti-Normativity". ↩︎

4. Contemporary originalism, as practiced by the Federalist Society and adjacent movements, contests this displacement by attempting to restore Common Law principles through constitutional interpretation. But conservatism preserves what still exists; restoring what has already been lost is reaction, not conservation. Originalism in practice selects among founding-era precedents according to present political need, which is Pragmatism in historical dress. The alternative would be to develop a theory for how to rebuild the conditions under which the lost principles could be rediscovered (see the approach sketched in "Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency", cited above). This would be a revolutionary approach in the older use of the term, before the French Revolution changed its meaning to refer instead to a violent break with the past. ↩︎

5. I capitalize Pragmatism when referring to the specific philosophical and legal movement. The term requires some disambiguation. C. S. Peirce coined "pragmatism" in the 1870s to denote a logical method for clarifying the meaning of concepts by tracing their conceivable practical consequences (see his "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," 1878). William James popularized the term but transformed it into something different in kind. In James's own words: "'It is useful because it is true' or 'it is true because it is useful.' Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing" (Pragmatism, 1907). More baldly: "The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving." And: "Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays." Peirce called this a "transmogrification" of his idea and renamed his own position "pragmaticism," a word he said was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" ("What Pragmatism Is," The Monist, 1905). The Pragmatism discussed in this essay, the one that captured American legal and governance institutions via Holmes and the Legal Realists, descends from James, not Peirce. Peirce's pragmaticism, a method of logical clarification committed to the reality of generals and the immutability of truth, has little in common with the antinomian instrumentalism that Holmes and his heirs made into American legal orthodoxy. ↩︎

6. The institutional death of civil law is ongoing and measurable. Tort filings in state courts (individuals seeking redress for wrongs done to them) declined more than 80% from 1993 to 2015, from about 10 per 1,000 Americans to fewer than 2 per 1,000 (the WSJ's analysis of National Center for State Courts data, reported in Joe Palazzolo, "We Won't See You in Court: The Era of Tort Lawsuits Is Waning," Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2017). Over the same period, contract cases (predominantly debt collection, foreclosure, and landlord-tenant disputes) rose from 18% to 51% of the civil docket. The courts are becoming a collections agency. Common law as a mechanism by which ordinary people hold others accountable for wrongs is disappearing. ↩︎

7. In fairness, I didn't speak with Agnes Callard. ↩︎

8. Tyler Cowen's term "mood affiliation" is useful here: the practice of evaluating claims based on the emotional associations they produce rather than on their logical content. ↩︎