Here's another Imprimis article I enjoyed, Victor Davis Hanson's 2025 commencement address for Hillsdale College.
Some excerpts:
Harvard University suddenly wishes to be free of Washington, D.C.—at least as long as the current administration remains in office. ... In answer, the public has been directing Harvard to consult Hillsdale, whose model disavowal of federal funding is long-standing and principled. Hillsdale’s declination of government money does not hinge on any particular administration, Republican or Democrat, being in power. Instead, Hillsdale has taken the position that the federal government should not dictate to private colleges, and that to ensure its independence, Hillsdale will neither seek nor accept taxpayer subsidies.
You students of the Class of 2025 have been instructed in, have absorbed fully, and will pass on a code of honorable conduct that has become a natural part of who you are. ... Hillsdale has taught you not to worry if you are not one with the current majority of youth, because you are certainly one with most of the past—and future—generations. ... Because your values are real, permanent, and ancient, you will not be won over by those who justify their lapses of behavior by situational ethics or feelings of victimization. Without such individual vows of honesty and compassion for others, civilization in aggregate cannot be sustained. It instead descends into the age-old banes of tribalism, disunity, and chaos.
Much of our society’s current crisis derives from this personal refusal or inability to respect the property of others, to tell the truth, to stand up to the bully, to protect the weaker, and to end each day in contemplation that you were more a moral force for the common good than either a neutral observer or on the wrong side of the ethical ledger. When individual behavior and decorum falter, so does a country, which is, after all, only the common reflection of millions of its individuals.
So often in the age of presentism, we in our narcissism and arrogance confuse our technical and material successes with automatic moral progress. We seem unaware that thinkers of the past ... worried about just the opposite: they worried that material progress and greater wealth would result in moral regress, given the greater opportunities to gratify the appetites with perceived fewer consequences and to use sophistry to excuse the sin.
Without traditional reverence for the past, an ungrateful nation not only suffers a loss of knowledge but is plagued by hubris—so often the twin of ignorance—believing that it alone has discovered ideas and behaviors unique to itself and its own era, when they are in fact ancient.
Key to the endangered idea of reverence for the past is a recognition that it is neither fair nor just to dismiss easily those of earlier generations based solely on the standards of the present. ... The Hillsdale reverence for the Western tradition and the American past is a reminder that we should not easily condemn and erase the dead, lest we and our times be judged capriciously by future generations and found wanting—whether for the medievalism of our dangerous cities, the electronic cruelty of the Internet, or the fragmentation of the family.
Your generation is now witness to a counterrevolution of sorts. Millions of Americans are asking for a reexamination of our culture and society with an eye to restoring ancient decency and looking to the good of past generations. Critical to this restoration is your optimism. Such positivity is the child of gratitude for all that we have inherited and all that we wish to enhance and pass on to others not yet born. With optimism and confidence in the citizenry, a civilization grows rather than shrinks. It becomes secure, not depressed or beset by self-loathing. It looks to the future with reverence for the past, rather than with shame or hatred.
The strength of this country ... has always been its singular ability to remain not just unshaken, but confident in its values, its resilience, and its inherent strength to overcome all challenges.
Here are some more valuable thoughts from Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine: New Thinking Needed on National Defense. There's no pay wall.
Please remember that I never agree with all of an author's ideas. That should be obvious but apparently isn't. When a problem is worth thinking about, it is inevitable that bad ideas will emerge. But we'll never get to the good ideas (or even recognize the bad ones) without casting a wide net. My goal is to stimulate thinking by presenting information I find interesting and/or helpful.
A smattering of semi-random quotes. Emphasis mine.
This raises the question of how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict.
[PGM=“precision guided munitions”] A key lesson of the Ukraine War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.
One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China.... Despite various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies bleed us dry.
An important thing we learned very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. [In Yemen,] when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles.
Recently, by the way, forces on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried methods.
We need new thinking...about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible.
The February 2025 issue of Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine features an excellent article by Roger Kimball, "Restoring American Culture." It's five reasonably short pages, with no paywall. He expresses what I've been feeling for many years, only better and with more authority than I can.
At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, René Descartes said that common sense was “the most widely distributed thing in the world.” Is it? Much as I admire Descartes, I have to note that he was imperfectly acquainted with the realities of 21st century America. If he were with us today, I am sure he would emend his opinion.
After all, is it common sense to pretend that men can be women? Or to pretend that you do not know what a woman is? During her confirmation hearings, a sitting member of the Supreme Court professed to be baffled by that question.
Is it common sense to open the borders of your country and then to spend truckloads of taxpayer dollars to feed, house, and nurture the millions of illegal migrants who have poured in? Is it common sense to sacrifice competence on the altar of so-called diversity? To allow politicians to bankrupt the country by incontinent overspending?
Like most important concepts—think of love, justice, knowledge, or the good—common sense is not easy to define. But we know it when we see it. And more to the point, we instantly sense its absence when it is supplanted.
In recent years—indeed, at least since the 1960s—our culture has suffered from a deficit of common sense. That deficit has eroded a great many valuable things, from our educational institutions to our cultural life more generally.
From the moment Donald Trump was shot at a rally last July, people have been speaking about a “vibe shift,” a shift in the zeitgeist of American culture. That revolution in sentiment picked up speed with Trump’s election in November, and it began barreling down the main line with his inauguration. We always hear about the “peaceful transfer of power” when a new president takes office. The usual procedure is for the old crowd to vacate their positions while the new crowd slides in to take their places. The institutions remain inviolate. Nothing essential changes.
Trump’s ascension was the opposite. He was elected not to preserve the status quo but to remake it.
Kimball spends some time analyzing three cultural phenomena: Kenneth Clark's amazing television series, Civilisation, which we watched in its entirety when it first aired on PBS (and again later in the VHS tape era), Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and Harry Scherman's Book of the Month Club.
One of the hallmarks of Civilization is its absence of chatter. Clark is a gracious historical guide, but he does not go in for small talk. He is genial but also serious. An abundance of glorious music often commandeers the audio. Clark says his piece and then lets the camera pan slowly over the art, architecture, and landscapes he has assembled for our enjoyment and edification. “Throughout,” as one reviewer noted, the show “maintains a majestically slow pace. Luxuriously long moments where the visuals are completely unencumbered by any commentary whatsoever.”
The original Civilization was pitched at a high level. It was also meticulously accessible. The treasures Clark toured were allowed to speak for themselves, and so speak they did. The elites didn’t much like Civilization, partly because they found it insufficiently multicultural, partly because they objected to Clark’s unstudied air of competence and cultural mastery.
But Civilization is a good example of what it might look like to restore culture in an age that has abandoned common sense. If it seems old-fashioned and out-of-date to a generation weaned on social media, special effects, and incessant lectures about the evils of capitalism and the West, that tells us more about the quality of our times than it does about Clark’s achievement in this series.
Something similar can be said about Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein began the concerts in 1958, just two weeks after he took the helm of the New York Philharmonic. These marvelous concerts—with commentary by Bernstein—aired on television, first in black and white and then in color, until 1972. Bernstein organized each concert around a theme—the meaning of music, musical modes, orchestration—drawing on the orchestra’s current programming for suitable illustrations. In 2005, a new nine-disc selection of the concerts was released, some 25 hours of music and commentary.
As with Clark’s Civilization, there was no small talk. The music was central.
The Young People’s Concerts were a huge popular success, in Europe and Asia as well as in the U.S. ... Despite Bernstein’s success as a conductor and composer, some commentators judge this long-running concert series to be his greatest musical achievement. He might have agreed. Looking back on the concerts years later, he said they were “among my favorite, most highly prized activities of my life.”
The point is that all these initiatives bore witness to a culture at one with itself. It was a culture innocent of the self-loathing that has been such a disfiguring feature of elite American culture since the 1960s. From our perspective in early 2025, it is a culture of common sense—affirmative, forward-looking, and normal.
Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine frequently features interesting, inspiring, and intellectually solid articles. I've started a new category for links to some of these articles online, for my records and for anyone else who is interested.
This one is from the December 2024 issue: Religious Liberty and the Genius of the American Founding. There's no pay wall.
Enjoy a very brief introduction to the history of religious liberty and the relationship between sacred and secular authority in the Western World. Here's my favorite line, quoting George Washington:
All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.
