In his essay “Cultural Debris,” Russell Kirk wrote that “not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.” The fabric of civilization, according to Kirk, is a complex tapestry woven from historical and philosophical threads. For any civilization, and particularly for the West, those threads are exemplified by its canon.
As a conservative academic, Kirk spent much of his career concerned with the state of the modern university. In his eyes, the university’s lurch away from the liberal arts and towards “career education” undermined the purpose of education proper. His pessimism on the subject was well-founded. Thirty years after Kirk’s death, the situation hasn’t improved much. Liberal arts broadly and the study of Western civilization specifically — if they can be considered separate fields — have both withered away.
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