From the Academy

It is not at all difficult to become a nihilist at the age of eighteen; but it is most difficult to pursue wisdom, thinking always being painful. In the recent rioting at the Sorbonne, some Parisian students sprayed a legend in paint above a doorway: “No Work!” It is infinitely amusing to spend one’s college years in empty protest, rather than in work; and a lifetime of idleness is the dream of the immature social visionary. One thinks of a book by a grandson of Karl Marx entitled The Right to be Idle.

Yet the world’s work is waiting to be done. The great wheel of circulation must be turned; and, even more important, the work of the intellect, illuminated by the moral imagination, cannot be neglected in this generation when Dinos conspires against Zeus. A rough protest against work and against order is a ruinous protest against the nature of things. For students to “do their thing” after this fashion is to bring down the academy and to break that continuity in the civil social order which the life of the intellect has long maintained.

RK

About the Author

Russell Kirk

Featured Tags

Alexis de Tocqueville

It is not at all difficult to become a nihilist at the age of eighteen; but it is most difficult to pursue wisdom, thinking always being painful. In the recent rioting at the Sorbonne, some Parisian students sprayed a legend in paint above a doorway: “No Work!” It is infinitely amusing to spend one’s college years in empty protest, rather than in work; and a lifetime of idleness is the dream of the immature social visionary. One thinks of a book by a grandson of Karl Marx entitled The Right to be Idle.

Yet the world’s work is waiting to be done. The great wheel of circulation must be turned; and, even more important, the work of the intellect, illuminated by the moral imagination, cannot be neglected in this generation when Dinos conspires against Zeus. A rough protest against work and against order is a ruinous protest against the nature of things. For students to “do their thing” after this fashion is to bring down the academy and to break that continuity in the civil social order which the life of the intellect has long maintained.