Greg Lukianoff delivered an especially insightful and informative address at a recent event, in which he explained how speech codes have taken over at colleges despite court judgments against them.

This provides proof once again of the importance of culture in maintaining our ideals, and shows that if we lose the culture, we lose the ideals as well. Even recourse to the law in the name of the ideals may not suffice if the culture has been sufficiently altered through newer imperatives, like those arising from political correctness. The university no longer transmits the great tradition that shapes our understanding of the good.

Outside the university, conservatives continually pronounce that America consists of nothing but her ideals and has no culture to speak of. But human beings require cultural contexts from which they derive the shape and meaning necessary to live their lives, and if the traditional culture is not maintained, then the PC culture takes over with all its coerciveness, in direct violation even of the ideals we say form our identity.

People do not live in abstractions. If we abrogate our tradition, as the Left has done, or announce that we have no culture but our ideals, as the Right has done, we are as good as asking to be taken over by those with a more vigorous sense of what they consider good. This is how tyranny triumphs.