So my conciliatory words on behalf of dead poets managed to replace hatred with contempt. My favorite comment on e-mail begins “You wimp!” Let me salvage my manhood by saying that every word in both of my Robin Williams posts could be true at the same time. I’ll add that the movie is very bad for my profession. Any parent could say, with plenty of reason, that it’s not worth big bucks to have my kid “inspired.” Sometime down the road, I’ll whine that no profession is savaged more by novels, movies, and so forth than that of the professor. Well, maybe we deserve it. I’ve said often enough that most of them do.

There’s a lot of talk in various venues in the last few days about whether young people are really libertarian. Well (obviously), it depends what you mean by libertarian. That controversy could be clarified by the simple insight that the dogma of our time is that nothing trumps keeping the people around right now alive for as long as possible and as free as possible. Only suckers think of themselves as “parts” of wholes greater than themselves, such as families, countries, churches, or species. The same goes with thinking of yourself, deep down, as a responsibly relational being. That “individualism” (see Tocqueville) ain’t the same thing as “libertarianism.” There’s a large role for government, after all, on the health-and-safety front, and, as I’ve said so often, we’re all getting more paranoid, prohibitionist, and puritanical (or highly judgmental and regulatory) when it comes to bodies, even as we are unjudgmental or “accepting” when it comes to souls or what used to be regarded as sin. And, of course, there’s the tendency to want the government to protect us from all forms of bullying — not only with fists but with speech. The libertarian adage about “sticks and stones” has been abandoned, for example, on our campuses and in our corporations.

So I was reminded at the ISI conference of Bertrand de Jouvenal’s distinction between being “libertarian” and being “securitarian.” Today’s young want to have it all. (Let me add quickly that I don’t mean all our young, certainly not those at the conference or those who attend Berry College. I really don’t! I’m pretty much going with what studies show about the young in general.)

But they’re not socialists! A socialist, of course, is inspired by a certain kind of civic devotion that leads to personal sacrifice. A real socialist has more than a bit of the Puritan in him. As Carl often points out, today’s young imagine with the libertarians that we can live in a post-political world; for them, “anarcho-capitalism” is a hyphenated word for fantastic self-indulgence. The good news, I guess, is that they’re not Fascists either. Or even nationalists.

Speaking of nations, I’m open to thinking that many of the messes we see in the world today are the result of mistaken confidence in our power of nation-building. Certainly the allegedly “built” government of Iraq inspires no one’s confidence right now, and there might be a nontrivial argument for wasting no more lives or treasure on it.

But the Kurds, of course, are a real nation (well, not technically) we didn’t even build. Not only that, they like us, and we should admire them as better than us on the personal-liberty and civic-devotion fronts. So the least we could do is help our allies big-time — with airpower and manpower — to fend off an “existential threat.” Who can deny that the Kurds should be our focus in delivering a decisive blow against ISIS, which is the greatest or at least most extreme threat to civilization since the Stalinists (and, of course, the Nazis)?