The first time I met Jordan Peterson, we disagreed. He
had just delivered a brilliant talk for the Society for
Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), treating in part
of the pros and cons of Liberal and Conservative political
philosophy.
Where we disagreed involved what he considered the pejorative
side of Conservatism. Peterson argued that Conservative
thinking and practice were a noble endeavor, but regrettably
focused on the concept of walls, a kind of insularity
that tended to exclude much that was regarded as disruptive
or troubling to a sense of unanimity and epistemological
coherence; indeed, such novel intrusions were likely to
be regarded as a species of “disease.” There
could be something closed-minded about Conservative principles,
a rejection of the strange, the innovative, the foreign,
and the revitalizing effect of infusions from elsewhere.
Such a thesis
seemed odd coming from a culture hero known for his courage
in rejecting social justice groupthink and promoting the
notion of personal obligation as a counterweight to runaway
“rights.” True, as Peterson wrote in 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, as if in contradiction
to half his title, “chaos, possibility, growth and
adventure” add to the intensity and meaningfulness
of life, situating us “on the border between order
and chaos.” But one must be careful how much chaos
one lets cross the border into the constitutional order
of both the self and the culture—and of the polity
as well. As times have shown, the core Liberal/Left agenda
of open borders (or as we now call it, globalism), in
the realms of both practical life and ideological consensus,
is an invitation to discord and misrule.
The segue
from Peterson’s remarks to the catastrophe at the
southern border is no doubt an unanticipated transition,
but in my estimation a salient one. New elements are entering
not only the nation but the culture as well, an injection
of novelty that is not, pace Peterson, an invigorating
but a destabilizing influence. The breaching of the southern
border by a torrent of illegal immigrants, as everyone
who is still sane knows, is an unprecedented disaster.
A nation without border controls is no longer a nation
but a theme park “justified” by Liberal/Left
preconceptions, a kind of free-for-all Disney World in
which the rides and features gradually cease to work.
A Magic Kingdom Park minus the magic, it is an anarchist’s
wet dream and the dystopian project of the political Left.
Chaos breaches the frontiers.
The rupture
at the border is also a symbol of the widening fissures
in traditional culture—the beliefs, assumptions,
usages and norms we once took for granted. One recalls
Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” where he sings
of the “crack where the light gets in,” a
musical rendering of Peterson’s observations—which
turns out to be in far too many cases, pace my old and
honored friend, a rift where the darkness gets in. And
the Left, as history has proven, brings political and
cultural darkness wherever it has prevailed.
Dennis Prager
has written what amounts to an obituary for the nation
and the modern West: “Everything the Left touches
it ruins.” He scrolls down the list of disciplines,
monuments, democratic entitlements, social structures,
and institutions that have crumbled as the cultural barriers
that once “conserved” the nation and its people
have been leveled: art, music, journalism, education,
the family, childhood, race relations, sexual differentiation,
the military, sports, the First Amendment–all have
been rendered derelict, all now signs of “the great
American tragedy.”
In an article
titled “Third Worldizing America,” Victor
Davis Hanson similarly points to the “crimes”
of the Left, the “utter breakdown of the law,”
and the dissolution of the conceptual borders of the country
sponsored by historical distortions like the 1619 Project.
As he writes in The Dying Citizen, “Citizens
differ from visitors, aliens, and residents passing through
who are not rooted inside borders where a constitution
and its laws reign supreme.” (Italics mine.) For
a nation to prosper, citizens “must honor the traditions
and customs of our country,” and recognize the necessity
of “delineated and established borders” if
they are not to find themselves living in a social and
political wilderness. “Aliens,” to use Hanson’s
term, whether foreign or domestic, illegal immigrants
or tribal Leftists, are cultural interlopers whose influence
is destructive.
Some walls
must come down. Some walls must go up. Some walls keep
people in. Some walls keep invaders out. A wall, as we
understand it here, is not an Iron Curtain. A defensive
wall is an immune system with a specific, beneficial function,
to repel what is harmful. Of course, walls have gates
that may be opened, and should be opened, for purposes
of commerce, travel, knowledge and replenishment—Peterson’s
“gripping and meaningful” irruptions into
the citadel. The gatekeepers, however, must be responsible,
informed, judicious and loyal to the people they represent
and to the founding traditions of the nation. They must
know when to open the gates and when to shut them. They
must labor for the advantage of their citizens.
Such was the
intention of the MAGA policies of the Trump administration,
which worked to reinstall the supporting walls of nation
and culture, that is, to aid working families; set the
economy on a strong footing, with “low unemployment,
and wage increases across every demographic,” as
Julie Kelly writes in Disloyal Opposition; rebuild
the military; thwart a “swamp” of domestic
enemies; establish a perimeter wall at the porous border;
and implement rational immigration protocols. An initiative
of this nature is not a kind of protectionist tariff wall
built to exclude new ideas or healthy competitive forces
in order to profit a guild of candlemakers by prohibiting
windows, as in Frédéric Bastiat’s
famous fable in The Economics of Freedom. It
is, rather, an effort to retain and foster a productive
national identity and a significant degree of cultural
integrity while remaining proportionately open to new
ventures and discoveries.
Today, things
have changed for the worse. The walls, physical, moral
and customary, that keep the culture intact and shield
its citizens from the incursion of parasites and the derelictions
of the Left have collapsed and will need to be raised
again if the nation is to flourish as it once did. Citizens
can no longer be indifferent to the plight of the present,
as if they were members of the Church of Laodicea whom
John the Elder castigated in Revelation (3:15)
as “neither hot nor cold.” Citizens will need
to recover their republican temperature if the community
is to survive.
Hanson believes
that with an engaged citizenry restoration is possible.
“Contemporary events,” he continues, “have
reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and
teetering on the abyss—and yet the calamities can
also teach, indeed energize, them to rebuild and recover
what they have lost.” In The Dark Side of the
Left, Richard J. Ellis, a Leftist critical of the
Left, is equally insistent on the necessity for national
coherence. “In such a society,” he writes,
“the more hierarchical visions of ordered community
will continue to resonate in American life. And rightly
so.” Leftists, however, are like the magistrates
in Constantine Cavafy’s celebrated poem “Waiting
for the Barbarians” whose gates are opened wide,
and who eagerly await the arrival of the barbarians and
are disappointed when they fail to appear.
What all this
means, obviously, is that the wall at the southern border
will need to be completed, and soon. No less important,
the interior walls of the culture that safeguard intellectual,
creative, family, informational, medical, legislative,
personal, market and commissary relations will need to
be rebuilt. Both species of wall, material and cultural
must be erected at the same time if the nation is to be
conserved. “Good fences make good neighbors,”
as Robert Frost’s churlish neighbor in “Mending
Wall,” a benighted old farmer who “moves in
darkness . . . like an old-stone savage,” was fond
of repeating. Frost was, on the whole, of the opposite
persuasion:
