Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends

A Personal View; A Call to Save Our Culture

by Micah E. Weiss

A Greek-Jew

I sat eating pizza with my uncle Stanley, my father, and my son one afternoon in Brooklyn.  My uncle, in his 80s at the time, was my grandfather's little brother.  He was a machinist and tinkerer, a beautiful, funny, intelligent, liberal-minded, New York Jew, born and raised in Brooklyn.  He was in basic training when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, so he missed the war, but he was stationed in Japan during the occupation, and was given the role of Military Policemen, something everyone in my family finds amusing because of how gentle and kind and unassuming he was.  The idea of my nebishy little Uncle Stanley putting down his copy of “The New Yorker”and clearing out a Tokyo bar of unruly GIs in the early morning hours seems hilariously improbable.  When he returned from the occupation, he went to Baruch College, a City University of New York branch–I’m not sure what he studied, but something in practical engineering is my guess.  He worked for his father, my great grandfather, an inventor and engineer who made a pile of money in the 20s and 30s on an innovative intaglio gravure printing press.  My uncle Stanley worked in the shop for around 30 years with several other men (including a guy named Sal, whose name I can’t help but hear in an old-timey New York accent).  His hobbies included buying a dozen broken thingamajigs (watches, for example) down on Canal Street, and then taking them apart and putting them back together again, recombining pieces into maybe two or three working watches.  He also had a propensity for collecting anything and everything and displaying it all in his home.  His home decor aesthetic was infused with a horror vacui (fear of empty space), and manifested in everything from a table full of Santa Claus dolls from many eras, to a refrigerator covered in magnets, to nearly every doorway lined with action figures along the moldings of the posts and lintels.  His collecting reflected his playfulness, as well as a cosmopolitan sourcing; the flea markets of New York City–which I’ve worked–might house the treasures of the world if you look carefully enough.  Somewhere there is video footage we took of that old house with table after table of collected things, curated by my eccentric and brilliant uncle.  Though it may be lost footage.  

At the pizza lunch in Brooklyn that day were four generations of Weisses.  My father was in his early 60s at that lunch, I was in my mid 30s, my son was about four.  Somehow, and I don’t remember the context, my uncle started reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade '' by Lord Alfred Tennyson.  My son, in a world of his own, perked up his ears at the word “cannon.”  My dad smiled.  I sat enraptured.  Uncle Stanley had most of it memorized and he wasn’t, as far as I know, a passionate reader of poetry.  He spent the rest of the lunch pulling stanzas out of his memory banks from classic poems I only remember as beautiful.   

When my mother was a child, her father started referring to her as Ophelia.  I always referred to him by the Greek word for grandfather, pappoú (which isn’t pronounced with a hard “p” but something in the middle of a “b” and “p”).  He was a deeply loving and affectionate man, stern at times, but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He lived with us for a year or two when I was 12-13, and I would wait up for him to return home from work.  He would hug and kiss me, and call me “my boy,” in his accent, and I can still smell his aftershave, and feel the sandpaper of his days-growth of beard on my cheek.  He had to shave every day, his beard grew so fast.  He was born and raised in Cyprus in the 1930s.  I believe he was born in a mud or daub hut on a family farm in a village with no electricity.  They raised goats, figs, olives, bees, and silkworms, where my great-grandmother, whose name I don’t know, spun silk to sell for money.  My grandfather spent some of his childhood being sent into the hills with the goats overnight, a task he apparently did not relish.  When he learned that my mother was taking my brother and me camping, his attitude was confusion bordering on disdain–he didn’t understand why anyone would sleep outside on the ground voluntarily.  His father, aside from tending their farm, was a cobbler  (I know his name because of a trick in Cypriot naming tradition for fathers and first-born sons where they alternate first and last names, so my grandfather was Michael Floury, his father was Floury Michael, and so on back for centuries).  For reasons I may never know, my great-grandfather thought it important that my grandfather go to school–something rare in their village.  Cyprus, with a history not entirely unlike that of Israel in that it has been passed back and forth between different empires since the Bronze Age, was controlled at the time by the British.  The British Empire set up English grammar schools all over Cyprus in the larger towns, and my grandfather was enrolled by his parents.  His mother took some of the silk none of them could usually afford to wear, and made him a suit appropriate for the school’s dress-code, and he would walk to the larger town avoiding ruffians and road agents, or so I’ve been told, and stayed with a family for the school week because of the distance.  Apparently the family did not treat him well but he went anyway and finished his schooling.  He learned to read and write.  He also learned the English language, mathematics, biology, astronomy, history, and Shakespeare, of course.  At some point, he read the play Hamlet.  He was a good enough student to be sent to America to attend college, but his uncles put him to work instead in the family diner; he became a chef, and eventually owned his own diner–for the rest of his life, one way or another, that was his work.  I don’t know what it was about my mother when she was five years old that led to her nickname.  Seeing pictures of her from those days, she only strikes me as an uncommonly pretty little girl.  However, family lore being what it is, it seems my mother’s family was struggling through tough times in the late 1950s, and it must have shown on the child, for her nickname, for better or worse, given by her father, was Ophelia.  

I have on various shelves my grandfather’s Philokalia, in English translation, a multi-volume collection of some of the more extraordinary Christian spiritual writings.  When I was a teen, we would talk about St. Paul, and he could quote him off hand.  The Philokalia has inspired texts I wonder now if he read, like The Way of a Pilgrim. His wife, my beloved grandmother, was practically a Bible scholar herself, and I can imagine their long hard lives being interspersed with many hours of discussion of the Psalms, Proverbs, and amazing tales buried in the lesser-read portions of that great book.  She was likely well read in Shakespeare as well, though I don’t know for sure and it wouldn’t surprise me at all.  I also have managed to save many relics of my Uncle Stanley’s need to collect things: little ivory figurines, preserved butterflies under glass, a machine part my Great-Grandfather’s shop produced for the war effort my uncle termed The Weiss Widget.  My wife and I seem to have the same horror vacui he did in our own mode of interior design.    

My Uncle Stanley and my Grandfather Michael, a secular atheist Brooklyn Jew and an observant Christian Greek Cypriot immigrant.  Neither of these men needed a liberal arts education to earn their living–my uncle the machinist, my grandfather the chef.  However, they were given something in their education, something that enriched their lives, something that trickled down to me.  There is something about the combination of these two men from my past that compels me to hold onto that legacy as more than just baubles of moments of pleasure.  Jew and Greek.  Jerusalem and Athens.  My past, my genetic legacy, whatever that means.  In these two men I see the origins of the West itself, in two men who worked with their hands their entire lives, but whose minds were alive with our culture, thanks in part to their single unifying element: an English language education.     

What is Education for?

Much has been written about what education is for, and there are many reasons to endorse the definition that universities are sense-making or knowledge-based institutions.  It is a strong argument.  Our research universities have been the envy of the world for almost a century and are one of the cornerstones of our prosperity along with our capitalist economy and our liberty based republican form of government and vast natural resources–many countries have two or even three of these pillars, but only the United States has all four.  Gathering the great minds of every generation together to seek out new ideas and discover new truths of the universe is one of the most practical traditions a culture can engage in, and ours has been doing it better than any culture in history for some time.  However, I believe there is more to our higher educational system than mere practicality, something contained in the meeting of those two great cities, Athens and Jerusalem, something unique to that which is called the West.  

Even more has been written about this by more eloquent and erudite men and women than I.  But in my life, the meeting of these traditions has gone far deeper than mere research, mere science, mere economy, mere democracy.  What has happened for me, and for us as Americans, is the meeting of all the poetry of the English language, all the interwoven threads of that poetry that reaches into the poetry of French, German, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, into that polyglot culture of the West as understood in the context of the most diverse country that has ever been.  All cultures are a juxtaposition of other cultures, but American culture is the culture of cultures, where the West came to grow and build on itself beyond the practical applications, and into the aesthetic and spiritual.  When Athenian democracy meets St. Paul’s declaration that there is no more Greek or Jew, the universality of humanity joins in the New World thousands of years later and coalesces in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, written in the same city where my Grandfather settled his family of six children, and where my Uncle Stanley decorated the house my Great-Grandfather built in Queens.  

There is loss in this poetry.  I will never speak Greek, nor chant at Synagogue.  My children, born of my Yankee-Irish wife and my Greek-Jew self, are even more disbursed in their heritage, and will never experience the kind of beautiful ethnic gatherings I did in my childhood–already diluted though they were.  My children are Whitman’s Great-Grandchildren more than my Grandfather’s.  However, even if you are 100% anything, in this country, because of the gifts of the west, Whitman is as much yours as mine, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”  Life isn’t fair in that way, that we can only live one life, and that the village and shtetl are not ours to enjoy in all their parochial splendor.  

The trade off is a kind of freedom the world had never known before our culture proposed it, imperfectly elaborated through our 247 year history.  We are individuals free to embrace and discard our pasts and heritages as we will, and in so doing much will be lost.  But as with every freedom, there is an implied responsibility to preserve what is deep, beautiful, abiding, and true as best as we can since our ethnicity isn’t preserving it for us.  The village and the shtetl (barring barbarians and Cossacks) preserved all that the villager ever needed to know.  We have a different burden.  The loss of the warmth of the homogeneous hearth is replaced with the vast glories of the library.  

Education is an act of Conservation

Ours is a grand inheritance, and our school system was once the caretaker of it.  Perhaps it was incidental or accidental that one would learn that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”  Perhaps it was merely the mode of teaching a young person in those days to read and write that Keats made its way into the curriculum.  

I’d contend, instead, that Beauty will out over time.  To miss the heritage of our language and culture out of political spite is to reject the responsibility our freedoms come with.  Along with research, our educational institutions once embraced debate.  Debate and research being intertwined in themselves, encouraging that greatest practical invention of the West: Science, with its built in self-correcting mechanisms.  There is an insistence amongst those who defend traditional educational settings that the current wave of illiberalism is an attack on debate and free speech, and I agree.  But Heather MacDonald recently has made a different argument, saying in an interview that the universities’ “Primary mission . . . is to pass on a civilizational legacy with gratitude and with joy,” a mission she describes as one that these institutions have “betrayed.”  These two perspectives, debate vs legacy, are actually one: the sciences were built upon the same liberal arts foundation, the same Quadrivium and Trivium, that our arts and letters were built on, the same Hellenistic foundations that built Greece and Rome, the same universal humanity brought by Christianity through Judaism, the same line of Western development started in Athens and Jerusalem 2,800 years ago, as those two cities overlapped in their greatness for that brief moment, out of the dark-age of the Bronze Age Collapse, and surviving through the Dark Ages of the late first millennium A.D. when the two were reunited again in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  This is the legacy the American system of universities once preserved.  A legacy of far more than mere practical science, but one of art, architecture, drama, political theory, philosophy and poetry.  Debate and free speech are mere facets of that larger heritage, that larger inheritance that we American Westerners can accept in a way that no other Westerners can; that Europe in unifying has tried and failed clumsily to mimic; that China and Japan and many other non-western countries, like an awkward game of cultural telephone, have also tried and failed to mimic in their universities.  Our culture of individualism and the embrace of diversity of thought, and our discarding of ethno-religious tribalism–only in America could we take that Western legacy and run as far and as fast, outpacing our European founding cultures.           

Now the mutilated Marxism of the post-modernists settles into its middle age, and the privileged elites of a handful of universities–a mere handful, mind you, 80 protests does not a movement make–engage in the tearing down of that Western legacy, the public gazes into its phones, none the wiser to what this is really about.  These students are more than useful idiots for Hamas and the Iranian Regime, LARPing their way out of their final papers and exams under a thin shield they call activism.  They are foot soldiers led by their professors and administrators (and often their parents) in an effete revolution against the very civilization that brought them the prosperity that pays for their Keffiyehs, their tents, their weed, and their iPhones.  Their effect on Israeli policy will be negligible in the long run, as the recent invasion of Rafah has proven.  Even if they were right, they are merely an army of proverbial broken clocks, the cuckoos of which are hanging from their foreheads, forever doomed to squawk at the same hour into the void of their own ignorance.  However, the universities themselves made them, the adults in their lives sanctioned their anti-Western, anti-American educations, and all perspectives of the beauty and glory of the West are lost or compartmentalized or diffused in a list of half-lie grievances and narratives on behalf of an oppressed population they neither care for nor understand.  

What was once an attitude of a handful of malcontented failed Marxists typified by the 500 or so students led by Jesse Jackson at Stanford in 1987, chanting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go,” is now the majority view of professors and students at the top universities and colleges.  Or at least an empowered minority at the majority of the top universities.  Both then and now these suburban wealthy anxiety-prone sufferers of self-diagnosed “mental illness,” the mostly white affluent elites that make up the demographics of both students and teachers, whose only real problem is Selma Envy mixed with a fear of finals, are what these top universities now produce, and they lead the charge to tear down our inheritance.  

And the sin? That Western Civilization was dominated by white males, an old hobby-horse, but one that never got put out to pasture.  Why is it so hard to accept that history isn’t fair?  That it didn’t happen equitably?  It doesn’t make Yeats’ request to “Tread Softly because you tread on my dreams,” less profound, less beautiful, that he was born a certain way.  And every high school student should be forced to read that poem.  Every single one.  If there is a point to the Department of Education at all, it should be to enforce that single curricular guideline.  You should be able to identify Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven off-hand, and recite it in an interview, in full, before being admitted to even a community college.  But we don’t do that anymore.  He fades from the curriculum as fast as the mediocrities that replace him rise, buoyed by declarations of diversity, and shielded from critique by the ultimate Sword of Damocles in polite society, the accusation of racism.  History isn’t fair.  White men had advantages, some geographic, mostly cultural.  It didn’t make them better people, it didn’t make their souls of any less value, but it gave them an opportunity to embrace an inheritance and build on it, one that is now open to all in our country.  Yet they are slowly but surely torn down, pulled out, and discarded for being white and male and dead.  

This is the Irredeemable Whiteness of Being that infuses the self-loathing of much of our professoriate and their students–the misunderstanding of themselves and the world that made them.  As these students burn American flags, and stupidly call a war “genocide,” and blindly label a nation of refugees “colonialism,” and accuse everyone who disagrees with them bigotry, I wonder what they will have left once the burning of Alexandria’s Library is complete.  When they are old, and sitting at a lunch table with the generations, what will they quote to fill the moment with whimsey and joy?  “From the river to the sea,” maybe, and still unsure which river and which sea.      

A Renaissance Perspective

I wonder what it must have felt like to be in Florence in the 1480s when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rapheal (cue Ninja Turtle joke) were all working within a few hundred yards of each other.  Walking those narrow streets that spider out from the Duomo, I imagined I could feel the energy of the High Renaissance, the chaotic, frenetic ascendency that must have surrounded everything.  Did it feel both beautiful and terrifying, like a slow-rolling thunder storm?  What must it have been like to discover Martianus Cappella’s De septem disciplinis ("On the seven disciplines"), the foundation of our liberal arts system of education.  What must it have felt like for that to be newly rediscovered and disseminated?  What must it have felt like as the Greek and Roman texts poured into northern and central Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries?  Carried in the hands first of returning crusaders and then of expelled Jews from Iberia, for the Arabs and Jews having preserved so much of Athens and Jerusalem in the interim thousand years since the fall of Rome’s Western Empire (how ironic that the Spanish monarchs could fund Columbus’ discovery of the New World while simultaneously driving the Golden Goose out of its own country.  And all in the same year!).  What must it have felt like for Donatello, when the old Greek and Roman statues were unearthed, or pulled out of cellars, or released by the Church to be viewed, to have seen for the first time in millennia the mastery of nameless artists and craftsmen?   For Michaelangelo to see Laocoön after it was pulled from the earth after more than a thousand years.  Or for Brunelleschi to look at the Pantheon in Rome, and to feel the Duomo of Florence forming in his imagination, because he was finally able to truly see what a dome was for the first time since the secrets were lost? 

For six hundred years now, our legacy of art and science, our heritage, the internal conflicts, the expanding empires culminating in the global hegemony of the United States of the last 80 years, has been a mixed bag of rising and falling cultures, or genocides, of artistic movements and triumphs, of disease spreading the collapse of many peoples, of literary traditions and new forms of expression and communication, of technologies both wondrous and terrible.  Of a global slave trade and a British crusade that ended it.  Of World Wars and the Pax Americana.  There have been harms and hurts, and glorious achievements, and heroes and villains.  

This is our history, both terrible and transcendent.  And our universities see only the terrible and neglect their responsibility to preserve the transcendent, and I do not know what follows.  Is this a decadent period?  A decline?  Is there really a new Dark Age forming all around us?  One we will not see or feel until we fail to produce enough engineers to keep the lights on?   Our fine arts are already insular, self-referential, niche atomized subcultural artifacts, lacking the unity great arts bring, because the greatness of the art is so overwhelmingly compelling to the culture that no one can look away.  This was the power of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and in our day was once matched by the influence of our greatest film auteurs.  Now we have a never ending parade of prequels, sequels, reboots, and remakes.  Our sciences and technologies are stagnating right along with the arts, with only the promise mixed with all our greatest fears of AI somewhere on the horizon.  It is over 20 years now that electric cars, social media, and the smartphone were the next big thing.  What have you done for me lately except make my students sick and stupid with tiktok?

As the Carlingian empire broke apart, as the Vikings came, as the little ice-age compounded the issues, European monasteries huddled around the Promethean warmth of what they could preserve.  Perhaps the new universities that are forming will be more than that?  Perhaps the promise of the University of Austin will succeed, and Ralston College will get off the ground, or Dartmouth’s incredibly brave and right-minded President Sian Beilock will turn the Ivy League around all by herself. 

Perhaps the thousand students at the two St. John’s College campuses, one of which my son will attend next year, will help preserve the West one graduating class at a time.  I hope so.  When I took my son for his interviews it was October 9th, and I was already thinking about the essay I later published here.  While other college campuses were exploding with anti-Israel protests before the IDF was even mobilized to do anything, while professors were signing open letters condemning Israel for being attacked (?) and the Democratic Socialists of New York were praising Hamas’ massacre of civilians, I walked the campus of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, while my son interviewed and toured and sat in on classes.  I saw a stunning thing.  Students learning.  Students with books in their hands everywhere I went.  Students talking about what they were learning, talking about their classes, translating ancient Greek together on a blackboard in the school cafe while others read.  When the evening class block started, when every student attends a mandatory grade-appropriate Seminar, the campus was a ghost town for over 2 hours–it was just me and my laptop and book.  No students were cutting class.  And then when Seminar ended, the kids poured out into the quad, talking about Seminar together.  I sat amongst them feeling mighty old and deeply envious, and also so excited that this was my son’s first choice.  There was an energy I had almost never felt on a campus before, with students of a wide variety of backgrounds, to be sure, but all bent towards the single abiding Telos of the American University System as it was originally conceived and formed: to learn this great heritage and preserve it for the future.  There were no protests, no posters, no flags of any kind but the one American flag that all American universities fly.  No slogans, no causes, no LARPers, no Hamas Girl Summer, no outside agitators; nothing but the young in pursuit of knowing where we came from in art, music, science, philosophy, prose, poetry.  The great conversation that every American is invited to join, happening, right in front of me.  For a teacher like me, it was powerful.            

Mighty Men Which Were of Old, the Men of Renown

The images at the top and below, are not Harvard, or Columbia, or Dartmouth.  They are of Bronx Community College.  The buildings were built when NYU was located there over a hundred years ago, before the idea of a community college had been thought of.  NYU would later abandon these buildings and move to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, but at the time of the building of that archway, it was in the Bronx, in a neighborhood known as University Heights.  The high school where I first worked in the Bronx held their graduation there for the first few years I was a teacher.  In this image you can see the the pantheon-like building Gould Hall, and the portico that surrounds it:

That first year, I walked with some fellow teachers up to that archway where you can enter the portico of the long outdoor walk around the hall.  Along this walk is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.  It is a product of its time, to be sure.  They have removed Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, something I can hardly criticize, but there are many other figures preserved there and some that are not, that one might object to one way or another.  However, the core of great men and women who are present will remain, I hope.  I hope it gains the funding it needs to be restored, preserved, and expanded, and that it becomes not the sign of decadence that I saw 18 years ago, but a sign of some new future ascendency.  

I may not see it in my lifetime, but that it is there at all, that it remains, and that there is a campaign to restore it is a sign of hope for me.  

I bring it up, though, not because of the Hall of Fame itself, but because what struck me as I walked in was the quote over the archway of the Portico.  I recognized that quote from Genesis 6:4 one of my favorites:

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” 

What the Nephilim are is lost to time, though scholars have speculated and debated iteratively for thousands of years.  Be this a mythological fragment, or a key to understanding the war between Heaven and Hell, or simply a misspelling over time, I don’t really care.  To me the beauty of it is in the not-knowing, and the humility I feel in the vast wondrous past of the West reaching back to its origins in the Near East.  Shadowlands of desert sands, and rivers of plenty, and ziggurats and pyramids, and a small tribe of Semites wandering the arid lands with their camels and sheep and strange God of gods. 

I adore this quote, and its placement as well, in all its hubristic association with Great Americans, carved between two Ionic columns, where a Hellenic Frieze might go on a Greek temple.  I recognized the quote because I’d read Genesis, and I read Genesis at least in part, for my Grandfather.  I saw it, the quote, the portico, the Pantheon-like building that it surrounds, and wave upon wave of historical, aesthetic, poetic implications filled my thoughts.  This is us.  Athens and Jerusalem again; a Hebrew quote on a Greek temple.  I hope these thoughts will pour from me as I sit with my Great-Grandchild, in a pizza place, when I am old.

NYU would move a dozen miles south, and it would choose Washington Square Park for its new home.  And there, on the arch to Washington is another quote befitting to our great universities and our great republic.  That is as fitting an end to this essay as anything else I can think of.  It is from the speech by Washington himself before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787: 

“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.  The event is in the hands of God.”