Thoughts from a Life: On the Importance of 'Bunking'

By Stephen Blackwood

It is easy enough to point out the incoherence of the radicals: the layers of reflexive ideology, senseless iconoclasm, ignorance, and inherently unfulfillable demands. And point them out we should. 

But then what? 

No merely critical standpoint can build, let alone ‘conserve’ anything. One can lament the fire ravaging Notre Dame, but a dislike of fire confers exactly none of the knowledge required to build—or indeed, rebuild—that magnificent monument of Western culture. For that, you need architectural-mathematical understanding, aesthetic vision, as well as stone-carvers, carpenters, vitrailleurs, and so forth. Lamenting the Cathedral’s destruction is one thing; rebuilding it is another.

Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.  

Once, when I asked him about how to build, and rebuild, he playfully replied: we can’t be about ‘debunking’. Rather, we need ‘bunking’. 

We need to know how to build.

Culture, he went on to say, is simply ‘the things we have loved’. 

Love is the only principle capable of conserving, of transmitting, or of building, anything at all.

So-called conservatives too often think it is enough to be right: right about the economy, right about systems of government, right about civic association, right about fundamental freedoms and dignity. 

But being right isn’t enough. When you have young people burning cities and convinced that their culture is intrinsically oppressive, that its fundamental principles are perverse—then, it is safe to say to conservatives (as the meme goes)—you had one job, and you failed. 

A culture does not, it cannot, continue without mechanisms for its own transmission. The West, terrible though it is to say, no longer has those. 

Sir Roger understood that. He understood that the only way to pass along a culture, the only way to conserve those things we love, is actually to pass them along—to share that love, to instill it in another, and in the young especially. Naturally, Sir Roger knew this was a bedrock philosophical insight of the Western tradition, wonderfully articulated in Aristotle’s De anima, and taken up by Augustine, Dante, the Enlightenment, and elsewhere: that is, that an act of will follows, and only follows, the illumination of intellect. 

A great deal follows from that insight, including the whole history of Western freedom, and the forms of life and culture that arise from, and realize, free human beings.

Sir Roger was not, fundamentally, a critic. True, he could be devastating, and justly so—whether with his Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, or in his hilarious quip about Jacques Derrida in his debate with Terry Eagleton—but the primary trajectory of his life was one of illumination, of sharing his deep and sustaining loves—architecture, music, philosophy, language, Wagner, horses, painting, poetry, wine, hunting, and England—with his readers, friends, students, neighbors, and, of course, his family.

That is the only way to conserve anything.

But do ‘conservatives’ any longer understand that? 

Many so-called conservatives talk as though if only Gramsci et al. had not proposed the long march through the institutions, then everything would have been fine. But the real problem was never—and certainly is not now—Gramsci, Marx or the activist left, no matter how unhinged. The problem is that we have failed to transmit what is fundamental: a culture adequate to the spiritual nature of human beings. Think tanks and marginal tax rates won’t do it. 

That approach has produced generations of young people who genuinely believe the radical left has more spiritual substance than the whole of our cultural past—and a post-truth culture of degraded politics, broken families, ideology as education, and a civic and architectural wasteland. 

There is only, and has ever been only, one remedy.

And that is: to open, as Sir Roger did, beautifully, patiently, brilliantly, and with love, determination, and humor, the horizon of spirit, for one and all, where alone the life worth living is to be found.

Sir Roger lit the way for others. 

May his death, and may the work of this Foundation, inspire us to follow his example.

Dr. Stephen Blackwood is the President of Ralston College.