The current fury over immigration in the United States reminds me of my experience, over 25 years, teaching in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College.

When I arrived in 1990 as a young professor in the English department, I was politically liberal, with certain Catholic modifications. I believed that abortion was homicide. I believed that suicide was criminal. I believed that marriage was for keeps. I believed that the social, cultural, and intellectual benefits conferred upon the world by the Christian Faith were incalculable, while the Faith itself transcended all such matters. 

I took for granted that Western arts and letters constituted a precious heritage, belonging first to anyone raised up in the West and then to all the world. It is no small thing to consider how deeply the works of Bach are admired in Japan.

Yet I had also accepted the liberal position on gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples. I said so openly in class, in the fall of 1991. I had accepted liberal positions on war, social welfare, the environment, and race relations. Not on education, because I knew how badly educated American teachers tended to be—and because I loathed consolidation and standardization. Then a change struck me like a thunderbolt.

I was scheduled in the spring of 1992 to begin teaching in that Western Civilization program. But a sociology professor (who had only arrived on campus when I did) had organized a student revolt against the program, through a group they called Students Organized Against Racism. I attended their first panel debate, in a room packed with 150 people, most of them students who wanted the program eliminated. I expected arguments from the literary-critical Left, and I was ready to counter them with arguments from history and from a different corner of that literary-critical Left.

So, when it came time for the audience to ask questions, I asked a young female student whether she knew that John Adams had described the new American system in terms he derived from Polybius’ description of the Roman Republic.  She did not. I expected her to complain that the Romans were “patriarchal,” so I gave her an account of a foundational episode in Livy, from the legendary days before the Republic, when Rome was little more than a cow town with a king. 

The Romans were striving for supremacy with their near kin, the Sabines. Three young brothers on the Roman side engaged in a battle with three on the Sabine side, winners to take all. Things looked bad for the Romans when two of their Horatii were slain by the Sabine Curiatii. Then the last Horatius did something apparently unheroic. He ran. 

The Curiatii pursued, but at different speeds, as two of them were wounded, one worse than the other. Suddenly, he turned about and slew his freshest opponent, then he dispatched the next two, one by one. The people rejoiced. But when he came home, he found his sister weeping because one of the three he slew was to be her husband. He killed her on the spot. It was a capital crime—yet the father pleaded with the king to spare his son for the great benefit he conferred upon the city.

I pointed out to the young lady that if you can’t make something subversive out of that story, you aren’t trying.

Her reply took my breath away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. The audience erupted in laughter and applause. And the scales fell from my eyes. 

These people did not care about Livy or Virgil—and I later came to see that they did not care about Lao-Tzu or Confucius, either. They were not there to argue for improvements to the Western Civilization program. They were not arguing for the greater merits of Japanese watercolors over those of the French impressionists. They wanted the program eliminated. So I began to question everything else about the political Left.

The program survived the attack and grew stronger, casting a broader net, including more art and music generally, and works from the periphery of the West. So it went until around 2008, when the program was mangled, in part to satisfy the demands of professors who did not teach in it, who did not like it, and who were not conversant with the material we taught. The central question should have been, “Given that the college has this program, what can we do to make it the best it can be?” It was not so. It was instead, among the long-standing opponents from the social sciences, “How much hobbling and gutting can we get away with?”

These people did not care about Livy or Virgil—and I later came to see that they did not care about Lao-Tzu or Confucius, either.Tweet This

Thus do we see the structure of the false fight, when one of the sides engages the fight under false pretenses, with another aim entirely in mind. At Providence, my colleagues and I wanted to have the best program, though we disagreed sometimes over what that would entail. The others wanted no such program at all, yet they were permitted to engage in and eventually dominate discussions about what form the program should take, deflecting attention from their own dubious territories.

Suppose the people of Mexico say, “We cherish our cultural heritage, which is a mingling of the Spanish and the native American, and we wish to craft an immigration policy that will preserve or enhance that heritage.” Who would gainsay them? Genuine discussions would turn toward the details, with all sides committed to the same general ideal, though differing on how to achieve it, or on how to combine it with an openness to other cultures, especially those to which the Mexican is allied. But should someone detest Mexican history, seeing in it little more than a saga of brutality and ignorance and characterizing the mother country, Spain, by the worst evils of the Inquisition, surely a sane person would say, “Friend, you are not a part of this discussion.”

Fighting is often productive; the false fight, never. If you hate or despise American ways, if when you think of American history you think first and second and third of its evils, you cannot have any strong interest in the assimilation of immigrants to those ways. Perhaps you can think in monetary terms, about how the tax intake compares with the welfare outflow and how the work of migrants affects the price of oranges. But if people say, “We think that one million legal immigrants a year is enough, and we worry that most of them in our time have little interest in becoming Americans,” before you accuse them of bigotry, you should admit that what they fear is what you hope for. You are glad that the muezzin on the loudspeaker calls people to pray in Dearborn, not because you love Islam but because you despise what you hope it will displace.

From 1992 to 2017, I taught in that program at Providence College, covering literature, history, theology, philosophy, and the fine arts from 1500 B.C. to the end of the Renaissance, presenting material originating from more than a dozen cultures, with literature written in Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, and occasionally Arabic, Old High German, Icelandic, and Portuguese. I read most of those languages, so I could present the students with what the texts really said, aside from the translations.  

You are glad that the muezzin on the loudspeaker calls people to pray in Dearborn, not because you love Islam but because you despise what you hope it will displace.Tweet This

None of this mattered to the self-styled multiculturalists; it was not “diverse.” For “diversity” in academe implies political uniformity of a peculiarly unforgiving sort.  Yet in all those years, I never once used my position of authority to push one side of some political controversy. My job was to teach Plato, not to cheat students by foisting my political opinions on them. If you want that sort of thing, you can get it for free on the internet. 

My greatest academic desire was to have them fall in love with what I loved—say, the paintings of Caravaggio, or the poetry of George Herbert. My greatest desire of all was to bring them closer to Christ, not by preaching, which was not my job, but by letting the Christian works speak for themselves.

This, too, I see, was to let the false fight go on. The professor who sought to shut down the Western Civilization program hated me and wanted me gone, while I neither hated him nor wanted him gone nor had the least thing to do with him. Everything for him was political. 

In his mind, George W. Bush was a filthy racist who delighted in withholding aid from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; that was the centerpiece of a course he taught with a friend of mine on city life. My friend talked about Dr. Johnson’s London, which both he and Dr. Johnson loved; the sociology professor talked about a supposedly malevolent Bush, whom he hated. I’m not a city boy, but I wonder about what makes city life attractive to people and how it differs from life in a small town. But that would not have sufficed for the professor energized by hate.

Does our Church know the false fight? We assume that every bishop and priest and religious sister actually wants the faithful to be more devout, firmer in their beliefs about God and Jesus, more alive in their commitment to all the Church teaches about the moral life, and more energetic in bringing the Good News to a world that so badly needs it. But what if it is not so? What if, in particular, conflicts over the liturgy constitute a false fight?

Suppose some layman sees that the Church has been the only prominent institution not to lose its mind in the sexual revolution. Suppose he draws connections between the collapse of marriage and family life and the collapse of working-class neighborhoods, parishes, and communities. Suppose he sees that solemnity of worship actually draws people in, precisely because it is so different from what a louche and dispirited world has to offer. We assume that bishops would encourage him. Why? 

What if the bishop or priest or Catholic teacher would find such a layman “deplorable,” to use Mrs. Clinton’s word of contempt? How can we argue with them? We might say, “This parish produces young people committed to the Church, eager to get married and raise families, and sometimes eager to join the priesthood or the religious orders.” What if that is not good news? What do these hierarchs really want?