The Happy Anachronism: Coffee, Newsprint, and the Inheritance We Risk Losing

After several years of poking a K-Cup for coffee and reading the news on a digital device, my bride and I decided to enjoy the simple splendor of freshly ground coffee and an honest-to-gawd newspaper. Oh my soul (!) how I’ve missed the rich taste of a dark roast coffee so fresh it whispers “You’re welcome” after each sip.

Then I opened the newspaper. Not the electronic variety, mind you, with its blinking advertisements, tacky little pop-ups, and assorted invitations to discover what some celebrity wore to the grocery store. This, sports fans, was ink on paper! Something you can fold, unfold, spread across the table, swat an insect or keep the kids off your lawn.

It was The Epoch Times, to which we very recently subscribed and they send a printed edition each week that is very much like the Sunday newspapers many of us grew up with, including comics, crossword puzzles, sections dedicated to Mind & Body, Life & Tradition, Opinion, Front Page and more.

There was a time when I’d scan the newspapers with a predator’s instinct, looking for the latest example of Invincible Ignorance from the progressive left. Skimming through the editorial page in many newspapers while looking for the absurd was, to use Bill Buckley’s phrase, like following a lit fuse in search of an explosion — one never had to wait very long.

But these days I’m more interested in simply understanding varying points of view whether I agree with them or not. Our world has changed, and if a course correction is needed, we ought at the very least to understand where things went awry.

There is something wonderfully civilized about the ritual. The aroma of robust coffee, the rustle of newsprint, the deliberate turning of pages. No algorithms deciding what I ought to read. No electronic interruptions demanding my attention. Just the newspaper, the coffee, and whatever thoughts the combination might provoke.

The combination did not disappoint.

I went first to the Opinion section where two columns caught my attention. The first, “The War We Have to Win: Marco Rubio and the Fight for Western Civilization,” by Jeff Minick, concerned the intellectual and moral inheritance of the West. The second, “Should We Still Send Our Kids to College? Ask Jordan Peterson,” by James Bryson, examined the purpose of higher education and whether our universities are fulfilling it.

At first glance, the subjects might appear only loosely related. The spinal column coursing through both pieces, however, suggests otherwise.

In the first column, Jeff Minick treats us to an analysis of the sturdy defense and observations of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in his recent remarks while in Athens, Greece. Consider the following from Secretary Rubio:

Here in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.
An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
These were not just formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristics of a people — expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.
To know them is to know ourselves.

Did you catch what he did there? Because there is something profoundly moving about that last sentence. You see, when we examine the intellectual and moral inheritance of Western civilization, we are not merely studying the accomplishments of people long dead. We are looking into a philosophical mirror.

The questions that occupied Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, and the American Founders are not dust-covered relics belonging exclusively to their respective centuries. They dig deep into the very nature of truth, justice, liberty, virtue, and the proper relationship between the individual and the state.

These are our questions. And the answers matter.

Western civilization has never enjoyed a monopoly on curiosity, discovery, or wisdom. Nor has it always lived up to its professed ideals. But among its enduring achievements is a tradition of inquiry that permits, and sometimes demands, the examination of its own assumptions.

We inherit not merely a body of knowledge, but a responsibility to understand it, question it, improve upon it, and transmit it.

Which brings us to the second column, in which James Bryson sheds light on his own experience in academia while sharing a few thoughts from Dr. Jordan Peterson. In light of the recent “Cornell Seven” controversy, Bryson quite understandably asks:

Why would any parent want to send his child to an institution that saddled him with a mountain of debt; was no guarantor of a profitable career; rendered him illiterate, lazy, and entitled; and introduced him to a seedy world of recreational substance abuse and debauchery?

Why indeed. But the column, drawing upon the thinking of Jordan Peterson, raises the more fundamental question: What is an education actually for?

Is it merely a credential certifying that its bearer has successfully completed a prescribed course of study? Is it vocational preparation? Is it an introduction to the accumulated knowledge of humanity?

Or ought it also cultivate the judgment, character, intellectual discipline, and moral understanding necessary to live as a responsible human being and citizen?

Barely in my 30s, I addressed the risks of failing to cultivate prudent judgment, character and intellectual discipline in a Mass Communications college class. The professor, a delightfully provocative old hippie, solicited a paper on what direction we thought the country was moving with the dawn of the Clinton Administration.

At the time, it seemed that when Clinton wasn't trying to make his administration resemble Noah's Ark, he was convinced there wasn't a problem in America for which he couldn't devise a federal solution. He felt our pain, promised to tend to our every need, and seemed determined that no American should remain underfed, under-cared-for, or, judging from the stories already circulating out of Arkansas, under-sexed.

I argued that, rather than federalizing everything including the heartbreak of psoriasis, the nation would be better served by educating citizens in certain foundational principles concerning the relationship between citizens and their government, the obligations citizens owe one another, and the virtues underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Otherwise, I warned, we would end up rudderless in a sea of relativism, eager to hang on to the latest political fad and ride it into the abyss.

I believed it then. I believe we’re seeing it now.

This does not mean that an educated citizen must accept every proposition handed down by his predecessors without examination. Quite the contrary.

A genuinely educated citizen should understand the philosophical foundations of his society well enough to defend them, challenge their application, refine his own understanding, and tolerate those who disagree. The preservation of liberty requires no less.

A healthy republic can accommodate a great many dissenters, skeptics, iconoclasts, and argumentative old curmudgeons like yours truly. Indeed, some of them are indispensable. But it also requires a sufficient number of citizens who understand and embrace the principles that make such disagreement possible.

Enough citizens who possess that understanding enable a free society that can weather disagreement and benefit from it. On the other hand, if too few possess it, the constitutional machinery may remain intact long after the civic habits necessary to operate it have deteriorated.

James Madison understood that human beings are imperfect creatures. The Constitution reflects that understanding through divided powers, checks and balances, and restraints upon government authority. But no constitutional arrangement can indefinitely compensate for a citizenry that no longer understands why those restraints exist in the first place.

A republic requires more than parchment. It requires people capable of appreciating the ideas written upon it.

And this is where these two newspaper columns converge. Rubio describes the inheritance. Peterson asks whether our educational institutions are cultivating people capable of receiving it.

The first question concerns what has been handed down to us. The second concerns what we intend to hand down to those who follow. There is a third question, perhaps the most troubling of all.

What happens when a civilization continues to celebrate its accomplishments but gradually loses the intellectual habits and moral convictions that made those accomplishments possible?

We can preserve the buildings, the monuments, the documents, and the ceremonies. We can invoke the Founders on national holidays and quote the Declaration of Independence at political gatherings. But if we cease to understand the principles behind those words, we risk transforming a living inheritance into a collection of historical souvenirs.

Which means we must read. We must think. We must argue. We must teach our children not merely what to believe, but how to reason about what is true, what is just, and what is worth preserving. Equally important, we must be willing to examine our own convictions with the same intellectual honesty we demand of others.

As I folded the newspaper and enjoyed the remains of my coffee, it occurred to me that the morning’s little ritual had illustrated something of the very argument I had been considering.

A newspaper had presented me with ideas I hadn’t gone looking for. Two writers had raised questions that sent me back through decades of reading, experience, and a classroom discussion from 1993.That is what serious reading can do. It doesn’t merely supply information. It invites us into a conversation extending backward through a hundred generations and forward into a future we will not live to see.

The coffee, meanwhile, had grown cold. A small price to pay for an encounter with civilization.