“Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.” —Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
The Cosmic Library
The Universal Menace
In 1983, Russell Kirk offered a powerful defense of universities in an essay for the The Modern Age, “The Tension of Order and Freedom in the University.” After affirming the necessary tension between freedom and order, Kirk guides his readers through various historical epochs, identifying the rise and fall of freedom with the birth and death of transcendent order.
If the great troubles of our time teach mankind anything, surely we ought now to recognize that true freedom cannot endure in a society that denies a transcendent order. A university that ridicules the claims of the transcendent must end without intellectual coherence—and without genuine intellectual freedom.
The university once had authority—it was authority—because it ultimately submitted to a higher spiritual jurisdiction. But times have changed, and for the worse. The madness, corruption, and godlessness of the modern university is well known, and we are now witnessing every discipline, even the hardest of sciences, fall into intellectual incoherence.
Kirk reminds us that chaos has always been the universal danger, with universities once serving as a bulwark against license, anarchy, passion and prejudice. Historically, these institutions disciplined and ordered the mind, which, in turn, helped to stave off the universal menace of chaos.
“Chaos is coming,” biologist Lyall Watson warns, “It is written in the laws of thermodynamics. Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter.”