To Do What We Can

Since 1482, when Da Vinci is believed to have sent a letter of professional introduction to the Regent of Milan, and certainly as early as Benjamin Franklin’s letter to Richard Bache in 1774 on behalf of an “ingenious and worthy” Thomas Paine, the resume has served as an index of aptitude and achievement across the Western world.

Franklin’s own list of aptitudes and achievements, as a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a writer and a publisher, reads as a resume of the exploits of the revolutionary generation itself. Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote that “he was the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.”

Although the resume of the average pioneer would likely not have included a heading for education, the bones left scattered and buried along the Oregon Trail (many of adolescents no older than the boys and girls that currently crowd our SAT prep classrooms and coding competitions) whisper a litany of experiences contending with and mastering the harsh and pragmatic realities of existence in ways that should humble any would-be writer of a college admissions essay.

In more recent memory, many of our grandfathers and great grandfathers, stirred and prodded by events in Europe and the Pacific, risked their lives and the fruition of their talents to serve at the front lines of Normandy, Anzio, and Guadalcanal. For their part, our grandmothers and great grandmothers, if they weren’t serving overseas in the Nurse Corps, shouldered a country and economy divested of its male workforce, together with the unspeakable burden of fatality and loss.

Whatever their talents, their combined achievement, which never appeared in any job resume or college application: the creation of the most prosperous, self-reliant and abundantly creative nation on earth, towers like Antaeus over the resume and college app fodder of our age.  Even now, from a distance, we can’t help feeling a sense of awe.

In 2023, the resume in its manifold forms (i.e. the CV, the college admissions essay, the recommendation letter) has a kind of Saturnian weightlessness to it. The exaggerated, hollow, and, at times, fabricated achievements and credentials we now vaunt, contrast starkly with the untested human beings we have become.  The modern university has played a centrifugal role in this hollowing out of our once courageous and self-reliant national and civilizational ethos.

We no longer see patrons and matrons, but eternal heirs and heiresses; perpetual adolescents, dependents, and complainants, whose “heroes” and role-models hail not from the ranks of the revolutionary, pioneering, or “silent” generations that preceded them, but from a conceitedly assertive and unaccomplished caste of attention-seeking and self-promoting self-congratulants.

The cult of the resume; the veneration of false idols; of non-achievement, and of parasitical grievance, is undermining and distorting the very concepts of heroism, of adulthood, of citizenship, and of intelligence itself. As in the nightmare fictions and dramas of William Golding and Arthur Miller, we have ceded the nation, language, and the moral groundwork of our societies to children.

We are launching THE POLITEIA for this reason above all others- to do what we can, where we can, to drag ourselves and those around us upward toward maturation, autonomy, and gratitude for the inheritance of a civilization that, although imperfect, has worked (and worked well); to push back against the contemporary modus vivendi, whereby narcissistic mediocrity, verging on ineptitude, masquerades and promenades as excellence without objection.

Instead of geniuses and matriculants to MIT and Harvard, formerly centers for the pursuit of truth and wisdom, let us return to the foundation by creating competent, honest, modest, and, above all, GRATEFUL adults and citizens.  All else is madness. And Shakespeare reminds us what happens when madmen lead the blind.  Freedom will be hence, and banishment will be here, if it isn’t already…