Once upon a time, in a faraway place called Brooklyn, there lived a museum director named Anne Pasternak. Because she was a member of America’s self-appointed cultural elite, she liked to travel to trendy places like Aspen and make sweeping statements about art and society. If we don’t focus our efforts entirely on celebrating “great work by people of color,” went one of her most popular refrains, “we will create pain for others, undermine calls of equity and justice, and fail to be the cultural leaders we must become.”
To show that she wasn’t all talk, Pasternak soon raided her own museum’s collection, selling off everything that was boring and old and white. Monet’s Les Iles à Port-Villez? Miró’s Couple d’amoureux dans la nuit? Degas’s Femme nue assise, s’essuyant les cheveux? Down with these dusty emblems of the patriarchy! Instead, under her leadership, visitors to the Brooklyn Museum were treated to exhibitions such as It’s Pablo-matic, a queer feminist takedown of Picasso by cringe comedian Hannah Gadsby, or the apparently unironically named Giants, which featured art from the collection of rapper Swizz Beatz and singer Alicia Keys.
How does this fairy tale of progressive idealism end, you ask? Grimly, of course: Earlier this summer, hooligans visited Pasternak’s home late one night, spray-painted it red, and tied a sheet to the two lovely Doric columns in front that accused the fair lady of the house of being a “white supremacist Zionist.”
Why should we care about Pasternak’s woes? Not, I’m sorry to say, because she is worthy of our pity. If anything, we may be forgiven a soupçon of satisfaction in seeing her devoured by the same wolfish ideologues she spent so long insisting were sheepish victims deserving of our love, nourishment, and respect. Nor should we spend too much time thinking about Pasternak because she is significant as a thinker or a leader—her actions all suggest that she is, alas, hardly proficient in either craft. But Pasternak’s story gains our attention because it isn’t really about Pasternak at all. It’s about our institutions: Can they still be saved?
It’s an urgent question. According to Gallup, only 17 percent of Americans now have confidence in the criminal justice system. Eight percent find Congress trustworthy. Even religion, with a 32 percent confidence rating, is largely reviled. Trust in all institutions, alas, is at a historic low.
How did we get here? The question is worth pondering at length, but if you’re looking for a good place to start, consider folks like Pasternak, institutional custodians who, when spotting the barbarians at the gates, invite them in and serve them tea and scones as they burn the place to the ground. Everywhere you look in America these days, you spot another person in a position of authority devoured by the very folks he or she has championed. Before Pasternak’s home was attacked, pro-Palestinian protesters invaded a Berkeley dean’s dinner party, and activists vandalized a university president’s office. There have been plenty other assaults on institutional leaders who had cheered on, or at the very least tolerated, the self-styled revolutionaries on the left.
Violence abounds, and I dare say that we’re at the tipping point. We have a choice to make. We can watch weak institutional leaders allow marauders to destroy what little is left of the once-towering halls of art and science, the institutions committed to the free exchange of ideas and the best Western culture has to offer. Or we can fight.
A confession: For a long time, had you asked me—especially after a martini or three—if I believed our institutions could still be saved, my answer would’ve been a loud, bellowing, almost cheerful “no.” What might be done to rescue Harvard, say, from the maws of the mutually accrediting mediocrities who currently run it? Try to answer that question in earnest, and you’ll be forced to admit that the cure, if one exists, involves dire measures, perhaps some combination of depriving the university of all federal aid, abolishing tenure, terminating a large swath of the faculty, dismissing most of the current student body, revising the admissions criteria, and recruiting new and worthy professors, administrators, and students. Is this possible? Hardly. Therefore, I was prone to argue, let us fetch the matches and kerosene and rid ourselves of this moral malignancy!
I wasn’t entirely wrong. But I wasn’t quite right, either. As some of my wiser friends pointed out, institutions do matter. They are keepers of traditions, repositories of excellence, engines for the creation and dissemination of good ideas. Dismiss them if you must—and sometimes, sadly, the rot runs so deep that there’s no other choice—but save them if you can, because without working institutions, we haven’t much of a shot at sustaining civilized life.
How, then, might we proceed with the battle for the souls of our institutions?
Two wrong answers come to mind. (Both have been on display these last few months as well-meaning people have tried their darndest to save the institutions they truly love.) The first involves giving failing institutions more money. The second involves the exact opposite approach. Both have failed, miserably.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. The tech overlord poured a lot of cash and energy into trying to secure a seat on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, arguing that if he could control the board he could change the institution. He failed. Other ambitious and moneyed men went the opposite direction, withdrawing their support from their alma maters, hoping that absence of cash would make the institutional hearts grow fonder. That, too, proved to be a flawed plan. When one American plutocrat takes his coins away, there’ll always be a gentleman from China or Russia or Qatar at the ready with an even bigger purse.
But ideas, hallelujah, have different properties. They are in much shorter supply, and you can’t substitute one for the other. So let’s not play that same game as do the dullards who run and ruin our institutions. It will take a long time to come up with enough cash or political clout to fix what they’ve destroyed. But we can’t wait. If we want to win this battle, our best bet is to do something truly and beautifully radical: We must embody what we wish to preserve. We must, to put it bluntly, pick up all the institutional slack.
How, exactly? By doing very difficult—and very thrilling—things.
Consider the void left by our now Pravda-like publishing houses and cesspool media. Isn’t it past time for us to commit ourselves to sponsoring new translations of meaningful masterworks, or setting up literary salons that encourage folks to discuss Chesterton, not Bridgerton?
Or imagine standing up to our schools, these cauldrons of indoctrination, by teaching our children Greek and Latin and Hebrew, and showing our so-called educators that excellence, not equity, is the engine of civilizational survival. That’s already happening, thanks be to God.
Ask yourself this question: Is there something that your favorite university, or newspaper, or museum used to do but no longer does? Then go ahead and do it yourself. It won’t always be possible—most of us can’t just go out there and buy the masterworks Anne Pasternak foolishly tossed by the wayside. But our ventures will generate precisely the sort of wild energy it takes to revitalize a culture.
Our resources may be modest, but the wind is in our sails. It is our good fortune to have been blessed with an enemy interested only in destruction, not construction. The pagans rioting in the streets can loot a store, but they cannot build a business; they can topple a statue, but they cherish nothing that merits commemoration in bronze. They understand power, but they know nothing of truth, beauty, or the other virtues that call men and women to greatness.
The nitwits leading our institutions are making an arrogant mistake. They imagine they have endless social capital at their disposal, which they may redistribute at will. Harvard’s power elite believed that the university was so flush with reputation that it could install an activist empty suit like Claudine Gay as its president and suffer no consequences. Boy, were they wrong. No doubt there are now brilliant kids out there who are wondering if Harvard really is their “dream school.” They’re looking for what we have to offer: real thinking, real debate, real standards—and a whole lot of joy.
Am I guilty of wishful thinking? You bet. But this is America, and wishful thinking is our birthright. Let’s lay off of all that grim talk about how bad things have gotten. While it may be true, when everything is broken and establishment leaders are discredited, we’re given a ripe opportunity to take charge and build anew. We haven’t a moment to spare.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.
Image by Viktoria Altman licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
