For God, For Country, And For Yale - The Welcome Return Of Aristocratic Civility

Harrison Cabot Lodge was the latest in the storied line of Boston Cabots and Lodges, product of an arranged but felicitous marriage between the two families which, as all of Beacon Hill knew, couldn't stand each other.  But Beatrice Cabot and Henry David Lodge were meant for each other and defied the long Montague and Capulet hostilities of America's first families, and married.  Their grandson, Harrison, was the proud bearer of both family names, and felt it was his responsibility to honor, protect, and preserve that particular, unique, historical legacy.  

 

Harrison was educated at St. Paul's and Yale - Harvard being the more obvious choice, but his father eschewed the soggy academic feel of the place and preferred the more overtly patriotic, conservative, aristocratic tenor of Yale. He, the father, Elihu Lodge, had been captain of the baseball team, a member of Skull and Bones, and academically at the top of his class. 

Yale in Elihu's day had changed little since its founding over two hundred years before.  It was still the privileged enclave of the New England wealthy and well-to-do, all with homes in Boston, Nantucket, and St. Tropez.  It was an era of sophistication, excellence, and noblesse oblige.  The Lodges and other important New England families gave generously to Yale and sponsored many praiseworthy social projects.  

The Elihu Lodge wing of Grace New Haven Hospital, later Yale New Haven Hospital, was a welcome addition, and the renovation of the New York Public Library, done under the direction of Ashley Hopgood Taylor, a student of Louis Sullivan and a master of the grand style of post-Belle Epoque American architecture, applauded.

 

Yale had begun to change during Harrison's years there.  Although the student body was still primarily from New England and private school educated, chinks in the armor began to show; and upon the ascension of Inslee Clark, new Dean of Students, the university became open-sourced.  The hundreds of Brooklyn Jews, champing at the bit with high-flying test scores and graduation from premier gifted-and-talented high schools but denied entry because of their religion and ethnicity, were admitted. 

Once the doors of admission were opened wide, the descent into the populism of race, gender, and ethnicity was assured.  The progression was slow and moderated by a still conservative board of directors and wealthy conservative alumni donors, but it was inevitable.  By the time Harrison's sons were ready for Yale, the place had become a political jamboree.  Gone was the revered classical education and the likes of Paul Weiss, Harold Bloom, Maynard Mack, and Vincent Scully and in were courses featuring slave journals, queer studies, transcultural communication, and revisionist history. 

It was unfair to blame Yale, of course, for the peculiar progressivism featured at the school was part of the new American social ethos.  Under the mantle of historical revisionism, Africa was raised to a place of cultural superiority, the black man of the forest became the new, sentient, new age human model, and Western civilization was derogated and dismissed for its racist, oppressive, manipulative, and exploitative colonialism.  

Esther Pilchman, head of Yale's Department of Cross-Culturality, declared 20-- Year Zero.  Modelling her revolutionary agenda to wipe the slate clean, to expunge every trace of the old Yale aristocratic mien after Cambodia's Pol Pot who exiled millions of his subjects to a life of Paleolithic labor, she said,  'There is no time to waste. The scourge of radical Right recidivism is here'. 

And with that the university became an inchoate, wild, Third World, rampaging mob scene - Palestinian statehood. death to Israel, down with white supremacy, destruction of the pillars of capitalism. 

The radical progressivism of Washington aided and abetted the dismantling of civility.  Identity politics was not simply a descriptive term for valuing race, gender, and ethnicity, but a banner of militancy. The country predictably divided on these arbitrary lines.  La lucha was too important to be confined by civility, manners, or good taste.

The Sixties, an era of confrontation and violent political activism, was child's play compared to the total lack of personal integrity, respect, consideration, and empathy of today.  There is a primitivism in the protests, a wild, unhinged, feral hatred that the relatively principled Sixties never saw. 

Every other weekend Harrison Lodge went back to Boston and spent the weekend with his family - his aged father, spinster Aunt Tally, poetess, dowager, philanthropist, and family historian; the Cousins Davenport who on each and every occasion reminded everyone that Yale and New Haven itself were founded by their ancestor John Davenport in 1638; and Humbert, a direct descendant of the Third Earl of Northumberland who had married into colonial Massachusetts society and was responsible for the knighthood of Percival Lodge for his service to international settlement. 

Boston was a shelter from the storm, and when Harrison was there, Yale, radical reformism, and the tide of sexual distortion, racial impossibilities, and economic disaster disappeared amidst the Revere silver, Tiffany lamps, Townsend secretaries and highboys, Persian carpets, roast beef, and claret.  

The Lodges were not whiners - history is of its own making, albeit at the hands of financial geniuses and captains of industry like themselves, and despite dire warnings does indeed repeat itself. The propriety, good taste, civilized manners, and noblesse oblige of their generations would certainly return.  Perhaps not in Chippendale, Turner, Copley, and West but in some reconfiguration.  The recent descent into mad, undefined populism has a bottom just like every other socio-cultural movement.  Bell curves are curves because of their waves and periodicity. 

The new radical conservatism of the current era has been a good beginning.  In fact its very lower middle class appeal and membership, its simple demands for a patriotic renewal and a return to the originalist values of Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin were ripe for the old traditional, aristocratic leadership of the Cabots, Lodges, and Davenports. 

Civility, honor, respect, and responsibility are not temporal values.  They have been central to every civilization since the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are innate, permanent, and viable.  They are not ancillary, votive candles, but central to the survival and preeminence of human society.  

American society, now in the social dregs, in an inchoate, ungovernable, primitivism, cannot remain as such.  It will recalibrate.  The neo-tribalism of the African diaspora will necessarily be subdued and subsumed within the larger, more temperate and logical majority.  The febrility and fantastical idealism of progressivism will soon run its course. 

America will once again be ordered the way all great societies always are - a top and a bottom; an educated, sophisticated elite, a sedimentary bottom, and an unwashed middle.  No society has ever been uniform or equal and never will be.  The unschooled, deficient, and pedestrian will always look for enlightened leadership and moral guidance. 

Democracy? That has shown to be a very weak and intellectually corrupt political system.  China which has never lost its Confucianist ethos, sense of respect and discipline, order and responsibility is a good example - a model for the future of the West.  Europe is in chaos, and only a few countries like Poland and Hungary have stood by their allegiance to European, Christian values - assured through strong, disciplined leadership. 

 

'So, there's hope?, asked Aunt Tally at dinner. 

'Yes, my dear, but as my great uncle Carlton said when he was Governor of Mysore during the British Raj, "takes time, my dear, takes time". 

Harrison Lodge no longer contributed to the Yale Alumni fund or attended reunions.  Let the St. Vitus' dance finish playing. Perhaps not in my time, he reflected, but it will.