Why We Teach

Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the past—the great tradition—and to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

In 1967, an English professor gave a talk at the annual Honors Banquet at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and the University later sent it out to its alumni, saying that it was “eminently worthy of note.” The professor defended the idea of tradition against those who argue that the advances of the modern world have made the past useless. In “The Use of Education,” his critique was harsh: “When a person says, in all honesty and not just to be smart, but sincerely, that he cannot comprehend the past, he means that he cannot rightly comprehend anything at all. He has no capacity for wonder, he has no imagination, and therefore thought for him is nonsense.” A little later in the talk, sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he said that “our own children are being stolen—and not from us, but from their heritage—by low philosophies of leisure and luxury, a shameless materialism, cheap notions of success.”

What Dr. John Senior said was eminently worthy of note. A few years later, he left Wyoming and moved to the University of Kansas, where he became a seminal figure in the renowned Integrated Humanities Program. An undergraduate named Robert Carlson was his student as an undergraduate, and several decades later, Dr. Carlson wrote the founding document of WCC, the Philosophical Vision Statement. The PVS draws everywhere upon the spirit of education articulated by Senior in his teaching and his writing, not only in the 1967 lecture, but in his later books, notably The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture.

Why found a new college? That was Dr. Carlson’s question, and in the PVS, he explains the need for WCC. He lists major changes in contemporary life, including the loss of the authority of the traditional family and the evaporation of content from education on every level. The major problem, he explains, is the disintegration that results from the absence of a center. Reflecting on the various devastations that result from the loss of God, he comes to this conclusion:

Today, more and more students come to our colleges and universities enmeshed in nihilism acquired from their early education and from our culture at large. This nihilism is further nourished in our colleges and universities. It is rooted in the denigration of objective truth and feeds a denial of any objective meaning in life. It leads to a loss of hope that ends in the despairing cry of Macbeth: Life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Dr. Carlson wrote the PVS in 2005, but strong contemporary thinkers—Jordan Peterson comes to mind—continue to emphasize the corrosive nihilism of the culture. What exactly do they mean? What do they understand nihilism to be?

The history of the word goes back to the early 1800s, when it had a different meaning, but the pertinent sense was fully present 150 years ago, from about the time that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto: “total rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, etc., often from a sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning. Also more generally…negativity, destructiveness, hostility to accepted beliefs or established institutions.” The question to ask—and the answer entails a study of the past 500 years—is why the advancement of science over these centuries coincides with “the denigration of objective truth” in the moral and religious spheres.

No one has escaped the fundamental argument, which goes something like this: science is about facts, and “meanings” are about values. Through some evolutionary trait, once useful, people want their lives to “mean” something, so they collectively invent ways to value things so that “meanings” exist. Baseball might be an example. What does it take to understand the excellence of Shohei Ohtani’s 2021 season for the Los Angeles Angels? Sports Illustrated compared Ohtani to Babe Ruth and even implied that he might be a better player than the Sultan of Swat himself. To baseball fans, such comparisons are monumental. To those ignorant of baseball (which is obviously an invented game), the attention paid to Ohtani might draw a mild interest, but not awe, not the reverence he has earned, especially in Japan.

In fact, the argument continues, isn’t all “meaning” invented in the same way? Nothing “means” anything in itself, but only in terms of its place in a constructed system of value, and such systems include all religions, all laws, all philosophies. In the world per se, there is no objective meaning or good. We invent all systems of value. We are just kidding ourselves that being “good” makes any difference. Nihilism is simply the default position of the mind convinced that it has to invent its own meaning.

On the other hand, if a good and loving God gave his creatures an intelligible world, and if it takes every bit of human capacity to understand even the smallest bit of what exists, what we have been given, then baseball looks very different. It offers a brilliantly complex imitation of the order built into the world as we really experience it. The better the double play or walk-off home run, the better the analogy. Every challenging game, every good legal system, every morally responsible code reflects the given order and teaches us more about it. We have reason to exclaim over Shohei Ohtani’s incredible season.

As the PVS makes clear, Wyoming Catholic College exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the past—the great tradition—and to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract (as though He were a useful organizational idea like Orwell’s Big Brother), but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

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The featured image is “Der Dorfschulmeister seine Gebühren einsammelnd” (1854) by Carl Schröder, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.