It Begins With Courage

Editor's Note: Mark Helprin responds to Hadley Arkes' lead essay "Free Speech and the American University: A Proposal."

It is hard to stress enough the necessity of reinstating in American life both the ability to make distinctions and the courage to stand by the moral dictates that flow from them. Given the vast variety of immaterial pressures that can be brought to bear, good judgment requires courage. I learned this very early on, probably as a child, inchoately, from witnessing cruelty and injustice. It grew less and less inchoate as I aged. 

One formative experience was being present as thirty or so uniformed, jack-booted Black Panthers marched through Harvard Yard in 1969, invaded the classroom of a visiting Swiss professor of city planning, and then assaulted, imprisoned, and forced him to return to Switzerland because they said that his work on medieval urban streetscapes presented a template for the genocide of black people in America. These were blackshirts, their offense blatant and obvious. I waited for the Harvard administration to take action. They did nothing, as they appeared divided between those who envied the courage of radicals (this is all too familiar) and those without the courage to act upon their opposition (familiar as well).

Advocating both the ability to make distinctions and the necessity of courage in following through requires the ability to make distinctions and the courage in following through. This no doubt explains the dearth of practitioners. But the interrelated questions of identity politics, abortion, and the sanctity of the individual are sufficiently electric and dangerous that to be answered justly, they require just that.

Mark Helprin is the author of numerous novels, short stories, and national security essays. His most recent novel is The Oceans and the Stars.