Academia's Holy Warriors

It was a Saturday night in May 2018 in Fox Hill, N.Y., and the Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen was talking about his garden. The occasion was a conference called “Beyond Liberalism,” organized around Deneen’s unlikely bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018). The setting was the mess hall of a “Bruderhof” intentional community, patterned on those established by Christian pacifists in the wake of World War I. Partly, Deneen talked about his garden because he had been on the road promoting his book and was looking forward to spending more time at home. But the garden was significant for other reasons. Every summer in his compost, Deneen said, he made something new out of something old. This was the essence of his ideal of “culture.” Culture was not, as many in liberal America assumed, about liberating ourselves from nature and convention. It consisted, rather, in “responsible stewardship.” Culture was “thick, inherited, and connected to a place,” Deneen said. “It renews itself like soil.”