The American university was built to test ideas rather than protect them. Prof. Robert George has devoted much of his career to restoring that purpose. The Princeton legal philosopher believes that education begins with intellectual humility, not ideological certainty. “We approach our conversations in a spirit of truth seeking, understanding that we’re fallible,” he said. That conviction has allowed him to maintain one of academia’s most unusual friendships, a partnership with Cornel West that has endured for more than two decades despite profound political disagreement.
George described their celebrated course, Adventures of Ideas, in which each professor selected six books that had shaped his own intellectual life. Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Mill, Newman, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., and others became common ground rather than political ammunition. George, a traditional Reagan conservative, and West, honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, challenged one another before students while remaining genuine friends. The classroom succeeded because neither man entered believing he possessed the final word. “If we’re wrong, we want to know why we’re wrong and how we’re wrong so that we can straighten ourselves out,” George explained.
Our conversation shifted from universities to the country’s widening political divide. Americans increasingly consume different facts, different histories, and different moral vocabularies. Questions surrounding race, crime, jury selection, and public confidence in institutions quickly become arguments over identity rather than evidence. George refused to surrender empirical reality to political fashion. “The facts just are the facts,” he said. Statistics neither become racist nor cease being true because they make people uncomfortable. Honest reform begins with an honest accounting of reality.
That principle also governed his understanding of racism. George rejected the fashionable habit of reducing every disparity to prejudice, while equally rejecting the claim that racism no longer exists. “Racism warps the personality of the person who embraces it,” he observed. America has endured genuine racial injustice, yet today’s problems cannot be solved by abandoning evidence for ideology. Daniel Patrick Moynihan understood that difficult truths had to be confronted before they could be corrected. George believes that the lesson remains relevant today.
The interview eventually reached what may be George’s central concern. He argued that the greatest modern danger is identitarianism, the tendency to define people primarily through race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or other group affiliations. “Identitarianism of any kind is very dangerous to a pluralistic republic like ours,” he warned. The answer is not a competing tribalism. “The solution to left wing identitarianism is not right wing identitarianism. It’s getting rid of identitarianism.” America, he argued, survives only when citizens place their constitutional identity above every narrower allegiance.
George illustrated that ideal through George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington rejected the language of mere toleration and instead affirmed equal citizenship. “We no longer speak of toleration. We speak of full equal citizenship,” George said, paraphrasing Washington’s message. The Jewish community was not an outsider living on sufferance. It belonged fully within the republic, bound by the same rights and responsibilities as every other American. George regards that principle as one of the nation’s highest achievements. “We’ve never had a moment to be ashamed of ourselves when we’ve lived up to those ideals.”
His prescription for the present was practical rather than rhetorical. Universities should expose students to competing viewpoints instead of insulating them from disagreement. Parents should teach civics. Citizens should organize locally instead of merely complaining nationally. George dismissed nostalgia for congressional investigations or ideological purges. Renewal comes from persuasion, education, and personal responsibility. “The question is not whether we have the tools. The question is whether we have the will.” Before we concluded, he offered one final admonition to those who share his concerns.
“Too many people on the conservative side sit and curse the darkness. Nobody lights a candle.”
The republic, he argued, will endure only if enough citizens decide to become that light.
Discover more from Randy Bock MD PC
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
