Listening to an adult voice amid pandemic childishness

George F. Will

In his 72 years, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who was raised in segregated Richmond, Virginia, acknowledges that he has seen much change, often for the better, including advances in the 1960s. But in his elegant new memoir, “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s,” he explains why today’s distemper was incubated in that “burnt and ravaged forest of a decade.”

He arrived at Yale in September 1963, a year after John Kerry and a year before George W. Bush, “never dreaming that this great university would in many ways set the example of what edu- cation should not be.” Everything on campus became politicized, a precursor to the saturation of the larger culture. America was careening toward today’s contentiousness, as “those who rightly challenged the assumptions of others became slowly more indignant at any challenge to their own.”

As the teaching of American history became “one extended exercise in self-flagellation,” historical illiteracy grew, leading to today’s “War on Names.” Wilkinson’s book arrives as Yale, plumbing new depths of shallowness, renames Calhoun College. Yale has chosen virtue-signaling rather than teaching. It should have helped students think about the complex assessments of complicated historical figures, such as the South Carolinian who was a profound political theorist, an anti-imperialist, an accomplished statesman and a defender of slavery, a challenging compound of greatness and moral failure.

Disoriented by the Vietnam War, “Yale became a place of childlike clarity. I arrived at a university that asked questions; I left one that fastened a creed.” We still live with this 1960s legacy — controversy has acquired a “razor’s edge” and “venom and vehemence” have become fashionable.

Wilkinson’s memoir also arrives as the nation braces for another battle over a Supreme Court nominee, perhaps illustrating Wilkinson’s belief that another legacy of the 1960s is that “America’s legal culture is also terribly divided.”

For the Earl Warren Court, Wilkinson, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan, has warm words: It “opened the arteries of change, broadened the franchise, equalized access to schools and facilities, gave the common man the First Amendment, and donated to a society in turmoil its lasting gift of peaceful change.”

But in the coarsening, embittering 1960s, Wilkinson writes, “more Americans annihilated fellow citizens in their consciousness than were slain on the field of any battle.” In a harbinger of very recent events, “the shorthaired and hard-hatted sensed that class prejudice had simply been substituted for race hatred.”

He locates the genesis of today’s politics of reciprocal resentments in “the contempt with which the young elites of the Sixties dismissed the contributions of America’s working classes.” The “insistent presentism” that became a permanent mentality in the 1960s cripples our ability to contemplate where we came from or can go. “Sometimes individuals lose, and societies gain,” Wilkinson writes. “Maybe someone’s loss of privilege is another’s gain in dignity. Perhaps there is a selfishness in every song of lament.” At this moment of pandemic vulgarity and childishness, his elegiac memoir is a precious reminder of what an adult voice sounds like.