On the Folly of Guarding a Fire

There is something deliciously simple about the article’s solution: if one fears a malady, cut off the patient. It shrewdly diagnoses the sickness not chiefly in Beijing, but in Cambridge — a domestic fever nourished by endowments, vanity and the comfortable commerce of ideas sold for coin. It is not the nationality of a scholar that alone makes a danger; it is the endowment of a university that behaves like a small metropolis, answerable to no town council, no parish, and often no conscience. The disease is not foreign feet crossing our thresholds; it is our own institutions walking about with the authority of priests and the discretion of thieves.

And what is the proposed cure for this sad state of affairs? It is here that the argument descends from a mere panic to a positive peril. To solve the problem of an unaccountable academic elite, the author wishes to empower an equally unaccountable government bureaucracy. He would have a clerk in a Washington office, a man we have never seen and will never elect, decide which young scholar from a foreign land is pure of heart and which is a secret agent. To escape the tyranny of the Dean, we are to rush to the tyranny of the Visa Officer. The very liberty the author pretends to defend is to be sacrificed to an apparatus of suspicion and centralized control, a vast machine of visas and clearances and state-approved laboratories. He would save the American mind by putting it in a government-issue cage.

The problem is that we have forgotten how to have a faith at all.

But the greatest and most profound error in this entire frantic proposal is its foundational assumption: the assumption of weakness. The author writes as a man defending a fortress, but a fortress that he secretly believes has already fallen. He is terrified of a young man with a book, afraid of a woman with a microscope. The fact that a vast and continuous stream of the world’s brightest and most ambitious souls flows to these shores—that they come here to learn, and that so many of them, enchanted by the place, remain here to build—is not a crisis. It is the most ringing and thunderous tribute to the vitality of American life that one could possibly imagine. It is a blessing to be embraced with the open-handed confidence of a great nation.

To give that up, to slam the door out of a fearful suspicion that our goods will be stolen, is not a mark of prudence, but of a deep and corroding despair. It is to believe that your culture is nothing more than a collection of trade secrets and patentable formulas, which can be pocketed and carried away like a stolen watch. It is to confess that you believe your entire worldview is so brittle and vulnerable that it cannot withstand exposure to a different one. A living and breathing culture, a faith that is truly believed, is not a fragile blueprint to be locked in a safe; it is a fire that warms all who draw near to it. It does not fear being stolen; it hopes to be caught. The proper response to a man who comes to learn your secrets is not to imprison him, but to convert him—not merely to your technology, but to your theology, to your entire, glorious, and chaotic way of life.

If we are so afraid of the students at our gates, it is not because of the strength of their convictions, but because of the weakness of our own. The problem is not that they are bringing a strange faith with them. The problem is that we have forgotten how to have a faith at all.