What constitutes the role, as well as the mission and the responsibility, of the conservative scholar in the twenty-first century? This is the epochal question that the contributors to the symposium featured exclusively in this “Millennium Issue,” of Modern Age, seek to answer. It is a vexing question and demands probing thought.

Living as we do in a time of history when discriminating critical thinking, let alone standards of discrimination, is endangered by anarchic tendencies, it is of supreme importance that conservative scholars will persist in opposing these regnant tendencies as they prevail in the academy, and in American society and culture as a whole. It is also of importance that conservative scholars pursuing their calling in the twenty-first century will give their witness without surrendering to impatience or to anger as they see all around them the widespread consequences of intellectual and social disorder.

There can be no substitute for right reason and for steadfast faith in the struggles that lie ahead of us in the third millennium. We must keep a cool head and steer carefully, to recall Joseph Conrad. If we panic in confronting those whom Russell Kirk calls “enemies of the permanent things,” we may lose everything. The power of these enemies is manifestly enormous, but it is essentially material and dialectical power—the power of “armed doctrines.” Such power is ultimately artificial and empty, as the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet Russia must surely remind us. Dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, unyielding in their moral and spiritual principles, it is now clear, ultimately won out in their efforts. Their example should inspire conservative scholars to hold fast to their tenets as they contend with enemies whose machinations demand unflagging resistance.

It is equally imperative, as this symposium shows, that we know the ground on which our struggles occur, the face of the enemy we are fighting, his weaponry, his ideological fanaticism, his language, in short, his full power and dominion. This is certainly an awesome spectacle to behold, and for the weak of heart it can prove disheartening. Screams of terror in the crucible of fire will do nothing to alter substantially the situation that inevitably presents itself. Only a qualitative and purposeful awareness of cruel realities will toughen us for the continuing battle between those who revere the dignity of life and “the idea of the holy” and those enlisted in the long revolutionary campaign since 1789 to finalize “the abolition of the past” and “the abolition of man.” The stakes in such a struggle are so high that there can be no “failure of nerve,” no retreat, not even respite from the heat of combat.

Somehow we must discern in the challenges those very opportunities that will permit us to redeem the time. For the conservative scholar this means alertness, lucidity, loyalty, discipline. Tact and tactic cannot be compromised, if our acceptances, affirmations, and definitions are to be clear-sighted and emphatic. Without doubt, the radical changes and realignments, the restructuring and repositioning that have been rapidly taking place in American society and culture since the end of World War II have affected the traditional basis and orientation of one’s function as a conservative scholar. Defining this function in direct relation to the pressures and tensions, and to the realities and possibilities of time and place is an inescapable requirement. The forces, of progressivism, needless to say, will not weaken in their ideological zeal; indeed, they will be adopting new forms and tactics, even new faces, as they press on with their agenda in the new century. Their efforts will continue to influence our socio-economic and our socio-cultural experience, even to a heightened degree, given the extended and pervasive influence of the media elites, especially the electronic media, accelerating as they do immoral-amoral attitudes that determine the Zeitgeist.

We are going to have to deal more and more, then, with an absolute relativism in all aspects of life, still another formidable example of the power of deformed ideology and the clear and present dangers it presents. These dangers, in the form of a fifth column, present even greater threats to the inner life, which traditionally we have associated with religious and spiritual essences. Revolutionary and radical advances have been transforming the outer conditions of human existence, and they are now relentlessly targeting the order of the soul, with the express purpose of erasing it completely. The subtlety and the totality of this revolutionary thrust must never be underestimated. Its ferocity and ambitions have no limits, and whenever and wherever limits are defied the human situation is subject to new explosions. It is incumbent on the conservative scholar to detect the sundry techniques and ambitions of the forces of innovation, which are in reality forces of corruption.

This symposium reminds us that the conservative scholar has a stewardship to fulfill—to bear witness to the truth and holiness of things, to the Tradition, to the Permanent Things, to axiomatic principles, written and unwritten; and to defend these against a secularism that incessantly profanes whatever it touches. He will need to guard against not only the seductions of “the empire of might” and the extremisms and malformations spawned by mad ideologies, but also the heresies and betrayals that can besmirch the conservative mind and mission. That is to say, the conservative scholar must never forget that principles precede programs of action; that, without a metaphysical bedrock of principles, actions in the public square lack moral substance, are in effect mere appendages of secular expansionism. For the conservative scholar in the twenty-first century, then, the ethical challenge he must face has both inner and outer “tensions of existence” that are not easily relieved or resolved.