Commentary
Growing old has its compensations. One is institutional memory. Having been educated in an era when “Western civilization” was not a trope to be spat out like a bad oyster, I was free to absorb the cultural glories of the past without shame.
At my Toronto public high school, Latin was obligatory. I loved it enough to enrol in a university honours course of study called “Latin, with an English option,” (which included a year’s study of Greek). We were a small cohort even then, but no opprobrium was attached to the study of classics.
The wheels of history turned. My liberal education focused on “the best that has been thought and said” in our cultural canon. Mere decades later, radical leftists were chanting “Hey, hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” And, step by step, it is going….