The Old School

Part One: Definitions & characterizations

As a [geopolitical neo-]conservative, I learned there are certain things, like pizza, that have lasted for generations of good reasons. As a brainy person, I learned that many social conventions and fashions are boring and stupid. As a technologist, I learned that there is much that can be improved in the infrastructure of our civilization. As someone approaching wisdom, I recognized the conflict between these impulses, but I have tended to favor the settled peace of what I call The Old School.

In one way, it was easy and natural to have geeky, strict and naive parents grow me into such an Old School individual. My parents’ families come from two American cities with deep roots, New Haven and New Orleans. Even these city names are reminiscent of something with an even older heritage. Yet I find that as a black American there are very specific outlines of the Old School that I cannot leave in that category of IYKYK. More people should know. So what I want to illustrate are highlights on a portrait of the Old School of black American culture in a highly personal way and then generalize it to some kind of rational, beautiful social conservatism for all.

Origins
It starts with this old gentleman Raymond Curtis Bowen, born in 1912, orphaned as a teen, married during the Depression, father of three. Episcopalian. Mason. Shriner. Elk. That would be my grandfather who lived to be 91. He built ships in bottles. He worked at Yale. He was a member of the Connecticut State Guard, issued a badge and pistol. Scotch. Cigars. Classical. Jazz. Shakespeare. He was one of those men who had a globe in his office and a rack of pipes. He was jolly. He was disciplined. He idolized his wife. He was reverent. He was proud of his children. His voice was unforgettable.

The greatest compliment he had, which I occasionally received, was “You’re a gentleman and a scholar.” So I was raised to be that, to which athletics were added, by my father. The most popular thing I’ve ever posted on the internet was the following picture of my parents’ wedding in 1959. I only recently learned that it was held at the Phi Gamma House at Yale.

Of course he was not the only one with this set of manners and pride, but it would be clear that this combination of families would generate some fairly interesting scions.

Decorum
My mother was raised Catholic in New Orleans. She taught me that a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward commitment. Our commitment to the dignity of our family was to behave like ladies and gentlemen, which entailed a lot. We had guardrails on our behavior which was easy and blended with mutual love and admiration. As a child, it was second nature. As a youth, the difference between our family and others in the neighborhood became apparent. Nobody in my house cursed at home. I have never heard either of my parents utter the word ‘nigger’ in all of my years. I learned it in the streets.

Speaking of which, I have recently had a very rude question in the back of my head since the era of St. George Floyd. “Have your parents or relatives ever called you a nigger?” It is both presumptuous and deep, because the psychological implications are profound, from the point of view of a member of a decorous family. If you accept that from your own parents who know you, you may very well accept it from other Americans who do not. So who are you, really?

I cannot tell from the outside looking in if all of our decorum was, all things being equal, the right emphasis. I question it because it inevitably raises such rude questions. After all, why would any Peasant take on the airs of a Genius? I suppose it has to do with any deeply held convictions about a proper patriotism in a proper society. Given the Emancipation Proclamation, one would expect the Negro to say: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Is decorum the pathway to sacred honor? Is it the virtue one would associate a proper American, or is it part of the legacy of slavery - the Slave having ascended by declaration to the status of Peasant? I have to say yes, decorum is the rote learning of honor. It is the ritual, like exercise and training are to athleticism — the discipline that staves off the descent into sloth, of self-loathing and debasement.

I know some young dupes consider the decorum of certain Old School flavors to be nothing more than ‘acting white’. That of course is a false dichotomy because even such naifs seek dignity. Of course they have designed all kinds of new dignities for which they believe America is unprepared. Rebellion is part of the reason they invented them. You cannot really blame such people for not having generations of dignity in their family heritage, which is why I would tend to ask that rude question. After all, if you can see niggers in your own family, surely there are others out there to be identified and treated appropriately. Any rap channel will share that poetry shamelessly.

Decorum, for what it’s worth, comes in a variety of socially conservative flavors. My family comes from two poles, New England and New Orleans Creole, the latter of which never had any slaves as ancestors as they were registered officially in Louisiana as ‘Free People of Color’, a colorstruck designation to be sure.

I sometimes tell the story of why my mother never pledged a sorority. It was because her best friend had the complexion which was too dark for the legendary ‘paper bag test’. If you can’t have her, you can’t have me, she told them. Such a decision was honorable — despite its violation of a certain kind of dignity bestowed on college frosh from an indubitably Old School sorority. My mother, raised in the parish of St. Peter Claver, didn’t need that distinction.

Black Or White
I’m not exactly sure why my father cannot stand Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong. I’m relatively certain that it issues from that black aesthetic spawned during his Black Nationalist phase. After all he did have The Last Poets in his record collection. He once explained that they cater too much to whitefolks. On the other hand, he is a huge fan of The Four Freshmen, Frank Sinatra and Keith Jarrett to name a few in his top 10. But there is no question that he loves jazz as did his father before him. My grandfather Raymond and I are more classics lovers than my father, but I only have four volumes of the Harvard Classics whereas he had the entire Five Foot Shelf. Well, I do have the PDFs. That’s an Old School humblebrag. As is my FLAC record collection which includes all of the above jazz plus a lot of Chopin, Bach and Satie among hundreds of others. Preservation is a responsibility.

Pops, who in his own strange way always mentioned the race of his non-black friends in conversation, nonetheless pledged an integrated fraternity at UConn. He was 2nd Vice President of Beta Sigma Gamma. One can hardly imagine a more Old School portrait than this from his yearbook, unless you intentionally wanted to make a racial exclusionary point. So these gents resembled nothing to me so much as the engineers at Mission Control, my heroes growing up.

The point is that there is nothing racially essentialist in the Old School I’m talking about. It always did and always will regard that which is transcendentally universal and as constant as Planck’s or Avogadro’s numbers, and to a slightly lesser extent the saints and the Stations of the Cross. Admiration and respect is due to those who kept the flame alive during the dark interregnums, be they The Dark Ages, the Antebellum South or the Era of St. George Floyd. The Old School persists.

You Keep Forgetting
When I was a young man, I had to explain myself. I managed my temptations to transgression. I was in the habit of being good, and my friends and associates would tell me that life is too short not to taste the wild side. I told them that life was too long to live in regret and denial. They would tell me that ‘black don’t crack’, but I’ve seen too many beautiful girls lose their ability to smile at the age of 30. I’ve seen too many mean mugs with legit reasons to walk looking at their shoes when they’re not looking over their shoulders. Everybody wants to eat the new candy, but they keep forgetting the classics. Hell, some of them never knew where the love and joy came from.

If I was one of those thin-skinned new age sophists, I would spend an hour trying to explain the bizarre loops of ‘cultural appropriation’ of Michael McDonald, Leiber & Stroller. A generation propagandized to relegate Muscle Shoals to the memory hole will viralize itself remembering or pretending they never knew. The Old School is keen on devotion. It’s OK if you finally get there the long way, just don’t forget we told you back in the day.

The Old School stands for something, so we won’t fall for just anything. We are used to being chuckled at and dismissed by noobs, fools and clowns. We’re not here just to wiggle our behinds. The Old School respects the Blues and Gospel of course. I think we can all say that the aesthetic of Soul remains. Soul seems to have aged out a little bit, but in my house we have been playing this song since our babies were born.

I could go on detailing Old School vs New Jack because it too was a challenge for me in the early 1990s. But today I don’t want to go down a black cultural rabbit hole. For all the wonderful flavors of the black American banquet, the universal side is more compelling to me. Suffice it to say that many families have tested their Old School ways and manners far beyond America’s borders. We talk a little bit about that in Old Black Money.

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The Fundamental Currency
It is axiomatic to me that trust is the fundamental currency of civilization, without which you have little more than barbarian competition. I think it is possible to be defensive of civilization itself without being either jingoistic or cynical. These days in America we make far more horror films than comedies. This is a sign of decline in optimism towards cynicism. I can’t say that I watch enough to typify the contemporary genre, but my last favorites were the original 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Leading them all is the work of Michael Crichton whose work cannot be interpreted as anything other than a defense of our proper civilization in light of its hubris.

Wherever you come from in America, for however long you’ve been here, our society is open and respective of cultural traditions.

As somebody recently said, we also keep forgetting that Communism is an invention of Western Civilization just over 100 years old. To my way of thinking, the entire civilized world is Western. That is if you can consider whatever is not in the UN to be the exception. Given there are those who idolize the Indigine as the champions of the exceptions, I have no problem plumbing the historical depths of the lessons of many cultures and societies. It’s only civilized to do so. So the lack of trust of individuals in their societies is something to be tolerated with some measure of disdain and neglect. The Old School says that civilization is to be sustained. And again from my perspective we can muddle through dark periods by holding more faith in past wisdom than future economies.

Which brings us to questions of what is sustainable, as we go through the inevitable changes that polities, economies, societies and armies bring. Let’s through in nature & acts of god too. When any of these things crush us, they are the only things that lower the Gini Coefficent. They bring us all towards zero. So ultimately that matter of trust which will either strengthen in its presence or weaken in its absence comes to those forces. Do we trust:

• Our politics

• Our economies

• Our societies

• Our armies

To trust in God and Nature stands outside of the matter of civilization as neither are under our control. So long as our societies support science and religion, our limited understanding and control are accounted for. Naturally every society has different tolerances for both, respectively.

So the Old School says, with respect to all that is new and contemporary and under duress or flourishing in the moment, that there is dignity possible and a decorous discipline to attain and sustain that human dignity. We say this decorum is within the capacity of all, even prisoners and slaves. Yet it is more than simply an externally granted humanist ribbon. It is something grown, something fought for. It is something, that when inherited, must be tested and proven. It is a self-determination that can be refined or simplified. But for it to be Old School it has to survive for generations.

Sustainability
Now I’m going to make my most controversial statements, but these are what should seem to be commonsense. The family is the basic unit of generational stability required of the Old School.

The Old School therefore rejects transhumanism. The Old School says that dignity is available today through commonsense. Why? Because the attainment of character requires self-discipline. You might learn decorum by rote as many ex-Catholics and ex-Marines can surely attest, but in order to sustain that, you have to internalize a discipline and apply it to life. You must have life. You must have a self. You cannot just hack some LLM system prompt and then call that decorum. Nor can you program a system and call yourself an author of dignity. You have to possess something which in my current vocabulary seems ineffable, but I’m working on this ontology. I think I’m coming to understand more. Moreover, anthropologically, the core of cultural traditions sustain this discipline.

If you mess up your family, your very own genes are not sustainable. Fortunately we have billions of base pairs from which to generate a very good chance. That’s the easy part. The hard part is figuring out how to sustain the Old School itself. Ultimately that’s for institutions to do and institutions cannot be destructive of family commonsense.

Now this all seems fairly straightforward, but if you become infected by enough historical study as I have, you can no longer pretend that ‘Judeo-Christian’ is the whole answer to Western Civilization. Why? Because Japan. Because South Korea, and because America could fail in parts or wholly. There are numerous orthodoxies to respect, and it’s hard enough to figure one’s way through the one you inherit. OK enough for now.

The Punk Exception
You know that I’ve also had a difficult time finding the right way to describe that contingent of society that provides the creative edge, that conscious indecision that acknowledges fallibility and decides to create experiments in living. That too is Western. I call it bohemian. For a time I considered myself a ‘Bap-Boho’ because in many ways I’m on all sorts of cusps.

Even so, I’ve declared myself GenX and aspire to some future state of Buddhist Zen (whether or not it’s actually Zen Buddhism). I know enough sensible Punks who are actually building stuff as geeks, nerds and explorers. We need them more than we need Philistine zombies. You need to commit to something beautiful. You need to declare yourself aloud.

Often the best way to think about this tension between decorum and rebellion is to find inspiration in the unique ways that truth can be found from many different angles. All conservatisms need to be challenged because everything that might be prohibited is not necessarily deleterious. Or as my mother used to quote the Bible, there is a time and a place for everything. More often than not she would add that now is not the time and here is not the place, which communicates a tacit allowance for that kind of foolishness outside of her domain. “When you have your own house, you can eat cold cereal for dinner.” Certainly my father’s library had books and albums whose themes conflicted. The Old School moves slowly, it will accept what’s new for the right purposes. We can’t all reconcile every truth and build every institution to preserve that all at once. One may clap politely at Richard Pryor’s stand-up, but then even more when he comes back from Africa. What’s beautiful and poetic should stand as a sign of the times, for future generations of course.