“I really believed that around the whole house, and the ground around it, the air itself was different. It was not the air of heaven. It rose from the dead, decaying trees, from the gray walls, and the quiet lake. It was a sickly, unhealthy air that I could see, slow-moving, heavy, and gray.”
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
I have never been much given to the reading of fiction – I find the lives of real people far more interesting, more entertaining, and less predictable – but I have long found Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” uniquely evocative in its portrayal of an institution in decline. I can summarize this famous story in one word: decay. The narrator witnesses this in nearly every sense imaginable; the literal House of Usher he finds in a state of dreary disrepair, and its two occupants gradually fall victim to their physical and mental frailty. United in fate, the House of Usher, literally and figuratively, no longer stands by story’s end. The once great dynasty winds up a hollowed out shell of its former grandeur, evermore to exist only in the memories of those who encountered it.
I wish this story did not seem as poignant in our current moment as it now does, but alas, such is the case. I cannot think about this nation’s once great institutions, its Harvards, its Yales, its Congresses and its Courts, and not see in them something of the blight that afflicted the House of Usher. Once bodies that commanded nearly universal respect, today they stand, barely, as withered husks of their former selves. For reasons largely of their own making, they now lack the desperately-needed credibility they once had. When we look for governors, we find self-absorbed gadflies more worried about the next cable news hit and garnering re-Tweets than in accomplishing anything. When we look for news, we find organs that appear more interested in reporting on the magnitude of their own virtue and importance rather than anything of substance. When we look for higher learning, we find over-credentialed partisans spoon-feeding us thinly-disguised ideological nostrums in the guise of sound pedagogy. When we look for God, we find well-meaning – and even better dressed – clerics who tell us that He probably isn’t real, and that if He is, he doesn’t care enough about us to correct us. Our institutions present us with a magnificent facade, but beneath the facade lies little more than a deeply-set cultural dry-rot putting the whole edifice at risk.
If we are Roderick Usher, it is because we no longer believe in ourselves, or in our purpose. An even cursory familiarity with the headlines shows firsthand a country that no longer believes in its own national identity. Worse, many seek actively to destroy it, and precious few want to stand up to defend it. We are, in a perverse mix of metaphors, a House of Usher divided against itself, and no house with either trait can long stand without serious renovation. Everything that has kept the house standing, from our Constitutional order, to liberal norms, to mediating institutions, to religion, slowly erodes out from under us. If we peel up the floorboards underneath us to attempt a repair, we find emanating an odor so rank, we replace the board and hope we can continue not to notice. This, we tell ourselves, will be a problem for the kids to deal with when we’re gone.
Everyone’s present, however, is someone else’s future, and yet someone further’s past. The thing about houses in both the literal and the metaphorical sense is that they do not just fall apart on their own. In a certain sense they do – entropy is a harsh mistress – but few things pose dangers of the same magnitude as negligence and wilful malice. We have an ossified, musty, intellectual class that dislikes many of the nation’s distinctives, and they have institutions from the academy, to the news media, and even to children’s literature that propagate these views. Their views become those of individuals shaped by such institutions, and when public policy is practically designed to empty out the family and the community as units of organization, the relative influence of such institutions grows still. If you teach people to hate themselves, they will, and both you and they will reap the rewards. Worse, there has been little in the way of strong push-back against these trends. It is bad enough to allow mold to fester in the walls. It is far worse to do nothing about it while someone else takes a sledgehammer to your house’s foundations. If you tell people their heritage, history, and identity have nothing worth preserving, they will treat those things as though they have nothing worth preserving. When you witness the results, you have no right to express surprise.
When considering Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the careful reader should keep a few things in mind. One of these is that the House refers not just to the edifice itself, but to its inhabitants. As our narrator flees the scene, the last scions of the Usher line are consumed by the ruins of the house as it collapses around them. We preserve things not just for the sake of the things themselves, but for the sake of those who live in and around them. When the house collapses, it will crush all of those unfortunate enough to find themselves inside when it happens. We do not have the luxury of Poe’s narrator. We do not get to leave. Either we stand, or we fall, and right now, we choose to fall. It need not be so, and what we need right now are people strong enough to start building the house back up.