The golden thread initiative is a project of cultural recovery perfectly fit for the season we’re in, publisher of The New Criterion and Encounter Books Roger Kimball said in his convocation speech April 10. 

“In many cultural precincts today, we find that faculty and students alike regard education chiefly as an exercise in disillusionment, and they look to the past only to corroborate their own sense of superiority and self-satisfaction,” Kimball said. “‘The Golden Thread’ is meant to be an antidote to that bundle of entrenched and debilitating pathologies.”

“The Golden Thread” is the title of a two-volume history of the Western tradition set to release Aug. 26. The initiative also includes the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization Wilfred M. McClay’s book, “Land of Hope.” This partnership is meant to inspire a revolution in the zeitgeist, according to Kimball. 

When introducing Kimball, College President Larry Arrn connected Kimball’s work as a cultural critic to his conservative identity. 

“You cannot have agriculture without conserving the fruits of the culture that has been built already,” Arnn said. 

The first volume, by James Hankins, traces history from the Greeks through the Renaissance. Allen Guelzo continues the story in the second volume from the Enlightenment to the day before yesterday, according to Kimball.

“‘The Golden Thread’ aims to awaken readers to their, which is to say our, vocation as custodians of this tradition, responsible for its preservation, its cultivation, and reform,” Kimball said. “We must be gardeners, Hankins said, not engineers, working with nature and nature’s God, not against.” 

The initiative also aims to help students and readers appreciate the achievement and the fragility of civilization, Kimball said. 

“‘The Golden Thread’ also makes a larger offer that Encounter is undertaking with Hillsdale to change the conversation about — well, I was going to say about education — but really it is about that firing thing that the rather dull word education is all about. Namely, opening the treasure chest of the past in order to confront and ultimately to emulate greatness.”

This is the countermovement, according to Kimball, against the modern educational trend of removing writers like Aristotle, Milton, Dante, and Shakespeare from the curriculum. Even worse, Kimball said, is the practice of using these authors primarily as examples of patriarchy, transphobia, racism, and imperialism.

“We are working to…help bring about a counter revolution that is also a return to fundamentals,” Kimball said. “We intend to embrace and rekindle a number of subjects, from science and mathematics to economics, history, and rhetoric.”

Kimball highlighted Cicero’s assertion that the work of education is similar to that of cultivating a field. Philosophy, Cicero said, is the cultivation of the mind or spirit, pulling out vices by the roots and making souls fit for the reception of seed. 

“But even the best care, Cicero warned, does not inevitably bring good results. The influence of education…cannot be the same for all,” Kimball said. “The results of cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care but also on the inherent nature of the thing being cultivated.” 

To explore the word thread, he recalled the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and more broadly pointed to the golden thread’s role in providing an account of mankind’s adventures in time. 

“In part, that means retracing the steps and the missteps that have brought us to our present journeys,” Kimball said. “We want to deliver readers from the provincialism, not only of place, but what the English writer David Cecil called a provinciality of time.” 

Provinciality of time, as defined by Cecil, is to feel ill at ease and out of place, except in one’s own period. To be cosmopolitan in time, to look at life through the eyes of great novelists, is to be freed from this limitation, Cecil writes. 

To close, Kimball examined the word opportunity and pointed to the cultural vibe shift that has brought newfound receptivity to “The Golden Thread”’s message of recovery. 

“That is the encouraging part,” Kimball said. “The admonitory part is that such magnificent seasons do not last forever. Such opportunities are as fleeting as they are rare. We must, as Shakespeare has Brutus say in the play ‘Julius Caesar,’ take the current when it serves or lose our veterans.”