It feels strange to write publicly in defense of not being public. I’m convinced that life’s most important activities almost always take place in spheres that are more or less private, where cameras are absent and nobody is reporting. Until quite recently, churches, classrooms, and family homes were just such sanctuaries from the world. We didn’t worry about image or appearance but focused on worship, learning, conversation, friendship, and love.

　　I’ve argued elsewhere that “beautiful losers” are people who don’t care about recognition or “victory” in the culture wars. Instead, they’re active, with others, in intrinsically worthwhile pursuits, rejuvenating culture by actually doing things, not just talking about them. They’re certainly not yelling on social media about the way the pursuits have been corrupted, or loudly informing the world that they are the only ones who have things right.

　　Still, this vision of life has a downside. In attempting to live well and do good where we are, we may begin to feel some self-doubt. Are our private activities really so meaningful? If nobody is talking about us, do we matter? More importantly, do other people share our views about the most important things? If they do, we would be unlikely to know it because they’re all so busy doing their own work and averse to self-advertisement. Esse quam videri: they’re doing the being, not the seeming.

　　Perhaps at times, though, a little publicity can be beneficial. Sometimes shining a light on good things is precisely what’s needed to remind us, or show us for the first time, that others share our views about meaningful activity. Surprisingly, even negative publicity can have good effects. When the activist Chris Rufo took issue with some comments I made in these pages last spring, a number of people contacted me to offer consolation, fearing that his attacks on me (and others like me) had been hurtful.

　　Actually, so far from being hurtful, the dust-up with Rufo has had multiple, unexpected good effects. Most importantly, it has connected me with even more people who share my views, who see what I’m trying to argue, and who are themselves resisting the coarsening of public culture by building alternatives to it. I was introduced to many people I hadn’t known before, co-laborers who are working to rejuvenate culture by opting out of the shouting and anger. These educators, parents, and writers are cultivating the receptive, appreciative, temperate, and supposedly “boring” virtues that liberal education affords.

　　One of the most remarkable of these efforts is taking place in the cities of Austin and San Antonio. I live in Waco, just two hours north of Austin on I-35, but until a few weeks ago I had absolutely no idea what was happening at a thriving group of classical charter schools called the Valor Schools. The world of classical schools is large, diverse, and growing, and there’s much to praise in the movement as a whole. But even among classical schools, Valor is at once stunningly forward-thinking and deeply conservative in its approach to educating K-12 children.

　　At the beginning of the summer, Valor’s president, David Williams, asked me to be the keynote speaker for the 2026 convocation in late July. I had no idea what I was in for. I was grateful to be invited, but I really didn’t know much, or anything, about the schools. It turns out that there are five campuses, presently enrolling five thousand students, with a waitlist of thousands more. Valor employs more than five hundred faculty and staff.

　　Williams had asked me to talk about the place of liberal education in our uncivil age. I wrote my talk a few weeks before the event, taking up an idea that I’ve already considered here, in Law Liberty: the warrior disposition versus a disposition of receptivity, appreciation, and conservation that is essential for liberal learning and, for that matter, for a fulfilling life. I supposed I’d be telling them something new and different in using Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, and Gabriel Marcel to illustrate this disposition.

　　Then, just to get the flavor of the school, I began to listen to talks given by its leaders. I realized that I had been wrong—very wrong—in imagining that “my” vision would be at all new to them. Instead of introducing the Valor community to some unknown set of concepts, I felt as if I were returning to a family, or to old friends, who had been steeped in the very same books and ideas that had formed me, too.

　　In a talk from earlier this year, David Williams—Dave, as he is known to faculty and staff alike—observed that the Logos, with all its Greek and Christian resonances, has been corrupted in modernity. Drawing on Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt, he described the ideological disasters of the twentieth century as “revolutions against the Logos.” Twenty-first-century public culture is likewise full of distortions on both left and right, questionable claims and outright lies that are foisted upon the public by agenda-driven influencers and pundits. As George Orwell and Josef Pieper famously observed, the abuse of language is widespread, and in our age, longstanding.

　　We need confidence and humility in diagnosing the disorders of the age, plus a rightly ordered will to resist them with energy.

　　Pieper, Dave noted, saw the distortions of language for the vices that they are: “back-biting, tale-bearing, derision”—all things that we moderns often don’t even consider vicious (though Aquinas thought they were mortal sins). These distortions advance pet projects and political causes, and now form part of ordinary public discourse, neither unusual nor unexpected. But they encourage dishonesty, rudeness, and often, anger and hatred. People enthusiastically destroy the reputations of others, deplatform them, and deprive their “enemies” of jobs and status. Truth is subservient to political success. Equanimity and moderation are nowhere to be found.

　　Because media outlets like YouTube and X are omnipresent and powerful, Dave observed, we’re seeing an abdication of the educator’s authority to people who don’t possess the intellectual virtues of deliberation and judgment. Many influencers and podcasters are manifestly not wise, though they may well be crafty and financially savvy. Their aims are monetizing influence, gaining followers, and refashioning culture. They care little—or not at all—about making true and responsible statements about reality, yet they have an outsize influence on our children. This corruption of speech reflects a corruption of intellect, which can damage or even destroy individuals and communities.

　　So far, so depressing, a reader might think.

　　Dave then offered two possible responses to this crisis: first, despair, which he candidly admitted isn’t irrational. What can a single person do, he wondered aloud, to stand against an entire culture, to resist the self-appointed thought-leaders who have millions of followers? Teachers have only twenty-five students in their classrooms, and only a few hours a day to influence them. Or, he proposed after a pause, and with a slight smile, perhaps there’s heroism.

　　What would such heroism look like? It emphatically isn’t a pitched battle on social media, with scorn, vitriol, and loud declarations against enemies. It must be a wholly different kind of enterprise, a fight that is not really a fight at all. The heroism and valor required to resist disorder are inspired by the likes of John Paul II, Eric Voegelin, and Aquinas (and Maritain, Gilson, Giussani, Marcel, Lewis, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, Plato, and on and on). It is therefore an almost contemplative heroism: teachers show students the joys of the intellectual life and demonstrate devotion to truth in their own lives.

　　As an exhortation to his audience of staff and faculty, Dave quoted a famous line from Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: “The spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life,” Voegelin wrote. “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.”

　　And here is the charge of the Valor Schools, contra mundum: refuse to subordinate the Logos to power and ideology. Have faith in the tradition of reason as it has been passed down over generations. Seek true, not comprehensive knowledge; pursue an intellectual life that looks beyond one’s own cherished opinions toward the whole of reality. Follow Aquinas, who always considers the best counter-arguments available; emulate John Stuart Mill, who advocates knowing an opponent’s side of a case as well as or better than one’s own.

　　We can’t be lazy or apathetic in these endeavors, but neither should we be overly proud of ourselves for doing something that is, frankly, so culturally important. At the heart of Valor’s philosophy of education is the importance of remaining receptive to the world around us, appreciative of unearned, inherited goods, and humble because we sense our own limitedness. We need confidence and humility in diagnosing the disorders of the age, plus a rightly ordered will to resist them with energy.

　　Although Valor may be restraining itself from power-and-ideology games, it isnt building a bunker. It carries its mission outwards into the community through the Valor Institute. The Valor Institute “for Studies in Person and Community” exists alongside the schools, offering a full slate of lectures and retreats throughout the year for faculty and staff and for invited guests. Recent speakers have included contemporary literary and academic luminaries like Bill McClay and Dana Gioia, and Fr. Thomas Joseph White will speak there later this year.

　　The Institute offers Liberty-Fund style retreats in which participants read and discuss a book or set of readings in a small seminar, cultivating friendships as they do so. Peter Crawford, formerly the academic dean for the Institute of Catholic Liberal Education and founding headmaster of the St. Jerome Institute in Washington, DC, has recently joined Valor as its chief academic officer and provides valuable leadership both at the school and the Institute. In short, this parallel institution exists to make sure that ideas remain at the very heart of the enterprise. Though they don’t do it very much themselves, these good things are absolutely worth publicizing.

　　I left Valor after two whirlwind days of intense discussions with deeply learned and wholly unpretentious faculty and staff. I discovered during the course of my visit that I was invited precisely because of the controversy stirred up by my Law Liberty podcast with James Patterson this past spring. I had come to their attention as a result of the social media controversy that followed that podcast, and because of the publicity that was generated by it—the very phenomenon that both Valor and I find so damaging in culture. Yet Providence works in mysterious ways, and perhaps I should thank my new friend, Chris Rufo, after all.

　　For what I saw at Valor was a confirmation of what I hoped was already true: that there is a large, mostly quiet group of people who are not culture warriors in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, they are fighting a different kind of battle—a battle without anger, without vitriol, and without hate and pride. They are engaging in that most important cultural work of educating our children—and themselves—in the fundamental civilizational virtues of receptiveness, wonder, appreciation, and yes, even love.