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We’re not talking about food and games, although both were in evidence at FEE during the NCFCA qualifying tournament, but about ideas and words. NCFCA, that would be the National Christian Forensic and Communicator’s Association; not a legitimate word on the board game played by competitors’ younger siblings, while awaiting assignments to time debates and speeches, but nonetheless, a good arrangement of letters. Over a hundred and fifty home-schooled high school students from the Northeast enjoyed FEE’s hospitality to learn, discuss, debate and perform. Over a hundred local community judges and an equal amount of parent judges were entertained and educated in the process. Dramatic and humorous literature were interpreted in a variety of formats while team policy debaters wrestled with US policy toward India, and Lincoln-Douglas debaters advanced arguments for preferring pragmatism over idealism when the two values conflict. (Or was it the other way around?) Expository speakers quoted Bastiat (from memory after 30 minutes of prep time) on questions related to banning individual development in flood prone areas, funding NPR, and government versus private development of alternative energy.
The next generation of policy leaders are being schooled in both the craft of freedom and art of persuasion. Supplementing the speeches were seminars by FEE’s own Greg Rempke, who’s been crisscrossing the states enlightening students at similar events, and CATO’s Doug Bandow. Greg spoke on the non-sustainability of socialism, and Doug on the private engines of global grow. Executive director Lee provided exemplary servant leadership in coordinating the FEE staff in tending to needs of the communicational combatants. It’s amazing how one’s spirits can be revived by a guy walking around with a bowl of candy.
Western civilization is built and maintained through the process of reasoned debate, an endangered speech form. According to José Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) “Euro–pean civilization, the product of a creative elite, was degenerating into Barbarism because of the growing power of the masses, for the masses lacked the mental discipline and the commitment to reason needed to preserve Europe’s intellectual and cultural traditions. Ortega did not equate the masses with the working class and the elite with the nobility; an attitude of mind, not a class affili–ation, distinguished the “mass-man” from the elite.
The mass-man, said Ortega, has a common–place mind and does not set high standards for himself. He is inert until driven by an exter–nal compulsion. He does not enter into rational dialogue with others, defend his opinions logi–cally, or accept objective standards. Faced with a problem, he “is satisfied with thinking the first thing he finds in his head” and “crushes…everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being elimi–nated.”Such intellectually vulgar people, de–clared Ortega, cannot understand or preserve the processes of civilization. The fascists exemplify this revolt of the masses, for “under fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who.., simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the ‘reason of unreason.”’ The danger lay in “the masses . . . having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so. Rejecting reason, the mass-man glorifies violence: the ultimate expression of barbarism.” If Euro–pean civilization is to be rescued from fascism and communism, said Ortega, the elite must sustain civilized values and provide leadership. (Perry, , Western Civilization 7th ed. p 821.)
Thanks FEE for providing leadership to help stem the tide of barbarism and cultivate the leaders of tomorrow.