Dean Koontz’s creatures arm readers with the moral imagination needed to resist utopia. In the face of left-wing cultural hegemony, we need creative minds playing with monsters and mayhem more than academics and their lectures, Daniel Crandall writes.

If the Right wants to influence the American culture toward greater liberty and personal responsibility, it would do well to produce more stories and less polemics. The latest offering from one right-of-center publisher is a well-reasoned treatise of intellectual rigor. It will not come close, however, to the influence carried by a work of popular fiction.

In fact, this academic text mostly avoids the arena controlled by the left-wing cultural hegemony.

Matthew Spalding, in We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future,

examines the progressive assault on the Founders’ principles that began more than a century ago and that continues—indeed, is accelerating—in our time. Modern political leaders and cultural elites have all too readily abandoned the principles to which America is dedicated; even more troubling is how readily we all let it happen.

In an excerpt available at National Review Online, Spalding argues for how Americans can rededicate themselves to the principles of liberty. Unfortunately, he is preaching to the choir. Those inclined to read this work are already dedicated to the principles of liberty. The task before us is inspiring people who have forgotten what it means to live by the principles of liberty. That is a role for the Cultural Influence Professions™ that shape our worldview and subsequently guide our political, economic, and religious behavior.

Public respect for religious liberty, free markets, and limited government do not arise from people studying academic treatises. These ideals arise from a culture conducive to their expression. It is useless to urge these principles to sprout from a cultural ground no longer fertile for them. Yet that is what the Right does, repeatedly, with books about government and politics.

It is high time we reflect on what John Adams thought was his progeny’s right.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Perhaps Adams was hinting at the idea that the nation he was creating could only endure so long as the arts and culture nourished the moral imagination. Matthew Spalding notes that those who fought and died in the American Revolution were not inspired by the “study of politics and war.” They were stirred by stories.

Levi Preston of Danvers, Mass., was in his early 20s in the spring of 1775 when he fought in the Battle of Concord at the opening of the American Revolution. Many years later, Captain Preston was asked why he went to fight that day.

Was it the intolerable oppressions of British colonial policy, or the Stamp Act? “I never saw any stamps,” Preston replied. What about the tax on tea? “I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”

It must have been all his reading of Harrington, Sidney, and Locke on the principles of liberty? “Never heard of ’em. We read only the Bible, the catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.” [emphasis added]

Neither the politics of the day nor polemics fed Preston’s moral imagination. It was music, agriculture, and books packed full of stories. There is precious little in common between Preston’s reading list above and the majority of ISI’s, Regnery’s or Encounter’s book catalog. Stories inspire us in the struggles we face, not academic lectures.

According to Peter Schramm, Abraham Lincoln’s reading “consisted almost entirely of the King James Bible, Blackstone’s lectures on English law, and Shakespeare”; works that were “most important to the development of his fine heart and mind.” There is little in law lectures that would feed the heart, but much in the Bible and Shakespeare that do so, proving that it takes twice as much work to nourish a heart as it does to develop a mind.

The heart and the moral imagination are intimately related and easily caught up in an exciting story such as the second book in Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series, City of Night. It is a thrilling tale that keeps one furiously flipping the pages, wondering what’s going to happen next. This mass-market paperback novel is much more than an incredibly entertaining read. It sparks the imagination with its exploration of the utopian temptation, the relationship between Creator and creation, and the evil that arises when people are seen as mere meat machines.

Dean Koontz, in his brief take on Mary Shelley’s classic story, describes what inspired his version:

The original novel is mostly mistaught in our universities these days, as professors twist Mary Shelley’s themes–and even turn them upside down–to endorse this or that modern attitude or political viewpoint. Of the several reasons why the book is a classic, perhaps the most important is the portrayal of Victor Frankenstein as a compassionate utopian destroyed by hubris. The history of humanity is soaked in blood precisely because we throw ourselves into the pursuit of one utopia after another, determined to perfect this world that cannot be perfected. Of all centuries, the 20th was the bloodiest because of Hitler’s National Socialism, Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s and Castro’s versions of Communism; as many as 200 million were murdered or killed in war because of these utopian schemes. Victor Frankenstein, utopian of the first order, hoped to perfect God’s creation, to reanimate the deceased and thus defeat death, and his project could result only in calamity, for it was against the natural law and common sense. [emphasis in original]

More people will pick up and read City of Night than will ever hear about We Still Hold These Truths, yet right-wing intellectuals dismiss pop culture offerings as trivial at best. There is truth in both Koontz’s and Spalding’s books. Koontz’s book feeds the imagination and quickens the heart. Spalding’s work, on the other hand, fills the intellect and little else.

An informed mind is a wonderful thing indeed. No one, however, was ever inspired to fight monsters through reasoned debate and lectures. Just ask Levi Preston or Abe Lincoln.

–Daniel Crandall