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This is an excellent project
August 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A new think tank is starting up called the Culture Project. Francis Beckwith provides the description.
The Culture Project, a new organization creating a fresh approach to cultural renewal, has launched a website with the ambitious aim of taking the conservative movement’s strengths at politics and expanding them to cultural pursuits.
Mike D’Virgilio, Founder and Executive Director of the organization, said, “Politics does not shape culture; culture shapes politics. That has limited the right’s long-term political success in the past half-century, because people’s basic assumptions come from our liberal-dominated culture—from the education system, entertainment, and the media—and these are all areas that conservatives have largely abdicated to the left. We cannot move America back to the values our country was founded on solely through politics. Only a serious, conscious effort toward cultural renewal can do that.”
Based in the Chicago area, The Culture Project has been founded to address this crucial need at the heart of modern conservatism. “There are several fine organizations on the right attempting to influence culture, but they are a separate and dispersed lot,” D’Virgilio noted. “Our objective is not only to bring more right-of-center individuals into the cultural influence professions but also to create a grand narrative of cultural renewal, to make a case for the development of a Culture of Liberty in the United States today. We will create a synergy and connection among all these groups and individuals, whose efforts can make a bigger impact through cooperation and outreach beyond the right.”
The website is just the beginning of this effort. The organization is developing programs to recruit, train, mentor, and educate a new generation of liberty-minded individuals who understand the central importance of culture to the health of American society, and to help them find their way into and through the nation’s cultural influence professions.
The project is also creating something that does not yet exist but is sorely needed: a think tank dedicated to culture. The current model of a think tank is to educate legislators, government executives, and their staffs and other politically influential parties about public policy issues, with the hope of affecting legislation. The Culture Project will bring that paradigm to the cultural influence professions with the intention of affecting the work they produce.
D’Virgilio says, “Our think tank will do what other think tanks do—write books, position papers, op-eds, and analyses, run conferences, and seminars, and the like–but with the objective of educating the culture industries about the value of liberty. Instead of writing for legislators and their staffs and people at other think tanks, the Culture Project will target public school administrators; Hollywood agents, producers, and scriptwriters; law school faculty members; newspaper editors; museum managers; and other important people in the cultural influence professions.”
D’Virgilio continued, “What is most revolutionary about this is that our efforts will not be pursued as part of a culture war or from a polemical or partisan perspective. We want to educate and persuade those who lean left, not fight with them. We want them to know we take their work seriously, not just sitting in judgment on them but appreciating their accomplishments. And we want them to know that they, too, will benefit from the establishment of a true culture of liberty in the United States.”
For more information about The Culture Project, contact S. T. Karnick at the sources noted above, or Mike D’Virgilio at mdvirgilio@thecultureproject.org or 630-226-6880.
Sounds great, and most importantly, they recognize that cultural issues are not necessarily things ripe for legislative battles. If we are going to change the culture, we have to influence the influencers of social mores.