The Union-Philanthropic Society

Looking back on it, maybe it was weird that I drove 3 hours home once a month to go to bookclub with my dad and his friends during college, but the truth is that I enjoyed sitting around debating and unpacking fiction probably a hundred times more than frat parties and cover bands and there didn’t seem to be a cure for that. On campus I was a part of The Union-Philanthropic Society, the 2nd oldest operating literary/debate society in the US (1789 I think) and home to honorary members along the way like Poe, Longfellow, Patrick Henry, and Francis Schaeffer. I get how pretentious that is to write, but it’s true and I loved it even if my attendance record left something to be desired.

I was inducted as a junior member as a freshman, and since I swore an oath of secrecy during the ceremony itself I’ll only say that since the society had found out about my religious upbringing, I was given a very short amount of time in a dimly lit space to prepare a 10 minute defense of why God does not exist. After passing with relatively flying colors, I was given the type of warm after-battle reception a God-conquering hero might expect: a few handshakes, a lapel pin, and a bottle of Andre champagne. I was so anxious about the campus police catching me carrying it back to my dorm underage that I drank the whole thing in the debate hall before I left and I don’t think I thought about champagne again for a year and a half.

Once I passed the much more difficult exam my Junior year and got a robe with my name on it, I eased into the Sunday evening ritual of semi-performing my officer duties and roasting junior members within an inch of their lives. The Sunday night meetings were the formal society programming but the good shit was the semi-regular cadence of Friday night sessions in the society hall spent smoking indoors, drinking, and shouting about socialism and the occult. My friend Ed Hess was a living library of demonology and cheese history, and other than myself he remains the smartest idiot I’ve ever met.

One of the under-appreciated or perhaps under-expressed segments of collegiate nostalgia is the feeling of having an understanding of the world. The narrative for college memories usually drifts into alcoholic regalia and unattended classes, but the thing I miss the most is the belief that the world was something you could crack open and hold in your hand. I used to make fun of us after graduation for feeling like we were solving something during all of those late night conversations over the Virginian sacraments of tobacco and bourbon while wearing society robes, but the truth of it is that would be the last time life made sense to me for a long time. A bit because college is a commune with a cafeteria which is extremely my shit, but mostly because one of the deep loves of my life is talking about interesting things with people who are different from me and that became a drastically less accessible pass time post-diploma.

I started going down the road a bit on the current state of public debate but I deleted it to spare us all the malaise. I’ll just say that I miss the temperamental celebrations of differences, and the richness of an open, loosely-topical social life spent with people you otherwise might never meet. That isn’t unfindable again by any means, but the loss of it for sections of my adulthood weighed heavily on me and I think a lot of my difficulty in my 20s stemmed from something close to not really comprehending or enjoying the alternate structure of the outside world. If there were a commune for dorks I would move there in an instant, and if you have any leads on how to live above a cafeteria please let me know.