What’s Wrong with the World

Among the foundational Conservative values is simple appreciation. Gratitude for the good that he, somehow, through no merit of his own, is able to enjoy and recollect, will always be at the very heart of what animates the Conservative. It will not do for us to forget this, and accept the pretense that Conservatism is just another variety of political activism, always exercised by discontent and annoyance. This is the pretense of the professional political operatives, whose livelihood depends upon the continued agitation of segments of the population. Their business is not the happiness of man, but his unhappiness. Political operatives we will always have with us; yet the Conservative at least knows their place. And knowing the place of things is a fine formulation for wisdom.

Conservatism has given pride of place to gratitude. This is the ground of its politics.

ISI Books has brought out a rich new collection of Russell Kirk’s writings: The Essential Russell Kirk, edited by George A. Panichas. It will serve nicely as an introduction to one of the great but greatly neglected men of American Letters. A Conservative truly and a gentleman, Kirk influenced the postwar history of the Republic — though his usual position was in dissent — in inscrutable but profound ways. The breadth of his reflections, the careful elegance of his style, the depth of his erudition, the joy and gratitude in his heart, and his candor about the crisis that confronts modern man: each is robustly demonstrated in this volume.

Kirk will ever be associated with the name Edmund Burke: for that alone — for reviving interest in the greatest Conservative of the modern age — he would be justly memorialized. But he accomplished much more. He brought the word ideology under the obloquy it so richly deserved, turning hundreds of aspiring Conservatives away from this ruinous intoxicant. In his fiction as well as his essays, he subtly emphasized the mystery of life on this earth, the ineradicable duality of man, caught as he is between his animal nature and his longings for the supernatural. He revitalized interest in other worthy figures: the fascinating and enigmatic John Randolph of Roanoke, the House of Representative’s greatest orator; the intellectual peregrinator Orestes Brownson, once given the astonishing honor of the title “an American Newman”; the forgotten traditionalists of the interwar years, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; and many more.

The most basic need of man, according to Russell Kirk, is order. Discovering, illuminating and defending the principles of American order was his vocation, which he carried out with grace, wit and intrepidity — as the reader of this volume will discover forthwith.

Reflective Conservatives are periodically haunted by the question, How do we resist Liberalism? They seek not a theoretical answer, however important that may be, but a practical answer. Liberalism at times seems a resistless force. It has subjugated to its unanswerable authority one of this country’s political parties; and it is on the verge of conquest of the other. It has very nearly made conservatism, at least in its mainstream guises, its vassal and sycophant. It has achieved enormous and ruinous advances into the territory of Christianity. Its opponents are numerous but fragmented, bewildered and largely ineffectual. What concrete steps of resistance should be taken?

The April issue of First Things features an adapted version of a lecture Fr. Neuhaus delivered at Beeson Divinity School, entitled Christ Without Culture. Neuhaus, suggestively modifying the famous Niebuhrian taxonomy of the ways in which the relationship of Christ and culture has been understood, adds to the list - Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture - the formulation Christ without culture. Noting that there is, in point of fact, a distinctive American culture, and more specifically, an American culture as it pertains to religious affirmations, Neuhaus elaborates:

Now, as a matter of historical and sociological fact, Christianity is never to be found apart from a cultural matrix; Christianity in all its forms is, as it is said, “enculturated.” In relation to a culture, the Church is both acting and being acted on, both shaping and being shaped. What then do I mean by suggesting this sixth type, Christ without culture? I mean that the Church—and here Church is broadly defined as the Christian movement through time—can at times adopt a way of being in the world that is deliberately indifferent to the culture of which it is part. In the “Christ without culture” model, that indifference results in the Church unconsciously adopting and thereby reinforcing, in the name of the gospel, patterns of culture that are incompatible with her gospel.

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in disputations over the nature and significance of neoconservatism, particularly as this tendency appears to be the dominant political motif of the present administration. Much of the discussion has been, well, not so much a discussion as an exchange of incandescent invective, and, when it has not been so intemperate, it has tended towards the obfuscatory, as in the attempt to deny that there actually exists a definable tendency corresponding to the term "neoconservatism". Fortunately, prominent neoconservative Michael Novak has obliged those pining for a succinct exposition of neoconservatism. That interview, however, requires some interpretation; for, like a scriptural text, the story of neoconservatism is not a fit one for private interpretation, particularly the self-interpretations of those who authored it. Unlike a scriptural text, which is best interpreted from within the tradition out of which it arose, neoconservatism is best interpreted by outsiders. After all, is it not the case that we are often understood best by those who are, well, not us?

To this end, I propose to provide an interpretation of select passages from the linked Novak interview, refraining from emotionally-freighted language; imagine the deadpan delivery of Bob Dole, and you will have in mind the intended tone.

Neoconservatism is a topic that has received a fair amount of commentary during the course of the past six years, and seems likely to receive still more, as a lame-duck administration continues to wallow in lameness, the war continues to drag, and the host organism of the neoconservative movement, the Republican Party, hurtles toward the abyss of 2008. Neoconservatism is a topic warranting serious reflection, for while the media and the average American might well content themselves with the knowledge that some neoconservatives promoted a foreign policy that resulted in a Mesopotamian quagmire, the tendency is not one that will be slinking off to die on one of history's ash-heaps anytime soon.

In light of these considerations, it seemed preferable - instead of offering a quick response to a thoughtful comment - to elaborate upon the nature and origins of neoconservatism.

A commenter last week repeated a common charge against Russell Kirk, which is a common charge against half a dozen great Conservatives, beginning with Burke: that he was “more a poet than a philosopher,” that he was imaginative in his wording, that, in short, his verbal talent exceeded his philosophic. To answer this charge, I call on Mr. Kirk himself, proffering his summary of the Middle Age: “Two types of humanity were the wonder of mediaeval Europe: the great saint and the great knight. In later ages, their descendents would be the scholar and the gentlemen.” That magical and masterful literary summary appears in what I regard as his masterpiece: The Roots of American Order.

There, friends, is a gift for your recent graduate. For this book abounds in such philosophic poetry as that. A young man or woman who regards him- or herself as educated may graduate knowing little of the Middle Age (this is a condition common enough to be a mark against our institutions of learning): now he or she will knowing something at least, and a precious thing, the truth.

And of course there is a whole chapter on the Middle Ages to follow. So let us have done with this notion that men of letters cannot teach because they are more poet than philosopher.

Having been issued a sort of philosophical summons to render an account of my opposition to the political economy of the neoconservatives, and indeed, of the American consensus of the past several generations, I propose to provide an answer to the question, "Why such stridency against cooperation for mutual betterment, AS DETERMINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS"? Ultimately, this is a question that implicates what I take to be the fundamental questions of political thought, namely, what is justice? and how is justice to be sought and approximated in the ordering of our earthly affairs?

Sometimes, conservatives exasperated by such skepticism concerning freedom and markets will frame the question as one of hypocrisy: Why would an executive who has arrived at a decision to outsource his manufacturing in order to save x dollars per hour on wages and benefits be regarded as greedy, while the American employees who wish to retain those wages and benefits are not so regarded, and are often considered to be struggling to retain something to which they are entitled? And what has this to do with public policy? Any one of several different, though interrelated conservative answers to such a query could be articulated, though I only wish to focus on one for the present. For the purposes of political economy, the executive has a higher set of hurdles to clear.

Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.

What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.

For this Sunday, we continue with Bertrand Bronson, circa 1952:

*   *   *   The assumption that men are basically alike in all times and places, and that the sum total of scientific information already available or yet to be discovered is unlikely to make any radical alteration in human nature, obviously puts a premium on the way in which the old truths are restated. This is not...to reduce the importance of the old truths, which are old because they are fundamental and therefore discovered early, and which, only because they are familiar, are likely to be rejected unless continually re-presented in fresh and agreeable forms.

Our last Sunday with Samuel Johnson, for the time being, though the first to offer an actual excerpt of his own writing, wherein he declares upon the "works of fiction" gaining fashion in his day, the difficulties (and virtues) of which are equally, if not more keenly, felt in our own time, now that the feeding of fantasy to the populace has become an industry. Most important for our puposes, though, is the fact that, however varied his subjects may be, the same force and foundation of character impresses itself upon them all:

...But the fear of not being approved as just copyers of human manners, is not the most important concern that an author of this sort ought to have before him. These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introduction to life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by priniciples, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.

Here at What’s Wrong with the World, we have recently endured the spectacle, not without its amusements, of conventional freethinking arguments. We have not neglected to laugh at the absurdities into which these poor men have cast their minds. But we have sometimes neglected, perhaps, to pray that they would be freed from this bondage. And we should not make light of the oppression of this bondage, yoked upon both the minds of individual men, and through them upon the public life of the Republic. As our won Daniel Larison sharply puts it, Freethinking ruins all things.

Old Russell Kirk was a man who bent is supple and penetrating mind over this oppression, especially in the latter part of his career, after he returned to the Church of Rome.

*    *    *    *

So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century. With the weakening of the moral order, “Things fall apart; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .” The Hellenic and the Roman cultures went down to dusty death after this fashion. What may be done to achieve reinvigoration?

As I suspect most readers of these pages will be aware, the son of Boston University professor of history and international relations Andrew Bacevich was killed while serving in Iraq. I'll not linger on the loss, which, like all such losses, is unutterably tragic, tinged in this case by the irony of the fallen hero's father's reputation as a critic of Bush's Mesopotamian misadventure. Our prayers must be with the Bacevich family as they mourn their loss.

The loss of a young officer, however, while an occasion for private grieving, is veritably pregnant with portents for the future of this nation, well beyond the polarization of our political discourse that would have the vilest of war enthusiasts penning letters to Prof. Bacevich to lay the blame for the loss of his son at the elder man's writings. For here it is not merely the nature of the loss - though even this alters its aspect when contemplated in light of the political setting - that arrests the mind, but the also nature of the political establishment itself. Though the sort of people who were rankled by the celebrated First Things End of Democracy symposium will likely bridle at the suggestion, it is all but incontrovertible that the response of the establishment to public opinion on the war (and on other matters, as we will see) indicates that the integrity of our ostensible republic of self-governing citizens has been compromised, perhaps mortally.

Red State editor and blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh is currently on board at Right Reason as a guest-blogger, contributing a series of pieces sketching the lineaments of a rapproachment between conservatism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's philosophy, long tarred by association with the horrors of German National Socialism, and rejected by most conservatives on account of its advocacy of militant irreligion and its status as a resource for postmodernists and nihilists, such as this fool, may, he argues, contain rich potentialities for conservative thought.

In an earlier thread, in which I sought to challenge some of the presumptions and delusions of the economistic modes of analysis that too often shape public policy, a reader commented that mass immigration is the greatest issue confronting the Western world today. It is incontrovertible that immigration is one of the most salient of all the momentous questions that confront us; whether we are considering the disruption of the social fabric, the alteration of the economic patterns and relationships that prevail in our country, the devolution of our political culture, or the immigration-driven presence among us of devotees of the jihad, immigration is implicated in all of these developments. But it seems to me somewhat precipitous to pronounce that immigration is foremost among these issues, in the sense that doing so might be placing proverbial carts before proverbial horses. Rather, or so it seems to me upon reflection, immigration is an element - a critical and integral element, nonetheless - of a broader historical tendency, a tendency often presented to us under the aspects of inevitability and progress. We might even look through the historicism with which we are often confronted, seeing in it merely the masquerade of a doctrine of fate, of the totality to which all of the particulars of our societies are to be sacrificed.

What should Conservatism look like after Bush? I try my hand at this question over at Redstate. Have a look.

In the debate over a proposed Jihad-sedition law — a law at once designating the threat of sedition on principles of Jihad a threat of highest gravity, and giving legal teeth to that designation — one response commonly heard, though more whispered than shouted, is that, “it will never pass.” I have written about this proposal several times over a period of over a year, but the impermanence of the Web medium makes it as though each proposal is quite novel and shocking — so I have some sense for how this thing strikes readers. A sizeable group, even at a place like Redstate, are inclined react with predictable antagonism to the proposal; some are even thrown into unreason by their shock; but others merely react with what we might call a conjecture of impotence, a preemptive prediction of failure.

In an otherwise excellent review of the latest installment of the Bourne franchise, Peter Suderman, amidst discussions of character development and depth, and the mirroring of content in cinematic form, throws out this baffler concerning the politics of the flick:

Greengrass tries to supplant Bourne’s emotional blankness with some fairly obvious and simplistic liberal politics at the end. Most of these bits, though, seem thin, even desperate, groping for something the series hasn’t earned rather than letting its cool, detached brutality speak for itself. And really, is there any need to spell it all out? It’s always been plain to see that Bourne was what Nathan Lee smartly calls “action hero as blowback.”

When I encountered post-modernism, critical theory, and all the rest of the nonsense back in graduate school, it soon emerged that anybody who resisted these trends was dubbed "conservative," and that, with the clear implication that this was an insult.

Being politically conservative myself on many issues, I found this strange. I knew for a fact that Professors X and Y were not politically conservative. They were politically liberal, though you found that out only in passing. They were professionals who were interested in their subject matter, taught it well, and did not bring political issues into the academic discussion gratuitously.