Redstate

in the thread following Leon's piece, I mentioned the dozens of people with whom I have spoken over the course of the past months who have concluded that the West's days are numbered, and that it is scarcely worth the trouble to struggle against a decline they perceive as inevitable.  To a man or woman, every one of these has mentioned the coarse and coarsening material culture of the age, ranging from the depravity of so much popular culture to the widespread cultural conviction that achieving and flaunting prosperity are the highest goods of mortal existence, as a reason for their withdrawal, not to say rank despair.  None of these people struggle financially, but they do regard that combination of economic anxiety and material striving as causative of our collective unwillingness to confront the problems of the age manfully.  Prosperity, I am sure a venerable tradition of republican philosophy would remind us, can easily dull the intellect and stifle the spirit, rendering a man prostrate before foes who are not so soft.

And that is to say nothing of the problems of so-called enlightenment: a man accustomed to the assertion of his own interests, to judging all things by the measure of those interests - for this simply is the psychological meaning of democracy - is less apt to learn the discipline and hardness of spirit requisite to the defense of his culture, for this latter is a concern which transcends his private interests and exposes them as partial, and he is less apt to learn this lesson even when he is religious.  A man must, in a word, submit himself to some authority in order to learn, not as an matter of intellect or abstraction, but in his very flesh, that there are things greater than himself and his petty interests, and that he must be prepared to sacrifice for them.

As for the inherent weaknesses of the democratic ideal, I am afraid that those are truths for the far side of the crisis.

The brief answer is that I don't necessarily see the inevitable causality between modernization and the disentigration of community. Neither do I view rationalism, as such, as incompatible with Christianity. I think Aquinas - among others - would agree with me there.

I think rationalism found itself as the enemy of Christianity simply out of overreaction from superstition - to the point where it began to question Christianity itself as superstition. I'd say that, in the final analysis, Christianity emerged from the temporary affliction of rationalism alive and well - not so much in Europe, but in America for sure.

In any event, I am of the belief that they can co-exist. And as to the point raised by yourself and Maximos about the danger of progress, comfort and prosperity, I would remind you both of the words of the preacher:

Prov 30:7-9

7 Two things I request of You

(Deprive me not before I die):

8 Remove falsehood and lies far from me;

Give me neither poverty nor riches--

Feed me with the food allotted to me;

9 Lest I be full and deny You,

And say, "Who is the LORD?"

Or lest I be poor and steal,

And profane the name of my God.

NKJV

Paul, you illustrate what is an even more basic challenge: how do you adapt to change while keeping your "soul". The challenge is more acute in our time because of the accelerating rate of change.

On one hand, we have groups like the Amish which to preserve their community and soul have had to become enclaves because the rate of societal change outstrips their ability to respond. On the other extreme, we have churches and others who are so eager to be "relevant" that they abandon historical truth all too quickly -- so open to change that they float away on the waves and get smashed in the breakers. In between are many groups, such as evangelicals, etc, that are trying to find a way to sucessfully embrace both change and community soul in a way that can be a model for those outside.

Your example of agrarian virtue versus urban progress, of course, has recurred at various times in our nation's history, though in the present age, the breaching of national borders by technology and capital is obscuring the identities of the combatants.

I find your identification of the "leftward" drift of Conservatism to be quite provocative. Interestingly, those on the left have also recognized and lamented the "rightward" drift of their ideologies (think of the outcome of Mao's Cultural Revolution in terms of today's Chinese Communist Party).

The optimists would view this as a convergence of left and right into a healthy synthesis, the political equivalence of statistical "regression to the mean". I'm dubious, as I think you are, and the rise of the Islamists also indicates the illusion of Omega Point thinking.

Rather, this convergence may rather be the rise of Chaos (which is what Leon is also alluding to), in which case you and Leon are both appealing to us to regain the traditional Conservative virtue of Order, an Order based on the inheritance that we in the West have acquired through generations of struggle by our forebears, an inheritance that we dare not fritter away but rather need to refine.

I assert that what we are seeing in the Western cultures around the world is the unhappy result of what happens when a society is overfed physically and mentally but malnourished spiritually.  We concern ourselves more on the care and feeding of our own idiosyncrasies than we do on anything resembling a "Higher cause".  The breakdown in communities and even families is then reduced to an inevitability as we drift apart from one another, encased in the cocoons of our own manufacture.

I see this development as having less to do with technological progress (though technological progress has certainly exacerbated and perhaps accelerated this decline), but rather with social progress.

Perhaps where I may align more directly with Leon is that I fear our societies may be so consumed with our own trivialities we are unable to focus appropriately on what to my mind is a grave threat to our very existence.  Indeed, that far too many of our fellow-cultural-travelers are even unwilling to admit such a threat exists other than in the minds of "The War Mongers" contributes greatly to my worry.

Having on several occasions noted here that "The Republic will survive, regardless" I must admit presently to not being nearly as sure as before on that score.

Finally, best regards to you and Leon for these posts.  I truly feel that our cups run-over here.

Cheers.

though I am of the opinion, regarding rationalism and faith, that they must necessarily co-exist; thus explains the petition of the preacher to "give me neither poverty nor riches.....Lest I be full and deny You,..."  For it is by reasoned thought, seasoned by faith, that man realizes his hopes and dreams, as well as his trials, are not an end unto themselves, but only a means to reveal, by the most intimate of grasp - and often by painful circumstance-  his necessary dependence upon God.  And it is when man's dependence on God is replaced with dependence solely upon himself - or worse, government - and sought by unfettered pursuit of prosperity and comfort and happiness, that the tyranny of which you speak, and the sum of our fears, become literally possible.

You have right and cause to be alarmed;  as well should we all.

 The causality is in the relationship between the project of modernity and its effect on community. Just to be clear on terms, by modernity I mean the ongoing effort that began with the Enlightenment that was, and is, intended to completely eradicate religion from public and private life and replace it with what Robert Bellah called 'secular religion'. This itself is simply the newest nomenclature for what Graham Wallas called The Great Society, Dewey called the Great Community and Walter Lippman called the Good Society.

  In 1927, Dewey wrote: "Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community" (in Bellah, Robert. et al. The Good SocietyNew York: Knopf, 1991. p.7).

  The answer to Dewey's question, IMO, is that the institutions created to replace what had been provided by those communities could not, and never will, substitute for the three pillars that once made those institutions unnecessary - tradition, religion and family. Since it is those elements that made community in the first place, how could one expect to destroy them and still be able to create a Great Community? How else can explain the postmodern urge to create instant traditions, simulated communities and oddball religions other than as nostalgia for what we once had?  

 Your point about Aquinas is fair, but if we start with Tertullian (Faith without Reason), proceed to Aquinas (Faith balanced with Rational Speculation) is there any reason to think that we Americans will not someday arrive at Reason without Faith? You and Paul both touched on the process that is at work here, a process we'd better become more aware of in ourselves.

  The Arabs have a wonderful story about this. A Bedouin was traveling by camel through the desert when stopped for the night, pitching a small tent to protect himself from the bitter cold. Just as he was dozing off, the camel asked him if it could at least put its nose inside, to keep it war. The Bedouin agreed and went back to sleep. A little while later the camel woke him, asking it it could now puts its head and neck inside. Irritated the Bedouin agreed. When he woke the next morning he found the camel sleeping on top of him. "Here is the camel", he thought, "but where is the tent?" A bit of conservative multiculturalism that leads me to ask: What will become of our tent?

 

I assure you that the rationalism of Aquinas is not the Rationalism which Oakeshott made a career out of exposing and dissecting, and which I am criticizing here. The difference, I guess, can be suggested by the opposition between the terms Pride and Humility.

Re: It is, rather, the core tragedy of Conservatism. It is so easy for us, in the face of the lunacy of our opponents, to become the apologists for yesterday's opponents who have now triumphed.

OK, let's not take pessimism to the point of denying historical facts. Yesterday's opponents did not triumph. They are all rotting away on the cesspit of history with their red stars and their hammers and sickles, their swastikas and flags of the rising suns--joining yet earlier skeletons bearing the banners of empire and monastic dynasty, the titled aristocrats' family crests, and the slave driver's whip. It's bad enough some folks here have been swlling Old Gloom-n-Doom 100 proof, but when you start to rewrite the past to make it gloomier too then someone needs to call you to account. And in regards to the past, please recall that predictions that Americans would not fight because they were too lazy, too rich and self-satisfied or too divided by faction were all proved false then as well.

Good grief I have attended funerals less doleful than this site today!

the point here, I think, which is that the conservative movement has not had many smashing victories on the domestic front of late, unless the temporary hold on federally-funded partial birth abortion can be considered one. We have either already lost, or are in danger of losing, every fight that matters to social and cultural conservatives. We don't engage from a position of strength, but rather negotiate from a position of weakness; we settle for crumbs from the tables of liberal joy. The things that conservatives value have been trashed to the point where they have become catchwords for smirky twerps on television looking for a quick laugh from a brain dead and soulless audience. It's not gloom I feel, but anger (not at you but at the way things are). A man shouldn't speak when he's angry, so I think I'll abandon the field for the rest of the day.  

 but if so then the thread is mixing two very different matters: foreign policy and true enemies (like the Nazis, Communists etc.), with domestic policy, where there are no enemies, just fellow citizens with whom one has some disagreements. And this is where I get off the bus: I cannot abide the politics of paranoia whether it comes from the Left or the Right. Those who would cast their fellow citizens (honest and good men and women for the part) in the same vein as yesterday's tyrants or today's fanatical murderers have gone way, way way off the rails.

To steer the topic back to Western Europe for a moment. German homeschooling groups are frequently harrassed by the German government. A nation, Germany, that once had a federal system with extensive local rights and variation, is now a consolidated, centralized state that runs everything from the capital.

For sure, the Prussian and NAZI legacies have contributed to this. However, if you ask German homeschoolers why the socialists have such a run of the place - a curious answer emerges. They blame the Allied attempt after WWII to stifle all things German. The de-NAZIfication process proceeded so far in its efforts that even the German National Anthem was targeted as being too strident. Germany has no sense of itself. In fact, Germans are afraid of their own culture and history.

A nation with no sense of itself has nothing to fight for. Most people will not fight for abstract notions like 'Western Civilization.' They stand up for what is theirs.

Homeschoolers, by definition, reject state control. The German government sees this as rebellion against the carefully controlled, and bland, social order, and reacts as if the NAZIs themselves had been reborn.

We need to recover the local and the particular against the universal and the general. That means recovering a sense of nationalism among Europeans whose elites wish to turn into generic 'EU citizens.'

The vote on the EU Constitution, I think, shows the disconnect between the Elite and the people they rule. Europeans are not ready to surrender their nations, but they need bold leadership to rally behind, and a renewed sense of themselves.

We also need to recover our own sense of a unique identity as Americans. I don't fear the multi-cultural PC crowd on the left half as much as I fear the multi-cultural PC crowd on the right. The leftists are clear about their goals, its the folks who celebrate America while undermining her very existance that I worry about.

Re: I don't fear the multi-cultural PC crowd on the left half as much as I fear the multi-cultural PC crowd on the right.

Who are these people excatly? Other than a few open-borders libertarians I have never found anyone on the Right who could fit that description. On Red State for example you will find a pretty good consensus including even moderates like myself that we need to better enforce our immigration laws and also assimilate more vigorously the immigrants that we have here.

Let us not forget that the rise of fascism after world war one was in part fueled by the same criticisms of the modern liberal democratic state.

    Indeed the Nazis purposefully sought a "back to the soil" movement to fight decadence and instill agrarian virtues. These criticisms are valid but can be taken too far.

    Let us instead concentrate on the patriotism and everyday common sense we find in Americans, yes even in city dwellers, even in New Yorkers!

Yesterday's opponents did not triumph. They are all rotting away on the cesspit of history with their red stars and their hammers and sickles, their swastikas and flags of the rising suns . . .

We have to dig a little deeper than that, Aleks. Consider how many of Marx's prescriptions in The Communist Manifesto have been affirmed in our public policy. Consider how damaging it is to an academic's career that he is revealed to be a Communist. (Answer: not damaging at all.) Consider that, according to Dan Flynn, Noam Chomsky is the most cited writer on earth (and not, I assure you, for his work in linguistics).

But the main point I am making is that even the Right drifts left over time. We see conservative writers defending "secularism" (not simply state neutrality in religion, but secularism) and condemning so vague "mediaevalism" as our real enemy in the war on terror. It wasn't that long ago when scholars of the Right were emphasizing the mediaeval roots of American liberty (see Kirk's The Roots of American Order). We see conservatives acquiescing totally in the subjection of the US military to feminism. When was the last time you heard a right-winger of prominence denounce the unspeakable dishonor of sending our sisters and daughters to war?

Now, I am not really interested in getting into the merits of all these points of dispute. If you want to defend women in the front-line military, have at it. By doing so you merely mark yourself as a Liberal, which is fine. But it is not so fine a thing to realize that most of the "conservatives" of our day agree with you.

Re: Consider how many of Marx's prescriptions in The Communist Manifesto have been affirmed in our public policy.

You're going to have to enlighten me here. Which Marxist policies are we following? By that I mean, things which are uniquely Marxist, not things which suggested and supported by non-Marxist philosophy as well. If, for example, Marx suggested votes for women, laws against animal cruelty or abolishing chattel slavery I would not think it legitimate to call such policies "Marxist".

Re: But the main point I am making is that even the Right drifts left over time.

Now here I would disagree, though in part because I do not believe that there is any fixed "left" or "right" but rather that these are defined locally on an ideological coordinate system that itself gradually deforms. So it's not that the right drifts left or vis versa (a notion sometimes decried by those on the far left) but rather the whole system drifts forward in time and the movement appears to be a shift to the left or right by those trying to perceive it in one dimensional space only.

You're going to have to enlighten me here. Which Marxist policies are we following?

I gave you a link to peruse. Here it is again. Some excerpts:

Marx demanded "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax." This remains his most unsinkable concept. Americans toil beneath a tax system that punishes success with ever-higher tax rates. Individual taxpayers who earn more than $307,050 must surrender 38.6 percent of their marginal incomes to Washington and even more to state and local governments. Ironically, Russia -- where Marx's ideas reigned with deadly consequences -- has swapped his progressive tax regime for a supply-side, 13 percent flat income tax. [. . .]

"Abolition of all right of inheritance" was another Marxist prescription. While Americans can inherit property, large estates suffer the 50 percent federal death tax. While it will phase out by 2010, it is scheduled to zoom back up to 55 percent in 2011. To reduce or avoid such confiscation, Americans spent $23 billion in 1998 coping with estate-tax laws, economists Alicia Munnell and Henry Aaron estimate. This nearly equaled the $23.1 billion that the death tax generated that year. [. . .]

Marx also wanted "centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state." As [Mark] Schmidt [of the National Taxpayers Union] notes, "Literally every new development in the communications industry must receive Federal Communications Commission approval or die without reaching the marketplace." Even my home telephone has a label that says it conforms to FCC regulations.

J. S. Mill, the great nineteenth century Liberal, declared forthrightly that anyone deriving his income from the largess of the state ought to be stripped of his franchise. Corrupt voters are worse, in a republic, than corrupt politicians. Where would that put Mill on our ideological spectrum today?

I'm not sure why you cite Mill here--he is a liberal (perhaps the best way to understand liberalism is to read On Liberty and On Representative Government) and many of Mill's ideas have been denounced here on Red state as socialist. He was most certainly not a small-government conservative, and for his time he was on the left.

uniquely Marxist policies, those which cannot be justified outside of Marx's system, and I don't think your examples qualify.

J. S. Mill, the great nineteenth century Liberal, declared forthrightly that anyone deriving his income from the largess of the state ought to be stripped of his franchise.  Corrupt voters are worse, in a republic, than corrupt politicians. Where would that put Mill on our ideological spectrum today?

For opinions like that, he'd be so far to the right as to be an unperson, a name to be cited only if followed by indignant condemnation, consigned to writing for The American Conservative or LewRockwell.com.

to demonstrate that his opinion on the justice of wealth redistribution would put him so far out on the Right of our political discourse as to remove his view from consideration; in short, to demonstrate that we have moved so far left as to make great Liberals look like right-wingers.

The world would be a better place if more people read Oakeshott.

"The Rationalist has rejected in advance the only external inspiration capable of correcting his error; he does not merely neglect the kind of knowledge which would save him, he begins by destroying it. First he turns out the light and then  complains he cannot see."

The world would be a better place if more people read Oakeshott.

I doubt even Conservatives read him anymore.

David Frum wrote earlier this year: "No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration. There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP."

Or how about John O'Sullivan speaking to the American Enterprise Institute:

"One explanation for this is offered in a recent issue of Commentary by David Gelernter: Republican leaders, and conservative leaders more generally, are themselves a junior branch of the New Class--what in the old Soviet jargon we might call "candidate-members" of the establishment. Here is Professor Gelernter: "Leading Republicans speak the elite's language as the Democrats do ("Diversity is our strength"--Newt Gingrich), honor and obey the basic tenets of orthodox feminism, are no more than Democrats to be hemmed in by traditional family structure. When VMI's future was on the line, you didn't see Republicans rallying to its side. A few complained; most shrugged." The same point is made in a different way by Peter Brimelow. Drawing on Norman Podhoretz's concept of the "brutal bargain" made by immigrants who surrendered their original language and culture as the price of entry into the American dream, Mr. Brimelow invents the conceit of the "bland bargain" made by conservatives after 1945 whereby they were admitted into respectable politics provided that they abjured racism, nativism, isolationism, and all the other bigotries of which their parents had been allegedly guilty.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in principle with such a bargain--and for a long time there was nothing wrong in practice with it either. It smoothed the way for the development of the morally serious conservative movement that won the White House in 1980 and the Congress in 1994. The problem is that the definition of what is respectable in these matters and what is not--racism, nativism, etc.--lies in the hands of the cultural institutions, particularly the media, which are themselves in the hands of New Class liberals. And they are constantly expanding the definition of established sins like racism, as well as inventing new ones like sexism, so that conservative leaders in thrall to the "bland bargain" find themselves morally disarmed on issues where the American people are on their side. As long as they remain silent on such issues as bilingual education or immigration and concentrate on "safe" topics like balancing the budget, they will be treated as respectable figures. If not, they risk being demonized by their opponents and disowned by their colleagues. And, by and large, notwithstanding the occasional Buchanan, they have observed a prudent silence on the central political issue of the reshaping of their country along non-national lines. Their reward is being allowed to participate in government provided that they propose no serious reforms of the multicultural state. American conservatism today occupies its own modest principality in the Utopia being built by the New Class."

RedState is not the Republican establishment. I daresay the majority of posters here are much, much more conservative than the vast majority of Republican Washington insiders.

There does seem to be a revival of interest in academia, however. There's a Michael Oakeshott Society, which sponsors a conference. Liberty Fund has kept a lot of his works in print, and Oxford and Yale also have published much of his work--and more is coming. Finally, in the last couple of years, several new scholarly books have come out.

Re: David Frum wrote earlier this year: "No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration.

Ironically Frum himself is an immigrant from Canada!

But anyway, we were talking about "multicultural PC rightwingers". Maybe you can find those among the Open Borders libertarians, though I suspect even most of them would stoutly reject the PC part of the label. And the explotive employers who favor high immigration levels are better described as greedy jerks, not as multiculturalists.

Andrew Sullivan routinely touts Oakeshott.

is that this pronounced leftward drift of conservatism has occurred in a brief span of time.  Fifteen years ago, when I first became immersed in the world of conservative politics and philosophy, citations of Burke, Kirk, Oakeshott and other traditionalist philosophers were routine in conservative writing.  Now, their ideas are ritualistically denounced, albeit without attribution; denounced, that it, on those increasingly rare occasions when it is deemed permissible to acknowledge that conservatism may once have been something somewhat other than it is now.  We, alas, have allowed our own memory hole to develop.