It is enough to make one pine for the forces of Reaction. But is John Gray right that we live in irrevocably cosmopolitan times? That diversity has penetrated too deep to be reverted? That the hope for an Old Right-style unitary civilization is as foolish as the hope for a Neocon unitary civilization, a Neolib unitary civilization, or a Commie unitary civilization? Yes, as far as it goes — but Gray seems to miss out on the central truth of paleocon thought, and really conservative thought generally in the United States, which is: national monoculturalism was never the objective, never even a desire. That impulse for cultural absolutism in America was a purely Yankee phenomenon, and New England succeeded largely in Yankifying enough of the USA to establish a powerful cultural hegemony. Southerners and Westerners, on the other hand, fit into two general groups: one wanted to be left alone at some sub-cultural level (me, my family, my township) whereas the other wanted to be left to its own devices at the cultural level (Southern imperialists, Mormons, cotton interests, etc.). It should be clear that cultural imperialism aiming outside the United States, in the Southern style, is not to be cheered for or excused instead of internal cultural imperialism in the Northern style. But the brilliant point of the American Revolution was that a regime could be gotten out from under without overturning it; secession suggested that revolutions, as they had forever been known, were unnecessary. To get what I wanted I didn’t need to install myself Head Despot in Paris. I just had to quit the country. And this was okay — because I didn’t want absolute rule over the nation. I didn’t care about commanding the political and social and cultural lives of the People. I wanted my own portion of world, with those who lived and worked as I did. ~James Poulos

Mr. Poulos joins in the ever-widening circle (okay, so there are five of us now) debating Austin Bramwell’s recent TAC article on the state of conservatism and the merits of “ancestral loyalties” and the paleo and traditional conservative appeals to such natural affinities and attachments as central elements of what we are trying to conserve.  Closely related to this debate was the friendly scuffle Peter Suderman and I had a little while ago about “lifestyle conservatism”.

In the post cited above, I believe Mr. Poulos understands the paleocon position as well as any non-paleo ever has.  This is encouraging in and of itself.  As I understand it, this respect for regional and local diversity he mentions has been centered around two basic ideas: first, that it is far better to mind our own business and tend to the affairs of those around us, and, second, that complex and historically evolved social institutions and customs will never naturally fit a pre-determined uniform pattern or national standard and attempts to make them fit will do untold violence to the health of a society.  What is euphemistically called rationalisation is, like any appeal to equality, an appeal to coercion and the forcible uniforming of the rich variety of life.  Yankification (the word itself sounds painful) is such an appeal to coercion on the cultural plane, the desire to make everyone think in the same “freethinking way” that they do (as the Missouri planter in Ride With The Devil put it so well) “without regard for station, or stature, or custom, or propriety.”  With the Freisinnigen and Red Republicans’ assaults on these hallmarks of civilised society, there can be no compromise.   The objection here is not to coercion per se, which will and must exist to some degree in a fallen world, but to the leveling and straightening of the developer and the centralist who would reduce the fine texture and lush growth of a vibrant social world to the grey goo of homogeneity.   

Before he gets to the part of his post quoted above, however, Mr. Poulos first frames the debate over ancestral loyalties with what are some of the central questions in that debate:

Basically the battle line is this: are paleoconservatives, with their God, grass, and genes position on the crucial function of religiosity and locality and family in the maintenance of social order, fools for a primitivist approach to human life that betrays enlightened (yes, loaded word) conservatism? Wouldn’t life be severely retarded if American society actually undertook the paleocon program? Haven’t the old myths of the loving-and-sacrosanct family and the loving-and-sacrosanct community been burst by decades and even centuries of internecine conflict of the most petty yet deep-seated sort? Hasn’t the noble skepticism of that other conservative tradition worked to beat back the oppressive power of clerisy and establish unitary yet benevolent national government and inspired rugged individualists to set out on their own and make what world they may?

The answer, as usual, is yes-but.

These questions reveal a fascinating, if somewhat annoying, divide among conservatives.  Let us begin with the last question and move back up the list, starting with the idea of the “unitary but benevolent national government.”  Benevolence is to some degree in the eye of the beholder.  A despotic government can be well-intentioned and can have good desires for its subjects, which does not mean that the attempt to bring these desires to fruition will do anything good for those subjects.  Besides, if we could trust that a unitary state would always remain benevolent, no one would have any reason to fear consolidation of power in a few hands; if the process of consolidation itself did not pervert and corrupt a government towards a certain unavoidable malevolence, no one would have ever complained about absolutism or usurpation. 

It might also be the case that a government might be benevolent to most, but rather wickedly brutal to a minority of those it claims to be under its jurisdiction (for instance, the Ottoman treatment of Armenians and Assyrians), or it might be benevolent to a narrow minority and cruel to the bulk of the population (e.g., the favouritism of all previous Iraqi regimes shown to Sunnis at the expense of other communities).  It has rarely, if ever, been the case that a government has been ”unitary” and also “benevolent” to all its charges.  Many unitary governments begin as the projection of power of one polity or a group of polities over others; others represent the perversion of a confederation into a consolidated state.  The kingdom or the states responsible for inaugurating the process of unification are always the overwhelming beneficiaries of that process (indeed, one of the main reasons for the struggle for unification is usually to secure such benefits), and those compelled to join or forced to remain are invariably the big losers in this process, sowing a basic structural and political injustice into the fabric of the “unitary but benevolent national government” against which the people of the losing states or kingdoms will always chafe and which they will always resent for as long as they remember something of the old arrangement.      

Then there is the claim about the government being
“national.”  It is difficult to have a unitary national government without nationalism, since a national government, which will allegedly embody and express the national will, is usually one of the first goals of any nationalist and where these nation-states appear nationalists are always behind them.  Nationalist myths, including our own, have always played up as noble and progressive the drive for unification as the realisation and fulfillment of the national potential.  This realisation is being held back and retarded, the nationalist might say, by the petty squabbles of different jurisdictions and the provincial interests of hidebound aristocrats.  In our case, the myth has been a story of moral as well as political and economic progress, a very Whiggish story that reassures us that every destroyed Southern town, every obliterated Indian tribe and every wrecked Filipino village have gone down to destruction for the sake of a greater good.  First the devastation, then, eventually, the benevolence.  In the German case, unification was driven by the desire to finally overcome the structural and political impediments to effective cooperation and mobilisation of resources that routinely prevented German states from being able to compete effectively against foreign adversaries (and even after unification, because the Reich was mostly consolidated by coordinated war efforts against non-Germans, the federal structure of the Reich continued to make it relatively unwieldy in comparison to the more highly centralised powers of Britain and France).  In the Italian case, it was the toxic mix of liberal idealism and dynastic ambition that laid southern Italy and Sicily to waste and planted a deep divide at the heart of the Kingdom, which festers in some form to this day in the Republic.  These are the most familiar examples of unification, but I imagine more could be found.  

Looking back to more ancient history, Chinese nationalists have admired Shih-huang-di for welding together the last seven kingdoms at the end of the Warring States period and creating the core of what they know to be Zhongguo.  The Emperor and the Assassin, one of the better Chinese dramas of recent years, portrays Zheng, the king of Qin, as sympathetically as he has probably ever been represented, showing him giving an emotional speech about protecting all of the people under heaven by bringing an end to the frequent wars between the several kingdoms.  He means well!  In the end, after much slaughter in the conquest of Zhou, we see the pitiable tyrant abandoned by his retainers and alone.  The hero of the piece, as the title would suggest, was the man sent to kill him.  This is a story I think a paleocon instinctively appreciates.  Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. (Where they make a desert, they call it peace.)  Such was the old response to the Shih-huang-dis of the world, put into the mouth of the Briton Calgacus by Tacitus.  Our response is much the same.

Undoubtedly myths of “loving-and-sacrosanct” family and community have been burst asunder, but this was partly because these myths were put together and then reproduced at times when family and community were coming under immense strain and were cracking under the pressure.  Before both began to dissolve and break down with greater frequency, there was no need to romanticise them and treat them as ideals to which we must return.  No one who has ever been in a family needs to be reminded about the petty disputes and jealousies and inane rivalries that make up family life; were more Americans exposed to their extended families more often, they would experience still more of this.  No one who has ever been in a small community for very long (I hesitate to speak of “tight-knit” communities, lest I be accused of reifying myths about some harmonious Mayberry-in-Elysium) imagines that it is necessarily where everyone loves one another in some great web of interdependent communion.  To make a community or family lovely and loving, one must begin by loving it, which means first accepting it as it is while also seeing it with the eyes of a lover, which is necessarily to see it with a kind of distortion, if we are speaking “objectively.”  But then people in relationships do not speak objectively about their relations and acquaintances–not if they want their relationships to succeed, anyway–since it is not usually considered terribly good form to objectify one’s relations and acquaintances. 

Family and community should be “loving and sacrosanct,” if you will, but because of men’s flaws and fallenness they often are not.  A certain realism tells us that we cannot expect to be rid of the foibles, pettiness, gossip, social cruelties and the little imperfections that go with living with other people in something like close relationship.  With some of these things, we should probably acknowledge that they are unavoidable, endure them as best we can, do what we can not to participate in the worst of them and otherwise leave them be.  What we should not do is what many of us would like to do, and what all of us are tempted to do, which is to give up on something because it imposes burdens on us and requires things of us that we are not always wanting to give.  What we certainly not do is be satisfied with the ersatz community of the unitary consolidated nation when that nation can only acquire its fullest meaning for us through our local, state and regional attachments.  Abiding in a community and in a family means living with all of the limitations these things impose on us, and it means accepting the hassles, frustrations and disappointments that can come with these things because they are vital to a full, sane and humane life. 

If I might take a slight detour, parish church life provides an example of what I think a real community can be, what it can offer and also what it requires of us that, say, a megachurch or a large nondenominational church might not necessarily offer or require.  The advantage of the nondenominational church or the megachurch is that, in many ways, it caters to the individual and allows the individual sufficient “space” and anonymity to take what he wants from the experience and leave the rest if he so chooses.  Whether or not this is the design or the intention of those in charge of the church, this can often be the effect.  This does not rule out the possibility of becoming more involved and more integrated into the life of that church, but in these churches it is much easier to avoid taking on a larger role.  It is possible avoid such a role at a parish, but especially in smaller parishes it is impossible to have anonymity for very long at all.  At the best parishes, the people there want you to be there, and they want you to become involved in the life of the church and before long you find yourself committing what you might have originally thought was considerable time to the parish that now seems like no time at all.  A small community, such as a parish can be, inspires this response in people, because it is an eminently natural response.  Meanwhile, attending a megachurch like that of Joel Osteen in the old Summit in Houston, surrounded by tens of thousands of others watching the show on the jumbotron (rather than, say, participating in the work of the people), may leave you with some inspirational sayings and may leave you with some good feelings, but it also leaves you fundamentally disconnected from everyone else there.  It does not demand very much from you; the setting of Osteen’s services suggest that the entire experience is more one of spectacle and less one of worship.  It does not make a call to kenosis, and consequently cannot offer the same fullness.   

Finally, as Mr. Poulos said, we don’t care, or at least we don’t care very much, whether the entire nation lives exactly as we do, much less the entire world.  (We do think that rooted, small-scale community life is the most sane and sustainable way of life, and it would benefit everyone to live in such a way, and we will argue strongly for this, but in the end we want to mind our own business and be allowed to mind our own business–it would therefore be best for us if everyone else were convinced that minding one’s own business was an important part of justice.)  While we are far from unaware of or indifferent to the rest of the world, we do not go out in search of “broader canvasses” to paint.  This tends to give the forces of consolidation the initiative and the advantage, but I can see no way for us to imitate most of their methods without abandoning who we are.  Like the Missouri planter in Ride With The Devil, we might well say:

That’s when I realized that the Yankees will surely win, because they believe everyone must live and think just like them. We don’t want to make everyone be like us. We shall surely lose because we don’t care how other people live-we just take care of ourselves.         

Perhaps because of this the Yankees will always win, but I see no reason why the rest of us should accept it or yield before the invaders.