Turning to Fr. Jape’s comments, I wish to show that, contrary to protestations, what Fr. Jape advocates is a distorting ideology like any other. That ideology so far lacks a useful name (probably the best would be “socialism,” a term monopolized long ago by opponents of private property), so I will call it “Ignatiusreillyism” or “Reillyism” for short. ~Austin Bramwell 

In the first place, Bramwell continues to use the term “ideology” in an overly broad manner disconnected from history and prior analysis. For Bramwell, whose heavy breathing on behalf of science and cognitive biology is telling, ideology is little more than the undeniable fact of the contingent nature of knowledge. Human beings cannot escape contingency, in thought any more than in birth. This has long been a principal conservative insight into man’s condition. Bramwell expresses the conservative notion of contingency in an appropriate, though cynical fashion: we are all “imprisoned in cages” we “cannot see.” Bramwell admits to being so imprisoned himself and reserves escape only for certain “geniuses” like Oakeshott who at least have the decency to carry the logic of contingency to its conclusion and completely shut up. ~Fr. Jape

Before I begin with my comments on the latest Jape installment and some additional comments on Mr. Bramwell’s response, I would like to make a few uncharacteristically irenic comments.  Mr. Bramwell’s original TAC article made devastating critiques of National Review and, by extension, the entire logic of the “war on terror” under which virtually all conservatives labour (i.e., that we are “at war” against a fairly undefined enemy, whose nature and form constantly shifts and changes), which the bold and heroic NROniks (and everyone else in the movement) have so far seen fit to ignore.  He succeeded in demonstrating that the way that almost everyone on the right has thought about “the war” after 9/11, using NR as a representative of the movement, has not involved much thought at all:

In sum, NR declared that we were “at war” when we were not, for reasons that it did not specify, against enemies that it could not define, and to achieve goals that war does not advance. “Defining Victory” dresses up as policy but inchoate thirst for vengeance against someone, anyone who hates us. How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed / when vengeance listens to the fool’s request! On Oct. 15, 2001, National Review had no position on post-9/11 foreign policy.

Nor did it find a position thereafter.

He then lays into the frequent recourse to metaphor (whether it is draining the swamp or draining a bathtub), which serves as a way of obscuring the vacuity of NR‘s foreign policy positions.  There is no substantive policy there–just a lot of airy talk.  (Though he does not dwell on these particular problems, the constant use of WWII analogies and the obsession with defining the enemy in terms of fascism also point to a shocking dearth of serious thinking about foreign policy on much of the right today.)  And what is true of NR is true of a great many other conservative journals and institutions.  This is really quite excellent and needs frequent repeating.  The concluding section that makes it clear how the movement imposes and reinforces uniformity and mindless obedience is also very good.  But where the mish-mash of NR‘s vacuous pronouncements on foreign policy merits a lengthy rebuke and the movement’s zombie-like capacity for uniformity on given policy prescriptions (contrary to the official story that the movement prizes and encourages lively intellectual diversity!) receives very extensive attention, Mr. Bramwell feels that he can be done with the rest with a sentence or a paragraph devoted to each faction.  Those of us indicted in those brief asides are indeed a bit disgruntled, but we most certainly know why we are so dissatisfied.

Now it is unfortunate that the only people talking at much length about Mr. Bramwell’s article are Jape and myself.  I think we have some important critiques to make, but there is far more to this article than the middle sections where we have focused most of our attention.  It will suit Mr. Bramwell to assume that we object so strenuously to these sections only because it is our ox that is being gored in them (and certainly I first focused on them because I recognised my understanding of conservatism as the target of these sections), but where the beginning of the article shines with analytical brilliance and where the end of the article stands out with its damning indictment of conservative groupthink the middle points hang in the air, unattached to anything, as if Mr. Bramwell felt that he had to say something damning about everyone on the right if he was to say anything damning about anyone at all.  They do not serve as a transition from the first section to the third, and they do not even attempt to engage the claims being ridiculed; these conservatives ridiculed in the middle section of the article are so risible, one might conclude, that they can be dismissed with a flick of the wrist and a weary shake of the head.  In other words, NR may be vacuous and the movement as a whole may be a stifling herd of automata following the directions from their leaders, but these people are in some ways even worse and less worthy of comment.  It may be telling that the only people who have even bothered to offer some cogent defense of their views against Mr. Bramwell’s claims have been the “Reillyists.”  Mr. Bramwell so labels us in order to mock every traditional conservative and paleoconservative as really no better than a preposterous obsessive shouting abuse at the screen in a movie theater.  The others may be witless or mindless, but we are, of course, just cranks who can be dismissed without much consideration. 

Even if, like Jape, we could all embrace Reilly as our own kind of admirable Don Quixote, we would still have to recognise the label as another way to avoid treating our objections at all seriously.  That he makes no effort to take them seriously is clear enough when he pretends that none of us has ever had anything to say about how to secure “peace, justice and prosperity,” and we don’t understand anything about “order,” either, when it would be fair to say that these four things are among our foremost concerns and it is also probably fair to say that we have discussed them at considerable length. 

Against our interest in strengthening or conserving the bonds of family, Mr. Bramwell has some remarkable things to say:

Second, the family is not the locus of harmony from which all further social bonds may flow. Rather, as nearly all great works of literature show, it is a primary source of strife, anger, jealousy, rage, and violence.

Of course, no one during this debate, or at any other time, has claimed that the family was “the locus of harmony from which all other social bonds flow.”  When setting up a strawman, it is better to at least draw a fairly convincing face on it to give it the rough appearance of a real man.  The family is not always and, in fact, is not very often a “locus of harmony,” as the recent Thanksgiving holiday celebrations of many will remind us, but then only romantics and propagandists would ever claim such a thing had existed or could exist.  The family is not important because it is an easy set of relationships that always embody the spirit of cooperation and perfect orderliness, but because it takes us in our disordered, fallen state and makes our predicament slightly more manageable by providing a natural bond that, when reinforced and supported by custom and religious sanction, compels fallen, autonomous, rebellious man to sacrifice and labour on behalf of others.  Yes, this is driven by biological imperatives of what Zizioulas calls the biological hypostasis.  In this way we are trained up to understand the importance of self-emptying love for the living of a more virtuous and sane life that contributes directly to our desire for social peace, social order and social justice.  If an economic regime does not allow people to form this vital institution, it becomes inimical to all of these other basic goods; a conservative, then, would have very definite things to say against a regime that threatens general prosperity of society while also resisting any regime that makes family formation and family stability increasingly difficult. 

The family is an institution vital to social stability, the healthy raising up of children, the provision of numerous social and (in many periods of history) economic goods for its members, and the basic unit of social and, broadly speaking, political life.  When family life is made stable by the customary obligations of marriage and the social stigmas that did once usually prevail against the break-up of families, the family channels, restrains and controls men’s appetites and impulses to some considerable degree, and through exogamous ties to other families it creates the foundations for social peace (one of those things we do not understand, never talk about and basically ignore).  Through networks of intermarriage, families serve as the joints holding up the structure of society.  Following Aristotle, ever the ideological crank, we might say that the community pre-exists and is in some sense prior to the family, but we would also hold that family households, not individuals, are typically the constituent members of any community, and without these constituent members there would be no need to consider problems of peace, justice, prosperity or order.  But never mind all that–I must return to pacing inside my invisible cage. 

Mr. Bramwell continually accuses us of believing in idealised, harmonious this and idealised, harmonious that, as if we were unaware of man’s capacity for conflict or vice or destruction and as if we did not know about the outbursts of private violence and vendetta that have raged throughout history.  This does a kind of violence to what we “Reillyists” actually say about these things.  We place such importance on the bonds of family, church and community and the requirements of custom and tradition because we recognise that these things can, if ordered rightly, check and curb many of the worst passions of men.  They can create channels for directing pride, ambition, and man’s impulses for rivalry and revenge away from recourse to violence and towards the building up of a well-ordered polity.  If taken to excess or arranged in ways that promote vendetta and social upheaval, obviously any of these things can become the enemy of the common good.  Those who argue on behalf of these attachments and loyalties are not oblivious to the threats and problems inherent in the natural affinities and loyalties they champion.  But they do know what the alternatives are, and they have seen those alternatives wreak social chaos on the life of this and other modern societies.  If I and the other Reillyists ever begin to encourage people to engage in multi-generation blood feuds with their neighbours for insulting someone’s horse, Mr. Bramwell’s current criticism will be spot on.  Until then, I await slightly more serious criticism.