In closing, I should state what I believe is *not* an ideology, since I must appear inordinately fond of calling everyone an ideologue. The world is generally too complex to understand without resort to simplifying assumptions; hence, for the most part, everyone who has informed political opinions is an ideologue, myself included [bold mine-DL]. The only persons are who are not ideologues are, first, radical quietists like Oakeshott who hew rigorously to the belief that political wisdom can’t be expressed in propositional form. They’re probably right. Second, those geniuses are not ideologues who are capable of seeing so far that they can recognize their own assumptions as such. These are the paragons of what Weber called the “ethics of responsibility.” All others, even the Reillyists, remain imprisoned in cages that they cannot see. ~Austin Bramwell

I stand corrected.  In his TAC article, Mr. Bramwell did not call for a pox on all houses.  It was only aimed at most houses, and only then to awaken us from our “dogmatic slumbers.”  Which dogmatic slumbers?  Why, those of ideology, of course, in which apparently “everyone who has informed political opinions” slumbers. 

Naturally, if at this point I were to say, “Surely Kirk thought that Burke held informed political opinions and yet was powerfully opposed to the spirit of ideology and was not an ideologue, which suggests that this definition of ideology is probably incorrect or less than useful,” I would simply be reifying my invisible cage of dogmatic commitments as confirmed by what I apparently consider to be Kirkian Revelation (not just revelation, but Revelation!).  To cite a reasonable authority on a matter becomes equivalent to waving Scripture in someone’s face and invoking God’s will.  I suspect that this will fail to convince very many, not least because it doesn’t seem to me to make very much sense.  That isn’t a problem, because almost anything I or anyone else will be able to say about it can be reduced, in the end, to the invisible cage of assumptions and commitments about which we are all supposedly unaware.

Let us consider what this definition of ideology means.  It means that when Mr. Bramwell said of Kirk that he had “almost no political opinions whatsoever,” this was actually a compliment for Kirk (it means that he was relatively non-ideological, which we all agree is generally a Good Thing).  So it was a compliment for him, in spite of the fact that it was a statement made in service of dismissing anyone who would desire “to return to its [the movement’s] alleged first principles,” such as those outlined by this same largely apolitical Russell Kirk, because the conservative movement supposedly never had any of these principles anyway.  Even though the “policy implications” of the ideas of Kirk, Weaver, et al. were obscure, and their ideas therefore apparently largely irrelevant to whatever it is that we ought to be doing (which at the end Mr. Bramwell suggests should be a search for wisdom, but one is left wondering what policy implications have to do with wisdom), to the extent that they were quietist and/or geniuses they were free from the taint of ideology.  So they are eccentric and their ideas of little use, but at least they aren’t ideological.  Except when they say silly things like, “ideas have consequences,” because we are supposed to think that people who say that believe that only ideas have consequences. 

All of which forces the question: what on earth is conservatism (which, to be “dogmatic” again, is the negation of ideology) if almost all conservatives of every stripe, who have undoubtedly had informed political opinions to one degree or another, are effectively ideologues?  The conservative protests in vain who says that he is not ideological, because the very attempt to respond will be considered simply a way of shoring up his ideological position.  

Then there is the question of the pre-political loyalties, which Mr. Bramwell says that he questioned.  Well, no, he didn’t question them.  He ridiculed them as “dangerously subversive” and in a reductio ad Mediorientem painted the bleak picture of what a society defined by “ancestral loyalties” must look like.  Missing then was his more qualified claim that all he meant was that pre-political and political loyalties must be balanced and neither should be allowed to go too far.  That makes a lot more sense than calling them dangerously subversive and alluding to the calamities of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern nations’ tribal and religious politics:

At most other times, however, ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive. The U.S. could not have survived had it not ruthlessly extirpated the ancestral loyalties of both natives and newcomers; Great Britain suffered endless civil wars before the great constitutional oak that Burke praised took root; the West itself succeeded precisely because it cut short the reach of the extended family or clan. Ancestral loyalties are the curse of uncivilized peoples, most especially in the hypermnesiac Middle East.     

In his response to Jape, he now claims:

Conceding that I was being provocative, in discussing “ancestral loyalties,” I made nothing more than the self-evident-to-the-point-of-banal observation that not all “pre-political” loyalties are good things. On the contrary, just like political loyalties, they are sometimes good and sometimes bad.

But calling something “the curse of uncivilized peoples” and conjuring dark images of sectarian massacre that his readers would have imagined upon reading about “ancestral loyalties” in relation to the Middle East is not to say that these loyalties are “sometimes good and sometimes bad.”  What he clearly said was that, except perhaps for a brief moment in the 1950s, talking up such loyalties has generally been a very bad idea and inimical to…well, to something.  What is that something?  Ah, order.  Because, he tells us, those who place value on these “ancestral loyalties” have a poor grasp of how to obtain order and must endorse these attachments in such a way that they are inimical to what I might call good order.  Mr. Bramwell also adds:

But it is not clear that Burke did categorically oppose the cutting short of “pre-political” loyalties. On the contrary, it strikes me as quite imprudent and un-Burkean to set “pre-political” against “political” loyalties in the first place, rather than to say, sensibly, that both, within limits, have their place.

But setting the pre-political against the political in the first place is exactly what Mr. Bramwell did in his original article.  Scroll back up and see the statement Mr. Bramwell made on this very point.  For instance, he said, “The U.S. could not have survived had it not ruthlessly extirpated the ancestral loyalties of both natives and newcomers,” which sounds very different from saying that those loyalties have their proper place.  Something does not have a place when it has been extirpated.  Even granting some license for making an exaggerated statement to get our attention, one seriously wonders whether Burke would have viewed such extirpation of loyalties as anything other than Jacobin insanity.  This statement about the U.S. sounds like, I’m sorry to say, something some rationalising liberal nationalist of the late 18th or 19th centuries would say.  The War of Secession saw some ruthless extirpation of people’s old loyalties to their separate states, all right, and a great many people have been the worse for it.  Every centralist and liberal revolutionary of the 19th century found these attachments to be impediments to their vision of order, sure enough, and they saw them as impediments to the rational, constitutional state they were trying to create.  They were right–these attachments are impediments to a liberal vision of society and they are impediments to the state.  Those are two reasons, though certainly not the most important, why these attachments are very good.  (Can they be taken to excess and turned into unjust and inhuman idols?  Of course, but the reality that they are not the “curse of uncivilized peoples” and instead the foundations on which civilised life is built should be equally clear.) 

That is why it seems fairly clear (I wouldn’t say self-evident) why anyone interested in checking and restraining the state, for example, and actually enjoying the good order of a healthy society that is not cramped and straitened by the burdens of unjust and intrusive government (including the central state’s tendency to make war and steal the wealth of the people), would want to defend these loyalties with far more energy than they would want to defend the claims of the central state or any order that such a state might impose.  Peace, justice and prosperity seem reasonably good standards by which to judge the conservative-ness of a particular vision of order, and yet there is little in Mr. Bramwell’s response that suggests that his original objection to “ancestral loyalties” or even his more qualified balancing act between the different sets of loyalties measures up very well by comparison. 

Then there is Mr. Bramwell’s frankly embarrassing targeting of the so-called Reillyists on their arguments in favour of the social bonds of family, religion and community:

They allude frequently a certain vision of the Middle Ages-the same one that we get from Henry Adams-where each man knows his place in the order of things and unquestioningly does his duty. It seems to me, however, that Reillyists understand neither family, community nor the Middle Ages.

Of course, no one who knows anything about the Middle Ages subscribes to the view that the imaginary feudal hierarchical pyramid mentioned here ever existed, and I honestly don’t know any of these so-called Reillyists who think that medieval Europe was a place with a perfectly harmonious-but-stratified social structure.  One would have to be entirely ignorant of the history of medieval Germany, Italy and France, among other places, to think that this model held up in actual practice or that it was even the conscious ideal of most people living at the time.  This vision was the construction of medieval legal theorists on the one hand, who were trying to make some sense of the bewildering array and diversity of relationships of service and fealty (the bonds and relationships existed, but they did not fit into a neat, uniform pattern), and was also encouraged by the revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who condemned “feudal” society for all the same reasons that Romantics in the 19th century came to praise such a society.   

Then there is the questionable claim, related to the claim that the Middle Ages were a “revolutionary age,” that “Nobody tried harder to “immanentize the eschaton” than Hildebrand.”  Mr. Bramwell refers here, I assume, to Pope Gregory VII, and as much as I share Richard Weaver’s dislike for Pope Gregory I simply cannot agree with such an erroneous statement.  First of all, a great many medieval people–the Cathars, for instance–tried harder to immanentise the eschaton than Gregory VII, and second of all Gregory VII didn’t try to do any such thing.  Whatever I may think of the negative consequences the so-called Papal Revolution had on western Europe and the possibility of reconciliation between Catholics and Orthodox, I would never say something so exaggerated and overreaching about Pope Gregory VII.  In his defense, Pope Gregory was insisting on the canonical rights of the See of Rome with respect to the investiture of bishops, which had by long usage and customary practice been taken over by local secular rulers for reasons of convenience and political expediency.  The Papal Revolution was in many respects a Papal Reaction, an attempt to “restore” a state of affairs that had, of course, never exactly existed before the 11th century but which represented an attempt to force the secular rulers of western Europe to adhere to the canons of the Catholic Church and to establish firmly the Papacy’s episcopal authority over other bishops.  This was an act of church reform that brought the practice of the Catholic Church into line with the canons.  It was quite far away from the spirit of gnosticism seeking to realise the Kingdom here below.  There were chiliasts in the Middle Ages, and there were several medieval mystics who taught, or who were believed to have taught, the imminent return of the Lord, whose way they believed they were preparing through spiritual or political action, but Gregory VII was as far removed from these people as anyone possibly could have been.   

All that having been said, preferring a society of deference, orders and hierarchy to one of rude egalitarianism and the emancipated individual need not appeal to medieval examples for its support (not that anyone today would be inclined to follow medieval examples if they were offered), but simply appeal to experience and the common sense respect for the fact that man is a social being that flourishes better when he belongs to a tightly-woven web of social bonds arising from his family, religion and neighbours.  More critical Byzantinists have regarded Byzantine society as distinct from its western medieval counterparts in the relative weakness of intermediary institutions (except for the Church) and the exposure of the individual and the nuclear family to the largely unmediated power of the autocrat.  As much as I admire and appreciate Byzantium, there is a lot of truth to this analysis, and I think it is fair to say that that is the kind of order towards which Mr. Bramwell’s vision inevitably tends.  It has certain advantages, but it carries with it tremendous costs that I, for one, do not believe to be worth paying. 

Certainly in the present moment I can think of nothing more dangerously subversive of good order than emphasising the dangers from “ancestral” or “pre-political loyalties” while having nothing to say about the continuing expansion of the central state that continues to impose its dysnomia upon this country and the world.