It’s less a sweeping call for a new movement than a plaintive plea for inclusion in the old conservative movement, which Dreher views as overly market-oriented and, so, disdainful of crunchy values. ~Maggie Gallagher

It has been suggested by one of my readers that the “crunchy” folks at the CC blog and I did not take Maggie Gallagher’s objections seriously enough and did not address her “reasoned critique.” I don’t think that’s the case, but I want to entertain the possibility that I have overlooked something. So I thought I would return to her column for a closer look, to make sure that I had not missed something really serious and reasonable.

She begins by calling the book a manifesto, which others have done as well. There is a manifesto in the front of the book, a set of points that sums up what the book describes, but the book is an extended argument based in the anecdotes recounted by Rod Dreher. To call it a manifesto is to misunderstand it before you have begun and, for many a conservative, to have already dismissed what it has to say (conservatives generally not being great fans of manifestos).

Then she says it is “less a sweeping call for a new movement,” which it really isn’t, and more of a “plaintive plea for inclusion in the old conservative movement,” which it really isn’t. Where she would get this impression frankly puzzles me. This confirms my impression that she thinks the book is one, long exercise in begging the “mainstream conservatives” for some crumbs of respect from their table: “Please, sir, may we have some more? We’re really conservative! Please let us have your scraps!” To put it mildly, this could not get things more wrong. If this were what the book was saying, its claims would not have put so many folks’ backs up. Irrational fears of incipient statism and a granola theocracy would not now be haunting many an NR reader’s dreams if the book were just a “plaintive plea” to belong. The “crunchies” know that they belong to the world of conservatism. The challenge they put to the rest is this: “If you do belong to the same world and believe the same things, why not start acting like it a bit more?” Not exactly plaintive, is it?

But let’s assume that the really substantial and serious stuff is yet to come. Maybe this is it:

If you want the key to Rod and his fellow crunchy cons, I think it is in statements like, “Beauty is more important than efficiency.” Well, gee sure, but only if you live in a society where the great public health threat to the poor is obesity. This level of affluence is what allows educated women to stay home, throw organic dinner parties, and home school their children instead of spending time at the hard labor of spinning wool, churning butter and chicken-farming. Rod knows this, of course.

So Ms. Gallagher is saying that beauty is only important to wealthy people? Beauty is all very well and good as a priority, but only for people who can afford it? So, beauty is a luxury. Let the minds and souls of the poor be left without nourishment–yes, I can see the wisdom in that, can’t you?

This does puzzle me. Most pre-modern civilisations treasured lasting beauty, transcendent beauty, as a cultural good to a far greater extent than most of us do today, and they were much, much poorer than we. Some might say, with some justice, that they were poorer because they placed spiritual and cultural goods ahead of material ones. But at least they had lasting spiritual and cultural goods, and these are what give life meaning. The principle Rod elaborated means simply this: when there comes a time to choose between increasing efficiency or preserving the beauty of a landscape, the integrity of a community or the sacred rhythms of life, the conservative should prefer the latter. The paved-over anthill of atomised individuals where each sings his own tune in obnoxious cacophony is undesirable.

The alternative she poses is not a serious one. No one disputes that affluence affords us opportunities that poverty does not, and likewise no one pretends that most people will any time soon revert to churning their own butter. This is almost a purely silly objection, stemming from what I suspect has to be a superficial acquaintance with the argument. Preoccupied with the organic food itself, she misses out on why Rod values organic food. Yes, on one level it is the greater aesthetic enjoyment he takes from it, but on the more substantial levels it is the support it provides for the local and agrarian way of life he holds to be an important good. He wants to divert the the flood of affluence into certain channels that irrigate and conserve what is meaningful to him, just as Kirk recommended all conservatives do when confronted with disruptive change.

But, wait, there’s more!

But in his restless, dissatisfied search for Something More, Rod appears to me as less a traditionalist than a fellow postmodern, rootless, cosmopolitan American desperately seeking an identity group where he can believe and belong.

Of course, until someone has found a tradition to which he can belong he will not be a traditionalist, and until he has put down roots he will be rootless. Until he identifies with a place, he will be a sort of “cosmopolitan” in the sense that cosmopolitans belong nowhere. Whatever was Rod thinking, trying to belong anywhere? Ms. Gallagher’s reply seems to be, “Don’t start putting down roots, Rod! You’re one of the rootless people. You can’t start putting down roots! That’s crazy!” For Ms. Gallagher, either you are a redwood (and there are no redwoods left) or a tumbleweed, and tumbleweeddom is the “only available way.”

But she allows as how this is normal for Americans:

We live in a society where ultimately our sense of who we are is self-created, not something that can be given at birth. This produces both an exhilarating sense of freedom and terrifying intuition of the lightness of our very being. If my identity is just something I chose one day and can unchoose another, how can I believe my self is real?

The idea that Americans do not possess identity at birth (even if it is an inherited sense of being a “people on the move”) is just wrong. We are not exempt from inheriting culture from our parents–the only people who do not have their identities given to them in youth are orphans, and even the experience of being orphaned is something that was given to them. In this sense, no one “makes” himself what he is.

It is a typical dichotomy of Old World/New World where the poor Oldies suffer under the weight of custom, station and tradition and the Newbies are somehow unburdened by the conditioned nature of human existence. New continent, new human nature! Put that way, few conservatives would agree with that, but that is the assumption behind Ms. Gallagher’s blithe comment that rootlessness is the American condition. Perhaps that is a significant component of American history, but it is a trend that conservatives should not want to celebrate and should seek to tame and direct towards a better end.

This has nothing to do with devaluing the experience of Americans in the past. We can admire the people who settled the frontier, not because they were going out into the unknown with a cosmic sense of adventure and self-creation, which many of them did not have, but because they settled what was unsettled and civilised what was wild. That is the admirable conclusion to every frontier story and every Western worthy of the name: the end to the rootlessness and wandering.

Everyone belongs to a tradition into which they are born and in which they had no choice about joining. There is always a givenness about your original identity, just as there is a givenness in what you inherit from your parents. But that identity is not static, and obviously you can add to or take away from it. There is something irreducible about who you are and where you came from that, even in your rejection of it, will always define you. This why Americans, even secular, post-Christian Americans, belong to the traditions of the European and Christian civilisation they despise or ignore. You can disrespect your ancestors, but you cannot deny them completely. Perhaps many generations will pass before the descendants honour their ancestors and their ways properly again, but that will redound to the credit of the descendants who revive the old ways and not the intervening generations who believed those ways no longer worth bothering about.