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Whirling, Whirling; The Church of the Lacedaemonians Was Neither Absolutist Nor Nihilistic, And It Didn’t Work Out Well For Them

The culture war has become self-parodic, so people are hungry for a morality that is neither absolutist nor nihilistic. ~David Brooks, The New York Times When I read things like this, I am reminded of the excellent Simpsons parody of the sorry spectacles that are our presidential elections when space aliens replaced Dole and Clinton and […]

The culture war has become self-parodic, so people are hungry for a morality that is neither absolutist nor nihilistic. ~David Brooks, The New York Times

When I read things like this, I am reminded of the excellent Simpsons parody of the sorry spectacles that are our presidential elections when space aliens replaced Dole and Clinton and were forced to undergo a crash-course in the weasel-worded rhetorical appeals that were vital to electoral success in a modern mass democracy.  After being booed for giving absolute support to abortion, and then being booed for absolutely opposing abortion, the alien playing Bob Dole said, to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd, “Abortions for some, small American flags for the others!”  That is about as coherent of a view as a morality that is “neither absolute nor nihilistic.”  This is a classic statement of trying to split the difference between coherent worldviews, and of trying to have it both ways.  It is the perfect example of wanting to live off the deposit of the inheritance of your civilisation while contributing nothing to and reinvesting nothing in it.  It is almost the application of via media for its own sake (well, that and the likely broader base of political support you might hope to cultivate with it), as if splitting the difference between truth and falsehood would lead to a higher truth because, in the common wisdom of the 1990s, “the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.”  (Incidentally, notice how no one ever says that about things like Holocaust denial or white supremacy?  I wonder why!)  

I wonder just how many are included in Brooks’ general claim about what “people” are hungry for these days.  Isn’t this really just an elaborate way of saying, “I want a morality that is neither absolute nor nihilistic.”  I am strongly reminded also of Jonah Goldberg’s definition of conservatism as a “partial philosophy of life.”

On a slightly related note, remembering that old debate brings back to my attention something that I wrote earlier this year about what I think is a proper conservative understanding of organicity and what the Slavophiles called integrality (which has obvious connections to my more recent criticisms of what I considered a deficient or limited use of the idea of organicity):

The “organic holism” Goldberg rebels against is the normal state of affairs for men of the conservative persuasion. There are false conceptions of that “organic holism,” which you do see in socialism, communism and fascism, just as there are false conceptions of the Good–that does not mean that we toss out “organic holism” or the idea of the Good. Abuse does not invalidate use. Remember that one?

If conservatism is a mentality or sensibility, it would permeate the whole of one’s life. If it is a “philosophy of life” (talk about your New Age, self-help language!) at all, it would inform the whole of life. How does one have a partial philosophy of life without having a “partial life”? A partial philosophy of life is moral schizophrenia. There is something false and fragmented about this approach to things, as if each “sphere” of life were hermetically sealed and preserved from interference from the other “spheres.” But what we believe to be true about God must affect what we believe about truth, beauty and virtue, and that in turn must affect what we believe about human relations, and that in turn must affect what we believe about the different sorts of relationships (political, economic, social, etc.) that men have. Goldberg has lost the sense of the what the Slavophiles called integrality–he shouldn’t feel too bad, as they believed that this was something the West had lost some time ago, but it is precisely that fragmented mind that Rod perceives and criticises. Goldberg is making Rod’s point for him, though it will undoubtedly once more be beyond him why this is so.

If conservatism is at all rooted in the Western intellectual tradition (and I rather think that it is), there is one Good in which all other goods participate and resemble. What is good in political life cannot diametrically oppose what is good in aesthetics, because of the unity of the Good. Yes, that is Plato, but I find Plato convincing here. So did Weaver. If conservatism does not understand this, it is little more than a fad, a pose, maybe a hobby or perhaps a kind of cult (in the negative sense). Worst of all, it could simply be an ideology. If someone claims to seek the Good, the True and the Beautiful, he cannot then be indifferent in practise to ugliness when it stares him in the face. That is Rod’s point. The difference between that and the idealisation of the Volk or the proletariat is so vast that Goldberg should be embarrassed to have drawn a connection between them.

Looking back on this relic of the Crunchy Wars, I think it holds up pretty well.  I might have developed a bit more the contrast between a conservatism that is actually a practical philosophy and a conservatism designed to organise a political coalition.  The former will concern itself with the affairs of the whole of everyday life because, well, that is what practical philosophy and ethics in particular do, while the representatives of the latter will beg off talking about questions of everyday life, the way of life of their supporters, because they are not particularly interested in a good vision of order.  When they think of virtue, they think of ways to stoke the fires of cultural conservative indignation over homosexuality in order to increase turnout (some of them probably also agree, at some level, that radical claims about gay “marriage” are absurd, but they are hardly staying up late at night worried about this problem).  But, pretty clearly, they are not thinking about the eunomia of the soul, which would include the restraining of the passions, the reign of the intellect over our desires and the right ordering of our intentions towards the True, the Good and the Beautiful.  Asceticism is admittedly a lousy election theme, so for conservatives who are mainly thinking about the next election talk of asceticism, sacramentality and communion is not just distracting but positively terrifying in a way (they might ask: how will talking about sacramental living win OH-18?). 

They are interested in keeping people on board with the “movement” and the party, keeping people voting and, in the case of the initial anti-crunchy explosion at NR, keeping people subscribing to their magazine.  (Just imagine if we had started laying into “stockjobbers” and “the moneyed interest” and used the full panoply of Jeffersonian attack rhetoric on “bank rule”!  Kudlow would have had a heart attack.)  In his own way, Brooks is trying to do damage control for the “movement,” declaring the path of the theocons and religious conservatives more generally to be a dead end and eschewing the “do your own thing” ethic of the libertarians.  You might call it a modified Sullivanism that makes the same moves in rejecting absolutes and rhetoric about moral truth and certainty, but which does not turn into galloping subjectivism by at least allowing for some kind of consensus standard for morality.  (One of the funnier things about the recent Cato appearance of Sullivan and Brooks is that nowhere, except perhaps in the audience, was there a perspective that affirmed abiding, eternal moral truth that was not negotiated and redefined arbitrarily by the individual or the group–and this was a discussion about the state of conservatism.  I think the participants in the discussion represented the parlous state of conservatism better than anything they may have had to say.) 

Because conservatism for many of these folks is really a vehicle to provide intellectual justifications for the preferred policies of whoever happens to run the “movement” at the moment (okay, it is not quite that cynical, but it is a lot closer than some might like to admit), and presumably few would advocate actual policies and laws that pertain to the way that people live their everyday lives they assume that every attempt to talk negatively about the cultural habits and ethos of ordinary Americans is part of some scheme to get the government involved in “legislating morality” (which, conventional wisdom has it, shouldn’t happen and can’t work–which would probably be surprising to prosecutors and judges) or, worse yet, engaging in…regulating…the…economy!  Aiee!  Knowing which side their bread is buttered on, they are not likely to run around declaring, George Grant-style, that corporations are inimical to traditional, stable societies.  Agrarianism is nice for poets (and who doesn’t like free-range chicken?), but, they are really saying to us, please don’t rock the boat.  What Brooks is saying here, by contrast, is that “the boat” itself has begun to sink and he thinks he has found a handy stopgap that will satisfy what Sullivan has started calling “the politics of meaning” without encouraging the religious conservatives who frankly embarrass people like Brooks and outright horrify people like Sullivan.  Where Sullivan wants to drive the religious folks back into their closet to pray (insert joke here), Brooks wants to appease them with some watered-down moralism that will have all the intellectual punch of that quintessential focus-group term, “Judeo-Christian values,” but a broader appeal than talking about things that are possibly very frightening, such as truth and virtue.

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