Page 42 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Ideas
about Buckley, but Corrington didn’t take kindly to sophisticates who seemed to put on airs. He preferred thinkers who possessed “a hard-nosed intelligence, an openness to experience, a limited but real sense of classical past and a profound respect not only for in- stitutions in place but for the work of a man’s hands and mind, as well as a deep and unshakeable certainty of the role of divine providence in the affairs of hu- manity, not to mention a profound contempt for in- herited title, place and dignity.”
He may not have found those qualities in Buck- ley, yet he shared Buckley’s penchant for erudite lan- guage. Within weeks of publishing “Are Southerners Different?”, Corrington delivered a paper in Chatta- nooga that decried the “rise of ideologies from the Enlightenment egophanies of the philosophes through the scientism and materialism of the 19th century to the political mass-movements and therapies of the 20th century, including, but not limited to, National
Socialism, Marxist-Leninism, secular humanism, and logical positivism,” all of which, he claimed, had “re- sulted in a virtual decerebration of the Humanities.”
The heavy burden of the past on their conscious- ness suited Southerners for the type of humanistic in- quiry that interested Corrington. “It is a handy thing for a writer to discover that his geographical and spiri- tual situations are parallel,” he said. “It makes the ge- ography live, and lends concreteness to the soul.” And Corrington’s soul was shaped by the South. He specu- lated that the symbolism of General Lee’s and General Joseph Johnston’s surrenders “made all the difference” in terms of his “development as a writer.” Whatever he wrote or thought, he knew he’d already lost.
In a basic sense, this is true of us all: life heads un- swervingly in one fatal direction. Better to realize we’re fighting battles we cannot win—that we cannot, of our own accord, bring about a permanent heaven on this temporary earth.
OLD and RIGHT
The Greeks, until the fourth century before Christ, were characterized by the joy of life. They lived in close touch with nature, and the human body was to them not a clog or
a curse but a model of beauty and a means of par- ticipating in the activities of nature. Their life phi- losophy was egoistic and materialistic. They wanted to enjoy all which their powers could win, yet their notion of olbos was so elevated that our modern lan- guages have no word for it. It means opulence, with generous liberality of sentiment and public spirit. “I do not call him who lives in prosperity, and with great possessions a man of olbos, but only a well-to- do treasure keeper” (Euripides). Such were the mores of the age of advance in wealth, population, military art, knowledge, mental achievement, and fine arts— all of which evidently were correlative and coherent parts of an expanding prosperity and group life.
The decline of the Greeks in the three centuries before our era is so great and sudden that it is very difficult to understand it. The best estimate of the population of the Peloponnesus in the second century B.C. puts it at 109 per square mile. Yet the population was emigrating, and population was restricted. A pair would have but one or two children. The cities were empty and the land was uncultivated. There was nei- ther war nor pestilence to account for this. It may be that the land was exhausted. There must have been a loss of economic power so that labor was unrewarded.
achievement in the struggle for existence without an adequate force. Our civilization is built on steam. The Greek and Roman civilization was built on slav- ery, that is, on an aggregation of human power. The result produced was, at first, very great, but the ex- ploitation of men entailed other consequences be- sides quantities of useful products. It was these con- sequences which issued in the mores, for in a society built on slavery as the form productive industry, all the mores, obeying the strain of consistency, must conform to that as the chief of the folkways.
It was at the beginning of the empire that the Ro- mans began to breed slaves because wars no longer brought in new supplies. Sex vice, laziness, decline of energy and enterprise, cowardice, and contempt for labor were consequences of slavery, for the free. The system operated, in both classical states, as a selection against the superior elements in the population.
The effect was intensified by the political system. The city became an arena of political struggle for the goods of life which it was a shame to work for. Tyrannies and democracies alternated with each other, but both alike used massacre and proscrip- tion, and both thought it policy to get rid of trou- blesome persons, that is, of those who had convic- tions and had the courage to avow them. Every able man became a victim of terrorism, exerted by idle market-place loafers.
The mores all sank together. There can be no
—William Graham Sumner, Folkways, 1906
42 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015