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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: conservatism (page 1 of 1)

December 16, 2024

unforgiven

A continuation of this post

~ 1 ~

I don’t suppose that there’s a sadder book in all the world to me than George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Though there are tragic elements and tragic characters in Eliot’s other novels, this book only is simply and straightforwardly a tragedy – and I scarcely know a darker one. It is like Hardy before Hardy; in many ways it prefigures Tess of the d’Urbervilles, though I find Maggie Tulliver a far more appealing figure than Tess Durbeyfield. And while Hardy can seem cold and passionless in his disposition of his dramatis personae, almost the icy voice of Fate itself, the manifest tenderness which Eliot shows to so many of her characters – even unappealing ones like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch – makes poor Maggie’s downfall especially hard to bear. George Eliot herself, her husband reported, wept ceaselessly as she wrote the book’s final pages; and how could she not have done so?

I speak of Maggie, though two people die at the book’s end: Maggie and her brother Tom. But Tom’s death, while it does not please me, causes me no pain or grief; Tom, to me, is one of the great villains of literature. He does not cause Maggie’s death, but he blights her life.

The tenderness that Eliot habitually extends to her characters she offers also to her readers, when she presents this as the epigraph to her book: “In death they were not divided.” In this way she gently suggests to us that at least two of the book’s major characters will die; and we don’t have to read very far into the book before we can make a very good guess about the identity of those who are doomed. We are thus given the opportunity to prepare ourselves for what is to come. It doesn’t really help, though; or anyway it doesn’t help me. But I appreciate the gesture.

There’s something else noteworthy about this epitaph: it’s a quotation, but a deliberately truncated one. The original appears in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, and is part of the song of lamentation that King David sings for two men fallen in battle: Saul, the first king of Israel, whom David replaced, and Saul’s son Jonathan, David’s dearest friend. David sings of them,

Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
and in their death they were not divided:
they were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.

Thus his commendation of two men, one his sometime enemy, the other his dearest friend. This perhaps is meant to tell us a little about Eliot’s views of her two chief characters.

But also: by saying of Tom and Maggie that “in death they were not divided,” she allows the correct inference that in life they very much were divided. And what divides them is Tom’s relentless cruelty to Maggie. Now, to be sure, Tom would say that it Maggie’s sins that divide them, that he merely does his duty. But this is untrue. Tom is in fact not reliably dutiful. His self-image is false. When the call of duty conflicts with the impulse to be cruel, his cruelty always wins.

Very early in the novel, Tom quarrels with his scruffy friend Bob Jakin – a few rungs down the social ladder from middle-class Tom – and calls him a cheat. “I hate a cheat. I sha’n’t go along with you any more.” And thus he ends his friendship with Bob. Though many years later Bob will re-appear in Tom and Maggie’s life, Tom never would have sought Bob again, nor questioned the wisdom of his judgment against Bob. As Eliot comments at the conclusion of that chapter,

Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him, – the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts. Maggie saw a cloud on his brow when he came home, which checked her joy at his coming so much sooner than she had expected, and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently throwing the small gravel-stones into the mill-dam. It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when you have set your mind on it. [Rat-catching is what Tom had planned to do with Bob.] But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.” That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.

(Re: the “Rhadamanthine personage,” Rhadamanthus, in Greek mythology, was a king of Crete who became a judge of the dead, and a strict and inflexible judge too.) And thus it always is. Again and again Maggie acts in ways that she comes to regret; again and again what she desires more than anything else is Tom’s forgiveness; again and again he denies it to her. Sometimes he forgets her sins, or grows tired of punishing her for them; but he never once forgives. In this he exaggerates the tendencies of his father, who not only refuses to forgive his greatest enemy but, when he thinks he is near death, commands Tom to write that refusal in the family Bible: “I don’t forgive Wakem for all that; and for all I’ll serve him honest, I wish evil may befall him.” Mr. Tulliver can think of nothing more sacred than a Bible, though he has no interest in practicing anything that might be taught therein.

Tom is his father’s son in this sense, though in others he is even stricter than his father. For instance, even when Mr. Tulliver is in great need of money he cannot make himself call in a debt his poor and unlucky brother-in-law owes him, because he he knows the pain it would cause his sister. In such a circumstance Tom would never hesitate. In the greatest crisis of Maggie’s life, when she has just barely escaped an elopement with her seducer, Tom turns her away: “You will find no home with me…. You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.” Further: “I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty.” 

You will find no home with me, no haven in a heartless world. You had to come to me — but I do not have to take you in, and I won’t. 

 

~ 2 ~

This I think is the one truly essential point: Tom has not done his duty. He portrays himself as a man of filial piety; he prides himself on having worked hard to rescue his father from debt; he makes his father’s enemies his own. Yet here he refuses to obey the very last commandment his father gave him, in the minutes before his death: “You must take care of her, Tom – don’t you fret, my wench – there’ll come somebody as’ll love you and take your part – and you must be good to her, my lad.” (Mr. Tulliver always refers to Maggie, in the most affectionate tones, as “the little wench.”) This, when Maggie’s suffering is at its worst, Tom refuses to do — even though she had given years of her youth to caring for Mr. Tulliver, while Tom was out making a career for himself. But Tom thinks he has done his duty and Maggie has failed to do hers. This is because “duty” for Tom is a matter of public respectability, and the ascent of the social ladder. That we have a duty to charity and kindness never crosses his mind. 

As I have said: Tom’s cruelty is his treasure, and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He delights to feel himself morally strong, and from that strength to judge those he feels to be weaker than he. When he repudiates Maggie, as he often does, it is hard not to feel that those are to him the best moments of his life: the ones in which he condemns, not his enemy, as his father had condemned Wakem, but his own flesh and blood, his own sister, who loves him more than she loves anyone and has all her life craves his approval. Tom Tulliver is not a good and responsible man who is sometimes overly strict; he is an absolute monster of cold-blooded savagery. His cruelty is limited only by the scope of his power; alas for his ego, he has only poor Maggie to tyrannize over.

Eliot says of Maggie that “she had always longed to be loved,” and that is true, but I think she longs for forgiveness even more, if indeed those two things can be divided. Perhaps she craves forgiveness as a token of love. And while from some who are dear to her she indeed receives forgiveness – that is almost the only thing that sheds light on the dark, dark road she is forced to walk – she is never forgiven by the person whose forgiveness would have meant the most to her: her brother.

Late in the book, Maggie speaks with a pastor, one Dr. Kenn – a wise and compassionate man, as his name might suggest. (Kennen in German connotes personal knowledge, what we might even call wisdom, as opposed to Wissen, which is the knowledge of facts.) Having spoken with Maggie, and having read the penitent letter of her would-be seducer, he says,

“I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle.”

This is of course a shrewdly accurate summation of Tom’s attitude. And Dr. Kenn knows how widespread such attitudes are, even if they rarely appear in such undiluted malignancy as they do in Tom.

After Maggie leaves, Dr. Kenn reflects on the intractable difficulties of her situation, in a passage that quietly harmonizes the voice of Dr. Kenn and that of the author. Eliot thinks (Kenn thinks? They think?) that “the shifting relation between passion and duty” – the very problem with which Maggie has struggled and with which Tom can never imagine there being any struggle, thinking as he does that his passions are his duties – is so complex that it can have no plain general answer. We remember the Jesuit casuists, who declined to be governed by largely-framed rules and could always, it was said, find a way of avoiding an unwelcome bondage to them. (The word casuist comes from the Latin casus, case – a rule that applies generally may not apply to this case.) Such men, Eliot says, “have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed, – the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.”

It is good to despise casuistry in its usual pejorative sense, but not good to refuse the … well, let us say the duty to make discriminations according to different circumstances. We cannot live wisely by ”maxims”:

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, – without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

 

~ 3 ~

But at this point I find myself under an unwelcome conviction. I must pause to note that Eliot says this: “Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” I shall strive to bear it in mind; but I am not confident of success.

The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s most autobiographical novel. The scene is shifted from the West Midlands of her youth to Lincolnshire, but Tulliver family bears close affinities to that of the author, whose real name was Mary Ann (sometimes Marian) Evans. Kathryn Hughes:  

Like her father and his brothers, she rose out of the class into which she was born by dint of hard work and talent. She left behind the farm, the dairy and the brown canal, and fashioned herself into one of the leading intellectual and literary artists of the day. But … she learned what it was like to belong to a family which regularly excluded those of whom it did not approve. When, at the age of twenty-two, she announced that she did not believe in God, her father sent her away from home. Fifteen years later, when she was living with a man to whom she was not married, her brother Isaac instructed her sisters never to speak or write to her again. 

But though her father rejected her for her unbelief, in the last years of his life, when he could not care for himself, he expected Mary Ann to care for him. And she did. Hughes again: 

At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May-June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’. Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next. 

Nevertheless, 

Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’. Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war [that is, during their conflict over her loss of religious faith and consequent refusal to attend church], Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. 

It became for a period, Hughes argues, Mary Ann’s vocation: 

This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare — always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’, she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’ 

So strong was her love for her father that, she wrote in a letter as his death neared, “What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone.” Nevertheless, Robert Evans, who had managed to offer some occasional words of kindness to his daughter in his final months, was ungenerous to her in his will. (It is I think no accident that wills, and second thoughts over wills, play a large part in some of her fiction, especially in Middlemarch.) 

Mary Ann was more generous to her father than he ever was to her — and not least through her portrayal of Mr. Tulliver, whose repeated expressions of affection for “the little wench” are very likely more than Mary Ann ever received from Robert Evans. She gives to that fictional father a warmheartedness which she rarely if ever experienced from her real one. 

 

~ 4 ~ 

But Isaac Evans was a different story. As noted above, when Mary Ann started living with George Henry Lewes — who was unable to divorce his wife for complicated reasons you can read about here — Isaac cut her off completely and demanded that other members of the family do the same. Despite her attempts at reconciliation, he maintained her silence until, a quarter-century later, Lewes died and Mary Ann married a man twenty years her junior named John Cross. When he learned of this marriage, Isaac wrote to her: 

My dear Sister

I have much pleasure in availing myself of the present opportunity to break the long silence which has existed between us, by offering our united and sincere congratulations to you and Mr Cross…. 

Your affectionate brother Isaac P Evans 

The “opportunity” being her marriage — nothing less respectable could have induced him to write. Like the bank-director brother of Silas in Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” he looks upon a disreputable sibling as “just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.” 

The generosity of Mary Ann’s reply is, to me, immensely moving: “It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross.” 

This is of course far better that Isaac deserves, Isaac with his own calculus of Deserving, Isaac with his indifference to any moral excellence he himself does not care to practice — Mary Ann’s faithful care for their dying father (like that of Maggie’s care for Mr Tulliver) earned her no points from her brother. It is hard for me not to hate him, as it is hard for me not to hate Tom Tulliver. But then I hear the voice of George Eliot: “If you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”

December 10, 2024

family matters

~ 1 ~

When Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged appeared in 1977, some critics on the Right denounced it as Marxist, while other critics on the Left denounced it as reactionary. On both sides there was, I think, a failure to understand what Lasch was primarily trying to do, which was to demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of then-current social-scientific thinking about the family — and to indicate some of the dire consequences of that inadequacy.

But the anger from the Left is certainly understandable, since Lasch really was goring some of their sacred cows. He had little patience with the then-widespread belief that women could achieve complete and completely equal integration into the workplace at no cost to anyone. (Such integration should happen, Lasch thought, but the costs needed to be inventoried and addressed.) He had even less patience with the tendency among many feminists to blame the “traditional family” for the subordinate social position of women.

In his preface to the paperback edition of his book, Lasch asks his critics, especially his feminist critics, to consider two major points. First, that “indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment, defines the consumption of commodities as the highest form of personal satisfaction, and exploits existing resources with criminal disregard of the future.” And second, that “the problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over the family.” 

By “work” here Lasch means work outside the home, work that someone else pays you to do. This is a point that Wendell Berry would later make repeatedly: that when Americans today talk about work, we always mean work that happens in the marketplace in exchange for money, and no other kind. 

That second point was one that he had emphasized in the final paragraph of the book:

Today the state controls not merely the individual’s body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt; not merely his outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination. The citizen’s entire existence has now been subjected to social direction, increasingly unmediated by the family or other institutions to which the work of socialization was once confined. Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weaken the capacity for self direction and self control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal and political freedom.

For Lasch, the Left and the Right alike consider the family largely sentimentally — the sentiments from the Right being positive, those from the Left negative — rather than analytically. And Haven in a Heartless World, while being in part a contribution to that analytical task, is more fundamentally a plea to Lasch’s fellow scholars to get to work to provide a deeper understanding of the extraordinarily complex situation of the modern family. 

Here again I want to invoke Wendell Berry, who made this very point at some length in his seminal 1992 essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”: 

The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservative” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the main stages of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet seen the father’s thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

This is effectively the conclusion that Lasch came to by the end of his book: that the conservation of the family is something that can only be achieved by politically and economically radical means. (Related: that’s why Lasch, like Berry, can’t be accurately described as a liberal or a conservative. That binary opposition is useless in many contexts.) 

One of the difficult questions Lasch raises is this: Why had parents, in the decades preceding the writing of the book, so often acquiesced in being sidelined? Why had they agreed to allow schools and institutions linked to schools — primarily clinical counseling of various kinds — usurp the role of formation that had once been essential to the family? Perhaps realizing that he had not clearly addressed this issue in the book proper, Lasch uses the Preface to the paperback edition to venture this idea:

The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.

— the idea being, Lasch thinks, to eliminate conflict from the home. A fruitless notion, says Lasch, in his quasi-Freudian mode: “The attempt to get rid of conflict succeeds only in driving it underground.”

My purpose in this post (and subsequent ones, when I can get them written) is to indicate some of the ways in which Lasch’s half-century-old book illuminates current ideas about the family — for the trends he identified in 1978 have continued to this day. And much can learned by juxtaposing the family’s complicity in its own marginalization with another point, one raised by one of Lasch’s critics from the Left. That critic, Mark Poster, rejects Lasch’s argument for the necessity of the family in these terms: “The only way to [ensure] democracy for children is to provide them with a wide circle of adults to identify with, the ability to select their sources of identification, and a separation between authority figures and nurturant figures.” (Poster published a book in the same year, 1978, that the paperback edition of Haven appeared: it is called Critical Theory of the Family and its argument is pretty much what you would expect from that title.)

There’s much that could be said about each of Poster’s criteria for ensuring “democracy for children,” but I think the key one is this: “the ability to select their sources of identification.” I believe that for Poster — and this is true of many, if not most, leftist critics of the family — the ineradicable failing of the family is simply that it is given, not chosen. From this point of view, only what the individual chooses for him- or herself can be valid for that individual. (Except in the case of race, which, as we learned some years ago from the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Rebecca Tuvel, simply though mysteriously cannot be chosen.) Poster’s user of the term “identification” is prescient, especially when one thinks of people who who say things like “I was assigned male at birth, but I identify as female.” I reject what was given and I choose otherwise. And the value of what I choose is determined wholly by the fact that I choose it. It is not something that anyone else has a right to an opinion about. (I find myself here thinking of Roger Scruton’s comment in The Meaning of Conservatism that the primary goal of liberalism is “the satisfaction of as many choices as short time allows.”) 

This mode of conceiving the person can shape how people think about their families as well, something readily seen in a recent New York Times article about people who end all contact with their families. One woman interviewed in that article — who cut off her father because he demonstrated “a lack of interest in my life as I got older” — articulates the key principle of this movement: “It is not a child’s responsibility to maintain a relationship with their parent(s).” In family matters, there are no responsibilities — at least none that bind me; there — again, for me — are only free choices. It would be interesting to know whether people who adhere to this principle think that parents have any responsibilities to their adult children. 

 

~ 2 ~

I was effectively raised by my paternal grandmother, because my mother worked long hours to keep a roof over our heads and my father was in and out of prison. He was a drunkard, and a violent one, so for me things were better when he was locked up. Not that we didn’t have good moments; you just never knew when the pivot to darkness would come. But you did know that it was coming. My mother was in a bad situation and did the best she could; but she was never an emotionally demonstrative woman, and at the end of the working day she didn’t have much energy left. Almost all of the demonstrated affection I received came from Grandma. Often she and she alone kept my head above water.

At age twenty-one, when I married the woman who has now been my wife for forty-four years, I entered a new family. I was not then merely rough around the edges — all my surfaces were abraded and abrasive, and I quiver slightly whenever I think about the conversations Teri’s parents must have had about the boy their daughter had determined to marry. Lord knows they had hoped for, and expected, someone much better than I was. But here’s the thing: once Teri’s father had said Yes to my request for his daughter’s hand in marriage — and yes, that’s how Teri wanted it: not just to give her consent, but to ask for and abide by the consent of her parents — I was his and his wife’s son. From that day forward I belonged to them just as securely and unquestionably as the children of their own marriage. I was not what they had chosen; I was handed to them not on a silver platter but on a chipped dinner plate; but they welcomed me into their home, into their life, into their hearts, and they never looked back. They could have said No; instead they said Yes, to me and all that I was and wasn’t. 

It is impossible for me to overstress how much that welcome meant to me, and how determinative that was for my future. Gradually I became someone not unlike the person they would have chosen if they had been the ones choosing, and one of the most gratifying moments of my life came when I was around fifty years old, and my father-in-law — a working man from Columbiana, Alabama, a simple man with a high-school education and a great big heart — gave me one of his characteristic bone-cracking hugs, looked me right in the eye, and said: “Alan, I’m so proud of the man you’ve turned out to be.” A Nobel Prize wouldn’t have meant so much to me as that word of praise from that man.

But all this began when they accepted me without question and without reservation, and committed themselves to my flourishing, as they were already committed to the flourishing of their biological children. I truly do not know what would have become of me if not for the constancy of their love. They loved their daughter; their daughter loved me; they were therefore called to love me too. So they did. To them it was as simple as that. 

Everything I think about family arises from this experience.

 

~ 3 ~

The phrase “haven in a heartless world” is Lasch’s but it is adapted from Karl Marx, who (in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) wrote that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Lasch’s phrase is thus more ambivalent and ambiguous than it appears to those who do not know what it borrows from, and have not grasped his long argument. That argument is: The modern economic order simultaneously creates the need for family to be a haven and prevents it from serving as a haven. (To get Marx’s argument, substitute “religion” for “family” in the previous sentence.) Lasch: 

The same historical developments that have made it necessary to set up private life — the family in particular — as a refuge from the cruel world of politics and work, an emotional sanctuary, have invaded this sanctuary and subjected it to outside control. 

As our socio-economic order has extended itself into what I call metaphysical capitalism, its power to penetrate and demolish all would-be havens has only increased. It strives to render us all homeless, and then to sell us the goods and services that, it is claimed, compensate for any and all losses. And homelessness is a key concept here. The comforts intrinsic to family life are those that arise from what a family at its best does, which is to make a home.

When people are groping about for a good quote about home, they typically turn to a couple of lines from a poem by Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But the quoters rarely know the context.

Those lines come from a dialogue in verse called “The Death of the Hired Man” (1915). The participants in the dialogue are a farmer named Warren and his wife, Mary. When Warren returns from errands, Mary greets him with the news that Silas — a man who had worked for them but had departed at a time when Warren needed him — has returned. Warren had told him that if he left he could not come back; but he has come back. Silas “has a plan,” Mary says, he has ideas for how he can help them; but, she also and more pertinently says, “His working days are done; I’m sure of it.” In fact, “‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die.’”

Warren “mocked gently” the word “home.” To which Mary:

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

It is in reply to this that Warren says “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the context of this story it’s an ambiguous statement, leaving open the possibility that since “he’s nothing to us” they do not in fact have to take him in. Why does Silas not go to his brother, a wealthy man, “director in the bank”? What might have divided Silas from her brother is not made explicit, but Mary says, “Silas is what he is — we wouldn’t mind him — / But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.” That is, precisely because he is nothing to them, Warren and Mary can accept the shiftless and feckless Silas, but his “kinsfolk” are ashamed of him, reject him: should he ever go to them, he knows, they would not take him in. So, in extremis, to Warren and Mary’s farm he comes.

In any event, Mary’s reply — never cited by quote-hunters — dissents from Warren’s way of putting the matter. She says, instead, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Thus Mary thinks that Silas’s brother “ought of right / To take him in,” regardless of what he deserves. Obligations to family are not, in Mary’s view, to be subjected to a calculus of deserving, even if that is precisely what “kinsfolk” tend to do.

The debate is ended when Warren, urged on by Mary, goes to check on Silas and finds him dead. The hired man has come home, or come to the nearest thing to home he could conceive. And Warren and Mary, however they may have quarreled with Silas, have become the nearest thing to family he could conceive.

Mary’s attitude towards Silas is rather like Teri’s parents’ attitude towards me: I was like a hound wandering in from the woods, nothing of theirs, but they fed me, they took me in. I was “nothing” to them until they took me in and by that very generosity made me something.

Silas’s brother, by contrast, resembles the woman I mentioned in the previous section of this essay, the one who cut off her father altogether for being insufficiently “interested” in her adult self. She has taken out the calculator of Deserving and found her father unworthy. She will not share a home, or anything of her life, with him. But we readers get the feeling, do we not, that she knows perfectly well that if she should ever have to go to her parents, they would have to take her in. They might well do so gladly, and strive to be for her a haven in a heartless world. Be that as it may, perhaps she thinks that she’ll never need such a haven — or that such a haven as she needs can be bought in the marketplace in the form of material possessions, or therapy, or even chatbot friends and companions. 

About all that, time is the great teacher. 

Let’s meditate on these matters for a while. I’ll return to this theme soon, I hope, in a post on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. It’s going to take me quite a few posts, I suspect, to put these various pieces together, but (IMO) that’s what a blog is for: tentative explorations, further developments, second and third thoughts, elaborations and corrections. Complex and difficult issues deserve such gentle treatment. 

December 2, 2024

memory, gratitude, story

Re: my recent post on the conservative disposition, I said there that the “two major elements” of that disposition “are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.” But you can only be grateful for something you actually remember encountering. Thus the work of our current digital Ministry of Amnesia is corrosive of gratitude and therefore anti-conservative. 

And gratitude is linked not only to memory but also to story. That is, the grateful person is impelled to narrate the causes and consequences of his gratitude. Gratitude and memory alike are impoverished and limited in their reach without this narration.

Thus an old man in Chinua Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savannah: 

To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He gives the eagerness to rise when they hear the call; to rise with racing blood and put on their garbs of war and go to the boundary of their town to engage the invading enemy boldly in battle. And then there are those others whose part is to wait and when the struggle is ended, to take over and recount its story.

The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards — each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? … 

So why do I say the story is chief among his fellow? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters — Recalling-is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus-fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.

November 27, 2024

disposition

Here I am not trying to say anything original; I’m trying to put clearly what are (in some circles anyway) familiar points.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

Therefore,

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Not indicentally, it is because conservatism is a disposition that Oakeshott titles this essay “On Being Conservative” rather than “On Being a Conservative.”

If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.

Note that this highly-valued inheritance takes many forms. It may be a marriage; a larger family; a friendship or network of friendships; a parish church; a university; a body of knowledge; a collection of artworks; the oeuvre of a novelist or poet or composer or painter. It is whatever one is grateful to have received; whatever encounter appears to one as a gift.

I would add that the disposition to conserve one’s inheritance is truly and fully healthy only when it is accompanied by a desire to share one’s good inheritance with others who lack access to it or even awareness of it. To conserve only for oneself and one’s own is avarice. As Lewis Hyde has noted, good gifts find their fulfillment in circulation. This is why I have written so often of repair: repair is often the first step in conservation. We want to pass our inheritance along in better shape than we found it.

The questions that then arise are:

  • What forces tend towards the preservation of my inheritance?
  • What forces tends towards its dissipation or depredation?
  • By what means might I protect it from harm?
  • By what means might I increase its health and extend its reach?

Among the conserving and destroying forces are

  • personal vices and virtues
  • social institutions and practices (healthy and unhealthy)
  • forms of government (healthy and unhealthy)

And the means of conserving are also to be pursued on each of these three axes.

From this outline several conclusions may be drawn. In this post and in subsequent ones I will try to draw some of them.

Let’s begin here: For the person of conservative disposition, the question of what form of government to prefer is secondary and instrumental. That is, it lies downstream of the inheritance one wishes to conserve.

Governance does not create or bestow any genuine inheritance; rather, its fulfills its purpose by safeguarding, or helping to safeguard, and extending, or helping to extend, the good things that are made and found extra-governmentally. Whether to prefer socialism to free-market capitalism or vice-versa is an empirical question, not a principial one. Those empirical reasons may be very strong but should never assume the status of first principles.

Therefore, persons of conservative disposition will not make their preferences in electoral politics, their party affiliations, central to their identity. Those affiliations will always be held relatively loosely, and will remain subject to critical reflection and reassessment.

Moreover, such persons will realize that an over-emphasis on party affiliation leads to a neglect of the other major forces that affect the conservation of their inheritance. They will understand that no matter who is elected to office, possibilities remain for personal formation, the strengthening of families, and the building and sustaining of the institutions of civil society. To be sure, governments can help or hinder such projects, often in powerful ways, but what Oliver Goldsmith wrote 250 years ago remains true:

In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

If we forget this, then we will falsely believe that we can preserve what we have inherited while watching institutions crumble and accepting or even delighting in vice — as though being on the Right Side excuses every other shortcoming. What does it profit a conservative to win an election but lose his soul — and along with it his inheritance?

Some people will read the above and think that my point is that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump. That is not my point. I am arguing that any vote for any candidate in any election (a) should be made with an eye towards preserving one’s inheritance and (b) should be one element in a larger pattern of thought and action that keeps questions of governance in their proper and limited place. I did not vote for Donald Trump and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would do so, but I believe I could come up with a dispositionally-conservative defense of voting for Trump. It would not be a defense that I believe in but rather one that I regard as rational. (I say I could make such a case, not that I will.)

What I’ve done in this post is simply to outline what I think the conservative disposition is and what its key points of focus should be. In future posts I will write about some particular elements of our inheritance and what might be done to conserve them. For instance:

February 6, 2024

Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics | The Nation:

But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, perhaps never fully confronted the politics of his conservative peers. Unlike Didion and Wills, Teachout never stopped writing for National Review. His review of a biography of Graham Greene ran in the magazine last year — a magazine that is no longer that of the Goldwater or Reagan right but one that that seems to have settled on a position of being anti-anti-Trump. Not only that, but Teachout eschewed a larger reckoning with the question of how Trump took over the GOP so quickly. It would have been a major contribution for a writer of Teachout’s caliber to make an inquiry into how the right had gone haywire, but he never made the effort. 

Why should Teachout have made that effort? He “eschewed” political controversy so he could write about the things he most cared about: the arts. Seems a reasonable decision to me, and one I wish more writers made. There aren’t enough writers who are conservative in Teachout’s mode. 

(Teachout was a terrific writer in so many ways, but I must pause to note that the one great outlier in his body of work was his absurdly unfair, tendentious, and just plain hostile biography of Duke Ellington. I’ve never understood his attitude towards the Duke. Ethan Iverson’s detailed critique of the biography, mentioned in the Nation essay, is very good, and is usefully supplemented by an equally detailed response by the Duke’s nephew.) 

July 12, 2023

starting from zero

The young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus to live and study and learn from the Silver Prince talked about “starting from zero.” One heard the phrase all the time: “starting from zero.” Gropius gave his backing to any experiment they cared to make, so long as it was in the name of a clean and pure future. Even new religions such as Mazdaznan. Even health-food regimens. During one stretch at Weimar the Bauhaus diet consisted entirely of a mush of fresh vegetables. It was so bland and fibrous they had to keep adding garlic in order to create any taste at all. Gropius’ wife at the time was Alma Mahler, formerly Mrs. Gustav Mahler, the first and foremost of that marvelous twentieth-century species, the Art Widow. The historians tell us, she remarked years later, that the hallmarks of the Bauhaus style were glass corners, flat roofs, honest materials, and expressed structure. But she, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel — she had since added the poet Franz Werfel to the skein — could assure you that the most unforgettable characteristic of the Bauhaus style was “garlic on the breath.” Nevertheless! how pure, how clean, how glorious it was to be … starting from zero!

— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

The new issue of Religion and Liberty features a long essay by Christine Rosen criticizing the we-have-nothing-to-conserve case presented by Jon Askonas in an essay I discuss here and here. Two points from me:

One: Rosen points out that Askonas’s hope for taking power through “a serious program of technological development” is just another version of Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” — a model of action which has repeatedly proven much better at destroying than building. Another way to put this is to borrow a phrase from N. S. Lyons and say that the members of several recent post-conservative movements – as exemplified by Askonas’s essay, but also by Patrick Deneen’s call for “regime change,” and by several more extreme calls from some corner of the right to Blow It All Up – tend to be “change merchants”:

Whether an academic, a journalist, a financial analyst, or a software developer, a member of this Virtual class makes his living — and, indeed, establishes his social and economic value — by manipulating, categorizing, and interpreting symbolic information and narrative. “Manipulate” is an important verb here, and not merely in the sense of deviousness. Such an individual’s job is to take existing information and change it into new forms, present it in new ways, or use it to tell new stories. This is what I am attempting to do as a writer in shaping this article, for example.

Members of this class therefore cannot produce anything without change. And they cannot sell what they’re producing unless it offers something at least somewhat new and different. Indeed, change is literally what they sell, in a sense, and they have a material incentive to push for it, since the faster the times are a-changin’ in their field, or in society, the more market opportunity exists for their products and services. They are, fundamentally, merchants of change.

Maybe I shouldn’t include either Askonas or Deneen in this description, because Askonas has walked back his strongest claims, and some reviewers say that Deneen does the same in the latter portions of Regime Change. (I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t yet read it, but the more hard-nosed hard-right critics of the book chastise Deneen for not following through on his more extreme denunciations of the System.) But as a general rule: To be a successful change merchant you have to include, as a necessary prelude to your sales pitch, the claim that nothing you’ll destroy along the way to your innovation is worth preserving. (Starting from zero!) That is, the genuine change merchant will always say that we have nothing to conserve, and the person who genuinely believes we have nothing to conserve will always be either a change merchant or a victim of despair (or maybe both).

Many changes are, of course, necessary, and others are not perhaps necessary but are good or useful or beautiful or all of the above. In my judgment, the people best placed to implement the better kinds of change are not neophiles, who are impatient with anything that exists and desirous to replace it with whatever happens to occur to them, but rather those with a well-founded appreciation for what already exists and from that very appreciation develop a desire to preserve, sustain — and improve. (As Wolfe points out, the neomania of the Bauhaus movement led to a situation in which “Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse.”) One of Burke’s most famous lines is germane here: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.” Conservation and change are not opposites, but, in what that great conservative Albus Dumbledore calls “the well-organized mind,” complementary impulses.

Two: Again, some of those who say that there’s nothing to conserve will qualify that statement when challenged; but there are many among us who think it’s really true. And when I hear that, I find myself thinking about a famous passage from Henry James’s study of Nathaniel Hawthorne:

The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools — no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class — no Epsom nor Ascot!

It turns out that there’s a certain kind of person who looks at the world we’re living in and thinks: No legitimate government, no useful laws, no worthwhile political acts or actors; no schools, no books, no skills of reading or writing or mathematics or art-making; no charitable organizations that serve people in need; no churches, no inspiring sermons, no beautiful liturgies, no memorable hymns; no national forests and parks, nor well-tended fields; no beautiful architecture, no thriving neighborhoods — no families! Nope. Not a thing to conserve. Those who went before us left us absolutely nothing of value. What can we do but start from zero, says the true change merchant, with me as your guide?

June 14, 2023

absolutizing (slight return)

Jon Askonas has responded to my earlier post, and his response deserves a fuller counter-response than I can give it right now. These are matters worthy of deeper reflection! I appreciate the slight parting of the curtain Askonas gives late in his post, the peek at his positive vision, and that may provide matter for discussion later. I just want to make a few brief notes right now and then use this post as a bookmark — I’ll return when I have more bandwidth.

  1. I didn’t accuse Askonas of the “absolutizing of fright” — that was my comment on Michael Anton in his “Flight 93 Election” essay. My claim is that I’m seeing — really everywhere, but because of my own political and religious convictions I’m focusing on my confrères — the escalation of a rhetoric that absolutizes and abstracts. What Askonas absolutizes, I think, is not fright but rather defeat. For someone who holds any tradition dear, the declaration that “Tradition is over” is both absolute and defeatist — “defeatist” not in a pejorative sense but in a strictly descriptive one. 
  2. Askonas: “One of the frustrating things about the line of criticism Jacobs undertakes is that it is highly personalist and individualistic, as if it was within the power of any individual to always conserve the things that he loves.” Successful conservation is not within my power, but the practice of conserving is my responsibility. And to say that I have this responsibility is not to say that I must (or even should) pursue it alone. The question What then should I do? is not the only question to ask; but if not sufficient, it is necessary; I can’t evade it by decrying “individualism.” And if (as Askonas does) you’re asking me to join you in a brand-new endeavor, and I wonder what exactly you have in mind, and your primary response to that is Dude, you’re so individualistic! — that’s … not very reassuring. 
  3. Askonas: “Selection effects drive a local increase in virtue and faithfulness. The strength of the tradition in these unique, rare local places masks the global decline…. The question is not whether these, the best men and women, may pass on their traditions, but whether their number are increasing or decreasing in society on the aggregate.” (I think by “global” Askonas means “in the West.”) As far as I can tell, Askonas here has conceded my point and abandoned his own. For if tradition thrives anywhere, then tradition is certainly not “over”; and ”decreasing“ is not a synonym for ”over.“ And if tradition is not over, then the question becomes, not “What will we do instead of practicing our dead tradition?” but rather “How can we who are blessed by a living tradition share that blessing with others?” or “How can we who are missing a living tradition draw on resources that have been well-conserved elsewhere?” (All this applies to the Black community also, as Albert Murray well understood. He was so passionate an advocate of the best traditions of Black American life precisely because he saw them embattled and endangered. This is a constant theme in his work.) 
  4. But I don’t think Askonas believes he has abandoned his point, because he makes a strong contrast between ”organic outgrowths of tradition” and “intentional projects of retrieval or revival from the long-dead past.” (Thus on his reading the classical school movement, which he likes, does not count as an example of living tradition, or a practice of conserving, because, remember, “We can no longer conserve.”) The idea that tradition isn’t really tradition unless it is unselfconsciously inherited and inhabited is one of the classic errors of Romanticism, an error prompted by the inevitably fruitless longing to reverse what Harold Bloom, among others, called the “fall into self-consciousness.” No; Eliot, again, was right when he said that “Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.” This may be the single most crucial point of disagreement between Askonas and me, and the one from which all the others flow. 
  5. Askonas tells me the questions I should be asking instead of the one I asked him, under the apparent assumption that I haven’t asked them. That is, as it happens, not a safe assumption, though I don’t expect Askonas to know that. But for the record, this blog — not to mention dozens of essays and a few books — is full of my attempts to answer them.  
  6. Finally, it seems to me that Askonas replies to my critique of his tendency towards vague but alarming imagery by doubling down on that tendency. Anton had his plane crashing, Kingsnorth has his ocean liner sinking, and now Askonas gives us Troy burning. (It’s disasters all the way down! There are no gradual changes in the cosmos of this mentalité, just crises requiring instant and extreme action.) Troy is burning, he says, though I don’t know what it means to say that we live in a conflagration, nor do I know what the contemporary equivalent of sailing to Italy by way of Carthage might be. He is annoyed with me for not knowing “what time it is” — but I think I do know. It’s time to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. It’s time to seek the good of the city in which we live as pilgrims. It’s time to preach the Gospel in season and out of season. All these metaphors of disaster are just distractions from our undramatic daily calling. “The rest is not our business.” 

More later; maybe quite a while later. I need to get back to the City of God — posts on that topic will resume next week. And in a way they’ll be continuations of this debate. 

UPDATE: It occurs to me, looking at this again, that I probably don’t need to say any more on this subject. By acknowledging that tradition isn’t over (only under challenge in many places) and that we can conserve (but conservation is not sufficient), Askonas has retracted the chief points that I wished to dispute. And anyway, I just realized that his is yet another version of the “negative world” position that is impervious to evidence and that I promised myself I wouldn’t respond to any more. (Why can’t I remember my self-promises?) 

June 12, 2023

absolutizing and abstraction, conservation and piety

Some years ago I wrote a post on what I called “the absolutizing of fright”:

I have the same questions about the notorious “Flight 93 Election” essay, which says “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” And also says, “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.” And also says, “we are headed off a cliff.” Later our pseudonymous author says that conservatives will be “persecuted,” will be “crushed,” and under a Hillary presidency America will be “doomed.” But what precisely is he talking about? It’s absolutely impossible to tell. He doesn’t give even a hint.

Under a Clinton presidency, would socially-conservative evangelical Christians like me have been fired from our jobs, driven from our homes by the military, and sent to re-education camps? Would we have been forced to sign some sort of Pledge of Allegiance to the Sexual Revolution, under threat of imprisonment? What? 

This kind of rhetoric — featuring an undefined alarm and an undefined response to that alarm — has if anything escalated and spread since then. For instance, in a recent essay Paul Kingsnorth talks about allowing the concept of “the West” to die: 

Maybe we need to let this concept fall away. To let it crumble so that we can see what lies beneath. Stop all the ‘fighting’ to preserve something nobody can even define, something which has long lost its heart and soul. Stop clinging to the side of the sinking hull as the band plays on. We struck the iceberg long ago; it must be time, at last, to stop clinging to the shifting metal. To let go and begin swimming, out towards the place where the light plays on the water. Just out there. Do you see? Beyond; just beyond. There is something waiting out there, but you have to strike out to reach it. You have to let go.

I have never been sure what people mean by “the West” either, so I hold no brief for the term. But Kingsnorth’s counsel? I have absolutely no idea what he might mean. I can’t even guess. It’s in the same disaster-porn mode as “The Flight 93 Election,” though Kingsnorth features a sinking ocean liner rather than a crashing plane. But I don’t understand the image. I don’t know how it translates into beliefs or actions, though whatever it means, it’s consistent with having a Substack, I guess. Might it also be consistent with preserving and transmitting the best ideas and the greatest achievements of those cultures that we typically identify with “the West”? 

Along similar lines: last year Jon [not Josh, as I earlier wrote] Askonas published an essay called “Why Conservatism Failed,” in which he wrote, “We can no longer conserve. So we must build and rebuild and, therefore, take a stand on what is worth building.” I don’t understand this either. If you’re rebuilding something aren’t you conserving some elements of it — or at the very least the memory and the idea of it?

And can we really “no longer conserve”? To conserve is surely to inherit or discover something of value and then attempt (a) keep it in good condition when you can, (b) repair it when it needs repair, and (c) pass it along to the next generation. I’ve been doing that my entire adult life, in a thousand ways. I’ve tried to teach my son the manners, morals, and convictions that I learned from the family I married into. I hope he’ll teach them to his children. I have taught and written in defense and celebration of the great books that previous generations preserved for me; of certain strenuous but also illuminating and life-giving ways of reading; of the rich inheritance of liturgy and hymnody that the churches in my life have introduced me to; of the world-centering and world-transforming story of Jesus Christ. I hope that those I have taught will receive all this as their inheritance and in their turn preserve and transmit it. Many, many others I know have done the same work. Is this not conserving? 

Askonas writes that “we are living after tradition” — but are we? I have received rich and wonderful traditions, have been blessed by them, and work for their perpetuation. Askonas also writes, “Those who look to build a human future have been freed from a rearguard defense of tradition to take up the path of the guerrilla, the upstart, the nomad.” Again: what does this mean? Like me, Askonas is a professor at an American university. How is this being a “nomad”? How is this being a “guerrilla”? Those seem like better descriptors for these guys.

Like Paul Kingsnorth, Askonas is speaking an imagistic language that strongly resists translation into specific beliefs and practices. Even when he suggests the possibility of “wild new technological practices,” it’s impossible to tell whether he’s referring to biotechnology, information technology, architecture, infrastructure — it could be anything, or nothing. The sheer abstraction is stultifying. 

Are our circumstances difficult? In some ways, sure. I’m sympathetic with T. S. Eliot’s view: 

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

But at many points in the history of the traditions I have gratefully received, the conditions seemed (indeed were) even less propitious. And yet the faithfulness of those who loved those traditions was not exercised in vain. 

My friend Tim Larsen speaks of the cacophony of new faiths that sprang up in America in the first half of the nineteenth century as “do-over religions.” Some of the language in the pieces I have been quoting sounds like the rhetoric of a do-over religion, and I fear that to think in this way is to despise the great work of our faithful elders and faithful ancestors. My concern is that writers like Kingsnorth and Askonas have not tried conservation and found it impossible, but found it challenging and left it untried. 

On the Netflix series High on the Hog, in the episode “The Rice Kingdom,” the food historian Michael W. Twitty makes a crab and okra soup — okra of course being a vegetable that slaves brought from West Africa — and comments, “Despite the fact that we were in hell, that we were being worked to death, we created a cuisine.” And note that that cuisine depended on elements of old food traditions that they had conserved — conserved in the most unpropitious circumstances imaginable. I concluded my recent essay on Albert Murray by quoting the great man on just this point: 

And man prevails through his style, through his elegance, through his control of forces. Not through his power, but through his control. People who confuse art with attack forget that what art is mainly concerned about is … form, and adequate form, and the artist is the first to know when a form is no longer as serviceable as it was. You see? And that’s what innovation is about. He’s trying to keep that form going, and he finds it necessary to extend, elaborate it, and refine it; to adjust it to new situations. That’s what innovation is about. It’s not to get rid of something simply to be getting rid of it, or to turn something around. It’s to continue something that is indispensable. 

A people who underwent centuries of slavery could think this way, could create all that they have created, but we can’t conserve? Tradition is over? Give me a break. 

But maybe this rhetoric not what it sounds like. Maybe it’s more constructive than it sounds. But because of the relentless vagueness of the imagery, the hand-waving abstraction, I can’t tell. So what I wonder is this: By the lights of this new do-over religion, what, specifically, should I be doing instead of what I have been doing? Until I find out, I’m going to keep practicing piety. 

February 1, 2023

Jahan Ganesh: 

The controversies of the day expose a problem with the right and it isn’t corruption. It isn’t “sleaze”. It is the impossibility of chasing money and fighting the culture wars. [Nadhim] Zahawi is one person, but stands for millions of a conservative temper in each generation. They are entitled to choose lucrative work over a life in the institutions that set the cultural weather. They are entitled to deplore the success of the left in bending those institutions to their dogma. What is neither honest nor becoming is to do both: to forfeit terrain and then seethe at its capture by hostile elements. […] 

Some conservatives have rationalised this discrepancy between electoral triumph and cultural retreat as a kind of leftwing swindle. Or, worse, as proof of democracy’s futility. Their own complicity is lost on them. There are Republicans who can’t believe how leftwing universities are and also can’t believe that anyone would ever choose the unlucrative life of an academic. At some point, you’d hope, the irony will dawn on them. 

(Via Andrew Wilson) 

November 21, 2022

subsidiarity

Dale Ahlquist:

While the Distributist movement gained a much larger following than most historians have acknowledged, and is even experiencing something of a revival these days, it has suffered from being dismissed. Conservatives (and capitalists) accuse Distributism of being too socialist, an enemy of free trade. Liberals (and socialists) accuse it of being too capitalist, an enemy of regulation and the public interest. But more often it is dismissed without a fair hearing – not only by established economists and academics but by most everyone else as well – simply because of its unfortunate name: Distributism. No one knows what it means, and usually people think it means something else. It is understandably conflated with redistribution, which means taking money from a wealthier segment of the citizenry and redistributing it to a less wealthy segment. Sort of like Robin Hood. Or taxation. Yet while the early Distributists recognized that some redistribution of land, wealth, and power would obviously be necessary to achieve their ends, redistribution was never their end goal nor what made their vision compelling to so many.

It is for this reason that the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton recently renamed Distributism. Now, I wish to make it clear that we don’t have any special control over the word “Distributism.” People can keep using the old word if they want. But we introduced a new word because the old word was … well, it was no good!

The new word we came up with is “Localism.” 

I see why they did this, but (a) “localism” is already a term used in other contexts and (b) at least “Distributism” captured the fact that the movement is not just cultural but also a project of political economy. 

Distributism/Localism, like anarcho-syndicalism and several other kinds of anarchism — which I am very much interested in — all think that our social and cultural problems cannot be fixed unless we can wrest economic control from Bosses and put it in the hands of local people. They are all subsidiarist movements, and these are all to some degree rooted in Catholic social teaching, so you would think that people who call themselves conservatives would at least be interested. Not so much, not any more. 

September 5, 2022

An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon “Statement of Principles” – The European Conservative:

In the end the National Conservative statement is neither conservative nor Christian. As critics of liberalism from both Left and Right, we must reject it. We acknowledge the importance of national cultures. We recognise the rightful place of the nation acting in defence of the common good on behalf of its citizens. But we cannot accept the idea that to fight globalisation we must uncritically embrace the nation-state as the one true political form, or the most complete community; or that the best good we can aim for is nation-states re-armed against each other, seeking their own interests in perpetual implied conflict. 

Agreed wholly. 

July 2, 2022

the sheepdog’s view

I’ve been thinking about the weirdly intense hatred many conservatives feel for people like David French and Liz Cheney — for anyone they think isn’t “fighting.” Here’s my conclusion: The conservative movement has too many sheepdogs and not enough shepherds.

Sheepdogs do two things: they snap at members of the herd whom they believe to be straying from their proper place, and they bark viciously at wolves and other intruders. Sheepdogs are good at identifying potential predators and scaring them off with noisy aggression. (Often they suspect innocent passers-by of being wolves, but that just comes with the job description. Better to err on the side of caution, etc.) 

What sheepdogs are useless at is caring for the sheep. They can’t feed the sheep, or inspect them for injury or illness, or give them medicine. All they can do is bark when they see someone who might be a predator. And that’s fine, except for this: the sheepdogs of the conservative movement think that everyone who is not a sheepdog – everyone who is not angrily barking — is a wolf. So they try to frighten away even the faithful shepherds. If they succeed, eventually the whole herd will die, from starvation or disease. And as that happens, the sheepdogs won’t even notice. They will stand there with their backs to the dying herd and bark their fool heads off. 

June 23, 2021

Little Platoons

Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age is a fascinating and provocative book that, in my judgment anyway, cries out for a sequel.

Before I go any further I should say that I’ve known Matt for years – we used to be co-conspirators at The American Scene – and we’ve corresponded occasionally since then, though not recently.

If there is any one idea that conservatives are thought to share, it’s the belief that a healthy society needs healthy mediating institutions. This is the burden of Yuval Levin’s recent book A Time to Build, and Yuval (also a friend) makes this argument about as well as it can be made. We do not flourish either as individuals or as a society when there is nothing to mediate between the atomized individual and the massive power of the modern nation-state. That’s why it’s always, though especially now, “a time to build” those mediating institutions that collectively are known as “civil society.” 

The really brilliant thing about Matt’s book — written by someone who, like me, possesses a conservative disposition but might not be issued a card by the people who authorize “card-carrying conservatives” — is its claim that in some areas of contemporary American life the mediating institutions are not too weak but rather too strong. And what he demonstrates with great acuity is the consistency with which those institutions, from youth soccer organizations to college admissions committees, have conscripted the “little platoon” of the family to serve their needs — indeed, to get families to compete with one another to serve those institutions’ needs: 

What happens, though, when citizens direct their suspicion not at a coercive government but at their peers, with whom they find or feel themselves, as parents and families, in competition? I join a chorus of scholars and writers in observing that such a competitive mood abides among parents today. Less noticed is how such competition creates new forms of subservience and conformity among families. In this environment, the intermediate bodies of civil society, cornerstone of the conservative theory of republican liberty, sometimes become demanding bosses, taskmasters, and gatekeepers in the enterprise of winning advantage for our children in a system of zero-sum competition. 

As a result,  

Under these conditions, the anxious and competitive citizen-parent looks to certain “voluntary associations,” certain institutions within “civil society,” not as bulwarks against coercive government but as ways to gain advantage over other families, exclusive paths to better futures. From boutique preschools to competitive sports clubs to selective colleges and universities, desirable institutions become bidding objects for future-worried and status-conscious families. 

Thus, “the era of intensive parenting is defined by the rise of a sort of hybrid entity, an institutional cyborg that is part organization and part family.” 

Matt is not by any means opposed to these mediating institutions as such — there’s a wonderful section on how he learned, through walking his kids to school every day and then hanging out for a while with teachers and other parents, how a school really can be the locus of genuine community — but looks with a gimlet eye, a Foucauldian gimlet eye, on the ways that, right now, in this country, a few such institutions form, sustain and disseminate their power over families.  

He’s scathing about college admissions, especially the turn towards “holistic” admissions processes which serve to transform mid-level administrators into eager shapers of souls. He mentions a Vice Provost at Emory who laments the imperfection of his knowledge of the inner lives of applicants, and continues: 

If you recall that, twenty or thirty years ago, admissions departments weren’t even mentioning authenticity, were not treating the therapeutic search for true voices and true selves as the goal of their investigations, and if you devote a moment’s thought to the absurdity of this search, you will be tempted to laugh at Vice Provost Latting’s hysterical protest against imperfect knowledge. But, laughable as this and other admissions testimony is, on its merits, I would like to present a good reason not to laugh. Setting up a yearslong, quasi-therapeutic process in which you goad young people to lay bare their vulnerable selves to you, when this process is actually a high-value transaction in which you use your massive leverage to mold those selves to your liking, is actually a terrible thing to do. 

Yes, it is. And I am glad to hear someone say it so bluntly. 

In his conclusion, Matt admits his reluctance to give advice to parents in such a coercive and panoptic environment, and that’s perfectly understandable. In any case, the primary function of the the primary purpose of the book is diagnostic: he wants to show us the specific ways in which these various mediating institutions co-opt families, and even in some cases make the families hosts to which they are the parasites. I don’t think that the book would have held together as well if it had tried to include parenting advice in the midst of everything else. But it is obvious that Matt has thought quite a lot about what it means to be a responsible parent in our time – he has a great riff on why he’s okay with the fact that his oldest daughter is the only person in her class who doesn’t have a smartphone – and I would really like to hear more from him about how he conceives of the positive responsibilities of being a parent, the dispositions and actions which strengthen that little platoon. I don’t think he needs to do this in a pop-psychology self-help way; Matt is by training a philosopher and I think philosophical reflection on this topic, so essential to human flourishing, would be welcome from him.

But the book provides a great service simply by teasing out the ways in which families are not served by but rather are made to serve these parasitic institutions — and the ways in which we are manipulated to do so ever more intensely by our felt need to compete with other families. As we are always told, the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. 

February 20, 2021

Conservatism Inc.

Ross Douthat, in an exceptionally insightful column:

As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump. These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one. And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible. There are threads linking Reagan to Donald Trump or William F. Buckley Jr. to Sean Hannity, as the right’s liberal critics often note. But to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession. Part of this feeling is justified, insofar as liberalism really has consolidated cultural power everywhere outside Conservatism Inc. But the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

This is cogent, clear, and indisputably true. Who within the world of Conservatism Inc. is even making the slightest attempt at appealing to people who aren’t already on board?

P.S. Perhaps I should say that I stand in an odd relation to all of this because, as I have often noted, my conservatism is fundamentally theological and a conservative theology – a genuine Gospel of Life – yields a set of political policies that spans the spectrum of Left to Right. (Or at least, the Left as it used to be and the Right as it used to be.) But a constant awareness of human fallibility and the typical forms that that fallibility takes – have I mentioned that I wrote a book on Original Sin? – will, I think, push one towards an Oakeshottian mode of thinking about politics, a conserving tendency, a disposition to be skeptical about utopian hopes and plans, regular appeals to Chesterton’s Fence. So perhaps it’s not surprising that for a long time conservative outlets were very hospitable to my writing. And perhaps it’s also not surprising that as Conservatism Inc. has taken hold I have had to find other homes for my work, work which at one time might have been seen as an expression of the conservative temperament but now … not so much. Because the “conservative disposition” isn’t what it used to be: now it’s primarily a “deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.”

June 12, 2019

after the platforms

Ross Douthat:

Yes, it’s understandable for conservatives to worry that if Silicon Valley censors the likes of Molyneux, it will end up censoring them. It’s sensible for them to join parts in the left in worrying about the concentrated power over information that the stewards of social-media platforms enjoy. And it’s necessary for them to recognize that the influence of redpillers and white-identitarians reflects their own failure, across the decades of movement-conservative institution building, to create something that seems more compelling to fugitives from liberalism than the Spirit of the Reddit Thread.

With all that said, though, a humane conservatism should still be able to thrive in a world where white nationalists have trouble monetizing their extremism, in which YouTube algorithms are built to maximize something other than addiction.

I’m not sure what Ross means in the last sentence I’ve quoted by “should.” Does he mean that “humane conservatism” is likely to thrive, or that if the system is fair it ought to be able to do so? I doubt the first and doubt the conditional of the second.

Here’s the situation as I see it. First, as Alexis Madrigal has recently written, the big social media companies will from now on find it less likely to take refuge in the claim that they are “merely platforms”:

These companies are continuing to make their platform arguments, but every day brings more conflicts that they seem unprepared to resolve. The platform defense used to shut down the why questions: Why should YouTube host conspiracy content? Why should Facebook host provably false information? Facebook, YouTube, and their kin keep trying to answer, We’re platforms! But activists and legislators are now saying, So what? “I think they have proven — by not taking down something they know is false — that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election,” Nancy Pelosi said in the wake of the altered-video fracas.

If you can’t plead platform neutrality, what do you do? Well, these companies being what they are, they’ll write algorithms to try to filter content. But the algorithms will often fail — after all, they can’t tell the difference between sites that promote hatred and sites that seek to combat it.

Where does that leave you? As Will Oremus points out, it leaves you with mob rule:

What should be clear to both sides, by now, is the extent to which these massive corporations are making up the rules of online speech as they go along. In the absence of any independent standards or accountability, public opinion has become an essential part of the process by which their moderation policies evolve.

Sure, online platforms have policies and terms of service that run thousands of words, which they enforce on a mass scale via software and a bureaucratic review process. But those rules have been stitched together piecemeal and ad hoc over the years to serve the companies’ own needs — which is why they tend to collapse as soon as a high-profile controversy subjects them to public scrutiny. Caving to pressure is a bad look, but it’s an inevitable feature of a system with policies that weren’t designed to withstand pressure in the first place.

Whatever should happen to humane conservatism on the internet, I don’t know what will, but as a person who is somewhat conservative and who would like to be humane, I wish I knew. In light of all the above, one thing seems nearly certain to me: If I were on a major social media service and a vocal group of that site’s users started calling me homophobic or transphobic or a white supremacist and demanded that I be banned, I would be banned.

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