Category Archive

Perhaps, but having a trio of “philosopher-bloggers” talk about the fortunes and future of the conservative intellectual movement is not blogging.  I will be at CPAC for an ISI-sponsored Friday panel from 1:00-3:00 in Congressional Room A.

P.S. It appears that the President will also be coming to CPAC on Friday.  That should be an interesting sight.

Related to the question of self-reliance are the paired concepts of self-restraint and self-indulgence.  You may remember that there was a lively debate about Crunchy Cons in the spring of 2006, and much of the argument was over patterns and types of consumption (or overconsumption, as we on the crunchy side saw it).  On one level, we were talking about an overconsumption of things, but this could be applied more narrowly to an overconsumption of food and of the unhealthiest–but frequently most convenient–kinds of food.  The debate was regularly sidetracked as we were chided for being snobbish foodies who were trying to impose our love of manchego on the masses.  We were pushing the ideal of enkrateia (I don’t think any of us used the word at the time, but this is broadly what we were talking about), and we were told that we were hypocritical busybodies, socialists-in-waiting and the like.  Overconsumption comes from disordered desire, or rather an excess of desire, and what the “crunchies” or neo-traditionalists were arguing for was moderation.  We were calling for cultivating self-restraint and constraining impulses towards gluttony.  (This in turn would tie into matters of land usage, such as how much land and how many resources are being devoted to raising livestock, and to questions of the treatment of animals in factory farming to provide the mass production of meat demanded by an overconsuming public–the kinds of questions that my green friends were putting to me years ago and which I, still in a rather unreflective libertarian phase, laughed off as unimportant.)   Accustomed to thinking of such arguments in terms of calls for government action, which we were not making, the critics presumably saw us as little better than pro-life Michael Bloombergs on a quest to eliminate transfats by edict.  They were, are, wrong.  

When Mike Huckabee started running for President (and was busily running, training for a marathon as part of his health kick), the prospect of having a weight-loss guru in the race was dispiriting for some of us, and his vague answers to health care questions indicated that he thought there was nothing wrong with the health care system that a good diet wouldn’t cure.  It has been easy to make light of Huckabee’s talk about preventive care and a national ”health crisis,” since he is usually heavy on quips and light on details, but I may be starting to see some value in what he’s talking about here.  Not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of pushing for changes in habits and making arguments that the good life entails moderation and that this must affect how we consume food.  This is not to move away from joie de vivre and festivity, which I believe are complements to a certain asceticism that a conservatism of virtue has to try to instill, but to encourage a return to proportion and limits and, above all, restraint.  The return of restraint would be a boon to conservatives in virtually all areas, whether we are talking about spending, foreign policy or conservation, but it can be applied more immediately in daily life.   

As Americans, our cultural responses to indulgence and restraint tend to veer towards extremes, and you find a generally humourless, puritanical lot crusading for various public health causes on one side and those who insist on their God-given right to kill themselves with smoke and fat if they so choose.  One area where cultural conservatives might make a valuable contribution is trying to bring these two views more into balance.  Promoting a sense of proportion, limits and restraint and encouraging the healthy enjoyment of food, and furthermore making the case that how and what a people eats is actually significant and not an irrelevant choice, could be one way that conservatives could attack a significant cause of health care expense by working to transform the culture and instill habits more in keeping with the virtues.  This is a classic example of the need to have checks imposed from within if they are not going to be imposed from without.   

Ross commented on Noah Feldman’s article on Mormonism recently, which reminded me that I had also wanted to respond to one part of it and arguments like the following:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt.

Put that way, Feldman might have a point, except that the claim of new revelation is actually the least “ridiculous” part of the story.  It is, and always has been, the content of that revelation that has drawn the most criticism, and so for the most part the majority dutifully ignores or downplays how the content of this or that religion is theologically untenable.  To do otherwise would begin us down the road to taking one set of theological claims more seriously than another, which might even (gasp!) lead us to assign different significance and measures of truth to different sets of claims.  The problem with this argument is that, for the sake of promoting toleration for minority religions, it essentially grants that every religion is just as inherently plausible as any other, which not only makes discussion of doctrine pointless, but actually impedes the possibility of religious dialogue and persuasion.  Granting this equality of religions paves the way for exactly the kind of arational sectarianism that skeptics believe is unavoidable with religion in public life.    

There is this very strange attitude about religion out there, and it is held by more than a few observant Christians as well as secular skeptics, that says that no revelation is more plausible than any other, which implies that revelation is entirely outside the realm of rational discouse and demonstration.  This is essentially fideism or a kind of neo-Barlaamism, which holds that believers should hold to their traditional faiths primarily because they are ancient–there is nothing that we can actually say rationally about a doctrine of God.  One of the reasons why this bizarre idea can gain such currency is the lack of respect people have for theology and dogma.  In our culture, if you want to dismiss someone’s position, you say that he is being dogmatic, and if you want to discredit an argument you refer to his worldview as a “theology,” preferably preceded by adjectives such as arcane. 

Such is the depth of our divorce from Christian intellectual tradition that many people do not recognise the substantive difference between an elaborately reasoned theological view and the ramblings of a science-fiction author.  Simply put, we lack discernment.  Militant atheists are at least consistent in the implications of holding such a disparaging view of revelation–for them, it is all made-up and undeserving of any respect.  Out of some misplaced sense of solidarity with other religious people against the Christopher Hitchenses and Dawkinses of the world, Christians seem to feel obliged to make general defenses of generic theism or the even more amorphous category of Religion, and woe betide the bishop who attempts, as Pope Benedict did, to illustrate the implications of radically different doctrines of God.  This then forces these Christians to argue that all these things are purely a matter of faith, where faith is defined not only as something inspired and the result of God’s grace (which it is), but also as something arational, rather than understanding that it is faith rightly understood that is the highest form of rationality.  Having conceded the high ground and having bought into a functionally extreme apophaticism, the Christian finds himself at a loss to make any argument from revelation, because he has already effectively granted that speaking kataphatically is impossible.  Trying to include everyone in a big tent of ecumenical anti-secularism eventually leads to being unable to say something about God and maintain that it is actually true, when there is nothing more fundamental to preaching and evangelising than speaking the truth about God in prayer and homilies. 

This brings me, oddly enough, to the question of evolution.  Fideistic understandings of religion and materialistic philosophies that seek to exploit evolutionary biology to their advantage enjoy a symbiotic relationship, since they both thrive on promoting mutual antagonism between reason and faith.  Tell the Christian that he must either endorse evolutionary theory or accept the Bible, and he will typically take the Bible, especially if he is not grounded in an authoritative teaching tradition that tells him that this choice is a false one.  Tell the average educated secular person that revealed religion is incompatible with scientific theory, and he may very well conclude that those who continue to adhere to revealed religion must be either ignorant, insane or up to no good.  Huckabee is someone who falls into the former category, of course, and declares himself agnostic on ”how” God works in creation, which is actually a far more honest view–and one that a majority of Americans would share–than affirming evolutionary theory because you know that it is socially unacceptable in certain circles to admit that you don’t understand or accept the theory.  As Rod has said before, evolution serves as a “cultural marker,” and it is deployed as a litmus test to see whether you belong to a certain kind of educated elite.  Ironically, the cultural bias against dogmatism and theology in religion has come around and struck science by making it permissible, even admirable, to doubt statements made with certainty.  Were it not for the tendency of many religious and secular Americans to oppose reason and faith, there would be no difficulty in affirming the truth of revelation and recognising the reasonable, albeit always provisional, nature of scientific inquiry.  Obviously, approaches to faith that prize doubt and uncertainty simply reinforce the tendency towards extreme apophaticism and fideism that make it impossible for believers and non-believers  to speak intelligibly to one another (to the extent that people working in two significantly different traditions can speak to one another). 

Sigh.  It’s enough to make you despair for your “national coalition,” also known as a “country.”  It never fails to amaze me how those who are keen to talk about the constructed nature of identity and social conventions seem to think that it is therefore somehow illegitimate to maintain identities and conventions once they have been constructed.  The key idea of constructivism is that we are the ones shaping and crafting the concepts we use, and that they supposedly do not derive from the nature of things.  If that is so, and for the sake of argument let’s say that it is, it is ultimately no more “abhorrent” in a firm, absolute sense for one group to exclude outsiders than it is for another to include them–both kinds of treatment of outsiders serve different functions, and the kind of treatment you advocate depends very much on which function you value more and which one you think you can live without.  Those who are already uninterested in the maintenance of national identity will naturally have no problem with welcoming in outsiders by the millions and tens of millions–they have made the great sacrifice of not maintaining something they didn’t value–while simultaneously declaring their greater moral sense for valuing inclusion.   

The unchosen obligations, which are still imposed on us and affect us even when we react against them by rejecting them, that the liberal wants to weaken actually serve both manifest and latent functions, and it is on account of this that they are reproduced.  Failing to maintain and reproduce them does actually lead to social disorder, which the liberal desperately tries to normalise and affirm as just a “different” kind of social organisation.  The vast majority of human experience tells us that there is something in human nature that compels us to cultivate in-group solidarity, construct identities in opposition to other groups of people and structure relatively restrictive social rules to organise our group.  Any of these things can be taken to extremes, and they can also be badly neglected.  In the current age of neglect, “society” continues to trudge on in one form or another, but the social costs stemming from neglecting those old unchosen obligations have badly damaged our capacity for creating social capital.   

Excesses in either direction will undermine human flourishing.  Of course, confusion sets in at the beginning when you begin making liberty the baseline of judging whether or not something is desirable.  Mr. Wilkinson has successfully shown once again that he hates boundary maintenance–both of the physical and the metaphorical kind–and that conservatives favour it, which is why he isn’t a conservative.  Very illuminating.   

At APSA, Prof. Patrick Deneen had a critique of Prof. Dienstag’s Pessimism, which I have discussed many times before, and of philosophical pessimism itself.   He said:

Memory and hope, Christopher Lasch argued – and not pessimism – are the proper antidotes to optimism.

I agree with this, or at least I almost agree.  Pessimism seems to me to be the antidote to the poison of optimism, and then memory and hope function as the proper nourishment that human nature needs to flourish.  Even if undiluted pessimism is a poison of its own, and I might grant that it is in its most extreme despair of any meaning in life, St. John of Damascus said of his heresiological work that it is necessary to make use of poisons to create antidotes. 

I have said many times that the virtue of hope has nothing to do with optimism, and Christians who routinely mistake hope for optimism are very badly confused about what hope is and what they are supposed to be hoping for in this life.  Indeed, to hope for salvation in Christ is almost the opposite of the optimist’s view.  The optimist says, “I will be saved, and I can save myself.”  The Christian says, “I may yet be saved, if it be God’s will.”  Hope and optimism are in fact antithetical, which reinforces my sense that optimism is as vicious as hope is virtuous.  Optimism is as demonic as hope is divine.

My own view is that the pessimists are as close to being right as secular philosophers are likely to be, but that in their denial even of the hope of salvation and their denial of all meaning they have missed the heart of why they are right about so many of their other observations.  They have seen clearly through the vanity of this world and the promises of those who would seek to realise some kind of salvation here below, and we would all be better off if there were more people inclined to see these promises as the hollow deceptions that they are.  However, the only possible pessimism that escapes the ultimate emptiness of this secular pessimism (the pessimists would see it not as emptiness, but as possibility) is a Christian pessimism that understands that redemption is still possible, but it is not one that can be fulfilled in this world.

James has a very interesting and valuable post on optimism.  We agree part of the way, in that we both seem sure that optimism is undesirable, misleading and potentially dangerous.  James goes on to say:

Optimism, in fact, is an attitude, an emotional orientation, a psychological posture, a feeling — a meta-feeling, even, a feeling about feelings, the feeling that we should  feel as if failure is impossible.

I agree that there is such an attitude, or orientation, or posture, or feeling, but I would say that this attitude is the product of an optimistic worldview, rather than the substance of optimism itself.  Just as I insist that we all recognise that pessimism is more than, and indeed quite different from, feeling gloomy and misanthropic, it is important that we understand optimism as a kind of philosophical thought.  Optimism of the kind I am describing, and which I reject utterly, is not simply unsettling cheerfulness and irrepressible giddiness, bad as these may be, but a set of assumptions about the world, human nature and the direction (or non-direction) of history.      

One of my first forays against dread optimism was early last year, when I came across this outstanding Salisbury quote in a Gimson article in The Spectator.  Lord Salisbury said:

The optimist view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill, and rather than not find it, will make two hardships to cure one. If all equitable remedies have failed, its votaries take it as proved without argument that the one-sided remedies, which alone are left, must needs succeed. But is not the other view barely possible? Is it not just conceivable that there is no remedy that we can apply for the Irish hatred of ourselves? …May it not, on the contrary, be our incessant doctoring and meddling, awaking the passions now of this party, now of that, raising at every step a fresh crop of resentments by the side of the old growth, that puts off the day when these feelings will decay quietly away and be forgotten?

Optimism is not simply an attitude or a feeling, but an assumption that all problems, in the end, have solutions and that we can know what they are and put them into effect.  It is an assumption that no consequences are final, there is always another day to set things right, that there is always a second chance and that history is moving towards something that we can discern and, even more remarkably, we may be able to accelerate progress towards that end.  The optimist says, “It is never too late,” while the pessimist knows that people are late and they miss what they are seeking, or something else interferes and prevents you from reaching the goal.  Pessimism recognises certain limitations of finite man that do not change; optimism sees human limits as continually expanding and being redefined.  This is not simply an attitude, but a belief about the structure of reality and the nature of history.  Anyone who accepts the reality of the radical contingency of historical change cannot think that history is going in any particular direction.  Anyone who briefly scans the annals of mankind cannot conclude that human reason has the capacity to actually “solve” fundamental problems of our condition, yet this is what an optimist, be he liberal or Marxist or something else, must believe.  According to Dienstag:

Pessimism, to Schopenhauer, means not that our civilization or morality are declining, but rather that human beings are fated to endure a life freighted with problems that are fundamentally unmeliorable.

Optimism is the view that there are ultimately no problems that are unmeliorable (optimists may make a concession with respect to death, but only very grudgingly).  Rather than being filled with burdens to be endured, life may be improved virtually without end in the optimist’s view.  This is far more, and far worse, than endless self-delusion based on excessive cheer and confidence.  It is the assumption that there is good reason to be so cheerful and confident about the future.

In the end, optimism as a philosophical view is an acceptance of the reality of progress.  Here is Dienstag on the struggle between the idea of progress and pessimism:

Finally, the dismissal of pessimism reflects the continuing grip that ideas of progress retain on contemporary consciousness.  Though supposedly slain many times (Lewis Mumford called it the “deadest of dead ideas” in 1932), this beast continues to rise from the ashes for the simple reason that, first, it helps us to make sense of the linear time of our calendar and, second, there is no easy substitute for it.  However much it may be denied in principle, in practice the idea of progress is difficult to displace.  And from that perspective, pessimism is especially bewildering…..Pessimism is a substitute for progress, but it is not a painless one.  In suggesting that we look at time and history differently, it asks us to alter radically our opinion of ourselves and of what we can expect from politics [bold mine-DL].  It does not simply tell us to expect less.  It tells us, in fact, to expect nothing.  This posture, I argue below, is not impossible and not suicidal.  It is neither skeptical (knowing nothing) nor nihilistic (wanting nothing).  It is a distinct account of the human condition that has developed in the shadow of progress–alongside it, as it were–with its own political stance.       

Popper more than thumped the table.  He used propaganda techniques to caricature Hegel.  He twisted his ideals into their opposite, attributing to him false motives, denounced him as pathological.  On all major isues dividing Popper and Hegel, I stand with Popper.  Hegel’s theodicy, his premature reconciliation of liberty and power, favored the status quo and represented a long and dangerous German intellectual tradition.  All the same, he was neither totalitarian nor nationalist and deserved a serious critique, not a caricature.  Popper’s attack remains a showpiece of intolerance and narrow-mindedness.  Writing in the midst of a war that would decide civilization’s fate, Popper understandably “did not mince words,” but this should have reinforced, not waived, critical rationalist maxims.  Resorting to manipulation to delegitimize Hegel, Popper betrayed critical rationalism. ~Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945

This biographer is extremely sympathetic to Popper, but he does not make excuses for him when Popper goes off the deep end in his arguments against those whom he regarded as the fonts of totalitarianism.  One need not embrace Hegel to recognise that he is not what Popper made him out to be.

One more time, from the introduction of Elements of the Philosophy of Right:

For Hegel,as for Mill, the function of representative institutions is not to govern, but to advise those who govern, and to determine who it is that governs.  Hegel expects deputies to the Estates to be ordinary citizens, not professional politicians.  One evident reason for this is that he wants the Estates to be close to the people, and to represent its true sentiments; another reason (unstated, but quite evident) is that he does not want the Estates to be politically strong enough to challenge the power of the professionals who actually govern.  But he does not intend the Estates to be powerless either.  In his lectures, Hegel describes a multi-party system in the Estates, and he insists that the government’s ministry must always represent the ‘majority party’; when it ceases to do so, he says, it must resign and a new ministry, representing the majority of the Estates, must take its place….This idea takes the Hegelian constitutional monarchy most of the way toward presently existing parliamentary systems with a nominal hereditary monarch (as in Britain, Holland and Sweden).

And we all know about iron hand of totalitarian terror that Queen Beatrix has.

Later, there is a vitally important point: “Hegel distinguishes between the ‘political state proper’ from the state in the broadest sense, the community as a whole with all its institutions….He regards the state in the latter sense as the individual’s final end [italics mine-DL].”  In other words, as far as a political telos is concerned, Hegel is arguing for a position that is substantially similar to that of Aristotle: the citizen’s end is realised in and through the life of the political community, because man is a political animal and this end is appropriate to his nature.  It is our latter-day, impoverished understanding of what a political community fully means that causes many to mistake the importance these philosophers give to this broader political community for a theoretical endorsement of unlimited governmental power.  A polity is more than its government (thank God!), and there are many philosophers whose political thought will make no sense if we do not keep this distinction in mind.  We may or may not find this account of political life satisfactory, but we are not free to describe it as totalitarian or proto-totalitarian.  It is, by definition, exactly not that, because it assumes that there is more to the political community than the all-encompassing government and party machine.

Speaking of Hegel’s legacy, the editor goes on:

This is the case with traditional images of Hegel as reactionary, absolutist, totalitarian.  Taken literally, of course, these images have been long discredited [italics mine-DL].  Yet in our liberal culture they nevertheless possess a kind of symbolic truth, because they represent this culture’s self-doubts projected with righteous venom into its iconography of the enemy.  Hegel is especially unappealing to that dogmatic kind of liberal who judges past social and political thinkers by the degree to which (it has been decided beforehand) all people of good will must share.  The value of Hegel’s social thought will be better appreciated by those who are willing to question received views, and take a deeper look at the philosophical problems of modern life [bold mine-DL]. 

It is especially rich that defenders of the Popperian caricature believe that they are the ones engaged in the rigorous independent thinking and resistance to “official” interpretations.  The last fifty years of Hegel scholarship, from what I understand, have been filled with the debunking of myths woven by those in thrall to the politically correct interpretations of their own time.  Incidentally, the disparagement and dismissal of many early American heroes on account of their insufficiently enlightened attitudes come from this same instinct to measure past thinkers against present standards and condemn them when they (inevitably) fail to measure up. 

Popper’s view of Hegel was the ideologically-driven modern liberal view of the man for decades, and its perpetuation today is simply a continuation of something not much better than propaganda, which in the Anglo-American world was already more than a little coloured by a dislike for things German.  Popper had a very good argument to make against 20th century historicists who used language about the direction of history–language that everyone knows I abhor, by the way–to justify appalling crimes against their fellow men.  Popper was writing a polemic against totalitarians of his own time, and he was right to do this.  Where he went awry was to try to find roots for the woes of the 20th century in Hegel’s actual thought, among other places, rather than in the ideologically filtered abuses of it. 

If a Nazi likes and promotes Wagner, whatever else you might rightly say about Wagner’s attitudes, that does not make Wagner a proto-Nazi or his music proto-Nazi music.  Obviously.  I suppose I am especially annoyed by the Hegel-bashing tradition because it is just one more aspect of the old, wearisome obsession to read all of modern German thought and history as one big prelude to the Nazis (the ultimate example of this was, naturally, on The History Channel, where a program actually stated that if the Romans had not been ambushed in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9, Hitler would never have come to power!), as if we could not find many more relevant proximate sources specific to the post-unification and post-WWI scene.  It is an attempt at a more sophisticated Goldhagenism, but the idea is the same.  It is itself a kind of essentialism–the sort of thing Popper rightly warned against–inasmuch as it seeks to find something particularly twisted in German culture to explain what happened later, but in the process succeeds in twisting everything to fit the preconceived pattern of some perverse Teutonic state-worship (to which we Anglo-Americans are, of course, immune).  This is a comforting myth that we tell ourselves, as it persuades us that we are somehow inherently less prone to the political and moral insanity of totalitarianism–that sort of thing only happens to other people.  How some parts of the Anglo-American world would love to be able to discredit a culture that did more to create Western civilisation than almost any other, and how better to do this than to smear the philosophical and artistic giants of the German past with the taint of somehow contributing to the rise of Hitler?  Just consider the stupidity of this: nationalists try to appropriate the cultural achievements of their countrymen over the centuries, regardless of whether the creators of the appropriated works would have anything to do with such people, and then it is taken by later observers as proof of their perfidy that some chauvinists have sullied their name by speaking it with admiration.    

At bottom, reading totalitarianism into Hegel’s thought is the worst sort of “precursorism” (interpreting earlier works in the light of what came later, rather than according to their own time and proper meaning) and an old standby of bad teleological historical narrative, those banes of real intellectual history, in which an idea that seems as if it could have led to something that happened later is taken as an inspiration for these later events.  Then there is the old habit of “so-and-so interpreted this thinker this way, therefore the thinker must mean what so-and-so says.”  Two things would have to be demonstrated for this to be a worthwhile point: the person citing the thinker would need to have shown that he understood what the original thinker meant, and this person would have to avoid making interpretations that flatly contradict what the thinker said.  Failure on either point makes the later “follower” of the thinker a bad student and a poor representative of the man’s thought. 

Nietzsche scholars are constantly battling against similar popular misrepresentations, as have scholars of Maistre (who was an important philosopher of science as well as a political thinker) and Bolingbroke, among others.  It makes no sense why a certain batch of interpretations or the tradition derived from them should be given priority if they do not do their subject justice.  If Byzantinists did that, no one would have bothered to say anything after Gibbon, and certainly not after Bury and Ostrogorsky.  Obviously, some interpretive battles will go on forever, but as more scholars dig into the material there will be more interpretations firmly established by the persuasiveness of the arguments and their support in the evidence.  Once well-supported and serious arguments have been made, however, it is not sufficient to go back to the old interpretation, unaltered, and declare that most people who have given the matter much thought don’t know what they’re talking about.     

From the introduction of Elements of the Philosophy of Right (pp. ix):

There were always those, however, who insisted that Hegel was fundamentally a theorist of the modern constitutional state, emphasizing in the state most of the same features which win the approval of Hegel’s liberal critics.  This was always the position of the Hegelian ‘centre’, including Hegel’s own students and most direct nineteenth-century followers [bold mine-DL].  This more sympathetic tradition in Hegel scholarship has reasserted itself decisively since the middle of the century, to such an extent that there is now a virtual consensus [bold mine-DL] among knowledgeable scholars that the earlier images of Hegel, as philosopher of the reactionary Prussian restoration and forerunner of modern totalitarianism, are simply wrong [bold mine-DL], whether they are viewed as accounts of Hegel’s attitude towards Prussian politics or as broader philosophical interpretations of his theory of state [bold mine-DL].

For what it’s worth, here’s another argument that Hegel was not a totalitarian. 

The point in all of this is to make clear that the popular, Popperian reading of Hegel as proto-totalitarian is wrong.  It is legitimate and appropriate to point this out when others repeat such a claim about Hegel.  For the time being, this is the last thing that I will say about this ridiculous controversy. 

While Hegel’s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate [bold mine-DL] who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition [bold mine-DL]. ~From the description of Renato Cristi’s Hegel on Freedom and Authority

Cristi is also author of “Hegel’s Conservative Liberalism”.  I cite scholarship on this question, since I assume that people who spend their lives studying Hegel might know a thing or two I don’t.  That is why scholars, like bloggers, make citations in the first place–to recognise that there are subjects on which others are greater authorities. 

Karl Popper, interesting, brilliant and fine man that he was, was not a Hegel scholar and was retrojecting onto Hegel the sort of exaltation of the state that he rightly found so terrifying in his own time.  He was not alone in this, but he was wrong to do this.  In mid-20th century, support for any kind of monarchy was likely to throw your credentials as a political liberal into doubt.  Because a constitutional monarchist is, almost by definition, some kind of liberal, as only a liberal or Whig would dare to suggest that the monarch be subject to the limits of a constitution (especially a written constitution), the only thing one might say about my description of Hegel is that it was a bit redundant. Pretty much all constitutional monarchists were liberals (in the 19th century, European sense), though not all liberals were constitutional monarchists.  It is possible to find in 19th century liberalism evidence of a dangerous centralising and “rationalising” tendency (demonstrated by Austrian liberals, Red Republicans and Garibaldian revolutionaries), and it is possible to criticise 19th century liberals for their close attachment to nationalism.  What you cannot do is deny that people who were plainly political liberals were, indeed, political liberals. 

Of course, when I referred to Hegel as a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist,” a statement that is actually true whether or not some people want to accept it, I was referring to the liberalism of his day.  What started all of this was my criticism of the lumping in of Hegel into a discussion of so-called “liberal fascism,” since Hegel was neither a modern liberal nor was he a proto-fascist. 

What is strange about all of this is that Hegel’s 19th century liberalism does not actually make him look that good to me.  However, there is still a big difference between sympathising with the principles of 1789 and believing in a totalising, all-intrusive state.  That said, Hegel’s sympathy for the principles of 1789 ought to make him bad enough for traditional conservatives today that no one should need to resort to trying to pin later totalitarian ideas on him.  If you want to make the argument that 1789 led inexorably to 1917 and 1933, that would be an argument for why being a 19th century liberal is not necessarily the most desirable thing to have been.  However, for good or ill, that is what Hegel was.

Update: It is also worth noting that Hegel, while he did approve of the principles of 1789, was not an uncritical admirer of the Revolution.  Similarly, it is possible for Hegel to be a liberal without being uncritically accepting of all elements in natural rights-based liberalism.  He also had some criticism for the Enlightenment.  The more I am made to think about it, “moderately liberal” sounds more accurate all the time.

Sometimes blogging is a really tiresome pastime.  I recently wrote in a recent post that Hegel was a “moderately liberal constitutional monarchist,” which has the virtue of being more or less accurate.  For instance, consider the following:

Hegel stresses the need to recognize that the realities of the modern state necessitate a strong public authority along with a populace that is free and unregimented [bold mine-DL]. The principle of government in the modern world is constitutional monarchy [bold mine-DL], the potentialities of which can be seen in Austria and Prussia.

There are all sorts of responses to Hegel’s position, and it might be interesting to pick up our copies of Philosophy of Right and sort through his arguments.  Denying that he held such a position, when it is the beginning of most discussions of Hegel’s political philosophy, seems to me to be an unsatisfactory response.  Repeating some caricature of Hegel’s position that you could have picked up in The Open Society And Its Enemies and pretending that this is the appropriate understanding of Hegel’s politics are not the methods likely to persuade anyone of Hegel’s terrible totalitarianism.

Must we arrive at something anti-liberal when we build up from a metaphysical proposition? ~Joseph Bottum

I suppose the postmodernists belong somewhere in the Counter-Enlightenment fold—although whether on the left or the right, philosophically, is difficult to say. ~Joseph Bottum

It is difficult, perhaps, because they aren’t Counter-Enlightenment people at all, but post-Enlightenment who have nothing in common with the Counter-Enlightenment except perhaps skepticism about the importance of the self and the power of reason. 

Even free will, however, is only one more suggestive part of death’s relation to politics. Think of all this in terms of the violence praised by a surprisingly large range of modern political theories. Why does death manifest itself—a sudden, miraculous, culture-forming power—whenever a thinker turns against the Enlightenment? What logic compels political philosophers, from the most radical right to the most radical left, to embrace murder when they renounce the poverty and weightlessness of modern culture? And why does literature show us again and again characters who imagine they can resolve the anxieties of modernity by drenching it in blood? ~Joseph Bottum

In my biased estimation, it occurs to me that a great many people were very enthusiastic about violence and killing and sacrificing human lives for the sake of goals inspired by the thought of the Enlightenment and its derivatives.  Something about “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” comes to mind.  Mr. Bottum’s question about political philosophers and murder gives the impression that there have been a great many anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment people openly calling for murder, but he does not give any examples and seems to take a number of things for granted that may not be true at all.  For instance, I suspect that he thinks fascism is opposed to the Enlightenment, when it is one of the latter’s outgrowths; he probably thinks that the liberal belief in the perfectibility of man is significantly different from the fascist and communist efforts to create a “new man.”  I am not sure that he assumes these things, but that is what I would have to guess.  His argument here is unclear, but there seems to be no other way for him to make his claim about philosophers and murder hold up unless he attributes an anti-Enlightenment position to the moral insanity of various sympathisers with what Niemeyer called ’total critique’.  Read the rest of this entry »

Later in this essay, I take up what may be the largest piece—the fact that, at a very abstract level of logic, freedom of the will is closely tied to a world with death in it: If nothing really dies, then we have no freedom of choice; if we lack significant freedom of choice, then death will prove unreal. ~Joseph Bottum

Via Ross

This sounds like pretty heady stuff, and at first it gives you the impression that this is a deep and powerful claim about the nature of existence.  Then you realise that it is utterly and in all ways wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Joshua Cohen and Brink Lindsey rehash liberaltarianism.  Try to stay awake, if you can.  If you’re still awake, Lindsey talks about his book. 

So I haven’t said anything since my return about my excursion to Charlottesville and the ISI conference I attended there.  Fear not–I will have some more remarks before too long.  Until my pen ran out of ink, I was taking fairly detailed notes on each talk, so I hope to be able to sketch out at least a couple of the ones that I found most striking.  Prof. Deneen’s talk was one of these, since it seemed on first hearing to agree with the thrust of something I had written a little over a year ago.  Amusingly, this was the piece that dragged me into the rather tiresome skirmishes with the West Coast Straussians during the Crunchy Wars, which was then followed by an even more tiresome argument with those people after I mentioned that Claes Ryn had figuratively given the Jaffa-style Straussian reading of “the Founding” a good swift kick to the ribs in a speech at last year’s Philadelphia Society meeting. 

When Prof. Deneen remarked in his talk, as I remember it, “Sometimes, I think I am the only Straussian left,” I thought to myself: “If only that were true!”  But, no, that’s not quite fair, and that wasn’t the whole of my reaction.  I later thought: “If this is real Straussianism, it isn’t anything like what those people at Claremont have said that it is and it isn’t that bad after all.”  How refreshing!  The delight of apparently finding a Straussian using Strauss to argue for a position that I, non-Straussian that I am, had previously made from an entirely different perspective and one that the self-appointed successors of Strauss had vehemently attacked was considerable.  

Present at the Charlottesville conference were some of my TAC/Chronicles colleagues and partners in blogging thought crime, Dan McCarthy (who says he disagrees with a “great deal” in the talk) and Clark Stooksbury, as well as the fun, witty James Poulos, IMP, those champions of prairie populism and prairie populists, Caleb Stegall and Jeff Taylor, plus many, many more.  I had a very good time at the conference, and I believe the talks were well worth the trip (which unfortunately involved getting stuck in the Philadelphia airport for eight hours thanks to US Airways, whose motto ought to be, “Just try to fly with us if you dare”). 

While you’re waiting for my remarks on the conference talks, I will point you to another source for your edification and entertainment: Prof. Deneen of Georgetown has the beginnings of his remarks that he delivered at the conference up on his blog (via Dan McCarthy). 

Update: Prof. Deneen posts the rest of the talk here.

Andrew Sullivan, the vicar of doubt, is debating Sam Harris, ueber-atheist, in a blogalogue.  For me, this is like watching the Raiders play the Cowboys: the only thing to do is simply root for injuries and mistakes. 

Andrew Sullivan has another one of his tiresome “Vive La Resistance” posts, this time (indirectly) citing Ms. Mac Donald’s interview with Razib when she is at her most petulant.  For her part, like Sullivan, Ms. Mac Donald sometimes likes to target a faceless “them” who manage to embody every flaw that she perceives in religious conservatives.  First, here’s Mac Donald:

In the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?

But no one assumes “conservative religious unanimity.”  Just as Sullivan fabricates his enemy, the “fundamentalists,” to match his preoccupations, Ms. Mac Donald imagines that there is such a thing as an “assumption of conservative religious unanimity,” which helps her defend the position that she is defending ”reason and realism” against superstitious yobs.  In a spirit similar to that Sullivan’s own incensed attack on “fundamentalism” and his claim that this mythical ”fundamentalism” is taking over and displacing American conservatism (which is far more ludicrous than Ms. Mac Donald’s more modest critiques), Ms. Mac Donald gives the impression that she is doggedly fighting against the overwhelming religiosity of modern conservatism.  As I have argued earlier today, this overwhelming religiosity is not nearly as great as she makes it out to be. 

I should say that if conservatism were governed by the truths of Christianity and leavened by the wisdom of the Fathers, I think it would generally be all to the benefit of conservatism.  The alternatives have always been an acquiescence in false Enlightenment liberal understandings of human nature and society or an acceptance of the Christian understanding that man is fallen (but capable of virtue) and in need of good order and the conservative wisdom that social organisation arises from inherited customs and structures and not from contract or consent.  When conservatives belittle the Enlightenment, it is normally the social and political theories of the more radical French thinkers that they are targeting, but they are in any case objecting for the most part to false understandings of the origin of society, how polities arise and function and what the rightful sources of legitimacy and authority are.  They object to a distorted understanding of the human person and a tendency of many Enlightenment thinkers to be hostile to rooted, traditional society and its numerous institutions and customs.  They do not reject scientific method, nor do they even necessarily hold an empiricist epistemology in low esteem.  The suggestion that they reject “empiricism” entirely, and the implication that most conservatives form a mass of hidebound ignoramuses who would abandon all scientific advances are both false.  

The strangest part of this charge is the connection between the Enlightenment and, for example, “the conquest of cholera,” since the major thinkers of the Enlightenment did not cure cholera and were not even close to understanding vaccination or many of the principles of public sanitation and hygiene that helped contain outbreaks.  There were still cholera epidemics in the 19th century, many of them in the filthy, overcrowded cities of the industrial era brought to us by technological progress.  In any case, what good, one might ask, did Voltaire’s contempt for Christianity do for people dying of cholera?  That is the part of the Enlightenment that we take pots shot at most of the time, so perhaps it is no wonder that Ms. Mac Donald defends it, but what does that have to do the advance of medical and technological sciences?  Is there a new psychosomatic cure for disease achieved not through prayer, but through mocking God?  Ms. Mac Donald refers to “empiricism,” whence come all these astounding fruits.  Now suppose that we find Leibniz’s “innate ideas” more compelling and more consistent with modern neuroscience than Locke’s tabula rasa?  Do we at least get credit for not rejecting Leibniz’s differential calculus?   

Ms. Mac Donald says that she finds it “depressing” that “every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment.”  But this is simply untrue.  No major conservative magazine “cheers on creationism” as such, much less do they do so “reflexively.”  I have yet to encounter a serious conservative writer or scholar who accepts the Young Earth thesis.  These people do not exist.  There are conservative people writing online who believe this, and there are even academics who believe it, but those aren’t the people Ms. Mac Donald was referring to. 

On ID, National Review has no formal position, and they certainly don’t “cheer” on creationism.  With respect to ID, they have entertained arguments from both sides, but that is hardly “cheering” anything on.  At least one of their more prominent contributors in John Derbyshire has made it his business to basically single-handedly crush Intelligent Design’s pretensions to being science.  It was not a difficult task, and he succeeded quite well.  I am as much of a Counter-Enlightenment man today as you are likely to find under the age of 30, and I have ridiculed ID’s claims to being science on several occasions.  That’s because it isn’t science.  Amusingly, two of the main proponents of this intellectual swindle are none other than the grand old man of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, and the grand dame Gertrude Himmelfarb, as Derbyshire noted last year.  As Derbyshire observed, their boosting of ID as science is entirely cynical and aimed at placating some religious conservatives.  That is hardly evidence of galloping religiosity in “every organ of conservative opinion.”  

I should note that I do not ridicule the possibility of understanding some of the claims of ID as a legitimate philosophical view on the orderliness of the universe and the implications this has for the existence of God, but that is not what ID proponents want when they push for recognition of their “theory.”  ID advocates are people who accept everything about the theory of evolution except the mythology woven around it; in place of that mythology, they would like to posit a different story, equally unproven and unproveable, for perhaps well-intentioned reasons that end up being nonetheless rather silly.  But Ms. Mac Donald might have more in common with ID proponents than she thinks, though, since they, too, enjoy playing the wounded, oppressed victim fighting against a hostile and arrogant establishment. 

As for taking pot shots at the Enlightenment, there isn’t that much of that going around these days.  More’s the pity.  I am fairly sure that I have made myself obnoxious to many movement conservatives because I go out of my way to disparage and ridicule certain assumptions of Locke and some of the more high-flown claims of the Declaration of Independence.  I take snide pot shots at the Enlightenment, but I never cheer on creationism and ID.  I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Do I start by pretending that carbon dating doesn’t exist, or do I start by pretending that saying, “God did it” serves as an acceptable hypothesis?  Neither does my blog constitute much of an “organ of conservative opinion,” though I suppose it is a small one of sorts.  

Anyway, lately it has not been the case that conservatives have been too hard on the Enlightenment–many have rather become its latter-day cheerleaders as a sort of cultural one-upsmanship vis-a-vis Islam.  The Weekly Standard has not, to my knowledge, ever made a snide remark about the Enlightenment.  If they have, it would have to have been rare or fairly mild.  What about American Spectator?  We could inquire, but I am fairly confident that the only place where you might conceivably find respectful consideration of creation science is in a publication like World, and I’m probably not being fair to them when I say that.  Did American Conservative have a big “Yes, The Earth Is Only 4,004 Years Old” editorial and I missed it?  Of course not. 

This is because it is entirely possible to accept that God created everything without having to insist upon the absolute literal interpretation of every number (many of which are clearly symbolic in any case) in the Bible.  It is also possible to accept that God created all living things while also acknowledging that evolution is a plausible explanation for how living beings change over time.  It is possible to despise Voltaire as an impious fool and loathe Locke as a treacherous stockjobbing mountebank and to view their ideas with disdain without insisting that we live in caves and eat raw meat while dying of the plague.

“Red Tory” was never a well-defined term, and it never described a particularly influential trend in our political life. It has come to mean the opposite of what Grant or Taylor intended. Today it is commonly used to refer to someone who has no trouble either with the global market or Trudeau’s attempted erasure of traditional English Canada, someone pleased both with Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Mulroney’s free trade agreements, a libertarian lite. Crombie fits in with this more contemporary meaning of red Tory, but there is little evidence that he (or Stanfield) ever wanted to take some doomed Grantian stand on behalf of “our own” against the twin evils of corporate capitalism and post-ethnic post-Christian “rights-talk” liberalism. ~Pithlord

For the sake of clarity, let me say first that when I use the term Red Tory, I am always using it as it related to George Grant’s views. 

The “doomed Grantian stand” doesn’t sound so bad to me, but then I think everyone already knew that.  If there are two points where I think paleoconservatives diverge most from the present “movement” (or rather, where they diverge from us!) it is in our critical and often hostile view of the negative effects corporations have on real communities and our tendency to roll our eyes when people start talking about “rights.”  In the latter case, this is not because we think that secure protections against government abuse are a bad idea (sometimes it feels as if we are among the last conservatives who think they are a good idea!), but because, inter alia, rights-talk encourages the growth of state power and the breakdown of social bonds.  It may not exactly cause either of these things, but it certainly doesn’t help combat them.  Perhaps I am only speaking for myself on these points, but all I can say is that when I read George Grant I find that I am usually nodding in agreement with everything I read.  There must be something to ideas that seem so very sensible, and if they have some truth in them they cannot ever be entirely doomed. 

So I don’t know that the Grantian stand is necessarily all that doomed of a stand to take.  Someone clever said something about there being no such thing as lost causes, and I am inclined to agree.  Is a Grantian stand an insanely unpopular position to take on the American right nowadays?  You better believe it, and it would have been pretty unpopular 50 years ago, too.  Is it necessarily and certainly doomed because of that?  I am less sure.

Conservatives should remind themselves that they do not live by politics alone. Conservatism is a way of life, of which electoral politics is only a part and not the whole. ~Lee Edwards

If conservatism is to be relevant again its adherents must give up their perks as Washington insiders, or stop listening to those who won’t. They must demand an end to corporate-welfare policies that hide behind claims of “privacy” and “free markets.” They must reject the claim that “big government is here to stay” and insist that Washington cede back to the states and localities the power to control their own lives — from what their towns look like, to what can be done in the local public square.

Conservatism’s roots do not lie in facile slogans about natural rights and free markets — let alone angry, dismissive rhetoric that casts aside the poor and treats rich people as above the law. They lie in our attachment to families, churches, towns, and small businesses. It’s time to remember who we are and who [sic] we should be defending. ~Bruce Frohnen

These are very good points from both.  To which I would add the following question: if you aren’t defending a way of life and a vision of order as a conservative, what exactly are you defending?

After all, it’s nice to think that your particular political ideology isn’t just a good way of running government, but also a good way of being a person. ~Peter Suderman

Each time I read over Peter’s post, the bit about ideology always brings me up short.  On why preserving a way of life focused on natural loyalties and guided by a spirit that values restraint, prescription and prudence, among other things, is not an ideology, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  It has long seemed to me that ideology is that sort of abstract commitment to a proposition or theory that one makes that has little or no relevance to how you live.  Being a good liberal involves accepting a number of rather dubious claims about the nature of man and society and setting policy accordingly.  Allegedly, what you do in your own, “private” life is no concern to anybody.  Likewise, being a good communist or fascist ideologue has everything to do with toeing party lines and supporting the right kinds of policies.  Living ethically is neither here nor there, except insofar as it comes into conflict with policy.  One of the most disappointing parts of Austin Bramwell’s thought-provoking article in TAC was when he lamented the lack of clear policy implications from the ideas of Voegelin, Kirk, Weaver, et al.  This made their statements of principle to be of little value for making policy.  To which I expect Voegelin would have replied, “What did you expect?  That the ground of being would endorse your tax legislation?  Do you take me for some sort of gnostic maniac?”  Except that he would have said it better than that, at greater length and with far more impressive erudition, none of which is very useful for setting policy.  This is because philosophers and men of letters, unless they are mad or extremely arrogant, do not typically presume to provide blueprints for policy (they rather assume this is what magistrates and princes do) but are very interested in questions of what is true, what is just and what is beautiful.  They are interested in reflection or the creation of literature or living the philosophical life as they tend to their own gardens.  Their example does the Karl Roves of the world no good at all, because their example suggests that most of what Rove has spent much of his life working on does not matter all that much.   

Yet ethics is the heart of real politika, the things concerning the polis or community.  One’s ethos, one’s way of life and habitual practices, defines what kind of politics a man has, and what kind of community he and his will create and maintain.  To speak slightly dismissively of ”lifestyle conservatism” is to accept that a way of life is a question of style rather than substance, when there is nothing, save revealed truth, that can seriously be considered more substantial for men than their own way of life–even though such an attachment to something so substantial is deemed “subversive” to princes and potentates and grandiose systems.  Consequently, there can hardly be anything (except for questions of revealed truth) more important than questions of how we live and why we live that way. 

Politics are the nuts and bolts of organising the life of a community or a number of communities according to a vision of order.  Power is a fact of life, as is the unequal distribution of it, and a conservative politics would try to prevent that power from doing damage to the things, people and places that you love in your natural affinities and loyalties.  It would presumably stress principles of legality, legitimacy, authority and precedent, and seek to disperse power to as many different centers as possible to prevent its corrosive and corrupting power from overtaking any single community or any number of communities together. 

You have to have politics, just as you must have the nuts and bolts to hold up your desk so that you can write your correspondence, read your books and put up pictures of friends and family, but you do not spend much or even most of your time tinkering with the structure of the desk.  It is only when the desk stands in need of serious repairs or somehow threatens the truly valuable things that you keep on it that you attend to it with much concern at all.  I think that a conservative would really pity the silly people who sit on the floor as they awkwardly try to write a letter on the ground in resistance to all kinds of desks and the even sillier people who believe that someday no desks will be needed, just as much as he would pity the people who are simply obsessed with managing the desk or with turning the desk upside down (when it becomes useless, but no matter).   

I don’t expect that everyone who calls himself a conservative will share precisely the same vision (homonoia is difficult to realise and we can sometimes substitute drab conformity for genuine oneness of mind), but I do assume that all of them, if they are serious about conservatism, will expect that such visions are central to our understanding of the world and that they encompass our pre-political loyalties and the stuff of everyday life where most of real life is lived out.  Or, rather, if they do not expect as much right now, I would very much hope that they begin to expect it very soon.  If conservatism is simply a way of organising people to squabble over scraps from the high table of government or as a means of getting “our” kind of people up to the high table, not only is there no terribly interesting future for it but I would not be all that interested in being part of such a thing in the first place.  

I am drawn back again to a powerful line in the very clever film Max, in which the title character, fictitious art dealer Max Rothmann, says to a young Hitler about art and politics, “What would you rather do?  Change the way that people see or the way they pay their taxes?”  By the end of the movie, Hitler has made his choice.  The challenge of instilling a conservative ethos (which, at its best, is not a conservative ethos as such but one that would be recognised as humane and sane by all, regardless of party or policy preferences) is much the same as the one posed by the character of Rothmann: do we concern ourselves with a way of life, an entire vision of what constitutes good order for our communities or do we focus on narrow questions of policy and politicking? 

There are undoubtedly also important questions of policy to be tackled, and I don’t belittle the hard work and imagination that this kind of work takes and the necessity of having people who do this kind of work.  However, if there is something we all need to remember before we can start undoing the damage of the last few years it is that a conservatism that places high priority on living an ethical life and shaping the life of the community to be as conducive to that sort of life is what intellectual conservatism has always aspired to present.  As problems of ethics, aesthetics, meaning and a well-ordered everyday life have taken a back seat to the struggle to dominate the greasy pole, conservatism has lost much of what used to make it genuinely interesting and what gave it such intellectual vitality. 

This is an old argument.  Frank Meyer once belittled the New Conservatives for lacking a “program.”  Don’t bother us with all this talk about virtue and community–give us something we can use!  Be more programmatic, he urged them.  This made a certain amount of sense in narrow, party-political terms.  But to become programmatic was to take a step towards the ideological and the world in which taking “positions” on “issues” became the defining activity of so many conservatives.  Again, there is a place for such politicking, but even this is not the whole of what we used to understand as the whole of politics, much less the whole of life, about which, if conservatism is a worthwhile state of mind and persuasion, conservatism ought to have something important to say.    

John F. Kennedy described himself, in a brilliant phrase, as ‘an idealist without illusions’. That is what is needed now to fight the War on Apathy at home and the War on Terror abroad. So come on, you Conservatives! Man the ideological barricades! ~Maurice Saatchi, The Spectator

JFK also said of himself that he was the Democratic nominee for President who “happened to be the Catholic.”  Not exactly an inspiring example for the ages, or have I confused him with the other JFK?  A better description might have been: “political illusionist without ideas.”  No one did ever die of apathy, but quite a few people died because of JFK’s illusions, or rather delusions. 

Now I am all for chucking out the politics of “the centre,” which is just a way of anointing the policies of the establishment with the holy chrism of moderation and reasonableness (and thus the “McCain-Lieberman Party” or, as it might now be known, the “Torture-War Party” is supposedly the embodiment of “centrist” politics!), and the application of serious ideas in politics would be a remarkable novelty.  It has only occasionally been tried, and usually with fairly bad ideas.  But here are a few problems: there are no idealists who do not suffer from illusions of one kind or another, and ideological barricades are made for, well, ideologues who ought to have nothing to do, properly speaking, with Conservatives or conservatives. 

Once a body of ideas is truncated, chopped up and reprocessed into a regime-justifying, power-seeking, lackeyish propaganda tool called ideology, it is not longer worth talking about or supporting.  The most radical–and idealistic–thing that any of us can do is not to man “ideological barricades,” but to depart from the street-fighting on the barricades between ideological camps and consider philosophical ideas in a spirit of genuine inquiry.  If there is still such a thing as a philosophical conservatism, it has been terribly ill-served by its attachment to a political movement, which requires the philosophers and orators to play the roles of apologists and panegyrists for the movement rather than as lovers of wisdom and truth.  Compromising with “the movement,” they submit themselves to it and sooner or later find themselves either corrupted by it or put on trial.  They are routinely urged to modify and change their views, told to refrain from commenting on certain kinds of things that might induce divisions in the “movement” or nudged towards a bland consensus position that promises an easy path to good connections and patronage but seems to go nowhere near the road less travelled of intellectual integrity.  This is a generic example of the kinds of effects this sort of alliance of idealists and intellectuals with political movements can have.  If we can only too readily recognise contemporary political movements in this description, that should tell us something about the state of those movements and the quality of the ideas they espouse.       

It is a mistake, however, to read Bolingbroke’s notions of natural law as if they culminate in optimistic rationalism with some implicit revolutionary call.  Burke was the first to misrepresent Bolingbroke in this way, when he suggested that Bolingbroke called upon reason to end the empire of prejudice and prescription.  This was not Bolingbroke’s intention.  He did write that men’s reason had been seduced by false appearances and that these seductions, confirmed by law and religion, had barred mankind from perfection.  But his recognition of imperfection did not lead him to assault the institutions and prejudices that barred the perfect realization of rational and natural law.  His reasons are clearly stated: “It was not in the councils of the most high, which it becomes us to adore and not to examine, that this should be so.”  God has made men such that passions, appetites, and ignorance often have greater force than reason, and thus irrational will often prevails over rational nature.  To the extent it does, it is determined by God that the state of mankind will be less than perfect; and that it will not attain the perfection of rational natural law.  In the Patriot King Bolingbroke cautions “that perfect schemes are not adapted to our imperfect state.”  He who would read Bolingbroke as an optimistic rationalist must remember Bolingbroke’s theodicy, and its central tenet, resignation before God’s incomprehensible order….It is no revolutionary rationalist who would say: “if our reasoning faculties were more perfect than they are, the order of intellectual beings would be broken unnecessarily, and man would be raised above his proper form…The reason he has is sufficient for him in the state allotted to him.” ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

Leaving aside for the moment the problems of Bolingbroke’s theology and anthropology, according to which man is not intended for perfection in God’s plan, this is an important corrective to the Burkean calumny against Bolingbroke, which is also embodied in Burke’s satirical Vindication of Natural Society, which has normally been read as a mockery of Bolingbroke’s own ideas.  However, as this passage suggests, Burke misunderstood important aspects of Bolingbroke’s ideas and seemed strangely intent on misunderstanding and opposing Bolingbroke in other areas–particularly when it came to the man’s struggle with Walpole–in ways that are rather dispiriting to discover, since it seems clear that in his criticism of abstract rights and the “projecting” spirit of the age he and Burke are of a single temperament and mind.

The inability to keep the past alive is the truly reactionary feature. -Ortega y Gasset

Here Ortega puts his finger on something that is often misunderstood.  True reverence for the past is not the same thing as wishing for its return.  To feel the past as part of oneself is to know it is alive, ever-changing in relation to the self that necessarily alters as it passes through time.  It is only those who have no real connection to the past who can view it as something unchanging, because it is something outside them. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

Indeed, it is only those disconnected from the past who believe that they can keep replaying the same episodes from the past and acting as if the past were recurring again and again (e.g., those who always think it is 1938); only those who hate the past would diminish it by imagining its continual recurrence in the present.  The reactionary loves the past as he loves a long-lost lover–he does not love her any less because she is unobtainable and gone forever, but indeed loves her all the more because she will never return.  He does not wish for her return, because her return is unnecessary for love to endure.  Though lovers perish, love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.

Pessimism is the philosophy that can never crown itself king.  To be king, to be master of every circumstance–that is what pessimism teaches as unattainable.  Whatever modesty they profess, whatever authority they disclaim, optimisitc philosophies secretly find this impossible to accept, which is why pessimism has found it necessary to appear before them as a jester. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

Optimism makes us perpetual enemies of those future moments that do not meet our expectations, which means all future moments.  It is when we expect nothing from the future that we are free to experience it as it will be, rather than as a disappointment. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

One could imagine a perspective in which nothing in particular was reliable, in this world, but which the world as a whole was comprehensible.  Such a view might mimic many of the effects of pessimism without really embracing it.  Augustine, for example, could be viewed in this way.  Indeed, many Augustinians are today called “Christian pessimists.”  They consider that this world is fundamentally disordered, that it will always contain evil, and cannot be set right, except, perhaps, by God at the Last Judgment.  Nonetheless, this terrible world can be viewed from elsewhere–its existence is part of a larger cosmology that also includes the heavenly city.  Although particular evils cannot be fathomed, the phenomenon of evil as a whole can be understood.  It shall be understood when one leaves the city of man for the city of God, either in this life, or the next.  Thus Augustine mimics (indeed foreshadows) many of the conclusions of pessimism–but always with the escape hatch of another world, where the effects of time are not felt. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

It is fair to say that I have been taking a strong interest in Dienstag’s study of pessimism because I hold such Christian pessimist premises.  In the final analysis, as far as these pessimists themselves would be concerned, I am not a thoroughgoing pessimist, because I retain the hope of salvation in Christ.  Obviously there is a certain unbridgeable difference here, but there are also many fascinating points of contact in a shared ascetic detachment and, if not exactly a contemptus mundi (pessimists would not have contempt for the world, but simply take it for what it is), an understanding that nothing lasts in this world. 

But, even if pessimists see Christian pessimists as mimics, both together share much in their recognition of the world as it is.  Even if pessimists see their Christian counterparts as retaining an “escape hatch” in God and the Kingdom not of this world, both share the conviction that man’s predicament is not soluble–at least not by human agency.  For the pessimists, man’s predicament is not to be solved at all, but accepted and borne; for the Christians, the predicament is solved only in Christ, but the structures of life in the world must still be borne all the same.  

A key difference between the pre-modern and modern man, as Chantal Delsol proposed in Icarus Fallen, is that modern man sees problems to be solved, but pre-modern man sees burdens to be borne.  The pessimist, though no less a child of modernity than the optimist, shares far more with this pre-modern mentality (and with a Christian understanding of suffering) than he does with his fellow moderns. 

As Michael Oakeshott put it: “Cervantes created a character in whom the disaster of each encounter with the world was powerless to impugn it as a self-enactment.”…The quixotic life is not thwarted by a lack of results; its value lies in the experience of freedom that it enacts.  That is why it is possible for the pessimistic ethic to persevere in the most adverse circumstances, when optimism has nothing to offer except an unfounded hope that is little more than wishful thinking.

All narratives, as all lives, must end (”human affairs are not eternal but all tend ever downwards”)–this is the pessimistic knowledge that grounds Cervantes’s perspective.  But if we all face destruction at the hands of time, this need not convince us to resign ourselves prematurely.  Although in one sense, nothing about the world has been changed for the better by Quixote’s actions, his success consists in having led a life consistent with who he is.  Like Sisyphus with his stone, he has achieved dignity by accomplishing nothing.  Or rather, what he has accomplished is to have enacted the value of pessimism in the form of a quest.  He has made his life unpredictable, memorable,and narrativisable by bringing his life-practice into contact with the world.  And a small portion of the world responds by allowing itself to be inspired by this practice. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

One of the best parts in Dienstag’s book is his chapter on Cervantes and Don Quixote, a work referenced by many of the major pessimists Dienstag studies.  In his telling, Dienstag mentions Quixote’s habit not of recounting specific teachings or codes of the knights-errant whom he is imitating, but instead tells stories.  That is perhaps what separates every truly humane person from an ideological one: the love of stories and the telling of stories to provide examples to follow, rather than programmatically reciting propositions, testing for ideological purity and uttering banal platitudes about the betterment of the world. 

Every story has an end, and many endings are not happy, but the good endings have a certain integrity and dignity of an authentic life.  Meanwhile the wheel of alleged Progress grinds ever onward, like time, like the grindstones of the windmills in Don Quixote, never satisfying, never satisfied, always consuming and offering us little in exchange for what it extracts from our humanity.  The optimist tries to cheat time, to beat it at its own game through every scheme of improvement imaginable, whereas the pessimist takes time on its own terms, gets knocked off his horse and badly bruised, but shakes off what has happened and goes on to the next adventure. 

The optimist would have the world be other than it is, and would have man become something other than what he is.  Pessimists and, I believe, Christians both seek for man to become what he is, though obviously the pessimists deny the Christians’ means of realising this and Christians typically reject the pessimistic rejection of all transcendence.  But what both tell us is that man can be transformed into who he truly is, made new, which is different from the optimistic view that man must inevitably keep becoming better and better in an unavoidable parade of unfreedom.  People who tell us that history has a direction steal from us the freedom that is “gained when one’s existence is detached from the narrative of progress.” (Dienstag, p. 198).   

Optimists insist that reality is insufficient and that they will redress the imbalance; they want us and everyone in the world to become someone else.  But as Ortega y Gasset said, “A hero, I have said, is one who wants to be himself…Don Quixote…is a hero.”  Let us, then, tilt at windmills in the understanding that the only true despair, the most bitter illusion, is the expectation of making the world fundamentally different from what it really is and the hope of lasting victory in this world. Read the rest of this entry »

Pessimism, to Schopenhauer, means not that our civilization or morality are declining, but rather that human beings are fated to endure a life freighted with problems that are fundamentally unmeliorable. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

Is this really that controversial or remarkable a claim?  It does not seem so outlandish to me, but then I cannot recall a time when I thought that meliorism made much sense.  I will refrain from Wedding Crashers references in this instance, since I imagine that is more Michael’s territory anyway.

The worst sort of unhappiness is produced by a lack of recognition of the limits to happiness. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

In this statement lies a vital part of the essence of every critique of consumerism, individualism, liberalism and every doctrine of revolutionary emancipation that exists or has existed.

Indeed, fundamentally, the pessimistic account of the origin of unhappiness (even, I would maintain, in Freud) has little to do with psychology itself but with a claim of ontological misalignment between human beings and the world they inhabit. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (p.33)

Dienstag is not talking about any of these things in relation to Christian theology.  Though he does mention Dostoevsky among the many pessimists of modernity (and it is perhaps by way of Dostoevsky that I have come to appreciate the insights of pessimism–