CrunchyCon on National Review Online

Rules of Engagement II
[Bruce Frohnen 03/30 06:16 PM]

This is probably my last post to the CC blog (I'm traveling tomorrow). So, for whatever it's worth, here's my take on why Crunchy Cons is important from a political standpoint, and where we should go from here: conservatism isn't primarily about politics, it's about culture. The left is always coming up with all kinds of schemes for the perfect government, which then will organize the perfect society. When it comes to the federal government, most Americans (who are conservative) in principle at least, mostly want to be left alone. But there are some catches:

First, the need for order. Kirk called this the first need of all. Unless we feel relatively safe, we won't be able to participate in public life, won't care very much about politics beyond law and order, and won't be keeping a lookout for our freedoms. Frightened people move to the suburbs, understandably. Frightened people also tend to vote for more and more centralized government (e.g. federalizing more and more crimes) to keep their streets safe, even though safety only comes from local, community control. Divorce rates over 50%, rampant drug use, rampant violence and increasingly random violence from suburban youths, do not make order. They make chaos, and if people don't give up the practices that lead to this, the result will be increasing calls for government programs to deal with the problems — mostly to drug, support, and eventually incarcerate our kids.

Second, the need for order in the soul if there is to be order in the commonwealth. If our lives don't make some kind of sense, don't fit together to make a coherent whole, we are going to find ourselves, and especially those who depend on us, falling into destructive habits. At the lowest level, we are going to find that we can't trust one another any longer. We no longer can count on people's promises — even if we get them in writing. Believe it or not, people used to look to lawyers as people who told the truth. Now that sounds like a joke in search of a punchline. As we become increasingly isolated and mistrustful, those of us with money can still lead relatively comfortable lives, filled with all kinds of diversions, but an awful lot of our kids are turning to destructive lives of alienation and/or sheer dishonest selfishness — viz. the stats on the prevalence of cheating in our schools. Again, disorder brings the need for more government, which we are getting, in part through an explosion in litigation, with all its related costs.

Third, in a lot of ways people don't think of local politics as politics — and in a way they are right. Libertarian dreams to the side, towns have always been things in themselves; the people in them always have seen them as entities that need protection and nurture. To the extent that towns are disenfranchised (and they have been, almost completely, in
America) people will simply go up the latter to more distant governments to get what they want.

All these factors make good, solid, conservative people willing to vote for more and more centralized government. Add to this the very real problems of corporations that have forgotten the value of employee and customer loyalty, and you have a recipe for increasing regulation.

The "crunchy" view (which to me is just traditional conservatism with enough of a funky twist to get a hearing in the mass markets) says "let's put the focus where it belongs: on how we want to live our lives, and what we need to change to be able to do that better."

This isn't a call for more government intervention, it's a call for LESS government intervention. The more we organize our own lives in ways that make sense, that help us treat one another in a decent fashion, and that keep control in the hands of a lot of local people rather than a few people in Washington, the more free AND decent and morally ordered our lives will be.

People in general will not long accept a system in which their lives don't make sense. They will look somewhere for order. The people about whom Rod writes (most of them far funkier than I) are looking to their local communities to forge meaningful ties. Better this than look to the government, no? And better this than live with no ties, such that we raise another Lord of the Flies generation.

I am at best slightly crunchy. But I'm very happy that Crunchy Cons was written, and I hope it gets a fair hearing.

Rules of Engagement
[Bruce Frohnen 03/30 02:04 PM]

Agreeing in general with Caleb's view that we must see politics as an arena in which we must take evil along with good, I'd like to point out the danger the Republican Party faces from a possible reversion to pre-Reagan alignments. The evangelical movement in politics is of very recent origin, and intimately tied with the social issues. Thus, the argument seems to be, so long as the party gives them the "right" position on social issues, they are and will remain Republican. And that, the argument goes, will be enough to forge and maintain a ruling coalition for decades to come.

What this overlooks is the fact that Reagan Democrats — currently mostly Republican — were a big part of this coalition, and were by and large middle and lower-middle class ethnic/relgious (Catholic) voters, brought over by decreasing economic opportunity as well as the social issues. And these voters may soon revert, even as many evangelicals retreat. The mainstream may be happy with the way things are going in our culture these days, but an awful lot of religious parents are not. Why else would the poll numbers look so dismal? People are worried about their kids — what opportunities they will have to "get ahead" — but also about what opportunities they will have to lead decent, settled lives. And, however much people may like Big Box America, it ain't good for the kids; and an increasing number of Americans know this, though they have little clue what to do about it.

For too long the Republican Party has been dependent on the Democratic establishment's status as hostages to the abortion lobby for its victories.
If that cracks, as it may well, issues like war in the Middle East, increases in government spending on confusing entitlements of limited value (prescription drugs) and the whole host of issues brought out by Bruce Bartlett in his recent book — whether we want to argue with his specifics or not — will create enough of a perception of Republicans as "for the rich guy" that there will be a series of big, big losses. This is highly unfortunate as it will bring in ever more centralization of power — more socialism, to be frank.

The vast majority of Americans are not libertarians. They fear government (as they should), but they also fear social anarchy. They like freedom, thank goodness, but demand order. So, whatever one may think is smart and savvy, it's small town values — integrity, thrift, industry, but also faith, stability, and safety — that sell in the bulk of the country. And this is where Rod's very cultural book has explicitly political salience. It makes a case for appealing to people who may well head left if we don't give them a reason to stay right.

I'll save my argument on why this is so, and is important, for a later post.

In the meantime, do please feel free to call me nuts.

battle lines
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/30 01:39 PM]

I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all.

You admitted that your nickname is "Poochy"? Man, this is going to be bad. One of my favorite older movies is Robert Altman's 1976 Nashville. (I read the "making of" book, and was surprised to learn that the intentions of the film were a lot stupider than the final product.) Anyway, this complex film gives a good glimpse of how much more polarized battle lines were 30 years ago. Back then, you could tell a person's political opinions simply by the way they dressed. And it was largely a generation gap, something we don't have today (probably because now all ages partake of a common entertainment culture; we didn't then). At the time of the Bicentennial, it really did seem like the country could fly to pieces. Rioting on college campuses, "Four dead in Ohio," all of that. The last thing we Boomers ever expected was that all this entrenched hostility would just sort of drift away. The current climate is, in comparison, pretty mild. Boundaries keep shifting, as with "Crunchy Cons" and "Lifey Liberals," more so as folks get younger: In my limited observation, the rising generation is more opposed to abortion than the Boomers, but that doesn't mean uniformly conservative (eg, laissez-faire about gay marriage). The main thing that puts me off party politics, though, is a sense of thoroughgoing phoniness. Everything is rigged, anxious, artificial, prechewed. In Nashville, a kook candidate rolls around town all day in a van with speakers on top, blasting out his cranky ideas. I kinda miss those days; I miss that kind of authentic, if nutty, encounter with real people and real ideas. Here in Maryland, the state legislature just passed a law to fund embryonic stem cell research. The newspapers reported that some surgery was required on the bill's name: supporters eliminated the adjective "embryonic." The bill still would *fund* embryonic research, but it was necessary to mute the point, to enable Roman Catholic legislators to vote for it without fear of reprisals. That's what I mean. Bring back the kook in the truck.

Correction
[Rod Dreher 03/30 12:59 PM]

Alas, I read too much into Kim’s lonely crunchy con post. She writes back:

Actually, I did not state why I am joining a convent. I am joining one because that is where God is calling me, not because I can't meet people or that it is too hard to do so. I have plenty of friends and know many people. Please make the correction on the blog….it sounds like I'm nothing but a shy, lonesome, wallflower…..my poker night crew would very likely disagree with that assessment!

If you ask me, the world needs more poker-playing nuns.

Re: Battle lines
[Rod Dreher 03/30 12:06 PM]

Kim in NYC:

You ask the question in your latest post: "What should I have told him?" I know it sounds cliché, but I think the only thing that works is a bit of political "ecumenism": let’s start working on what each side has in common with the other. It just seems to me that human nature is always looking for something that is familiar, or like it. I've seen it happen before,both in my personal experience and in politics (think feminists and fundamentalists coming together over the issue of pornography). I think once we start seeing what it is we have in common with the "other side", we become less apt to dehumanize them and more willing to work with them without compromising those Permanent Things we care for so deeply.

(Kim also sent in a note saying she’s 41, single with no kids, active in her Catholic parish and community … and considering a vocation to the nunnery because it’s too hard to meet people. “What’s a single crunchy con to do?” she asks.)

Re: Battle Lines
[Caleb Stegall 03/30 12:05 PM]

Rod, whenever I hear talk from those who want to “break out of” the stale left-right debates I am always immediately skeptical and want to know what game they are playing at. This may sound odd coming from one who has often complained that the GOP is just the rightward edge of our liberal majority (which it is), but there remain real differences between the two major parties that cannot be dismissed so easily. The fact is that breaking out of politics as trench warfare almost always means breaking left in reality. Consider Jim Wallis as exhibit A.

Just before the 2004 election, the Christian media (especially the evangelical media) was awash with instructions to the Christian voter to think outside of their political boxes, to exercise “discernment,” to resist being a “one issue voter,” and even to abstain from voting altogether because of the allegedly inadequate choices.

Despite our own position at The New Pantagruel that unchecked liberalism “has become endemically exploitative in both the political right and left today, though for a time the areas of exploitation have remained distinct,” we editorialized strongly

against the foolishness of pining for an ideologically acceptable politics in which a Christian can comfortably rest, knowing that no evil is being done on his behalf. To the contrary, history is replete with the tragic lesson that political power is inherently corrupting of principle, yet the truth of principles cannot get any traction in the world without being in and of it. A moral man may choose sectarian withdrawal, itself a kind of politics by other means, or the tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities. But it is the immaturity of double-mindedness to choose one and pine for the other, and such a divided mind produces only instability where order is required.

The double-mindedness which produces electoral withdrawal as a kind of fortification against compromised engagement in the rest of one’s life is a symptom of the troubling trend among Christians to cocoon themselves in the “misunderstood minority” identity and abdicate any responsibility for power while simultaneously refusing to give up what power they have. We have become exemplars of the tendency to develop a mind so principled that it succumbs to either ideologism or an idealistic paralysis that comes from seeing through all the false choices.

Institutional power is what it is—always. If a system passes through revolution to the establishment of a new regime, it will merely play its own variation on the same old problems. Or as Pete Townsend put it, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The best of our Christian political tradition teaches us, therefore, to align ourselves radically with the particular and the individual without actually believing that the institutional regime must be overthrown. One can thus work to mitigate and contain institutional power; living in love with the frail limits of existence—family, friends, community, and place—in service of truth, goodness, and beauty, yet knowing that even if good can be done, evil will be done too.

… Our broader hope [is for a political] discourse that does not minimize differences to “spare feelings” because ultimately we believe life is tragicomic and eucatastrophic. While we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes, a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast.

What I do think is stupid nearly beyond belief, however, is the GOP’s failure to sense and grasp the opportunities for coalition building with groups typically written off as Democrat strongholds. Reagan Democrats, Hispanic immigrants, Catholic union members, inner city minorities — all ought to be natural constituencies of the traditional conservative argument.

On the flip side, large numbers of GOP moderates have far more in common with liberal Democrats than they do with anything resembling conservatism. So yes, I think there is a serious political realignment afoot. But if (when) it occurs, politics will still be warfare by other means — we won’t ever escape that.

Battle lines
[Rod Dreher 03/30 11:05 AM]

Things went pretty well with the Washington Post reporter, Hank Stuever, who turned out to be a really nice guy. At one point asked a perfectly reasonable question that I had hoped he might not, because I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all, and I guess everybody will find out when the Style section hits the stands in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, at one point we talked a bit about the hardened battle lines between Left and Right in this country, which is something I decry in the final chapter of Crunchy Cons. I talk (in the book) about trying to think past the stale left-vs-right dynamic that has our political imagination so paralyzed right now, but how hearing some smug liberals in a local bar talk about how satisfying it would be if an Islamic militant drove a truck bomb into a conservative Baptist church in town made me so angry I was ready in that moment to vote Republican until kingdom come.

This, I wrote, is how it happens. How both parties and their partisan machines keep us all stuck on stupid when it comes to voting: they gin up such fear and hatred of the Other that they get us to be loyal to them no matter how badly they’re failing, or lousy their agendas. I told Hank that to look at the mainstream left and right today, one is reminded of trench warfare in World War I, in which two armies expend tremendous firepower and destructive effort to advance 50 yards. It’s dispiriting. “So, how do we break out of it?” the reporter asked. I didn’t know what to tell him. What should I have told him?

More Parody
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 05:03 PM]

Someone just sent this to me. Very nicely done. I especially liked the time/date stamps the guy made up for me. And the yurt yurt yurt bit was hilarious as well.

I do, of course, take issue with the caricature that I think everyone sucks. Poor people obviously don’t suck. And neither do farmers. Or yurt dwellers.

Re: Civil Society
[Bruce Frohnen 03/29 03:52 PM]

Bravo Rebecca! This is how real change comes about. Hearts and minds aren't won through ideology, but through the concrete activities of living together, which can only be done in small, "marginal" communities, not in a vast, naked public square.

Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/29 03:31 PM]

Rebecca writes:

I wanted to respond quickly to your friend Mike regarding being active in the community. I think that a huge part of what is simultaneously driving much of the "doom and gloom" and the small scale community involvement which comes with being a "crunchy con" is that we have lost faith in much of what has been thought of as civil society. Our schools, our political parties, county boards, chambers of commerce and many of the other avenues by which we've often been encouraged to "get out there" are so corrupted that fighting them or even expecting anything good out of them seems to be a lost cause. So yes, we're active, but we're not doing it within organizations which are often looked upon as being essential to a civil society. I think it's the reality of the failure of the basic structures of our civil society on top of the disintegration of our cultural/moral framework which is driving many people to simply withdraw and seek out places where we really can influence our worlds. So we homeschool because we cannot change the school system, we support crisis pregnancy centers because we can't influence the laws or change the larger culture which is driving the problem, we join garden clubs because we can't stop the county board from paving everything over and so-on and so-forth. I think part of what makes a crunchy con a crunchy con is that we don't buy into the idea that we can do much in the larger world of politics, education and culture. So we are retreating into smaller worlds where we can influence things for the better. Hopefully, in time, we can gain enough influence in these small areas that we'll start being able to influence some of the larger structures of society. In the meantime, I'm not holding my breath.

That sounds a lot like what Donna Steichen told me about why she got involved in homeschooling. I quote her in the book as saying:

“Back when I was raising my own children, homeschooling was considered an exotic necessity for diplomatic families on jungle postings. So I took the first route: I met teachers, baked brownies, judged speech contests, served as a classroom, lunchroom, playground, and library volunteer, held offices in home and school associations, etc., etc., etc. Later, as difficulties arose, I argued with teachers, confronted pastors, principals, and department heads – especially but not exclusively Religion Department heads – served on advisory committees, and eventually, more than once, engaged school boards in public combat. It was a strenuous and emotionally exhausting way of life. It was also futile.”

Re: Four Horsemen
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 02:28 PM]

You never know what will set off all the emailers with itchy send-fingers. Some are objecting to what they conclude is my injection of a bizarre Revelation-styled Christian Armageddon into the discussion through my link to the Four Horsemen. To which I say: settle down people. I was simply referring to the historical realities of war, pestilence, famine (scarcity), and death — all nicely imagined as Four Horsemen in apocalyptic literature. Some quick googling shows that I am not the first to make this suggestion.

"do some good"
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/29 01:33 PM]

Mike exhorts us to "get out there in the community and do some good." This is probably one of those things that we assume and leave unsaid, but for many crunchies, doing good comes under the heading of participating in their faith community. Churches coordinate lots of do-gooder activities, and nudge members to participate. My own parish is pretty small, but we still take part in soup kitchens, pregnancy care center work, making food bags for the homeless, and so forth. Other church members help in areas that interest them personally, such as street preaching in the red-light district, or building homes in Haiti. I record books for our state-wide Radio Reading Network for the Blind. I guess if we haven't made much of this, it's because we presumed it was covered in the "Religion" section.

Re: fear mongering
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 12:52 PM]

Rod said:

The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen.

I agree. But I arrive at that conclusion from what I take to be the perfectly natural and obvious truth that 99% of history has been rough and we have no reason to expect a lifelong exemption from that truth. I don’t put a lot of stock in the prophets of any particular and specific disaster because they strike me not only as indulging in fantastic speculations, but also as buttressing, in a perverse kind of way, the alternative fantastic speculation that peace and prosperity and health and wealth are the natural state of affairs. Both sides completely miss the tragicomic outlook that properly ought to define our tenuous and fragile creaturely existence.

I expect history will intrude on our fantasies in much more natural and obvious — and less conspiratorial and catastrophic — ways. Preparation and expectation, yes. Panic and gloom, no.

Re: Fear mongering
[Rod Dreher 03/29 12:16 PM]

I should probably say something personal about my tendency toward alarmism. While it is true that I’m very much a “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” kind of guy, I can see that I was strongly affected by September 11. For me personally, the biggest lesson of that day was that everything you think is solid and safe can disappear in a single morning. I’ve told the story before, so I won’t go into it in detail again, but I will never forget as long as I live the experience of that morning. When I walked out my front door on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the towers burning, I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge, to get over to the site to cover the story. Within the hour, I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the south tower collapse. Seconds before it came down, a NYPost colleague told me not to go down there, that those things were going to fall. I looked at her with total sincerity and conviction, and said, “Come on, that’s the World Trade Center, they’re not going to fall.”

Nothing that ever happened to me was as traumatic as what followed, and I’ve spent a long time since then thinking about the hour’s walk from my house to the other side of the bridge, and how my mind could not accept the full meaning of what my eyes were actually seeing. Of course, as we now know we all had ample warning that this kind of thing was being planned, and was possible. We collectively refused to take Islamic terrorism and extremism with appropriate seriousness, and in my opinion, we have not changed. I am fascinated by willful blindness — including my own; I have reproached myself many times for being unwilling to take seriously the warnings prior to the Iraq War that the US would inherit a fractured country that would tend to a civil war we couldn’t control. I didn’t want to see that, because I was so eager to see someone, anyone, pay for 9/11. But that’s another story. The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen. I know, I know, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about what might happen, but that’s no reason to prudently prepare, and to think about ways of addressing social and individual weaknesses now, while there is time, instead of waiting for the crisis moment to be upon us.

I will never forget how clear and blue the sky over New York harbor was on the morning of September 11.

(Now for something completely different: today’s anxiety is over the fact that this afternoon, a Washington Post Style section reporter is coming over to the house to hang out and cook dinner with us. We’re going to make a field trip to Whole Foods, in fact. What if he discovers my secret stash of Cheetos?)

How Culture Happens
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 11:55 AM]

Maggie Gallagher has some good and interesting thoughts on “how culture happens” in the context of the marriage debate. She says that the “language and rhetoric” of choice creates a cultural shift that is not necessarily anticipated or even wanted by those using that language. So, for example, the language of personal liberation and of equal rights which was used by feminists and civil rights leaders creates new categories of public thought which must then be reckoned with publicly during any future debate. So, in Gallagher’s telling, the language and rhetoric of personal liberation open the door for a public argument over gay marriage which in turn opens the door for a public argument over polygamy. Just as the language and rhetoric of the Supreme Court’s birth control decisions opened up the possibility of constitutionalizing the right to abort and probably the right to homosexual marriage. Gallagher says that

“[polygamists’] arguments now strike many cultural elites (such as the editors of the New York Times Arts page) as plausible, worthy of being entertained, because of the way they echo the gay marriage arguments. This in itself marks a cultural shift. … I don’t believe polygamy is an inevitable result of the gay marriage debate. But I think the push for gay marriage has already visibly altered our public culture of marriage. Things that were taken for granted, now must be discussed and defended. … [C]ulture consists largely of the things that don’t have to be discussed that much, because they are presumed. Culture consists of shared premises. Institutions shape human behavior by shaping categories of human thought, especially by marking off a huge category of possibilities as ‘not necessary to think about.’”

This is an important insight into culture and how it develops and impacts our common life together. And I think that a central aspect of the concerns Rod has raised is to apply this same insight to some of the less obvious cultural arenas and artifacts. The advent of technological advances, for example, marks a serious cultural shift primarily because it opens up huge categories of thought and possibility which were not necessary to think about previously. Technological artifacts carry within them an inherent “cultural logic.” Globalizing markets buttressed by centralized governments likewise open up huge possibilities previously unthinkable. Immigration is a hot issue just now: does the global marketplace’s demand for cheap labor trump sovereign national boundaries (not to mention cultural and legal boundaries)? Not a question which would even have been asked in a culture devoid of the rhetoric of globalization.

The questions being probed on this blog mostly fit into the category Gallagher describes: what cultural logic is stowed away in the baggage holds of the various ways and means we are encouraged to — and largely do — live today? And what possibilities previously unthinkable does that logic open up.

Re: Civil society
[Bruce Frohnen 03/29 11:10 AM]

I'm not sure I actually disagree with Mike's point — that it is necessary to get out there and join, or form, real, concrete communities through which we can improve our public life. But Mike seems to share the anti-crunchy view that there is something too "weird" or "countercultural" or perhaps simply too apolitical about the kinds of groups traditional conservatives join, form, and participate in. Homeschoolers are too weird for Mike? But aren't they forming a community that is influencing public policy, educating their kids, and bringing together people who share important values, thought often not the same backgrounds? Okay, you don't like that. . . how about involvement in the parochial school? Or does it HAVE to be the PTA? I quit the homeowners' association board on which I once sat because it became clear that mine was a loan voice for a kind of life different from the search for hermetically sealed houses (with increasing property values, to be sure). Then I moved to a neighborhood in which participation is neither meaningless nor value-less. Or are neighborhood associations too "private" and "self-centered" as well?

I mean this as a real question. What counts? As a cultural conservative I certainly don't think that only political participation counts; indeed, I think it's the LEAST important form of participation — voting being today little more than a statement of abstract support for one interest coalition or another. But perhaps people genuinely think that re-building our towns, rebuilding our churches and educational institutions, and simply following the central vocations of life in work, in daily life, in family, church, and local association aren't that important? I think they are.

RE: civil society
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 09:37 AM]

I don’t really disagree much with Mike other than with his unjustified assumption that I disagree with him. Of course we must “actually do things” instead of merely pontificating. That is what I have been saying all along.

Invincible Sluggishness
[Caleb Stegall 03/29 08:54 AM]

I don’t know about the various doomsday scenarios. Too much fear mongering. But if history teaches us anything, it is that things do not remain static. It would be foolish to presume that the conditions that prevail now will continue indefinitely. The following from T.S. Eliot comes to mind:

The fact that a problem will certainly take a long time to solve, and that it will demand the attention of many minds for several generations, is no justification for postponing the study. And, in times of emergency, it may prove in the long run that the problems we have postponed or ignored, rather than those we have failed to attack successfully, will return to plague us. Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow: but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment. ... There is one class of persons to which one speaks with difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain. The second, more numerous and obstinate than may first appear, because it represents a state of mind into which we are all prone through natural sloth to relapse, consists of those people who cannot believe that things will ever be very different from what they are at the moment. From time to time, under the influence perhaps of some persuasive writer or speaker, they may have an instant of disquiet or hope; but an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes them go on behaving as if nothing would ever change. Those to whom one speaks with difficulty, but not perhaps in vain, are the persons who believe that great changes must come, but are not sure either of what is inevitable, or of what is probable, or of what is desirable.

The important thing is to keep at bay our natural inclination towards acedia — sloth of the spirit — and to resist giving in to an “invincible sluggishness of imagination” which would prevent us from taking a true reckoning of history and of the place our age has within its ebb and flow.

The liturgical city
[Rod Dreher 03/29 08:52 AM]

I know we left architecture and urban planning behind weeks ago, but Angelo’s website Godspy has just published a remarkable essay by Paul Grenier and Tim Patitsas about what makes a city beautiful: its liturgical character. A reader sent this to me and said that reading it, he finally understood what motivates Crunchy Cons. I’d say he nails it. What a great piece that is, Angelo!

Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/29 08:51 AM]

Mike, the guy in the book who confronted the developer in a story mentioned in Crunchy Cons, says I lose him with my Derbish gloom:

Get out there in the community and do some good. There are good folks out there, doing good things. But they need all the good people they can get to help. And by "community" I don't mean forming little enclaves of counter-cultural "communities." Seems to me it's possible to do all the things like turn off the TV and avoid fast food, etc., and still find the redeemable and rewarding aspects of civil society right outside your front door. I just wonder if you'd be cheerier, and the rest of your Crunchy-Con cohorts would be cheerier, if the "sacramental sensibility" y'all espouse consisted more of engaging in actual activity, in actually doing things — as in the "active love" that Zosima tells Alyosha Karamazov we all must do in our community when the former sends the young novice out of the monastery and into the world — instead of pondering one's own virtuous navel while consigning the world to hell in a handbasket.

Since your book is a very personal treatise about the rewarding and sacramental experiences in the lifestyle choices you and your wife have made, I hope you don't mind a rather personal — but in no way negatively intended observation: I see a very similar lack of civic-mindedness displayed by the Crunchy Cons as I see in the Bowling Alone mindset, a (dare-I-say equally self-centered) escape and retreat from the public square and from community life, the major difference being merely the type of house and subdivision. Sure, you might justifiably claim that within your cloister you're engaged in more virtuous pursuits than the Bobo and the Patio Man — like making your family your highest priority. But there are other virtues besides making the best life for your family, and it indeed seems possible to turn family into a defensive fortress as opposed to getting out there into the community more, which at the same time will help one's younguns to learn love for/commitment to community as well.

I tell you this: mainstream society on the tube or in the mass culture at large, which seems to be the basis of your description of it, is nothing like what I experience in countless little Kirk-ian platoons in the community (the kind CCers profess to admire but I see no evidence in the book of participating in). In short, since I view Crunchy Conservatism not as an effort make "lifestyle" into a politics but as a challenge to conservatives to let their politics more greatly inform their lifestyles, I offer a challenge back to the Crunchy Cons:

Get a babysitter more often. (Your children will not be ruined by this). Get out there and be with more people, and do things. Make the world better in ways both small and big. Crunchy Con-ness seriously lacks communitas. You can engage in it and still be a Crunchy Con — maybe even a more truly "sacramental" one at that, for I know of few sacraments done in solitude and outside the community. You will also be happier for it.

That’s a serious challenge. I’ll try to answer it tomorrow, because I’ve got to finish some projects before I leave today. I would just point out that one shouldn’t necessarily assume that the people I talked to in my book aren’t engaged in communitas. They might not be, but when I interviewed people for the Home chapter, for example, I just talked to them about their houses, not their community activism. I also don’t see why it doesn’t count as community activism to be involved in building up one’s own “little enclaves.” But I imagine Bruce and Caleb might have something to say about that. N.B., I said to Julie one night, not long after I had to quit taking a night class because I worked so many long hours that I didn’t have time to devote to it, that I don’t understand how my dad was able as a younger man to devote so much time to community service activities. Then it occurred to me: when five o’clock came around, he was off the clock. Period. The end. Me, I come in at 8:20, and don’t usually get out of here until 7:30pm, which gives me about an hour or so with the boys until their bedtime. Five days a week. Believe me, if I could work shorter hours, I would. But I can’t. I know other dads in the same position.

Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/28 06:03 PM]

Frederica, it’s true that we can’t prepare adequately for a disaster as total as something like Katrina. But what concerns me is how civil society would enable people to live with a relatively severe level of hardship. I am amazed at the stories my father tells about being a kid during the Great Depression, and how poor everybody was. In his telling, the kind of suffering Americans endured back then was unlike anything most of us can even imagine today. But he says people took care of each other, and most people had a strong internal sense of order and discipline that kept society from going off the tracks. You had to know your neighbor, because no man could afford to be an island under those conditions. That’s the kind of thing that concerns me – how we’ve allowed our civic character to atrophy because we haven’t had to know our neighbors for a long time.

I mention in the book the examples of Katrina and Rita. We know how bad civil society broke down in New Orleans after Katrina, though happily many of the initial claims proved to have been exaggerated. What made an impression on me was three weeks later, when Hurricane Rita hit the Cajun country. I was down in south Louisiana that weekend, and it was instructive to watch the TV coverage of the aftermath on a Lafayette TV channel. Those rural and small-town Cajuns took care of each other. They got into their boats and went out to help. The NYTimes a few years ago wrote a story about how sociologists have discovered that there’s no place in America where people stick around to the degree that they do in Acadiana. Folks just don’t leave. They’ve got their problems, but as Caleb has pointed out throughout the run of this blog, there’s value to sticking around. You know your neighbors and develop a sense of loyalty that you really count on when the chips are down.

I have concern, maybe even fear, that the radical individualism and materialism that we’ve been cultivating for so long in the USA will be the downfall of us if we ever have to face a critical and sustained crisis. When I think about my dad’s stories of the Depression, and try to imagine people today, soft as we are, trying to hold ourselves together in that kind of trial, it’s hard to be optimistic. That’s why I believe that we have a responsibility to do what we can to build and strengthen the little platoons today.

re: Civil Society
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 05:35 PM]

I remember thinking through some of these issues when we were looking toward a Y2K breakdown (yes, I was one of the nervous nellies then). The conclusion I came to was, if you're talking about the kind of societal breakdown where we are in physical danger (for example, from starving and rioting folks a few neighborhoods away), then there is no place you can go where you can be sure of safety. Instead of the desperate folks finding your hideout in weeks, they would find you in years.

There was a quote you had back then, Rod, something like "Totalizing a disaster has the effect of annihilating the disaster." I don't remember who said it. But it meant that if you believe that ultimately no amount of preparation will be effective, then it's pointless to prepare. So, unlike friends who dug wells and converted their savings to gold, we just bought bottled water and canned food and prepared spiritually for whatever awaited. We were never so happy to face an anticlimax in our lives.

But isn't it worth noting that, in such a case, you're talking about a different kind of societal disruption? We'd been deploring the general spread of incivility, crudity, aggressive pornification, and so forth. I'd say, sadly, that while that makes for a miserable society, it does not directly cause things to grind to a halt. We can "withdraw in disgust," cultivate an alternative life, and as writers make loving forays to bring health and hope to our neighbors — while still relying on the same systems they do for police, clean water, groceries, and so forth.

A natural or man-made disaster is independent of cultural disease, and might occur even if we were eminently virtuous. The problems it poses are also quite different. A well-placed disaster could disrupt access to the things we require to stay alive, like water and medication. Similarly disrupted neighbors might become violent. I don't have any recommendation about how to navigate such a disaster except by prayerful following of those who gracefully preceded us.

Just wanted to point out that it's two different kinds of "Civil Society" collapse. We can withdraw from the former, but it won't be a complete withdrawal. The latter, there's not much you *can* do.

Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/28 05:02 PM]

One thing I write about in the final chapter of “Crunchy Cons” is the sense of anxiety I think a lot of us share that, as Peggy Noonan put it in a column a few months ago, “the wheels are coming off,” that “a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.” In Peggy’s telling, the elites are pretty much just trying to take care of their own before it all comes down. She sees this, rightly, as disreputable, but I wonder: am I not arguing for a similar thing? Am I not suggesting that in some fundamental way, that what ails us can’t be fixed, at least not through usual means, and that because tough history is coming, people would be well advised to do things that amount to taking care of their own?

I think that yes, I am saying that, at some level. I don’t want to draw that conclusion. I resist it. But I can’t shake the pessimism I have over the big picture. The Katrina debacle was so unnerving to me because it showed how fragile civil society was. I wonder what would happen if, God forbid, terrorists set off a suitcase nuke in an American port city? Stephen Flynn, the port security guru, told me that if that were to happen, the US Government would have no choice but to shut down all US ports until they could install radiation detection devices. To stop all port activity for two weeks or longer would probably destroy the US economy – and with it the world’s. It could happen that quickly. Frank Gaffney came to the Dallas Morning News last year to tell us about a little-noticed 2004 blue-ribbon panel report on the danger facing America from an electromagnetic impulse (EMP) weapon. A conventional nuclear bomb atop a Scud and detonated high in the atmosphere above the US could, says Gaffney, “take the United States from a 21st-century society to an 18th-century society instantaneously.”

These are not Chicken Little scenarios. Either case would put this country in tremendous hardship, and would severely test the bonds of civil society. If such hard times were to come upon us, those who knew how to do for themselves, and who had neighbors and family close by that they could rely on, would stand a much better chance of making it. Those who have just been going through life taking it easy and assuming that it’s always going to be like it is – they’re going to be in trouble. I think I’m far too much like the latter than the former, and I want to change that while there’s time. I think that we always have to be working towards bettering the common conditions for us all, but I find it increasingly difficult to have much hope in the power of collective effort under today’s conditions. But regular readers know I tend to Derbish levels of gloom sometimes. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise.

More on the borderlands
[Bruce Frohnen 03/28 01:23 PM]

Picking up on Rod's point, I think what most critics of homeschooling fail to note is that these people themselves are forming communities. As I've mentioned before, we don't homeschool, but the people we know who do are not sticking their kids in the closet with McGuffy readers, telling them not to talk to the "evil strangers." Far from it. Homeschoolers congregate; they are always getting together for common classes, social outings and so on.

Which is why, while we send our kids to local parochial schools (we were lucky enough to find a good one) it seems to me that homeschooling communities are important to the revival of any decent common culture. They offer a means to break the bureaucracy's hold on schooling that other reforms (e.g. vouchers, which encourage consumerism and further break up neighborhood life) can't.

Re: Borderlands
[Rod Dreher 03/28 12:38 PM]

To be clear, I was talking about “defensible borders” in a metaphorical sense. I think history and an understanding of human nature shows what happens to utopias. A few years ago, Julie and I were thinking of leaving NYC and moving to a small town known for being home to a large-ish community of orthodox Catholics. A friend of ours who lives there and who shares our commitment to orthodox faith and life said she’d be pleased if we’d make that move, but that we should know that there was a definite cultishness afoot in the town. Julie asked, “Are you saying something like there would be Catholic mothers who wouldn’t let their kids play with my kid because I wear blue jeans, not dresses?” Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, said our friend. Thus ended the lesson.

Still, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to be in a geographical location where the community still respects traditional virtues. I also find it hard to fault people who have lost faith in the ability of the common culture to do this, and who, in response, have decided that the best thing they can do is to quit worrying about fixing what is, for whatever reason, unfixable, and instead to focus on building new forms of community where the moral life is still possible. As the guy in “Slacker” says, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

Look at the homeschooling movement. In effect, homeschoolers are saying that they no longer have faith in the public schools to educate their children, morally or otherwise. I have found in talking with various people who oppose homeschooling in theory that they don’t necessarily disagree with the gist of the homeschoolers’ critique of public schooling, but they (the homeschooling opponents) are bothered — to the point of being unnerved — by what the withdrawal of homeschoolers’ children from the public school system means. I’ve had it said to me time and time again, “Homeschooling parents are usually those who care most passionately about their childrens’ education; don’t you think it’s a catastrophe for the whole if those parents and their kids withdraw from the system?” Answer: yes, it’s bad for the whole, but why is it that the kind of people who expect their children to be self-disciplined, to work hard, to be conventionally good kids — why is it that nobody worries about people like that, and their needs? Why are we not trying to make schools a better place for those who have high academic standards, and standards of personal conduct. For those who believe in order (and not just rule-following)?

A relatively minor example, but one that resonates right at this moment: Within the past hour, I stood on the fourth-floor terrace here outside my office in downtown Dallas and watched hundreds of Latino students pour out of the trains and take over a downtown street, waving Mexican flags and acting with indifference to the traffic laws, and the rules — internal self-discipline, to say nothing of school rules — that say they should be in school getting a good education. For the second day, Latino students from all over Dallas public schools are walking out in protest of proposed immigration legislation. You watch: nothing is going to happen to them. There will be no consequences. The establishment will fall all over itself to accommodate their demands. And people like me will sit back and watch this admittedly small thing, but see it as another example of a collapsing common culture with the ability and confidence to defend itself. Like I said, withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. I care about my children’s character and education, but I don’t believe the common culture, such as it is, does.

borderlands
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 12:20 PM]

I find that Evangelicals are very receptive to this, actually. Christianity Today published a longish essay I wrote in February , and my mail since has been enthusiastic. (And my books rather hammer on this theme. Hope it's not obnoxious to self-promote.)

A Short Post
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 11:19 AM]

And I think the best way to change a culture is to seed it with holy people. I think what's made Evangelicalism less effective than it might be is a tendency to dream of big cultural-impact projects, rather than the humbler route of turning out millions of transformed, humble, holy people.

Nicely put. I think we are all on the same basic page. And I would add that along with Gnostic tendencies, evangelicals have been hurt by “salvation inflation” — a temptation to define “transformed, humble, holy people” in the most “nice” and inclusive way possible to mean, essentially, well intentioned but virtually indistinguishable (and certainly manageable) citizens of late liberal modernity.

borderlands
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/28 10:20 AM]

Like Bruce said. I think we're in the same ballpark. And I don't think I really disagree with Caleb here either, though such lonnnnnngggg posts are a temptation to skim. However, here I think he misread me:

I wonder if you don’t give the game away with unnecessary talk of burned out utopians and despair that striving towards any kind of demanding standard has been rendered utterly impossible by the combination of disorder and affluence?

I'll clarify. By "burned out utopians" I meant specifically to counter the possible notion that all Crunchy Cons should move to a single *geographic* location. I don't think that's what Rod meant by "defensible borders," but I wanted to touch on it, since historically others thought that was a good idea. As you, Caleb, would agree, one drawback to an earthly utopian community is that it would take you away from your homeland and relatives.

I don't "despair" of striving toward a demanding standard; as I said, we can live holy lives. As an Orthodox Christian, I would say that the whole point of earthly life is transformation in Christ (and as far as I know, the Orthodox Church is the Christian body in the US that most diligently continues first-millennium patterns of fasting, confession, and personal spiritual direction. Not that you don't find lots of nominalism as well, but at least the standards haven't been "updated".)

And I think the best way to change a culture is to seed it with holy people. I think what's made Evangelicalism less effective than it might be is a tendency to dream of big cultural-impact projects, rather than the humbler route of turning out millions of transformed, humble, holy people.

Hard times prompt self-discipline, and make the practical value of such virtues obvious. But in a comfortable age like ours self-indulgence is the rule, shopping is a patriotic duty, and serious spiritual discipline looks like a quirky hobby. It would be easier for us if the culture really were collapsing, as it was for St Benedict, but it's capable of spending many more decades in the Barcalounger.

And I should add that I approve of "going back into the culture" as journalists, screenwriters, etc. That's what I'm doing with my life, as is Rod and others of us; we'd be glad to have our children follow in our footsteps. But if we're not diligently praying and fasting and listening to our spiritual fathers' guidance, we'll be a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal. Without humility and repentance, and genuine love for our neighbors, we're just self-righteous blowhards.

Re: Borders
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 09:59 AM]

Bruce, I don’t disagree with you. Can I be a moderate too?

I am not advocating a “withdrawal” from society. Never have. And I doubt anyone can find anything in what I’ve said to that effect. I have advocated, as you put it, working with what we have where we are to rebuild “communities that rely as little as possible on faceless ‘mechanisms’ and as much as possible on actual people.”

It looks like we posted at the same time, but as I hope is apparent below, my concern with the false dichotomy between “withdrawal” and “engagement” is that it leads to all kinds of mistakes made by those who would accept the dichotomy and who do not wish to be known as evil world renouncers. The point is to think more carefully through the problems facing us and shift, reimagine, and reconsolidate the ground of our engagement.

On Borders
[Bruce Frohnen 03/28 09:29 AM]

I'm always uncomfortable when I find myself the "moderate" in any discussion. Being at one end or the other of a debate is, if nothing else, more fun. But I genuinely feel that the path we need to take lies somewhere in between those espoused by Frederica and Caleb.

On the one hand, Caleb certainly is right that we need to rebuild the local ties torn asunder over the last 50-60 years as our culture has dived headlong into various schemes of centralization, hypermobility, and fungibility. Products, suppliers, and employees all seem to be just cogs in various machines, now, and too many people think this is a good thing because it makes things cheaper and frees them from recognizing their responsibilities.

On the other hand, Frederica certainly is right to say that we cannot withdraw from society. It would be good for society if more would choose the cloistered life, if more would pray for the rest of us as a vocation.

But those of us with families in important ways must live in the world.
Pastoral innocence is a good reserved for the few — those who need not live in town, who can make a living in isolation. Again, it would be better if we had more such communities, but I'll not be joining one. I value my vocation, my interaction with others who are connected with my vocation, and my intellectual curiosity about how things work (or don't work) and can, or cannot, be improved too much to give up on active engagement.

And this, to my mind, brings us to the real dilemma: how do you rebuild something you know (and I think all of us at some level, in our very natures, know) is right, but which is frayed to the point of being almost invisible? How does one rebuild character-forming communities of ordered liberty? After the destructive generation has come what I think of as the Lord of the Flies generation — abandoned to a desolate wasteland of television and authority-less mob schooling by parents too concerned with "bringing down the power" to spend time building up their children's character. All of our institutions are deeply wounded, and few over the age of 30 can even remember what a healthy society is like.

But the answer cannot be to fly into the wilderness. It is highly unfortunate but nonetheless true that ours is a national economy, with national laws and rules concerning how everything is set up. You cannot escape them through mere distance. What you must do is live at their margins, building communities that rely as little as possible on faceless "mechanisms" and as much as possible on actual people — preferably people you know, with whom you can forge friendships.

The utopians failed because they didn't recognize that our society, like every society and like every meaningful institution, big and small, is a community of communities. This connects us with both good and bad things in a society as nationalized as ours has become. We all are by nature part of the lives, not just of our neighbors, not just of our fellow parishioners, but of those who make up and order the institutions of our economic and political as well as social and religious lives. But we must encourage, as much as we can, the actual multiplication of authorities, creating "niche markets" sub-communities, associations of all kinds within which we can build decent lives. It is in the multiplicity of authorities alone that we can find any real, ordered liberty, any chance for a life of virtue. The drive to separate leads too easily into the drive to place one person or a small group permanently at the head, with all the authority and all the power. The result always has been and always will be disaster for the real people (and their families) who are told to sacrifice for a greater good only the leaders "know." The result is the gnostic fallacy Voegelin warned against. Better, then, to work with what we have where we are; to build, not walls, but communities.

To build community in a culture that has become hostile to the very idea of community will not be easy. It certainly means being called all sorts of names and accused of wanting to run other people's lives because you dare to suggest there may be something better than mindless self-indulgence. But this task of a hundred years is necessary, and surely not too hard for people who recognize that they will never be fully at home in this world.

Re: Defensible Borders
[Caleb Stegall 03/28 09:28 AM]

Frederica,

I wonder if you don’t give the game away with unnecessary talk of burned out utopians and despair that striving towards any kind of demanding standard has been rendered utterly impossible by the combination of disorder and affluence?

The evangelicals are currently experiencing a deep crisis that flows directly from their naïve “wanting to go back into the common culture and be an influence for good” armed with little more than good intentions and “discernment.” Evangelical literature at places like Christianity Today is replete with “self-help” styled advice for living in the swamp that concede too much to a crass kind of determinism: “You don’t really have to change your life in a material way — and you couldn't even if you wanted to, because the alternative is too hard, and really we’d lose lots of readers if we introduced anything strenuous into the conversation. Besides, the common culture is strong and won’t fail us, we just need to recognize the need to take time out to ‘be holy’ and learn to ‘be discerning.’” This is an extremely weak appology for faith and holiness and has led to all kinds of problems in the evangelical church.

Holiness requires concrete and particular regimines, routines, and comitments — not just the vagaries of good intentions and discernment. There are some rings that cannot be worn — to be Tolkeinian about it — even by those who wish to steward the permanent things. The life that is called for and needed now is a life of struggle.

We published a long rumination on these questions, specifically on the interpretations of MacIntyre on offer in the Christian press, which may be helpful for this discussion. I’ve excerpted it liberally below:

[Consider] Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.” They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,” who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.” In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus—“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff”—as a “precedent” over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.” I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to [Alan] Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.

I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing” influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.” In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.” “People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.” This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.

Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,” he has “new evangelical friends,” and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.” Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects” them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.” On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.”

Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works—not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement” literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.”

Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. …

In 1981, Roger Fisher’s international best-selling negotiation handbook Getting to Yes was published. The book was, and continues to be, such a success because it concisely distills the conflict resolution techniques and procedures which must be used by good citizens of a liberal order. The primary methodology taught by Fisher requires a shift in focus from the positions of disputing parties to the interests of the parties, and from there to work towards creative solutions that approximately satisfy all represented interests.

This method for binding disparate individuals or elements of society together in a common scheme of interest preservation is not original with Fisher. It is in fact the quintessential rule of modern liberal society with its required autonomy of individual interest and resistance to the notion of sacrifice for the commonwealth. Karl Marx recognized this structure and aptly named its central point of reference the “cash nexus”: the point at which all disparate interests congregate to achieve satisfaction and the point which must therefore be defended at any and all cost. Marx was famously skeptical about the ability of a society built within the gravitational field of the cash nexus to hang together.

In any thoughtful consideration of the questions raised above, it would be difficult to underestimate the extent to which conservative Christians have absorbed the Getting to Yes philosophy as it relates to the Church and its relationship to the world. An analysis of the pertinent movement literature reveals the overriding goal of most Christian cultural engagement is to find the cultural nirvana where Christians and secularists can finally get to “Yes!”—the culture nexus. Thus, prime importance is attributed to “the conversation”—to the long slow dance towards “yes!” wherein Christian interests are elucidated and differentiated in increasingly abstract and sophisticated ways.

Those committed to this process cannot help but suffer a corrupted view of the Church. The individual Christian is defined primarily by his interests rather than by older notions of membership, and consequently the Church becomes a community of shared interests rather than a community of practice. It is not surprising that in this context “discernment” rather than obedience becomes the most important virtue. And the peddlers of cultural discernment … naturally have an ongoing interest in maintaining the illusion that the process of getting to “yes!” with the world is a “perennial tightrope” walk which requires careful balance. Loud shouts at those on the tightrope are not merely an annoyance, but a disloyal attempt to upset the balance along the path to the culture nexus.

… Given this unfortunate reality, one could conclude that designated Christian intellectuals … may theorize all they want—it is a community of practice that counts in the end. … Many people—Evangelicals in particular—seem to have difficulty grasping that this is the point of MacIntyre’s oft-quoted passage from After Virtue in which he concludes that a new St. Benedict is needed to build a community of traditional moral discourse grounded in practice, discipline, and ritual. So strong is the Christian intellectuals’ taste for brilliant abstract formulations, helpfully prescriptive manifestoes (have you seen ours?), and a perpetual outpouring of books from InterVarsity Press, Baker, and Eerdmans (all summarily reviewed in First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture) that they fail to note what is the single most significant difference between, say, real oddities like Thomas More College (in Merrimack, NH) and the relatively mainstream Baylor and Wheaton. At Thomas More, like at a Benedictine monastery, students and faculty live, work, prepare meals, and eat together. Thomas More students are also responsible for housekeeping. This strikes me as a radical idea, a truly countercultural strategy that unfortunately stands little chance for enthusiastic approval in CCCU institutions. It is badly needed. At a certain Calvinist college proud of its commitment to Christian identity and cultural engagement, I have been told that the student dorms once became too filthy by the end of the term for staff to handle. The problem was resolved in the typically modern way: hire the Merry Maids! Is cleanliness next to godliness if you outsource for it?

… Unfortunately, there are numerous examples in the movement literature of a stubborn adherence to the Fisher/Stout method of cultural engagement. John Owen … takes up MacIntyre in the April issue of First Things. … Owen is … daunted by the image of ascesis that the “St. Benedict Option” conjures up. Fortunately for Owen and for the dual loyalty he imagines, his solution does not require us to follow the saint “all the way into the cloisters.”

… Given the spiritual weakness of a church within this trajectory, [Roger] Wilken argues that it is now “less urgent to convince the … culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.” In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to “Yes!” Wilken concludes: “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”

I know nothing about either Wilken or Owen, but my guess is that Wilken is a Catholic who thinks orthopraxically and through the Mass whereas Owen is an Evangelical whose primary source of order and reflection—his tradition—is the mass of literature he cites. Owen’s primary commitment to the “conversation” leads him into all kinds of errors, including a strong tendency towards reductive (and erroneous) pigeonholing: Wendell Berry and Stanley Hauerwas become “left-wing” and are thus safely defined and dealt with exclusively in terms of “their place” in the conversation.

Wilken, by contrast, embraces a carnivalesque humanism. Putting it pointedly: Christian renewal means virtue and the cakes and ale. This truth about the Church is central to its transforming power and the one without which, no matter how many concessions are obtained at the negotiation table by self appointed Christian representatives, it will surely fail.

defensible borders
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/27 06:01 PM]

Would doing so amount to giving up on the culture in despair … or would it mean retreating behind defensible borders?

See, this is where I think we run into trouble, Rod. I expect you meant "retreating behind defensible borders" metaphorically (though we have joked about decamping to Lost Cove, TN), but just for the record, we should recognize a geographic retreat like that would be futile. Too many burned-out utopians precede us. And, if push came literally to shove, we certainly could not physically defend our borders.

The alternative is the kind of thing Evangelicals have been doing for a few decades, building a separate, parallel culture that offers an equivalent for every content-carrying product the diseased general culture provides (rock music, romance novels, news magazines, you name it). But most Christian households are porous, and their members use these "pure" sources in addition to, not instead of, the mainstream's offerings. Among Evangelicals there is a renewed sense that they need to quit the biodome and go back *into* the mainstream culture, and train to be responsible journalists, screenwriters, etc.

St. Benedict had the advantage of being a monk, and the kind of life he was able to build was founded on some very exacting principles that ordinary Crunchies are not likely to emulate. He *did* start with a geographic center. He attracted people who were willing to hold all things in common, and to be celibate. Well, already you've lost most readers of this list.

It would be different if the culture and its institutions were falling apart physically and economically, and the only safe place to live was behind monastery walls. Instead we're living in a culture that is debased and sordid, but quite strong, and able to provide a very high level of comfort to most members. The more comfort, the less self-discipline necessary to survival. Paradoxically, one thing St. Benedict had on his side was that the physical state of affairs was much more bleak.

Can we approximate his work while living as individuals, geographically scattered, holding property, and consuming mainstream content? I'm doubtful that you can build an alternative culture under such diffuse circumstances.

I think you can live a holy life, however. And in a local religious community (church, temple or synagogue) you can find and give support. And, guided by the lamp of the Permanent Things, become competent to discern how to safely navigate the common culture we must continue to inhabit. And hopefully children raised in such dedicated households will likewise be stable and discerning, though we cannot prevent heartbreaking contrary choices. Eventually we'll reach the point where Evangelicals now stand, of wanting to go back into the common culture and be an influence for good.

Faith must be reasonable
[Angelo Matera 03/27 05:46 PM]

Rod, in a time of “apostasy” it’s tempting to see sincerity and fervor, without thought or nuance, as the answer to weakness and relativism, but it’s not. Look at the Iraq war — lots of very sincere people trusted their patriotic instincts, and followed the president — a perfect example of unthinking sincerity — into a disaster.

A retreat to fundamentalism of any kind, whether Moslem or Christian, will not solve the crisis of faith. (Pope John Paul II addressed this issue in his encyclical Faith & Reason.)

That crisis can only be addressed by Christians (and others who believe in transcendent values) demonstrating, through their lives (and relying on grace) that genuine faith and real life are not only compatible, but each requires the other.

Christians cannot answer The Da Vinci Code by resorting to Left Behind, the two polarities we are often faced with in this country,

In a panel discussion on the one year anniversary of 9/11, Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, who directs the Catholic lay movement Communion & Liberation in the US, together with Salman Rushdie, diagnosed the “clash of civilizations” exemplified by 9/11 this way:

Albacete: “The human vocation to the Infinite had been effectively suppressed by modern criticism and, instead of disappearing, it had struck back with a deadly force. The proper response, I suggested, was not further suppression of the religious instinct, but its adequate education by insistence on the requirements of reason and a humble respect for a non-syncretistic pluralism based on true religious liberty.”

Rushdie: "…In the end, our future depends on the encounter between religion, critical reasoning, and humility."

The situation is very good
[Caleb Stegall 03/27 05:29 PM]

Where do we go from here? That is really the question isn’t it. I spent some time talking about that and related questions in this interview from last year which I will crib from substantially below. Maybe some of the points raised will give some direction for our discussion this last week.

Starting from the Voeglenian premise that no one is obliged to participate in the disorders of his age, and in fact is obliged to resist them, the overwhelming moral sense I have when surveying the modern world is one of loss. A sense that what we have left behind in our affluence and mobility is a certain kind of Good that flourishes in rootedness and struggle — a way of being human that was always understood as the good life; a kind of self-provisioning that took place within a small network of interconnected social obligations, each to the other and all to a particular place, and to the customs and rites that naturally complimented that place. The spiritual order — both personal and social — of this good life is nourished on a veneration of children, work, craft, a sense of honor in commitments, and a common responsibility.

In place of this, we have been given the atomized individual, armed with a plethora of rights, making his way in a system of "opportunity" that requires the spiritual symbolization of society as a ladder to be climbed, which leaves a wake of personal disorder, the destruction of exploited people, places, and traditional communities, and loss of meaning on a massive scale.

It is true that liberalism — which is really the engine of modernism — as an ordering principle is tremendously powerful, and now has the inertia of centuries driving it forward still, but it has some significant weaknesses, chief among them that it lies. It lies about the human condition and it lies about the reality of natural limits embedded in reality. Human freedom and consumption simply cannot expand infinitely. Eventually, the structures supporting such expansion will give way, and it remains to be seen what, if any, civilizing forces will be left to bring order out of that chaos.

In the mean time, I think like Rod that we look to the wisdom of people like McIntyre and Eliot who urged that we turn aside from the project of shoring up modern liberalism, and begin to construct new enclaves of civility and order within which a true intellectual and moral life — the Good life — can be sustained. In time, this fertile soil will likely be the only source of order to "save the world from suicide," to borrow Eliot's phrase. Of course the Church is and should be the ideal and supernatural guardian of these enclaves.

The danger in this project is one of retreat and ghettoization which can easily occur in the context of the search for a satisfactory response to political and cultural liberalism. To some extent we are caught between the difficulties of assimilating with the dominant order on the one hand and on the other, acquiescing to being shunted aside into a kind of nature preserve for rubes and hold-outs — a ghetto; a facsimile habitat mimicking liberal society but with a Christian or “conservative” spin.

Often these responses happen at the same time in a community caught in this dilemma; it's happened most obviously to Christian evangelicals. Its leaders seek access to and are granted nominal positions of "influence" in secular society in exchange for keeping the rowdies on the reservation. The problem with this is that it cuts out the church's heart and replaces it with what sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed "therapeutic deism". Christianity becomes just another lifestyle choice complete with its own marketing departments, commercial backers, support "systems," and political interest groups. In this sense, late modern liberalism ghettoizes all identity — you really are what you eat, what you wear, what you consume. The discussion on this blog has illustrated this concept well.

When I talk about new enclaves of civility and culture, borrowing from thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre and T. S. Eliot, I think the point is that communities of tradition and practice need to be rebuilt along different non-liberal lines in a way that allows a real culture to flourish again. The church can never accept life on a reservation, but neither should it position itself to run what is already a decultured and post-Christian deformity — which is largely what late liberalism has become.

Instead of syncretism or retreat, the idea ought to be to learn — and it is a learning process — to live in love within the limits of one's existence. To suffer one's place and one's people — their joys and sorrows and history which weave a network of memory to which we belong — in service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is the true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. And really this is the heart of what Christ and the Church Fathers teach us about Christian holiness: master one's passions, deny oneself, and love others. This is the Christian answer to the spirit of death which dwells in the old man, and which, in the increasing absence of Christian holiness, becomes writ large as a Culture of Death. I talk to a lot of Christians who are flummoxed by their relative lack of political success in beating back the culture of death, even at a time of supposed conservative ascendancy and the power of the "values" vote. Of course there are multiple reasons for this, but foremost in my mind is that it does no good to vote an anti-abortion ticket if in one's life and community there is no drive and discipline towards holiness.

When one lives as a modern — and we almost all do to one degree or another — he is implicated by nearly all the habits of his heart in the same culture of choice he believes he is voting against. When we fail to resist the symbolization of the modern world as a giant machine in which each part relates to all the others in a purely mechanical way, we give in to thinking in the most utilitarian way possible: how can I fulfill my needs and desires most efficiently? And the political question becomes: how can we configure the machine so that each part has the maximum freedom to pursue its own end as efficiently as possible, without interfering with the ends pursued by the other parts.

Society and work and even family and church become ladders to be climbed, and the central spiritual motifs of our time become mobility and choice, and the fruits of this are pretty apparent — massive dislocation, family breakup, the end of meaningful small town and rural life, center-city rot, the end of functional education, economic ruin of small producers and landholders, the devolution of political life into identity and victimization games, and on and on. The end result of which is a profound existential alienation in the soul of modern man; he is without a home.

And the pernicious logic of choice (which has a kind of weedy genius) in turn capitalizes on its own discontented and confused search for home and meaning by churning out a-hundred-and-one cheap and easy anecdotes. So we are awash in this expansive sea of popular mass culture which offers everything from Martha Stewart to easy birth control to empty entertainment to mega-lo-mart churches and discount-store religion. All of which functions to shield people from ever even approaching anything real: real faith, real truth, real meaning and contentment.

Certainly in the life of our family we have tried to figure out what to do, but there is no doubt that it is tremendously difficult to resist the disorders of the age. I think for starters, we need to clear our lives of all the mass culture weeds that choke out authentic growth. Read the classics and the Church Fathers instead of junk fiction and self-help crap. And then go about the hard work of learning the discipline of place. Get married. Have kids, lots of them. Don't turn them over to others to raise. When I finished law school I had offers to work at several large east coast law firms for twice the money I could make at home. But home was more important, so we stayed. Shortly after law school, my wife Ann and I, with our three boys (now five boys), moved to 18 acres outside of town. We try to grow some of our own food, Ann has homeschooled, we have a commitment to this place and these people that trumps most of the other things we could spend our life pursuing. It isn't perfect or anywhere near that, but it is, we hope, a decent resistance.

There is risk in all of this — commitment by its nature portends disaster. Inevitably either we fail the place or person or idea we are committed to or it will fail us. The “real” that we all crave requires real risk though. And in that crucible I think the terrible beauty and transcendent hope of the uncertain journey of faith in Jesus becomes real, and our souls become attuned to that reality.

And in the end we must always remember the spiritual truth that, as the playwright Andras Visky puts it, the situation is very good, it is hopeless.

Spengler, again
[Rod Dreher 03/27 05:03 PM]

The estimable Spengler is at it again, taking up in today’s column the Rahman apostasy case. Why am I bringing it up on the CC blog? Because Spengler appears to believe that once a culture turns its back on faith, it begins to die. Read these excerpts:

Death everywhere and always is the penalty for apostasy, in Islam and every other faith. It cannot be otherwise, for faith is life and its abandonment is death. Americans should remove the beam from their own eye as they contemplate the gallows in the eye of the Muslims. Philistine hypocrisy pervades Western denunciations of the Afghan courts, which were threatening to hang Christian convert Abdul Rahman until the case was dropped on Monday.

Afghanistan, to be sure, is a tribal society whose encounter with the modern world inevitably will be a train wreck. The trouble is that the West has apostatized, and is killing itself. There turned out to be hope for Rahman, but there is none for Latvia or Ukraine, and little enough for Germany or Spain. That said, I wish to make clear that I found the persecution of Rahman deplorable.

[snip]

"Where are the moderate Muslims?" sigh the self-appointed Sybils of the Western media. Faith is life. What does it mean to be moderately alive? Find the "moderate Christians" and the "moderate Jews", and you will have the answer. "Moderate Christians" such as Episcopalian priests or Anglican vicars are becoming redundant as their congregations migrate to red-blooded evangelical denominations or give up religion altogether. "Moderate Jews" are mainly secular and tend to intermarry. There really is no such thing as a "moderate" Christian; there simply are Christians, and soon-to-be-ex-Christians. The secular establishment has awoken with sheer panic to this fact at last. In response we have such diatribes such as Kevin Phillips' new book American Theocracy, an amalgam of misunderstandings, myths and calumnies about the so-called religious right.

I don’t think Spengler is saying that a culture must either apply the hammer to all heretics, or sign its death warrant. None of us wants to live in a culture that punishes those of minority faiths, or no faith at all. Is he saying, though, that it’s a law of nature that once a culture grants permission to apostasize without (serious) consequence, it has already started down a path to self-destruction? Is it possible, as he seems to allow for in his admiring discussion of the United States, for a culture to be both seriously religious, genuinely pluralistic, and thriving, not declining? Perhaps Spengler will write in to elaborate on his remarks, in which case I’ll post them to the CC blog.

Crunchies & In Our Hands
[Kathryn Jean Lopez 03/27 04:31 PM]

Have any of y'all taken a look at Charles Murray's $10,000 alternative to the welfare state? Just curious.

Not THAT Tyler
[Rod Dreher 03/27 04:22 PM]

A New Orleans lawyer who ought to be out there suing FEMA instead of writing e-mails to me, says that “Fight Club” has a secret crunchy con history:

Tyler Durden: Crunchy Con. Think about it – forsakes consumerism, moves into a blighted inner-city neighborhood where he lives simply, starts a movement then denies that it exists and that he’s its leader, goes to meetings where guys hug each other, lives outside the mainstream, is a loving paterfamilias who goes to church regularly. Oops, strike that last one.

Among all the Hank and Homer bidness, someone else must have noticed this, huh?

Now that I think about it, I think Brad Pitt was Tyler Durden. Don’t know Ed Norton’s character’s name.

Re: The St. Benedict Option
[Rod Dreher 03/27 04:03 PM]

Reader Tyler writes:

In response to your question, "What would the St. Benedict option look like today?", I would say that several examples, some of which have been touched upon in the blog, are evidence that this approach has been well underway for some time. Homeschooling. The vibrancy of orthodox Christianity (compared with the vacuity of the mainline Protestant branches). As well as efforts such as Ave Maria University and Ave Maria town, the project of Tom Monahan (who incidentally had to defend to the likes of Katie Couric how it could be possible that a community could be formed where porno, condoms, and abortions were not readily available), in deed this blog itself.

We as a culture must now rely on our creative minorities (the phrase is that of Benedict XVI) to preserve that which is True. From this spark one hopes that future generations can emerge from the cultural catacombs to spread the good news once again to the barbarians. The demographics which appear so bleak for Europe may be the key to the future, as the counter-culture leftists are aging and are not reproducing. The trends can already be seen. For example, it has been my experience that most of the young priests I encounter are far more orthodox then the older generation.

Ultimately, however I do not think that a broad political movement can be created out of those who may be "crunchy" on the left and/or right. The call to live by the measure of the Permanent Things is simply not popular. I therefore fully endorse article 10 of your manifesto, which acknowledges that the culture can not be saved by politics. Each man must decide how am I to live my life and for what purpose. No public policy promulgated by politicians will answer this question.

The St. Benedict Option
[Rod Dreher 03/27 02:06 PM]

Today begins the final week of the Crunchy Con blog. This week we’ll be talking about where to go from here. The title of this chapter, “Waiting for Benedict,” comes from the final words in “After Virtue,” an influential work of moral philosophy by Notre Dame’s Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age ... and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. ... A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict.

Why St. Benedict? Because Benedict of Nursia left the dying city of empire in disgust with its dissolute ways, retreating to the countryside seeking God. He would in time draw around him a group of men who shared his moral concerns. Later he would write a Rule upon which Western monastic life would be founded. This Rule became one of the most important documents in the history of Western civilization — and indeed is a prime reason we even have something called Western civilization. The monasteries that would observe Benedict’s rule kept the faith and the virtues alive during the Dark Ages, and served as seedbeds of cultural and religious renewal.

MacIntyre’s book argues that we have reached a decisive point of moral and cultural fragmentation in the West, having pushed radical individualism and moral relativism to the point where it is difficult to appeal to shared moral norms as a way of deciding public policy. Our moral language is increasingly empty, as we haven’t kept the communities and traditions that gave meaning to our moral language. He argues that we are at the point where the only sensible thing for traditionalists to do is to withdraw into smaller groupings and to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained.”

If traditionalist/crunchy conservatives were to take the St. Benedict Option today, what would it look like? Would doing so amount to giving up on the culture in despair … or would it mean retreating behind defensible borders? Thoughts?

Re: Chris Weinkopf
[Bruce Frohnen 03/27 01:29 PM]

I find particularly striking Chris's statement that "that the free market is, like democracy, only as good as the people who participate in it." The same goes for any human institution, I think. The questions most of us should be asking most of the time is not "does the market/government/etc. allow me to do this?" but rather "is it right to do this?" Frank Meyer, father of fusionism, himself noted, not just that virtue requires freedom, but also that freedom requires virtue.

Burke said "intemperate men cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." And no institution, no matter how well crafted, can alter that.
No matter how well set up, every institution requires the practice of virtue to survive.

Chris Weinkopf
[Rod Dreher 03/27 11:39 AM]

Chris Weinkopf, editorial page editor of the LA Daily News, comes out as pretty much a crunchy con in his (generous) column Sunday. Excerpt:

The evidence is compelling: My family watches no TV. We recycle. We choose to pay more for our milk instead of buying the cheaper, hormone-injected and antibiotic-loaded kind. We've accepted a more modest lifestyle than we could otherwise afford if I were willing to work 80-hour weeks or my wife were pursuing her career instead of staying home to raise our children full-time. We realize this kind of life isn't for everyone, but to us, these decisions don't feel like sacrifices they're liberating secrets to a richer life, handed down by wise families we admire.

Some of these choices are "crunchy," some are conservative, and some defy labels altogether. But we try and quite often fail to gradually focus more on our faith and ideals, and less on our appetites or the latest trend, in making household decisions.

Ultimately, "Crunchy Cons" isn't about Birkenstocks or bungalows, but about trying to better orient one's life around the Permanent Things, caps ok and becoming more mindful of our ethical blind spots. Dreher encourages some much-needed, and sometimes unsettling soul-searching for those of us on the right. He reminds conservatives that we have no monopoly on virtue, and that the free market is, like democracy, only as good as the people who participate in it.

Skepticism
[Amy Welborn 03/24 05:06 PM]

Rod writes of the importance of traditional forms of faith as a basis for, well, traditionalism - another way of describing the particular form of Crunchy Con-ness we are discussing. What you describe, Rod, over and over, is what amounts to a sacramental sensibility (as you yourself call it) - basically that our beliefs manifest themselves in what we do in the world, and conversely, what we do in the world can deepen our experience of the transcendent.

But as I was mulling over this and the conversations of the past month, a thought came to me. The sensibility that Rod is describing, whatever you want to call it, is vital to conservatism..and any other ideology or institution. Why? Because it is a constant reminder of what lasts and what doesn't.

That brings us to a knotty, perhaps paradoxical place
- a subgenre of an ideology focused on drawing meaning from how we live draws its power, ultimately, from being a reminder that the way we live will not be around forever.

What the Crunchy Con manifesto brings to the debate, I think, is skepticism about the powers and principalities. This is ironic, as I said, because Crunchy Con-ness is anything but abstract and ethereal. It is about the earth, other creatures and our relationship to them. But the point is that Crunchy Con-ness, as a reflection of a religious sensibility, ultimately values the creatures and the stuff and the relationship because they point, not to themselves, but to what lasts. Or, if I may be so bold, to Who lasts.

That's a useful, if sometimes irritating and discomfiting reminder, I think.

Wow. A post
[Amy Welborn 03/24 04:30 PM]

First, apologies for being such a loser blog participant. I have excuses: Right when the blog began, I went to Rome for 9 days. Then I came back, and have been recovering from going to Rome in various ways, including catching up on work, reading through these very brainy posts and being thoroughly intimidated by them, and simply adjusting to life back in northern Indiana.

In a way I've not recovered, and the reason why ties in a bit with the subject of the moment. But first, let me take on a couple of other matters forthrightly.

I think Rod has raised quite important issues via this book, and I'm grateful. I can see some of the objections, but part of my problem is that I sit at a certain distance from the project and the conversations here, simply because I have little to no interest in how ideological conservatives define themselves. It's not *my* fundamental identity, not even politically. It's not that I don't find myself in agreement with many elements of conservative ideological self-identification, but at the end of the day, the arguments about the definition of "conservative" and its subgenres is not someting I can get really, really invested in.

If Rod interprets his conservativism in a Crunchy way, and sees his Crunchiness as rooted in conservative principles - so what? Personally, it makes a lot more sense than the whole South Park Republican subgenre, but then again, at a certain level I can see that too.

Contra much of the discussion here and comments in certain reviews, I didn't experience Crunchy Cons as work in which the emphasis was on telling other self-identified conservatives how to live. It was, for the most part, an explanation of how the life that the Drehers and others like them lead is rooted in conservative principles. It all comes back to the intial experience of being at the end of "conservative" scorn for shopping at the food co-op and wearking Birkenstocks. "Wow, that's liberal of you." "Well, no it's not, and let me explain why."

Granted, Rod does get in the prophet groove, and it's strong, and it's challenging. But given the flux within conservatives and the constant conversations about conservative identity, I see this as one more interesting ingredient to the mix.

But as I said, that is a wrap-up digression, so on to religion.

Re: Tradition and Islam
[Rod Dreher 03/24 10:45 AM]

Reader Dan writes from Wisconsin:

There is indeed a problem for traditionalist Christians and social conservatives to the extent that other "Conservatives" hitch themselves with too little or no qualification to a modernist liberalism. Western religious traditionalists along with members of the true Left may indeed find some consensus with Muslims about the threat of a materialistic, unrestrained free-market order that madly preaches the spread of porn as a solvent to militant moral and religious particularisms which are accused of disenfranchising women and children. Turn the world into Las Vegas, and everyone will be too "happy" — i.e., sedated and distracted — to cause much trouble. This somehow takes care of the disenfranchisement problem?

That reasoning is the madness that all serious Muslims feel compelled to oppose, including the radical, militant sort. However, it is a real stretch of guilt by association reasoning to lump Muslims, Christians, Jews, Mormons, and others together with the likes of Sayyid Qutb simply because they're all unwilling to live in a degrading Jerry Springer and "Girls Gone WIld" world.

With much better justification you could argue instead that western traditionalists and the majority of serious and non-militant Muslims have the only viable and legitimate basis for dialogue and partnership. The "porn and prophylactics for progress" party is the dead-end European gambit; pursuing it is certain to provoke deep reaction and resistance.

It is not as if there are no examples of positive Christian-Muslim coexistence and collaboration. In the latest issue of First Things, Stephen Schwartz notes, "Paradoxically, the only support the struggling [Albanian] Catholics have found is from the Muslim intelligentsia in northern Albania, who admire the Roman apostolate for its contribution to local and national progress. People like the Muslim journalist Blendi Kraja are more avid in their promotion of Catholic culture than local Church representatives... Tens of thousands of Albanians have returned from Islam to Catholic Christianity, the faith of their ancestors before the Turkish conquest of the country in the fifteenth century. Local Muslim clerics make no protest against these religious revisions, arguing that the descendants of Catholics have the right to reaffirm their traditional faith."

Would Vince argue that the Balkans and "women's rights" would be better served by the arrival of activist shock-troops representing the values and agendas of the likes of the ACLU, NOW, and NARAL?

Linker on Neuhaus
[Rod Dreher 03/24 08:48 AM]

Well, this will certainly cause a stir. It's a long review essay from The New Republic, taking on Father Richard John Neuhaus's new book. The review's author is Damon Linker, the former editor of Fr. Neuhaus's magazine First Things. It's rather critical, and raises a number of serious questions about theological conservatism and its shaky compatability with the American order.

Tradition and Islam
[Rod Dreher 03/24 08:47 AM]

Vince, no crunchy-con he, writes:

To what degree does traditional conservatism resemble traditional (sometimes militant) Islam? Minus the violence, there are similarities which trouble me, even more after 9/11. Have you considered the extent to which 9/11 shook out many of our assumptions like an old rug? Moving the Middle East forward means championing some things which conservatives have previously been neutral or hostile to (women’s rights, for example). In order to drain the swamps of terrorism, anything that looks isolationist, antidemocratic, anti-industrial, and antimodern has to go. That means traditional conservatism has to adapt or finally be rejected. After 9/11, we necessarily have to become champions of democracy, modernity, and progress, all of which terrorists despise. There is something wrong when traditional conservatives and militant Islamists speak the same language in their disgust with America.

Well, for one thing, it depends on what you want to conserve. I do not wish to conserve the values of the Ayatollah Sistani, and would be thrilled to see them pass into history, while Muslims conserve what is most humane in their tradition. Alas, it does appear that American blood and American treasure — quite a lot of it — has gone to institutionalize Sistani’s worldview. Be that as it may, it is fallacious to argue that because militant Islam has problems with modernity as it is playing out in contemporary America, that therefore traditional conservatism shares the same taint. This is guilt by association. And it is a false choice to say one must either have Hugh Hefner or the Ayatollah Sistani. Remember my story about the practicing Muslim mother I met in Dubai, who lives in London and who told me she and her husband despise Islamic fundamentalism, but also despise the eroticized, materialistic secular culture in Britain. They feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Traditional conservatives here understand what she means.

Roger Scruton wrote a wonderful short book about terrorism and modernity, called The West and the Rest, in which he says:

It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence [Western-educated, wealthy Islamist ideologues]. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocated, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is thte price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God’s law, the impact of porongraphy is devastating.

Answering J.B. Watson
[Rod Dreher 03/24 08:44 AM]

I posted something yesterday by J.B. Watson, who argued that he chooses to be Catholic, not Orthodox, in part because he is a man of the West, and wishes to be fully part of the Western Christian tradition. I don’t endorse his view, but I thought it was an interesting one. Now, Daniel Larison, a convert to Orthodoxy, has answered him, an excerpt of which I post here to contribute to the conversation about choosing one’s Tradition:

Then there is the claim that "they are Eastern churches, and I am a Western man." If we are speaking in terms of a civilisation as a basis for determining which "valid" church Westerners will choose, we are speaking of a Christian civilisation. That civilisation encompasses the heirs of Byzantium as well as the heirs of Latin Christendom. If that is the case, the distinction between what is Eastern and Western collapses rather quickly. What is an authentic measure of the mind of that civilisation, if not the common mind it possessed prior to the schism? If it is that mind that created the fundamental, defining doctrines of the Faith, and that mind was possessed equally throughout the oikoumene before the schism and was expressed in ecumenical councils that were, because of particular historical reasons, all located in the East, we cannot dismiss the "Eastern" churches for being Eastern if we grant, as Mr. Watson does, that they have a valid apostolic succession, valid sacraments and the correct definition of faith. Once we accept the latter, their "Easternness" ought to be immaterial to Western peoples. Indeed, if we see the continuities in the Orthodox Church from the early centuries until today we will be more hard-pressed to mark them off anachronistically as simply Eastern and thus unfit for "Western men."

Re: Religion, Conservatism and America
[Rod Dreher 03/23 03:45 PM]

To clarify my earlier remarks, Bruce, I don’t think it is necessary to be religious to be a conservative, as we understand that in America today. I count libertarians as part of the broader conservative movement, and certainly religion is not required to their understanding of conservatism. But for us traditionalists, of whatever iteration, I don’t see how what we uphold as conservative can be sustained without reference to religion — either formal religion, or a sincere belief in the existence of transcendentals, i.e., the Permanent Things.

Re: Changing religion
[Rod Dreher 03/23 03:28 PM]

Dave from Georgia:

Far as I could tell, I never changed, but the United Presbyterian Church sure did, so now I'm all-over Southern Baptist. Membership in any of the old mainline Protestant denominations for a conservative either means fighting all the time, or looking for a church that doesn't make you angry on Sunday. As Mom says now, "I'm too old to change, but I don't like going to church knowing that I'll feel worse on the way home."

Religion, Conservatism, and America
[Bruce Frohnen 03/23 01:55 PM]

I don't know that it is absolutely essential to be a religious believer in order to be a conservative. I do believe that it is necessary to have religious faith in order to realize one's conservatism to its fullest extent — but then one needs faith to realize anything to its fullest proper extent in this life. More to the point, it seems clear to me, from what I've seen around me, that while one can be conservative without being personally religious, one cannot be a conservative without recognizing the crucial role religion plays in forming a culture and maintaining a common public life. Long before he found faith in God, for example, Willmoore Kendall upheld the importance of religion as key to the American political tradition. The same goes for Russell Kirk.

The corollary question, "whether real Christian faith, particularly of the conservative kind, is really reconcilable with American nationalism," is trickier. Historically America left more room than most nations for real religion combined with real variety because it was literally a community of communities. Federalism, localism and the sheer size of our country allowed for many communities to form and thrive, rooted in religious identities. As we've become more homogenized, superficial and thin as a culture, under the pressures of mass production, consumerism, hyper-mobility, and the cult of efficiency, this has become more difficult. Everyone wants to be comfortable wherever the highest paycheck happens to lead them. And many ideologues are now insisting that to be an American means solely to buy into our nation as an abstract ideal of maximum individual autonomy — a principle destructive of faith and, not coincidentally, of real liberty because it undermines the local associations that make meaningful freedom possible and protect it from the centralized state.

John Courtney Murray wrote of our nation's founding as establishing articles of peace, which Catholics in particular (but this goes for people of faith in general) should accept as a kind of minimum basis for living with other people in, well, peace. But these articles (e.g. religious freedom) are minimal in the sense that they only tell us how to order our political life, and what is most important is our religious life, then our social life. Politics, in this view, in the conservative view and I think in any really rational view, is important only to the extent that it is relevant to how we lead our lives in general. Governments are good or bad according to how well they protect and foster our families, churches, and local associations, not according to how equal they make us all, how good they are at destroying anything that may get in the way of our satisfying various appetites, etc.

Because constitutionalism and decentralization are so crucial to the flowering of religious community, real religious faith historically has been more consistent with the American way of life than most any other. Sadly, the more America becomes centralized and homogenized, the less special it becomes, and the less friendly toward meaningful religion. Which is why I agree so strongly with the crunchy drive to return to more locally based communities in which people can live their faith with their fellows.

The heart of the matter
[Rod Dreher 03/23 01:25 PM]

A reader writes:

Not that you asked, but a debate about the assertion you posted today — - "Mac said that crunchy conservatism can’t be practiced without a serious religious commitment, which means submission to a real power greater than the individual" — -seems at the heart of what the online conversation about your book needs to address. The corollary, which is whether real Christian faith, particularly of the conservative kind, is really reconcilable with American nationalism might also be worth considering.

He’s right. I’ll have to come back to this later — I have to edit several pieces right now. Bruce? Angelo? Caleb? Anybody? Care to take this on?

I will say (again) that I’ve come to believe that the kind of neotraditionalism I espouse in the book only really makes sense to religious conservatives. You don’t have to be religious to share some of its precepts, but it only really hangs together for those who — Christian, Jewish or whatnot — believe that the material world is built on spiritual realities.

Maclin Horton
[Rod Dreher 03/23 12:17 PM]

One of the most interesting people I interviewed for Crunchy Cons was Maclin Horton (who blogs here), a Catholic convert who went from 1960s counterculturalist to faithful orthodox Catholic without ever losing his sense that something was seriously wrong with mainstream American society. He thinks that we’ve gone so far into “Brave New World”-dom that contemporary Americans wouldn’t understand why the comfort-mad dystopia Aldous Huxley portrayed is a bad thing. “They might balk at the stratification of the population by intelligence level, but otherwise would not see anything wrong with this vision of a scientifically controlled hedonistic paradise. I’ll die fighting that in whatever way I can,” he tells me in the book.

Mac added that he loves America, and sees nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to ease suffering. The problem comes in when maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain become ends in themselves, he said, and a society that places those things as its ultimate ends will justify anything to achieve those ends. Mac tells me in the Religion chapter that Woodstock was the epitome of the meeting of amoral capitalism and Baby Boomer hedonism: you had masses of people willing to do anything to satisfy their desires, and businessmen willing to give them what they wanted:

“It was the very acme of consumerism. You had several hundred thousand people willingly reducing themselves to a condition of infantile dependence and passivity in the expectation that competent adults would take care of their physical needs. It was that, more than the doping and fornicating, that was really most disgusting and even frightening about it.”

Yet he emerged from the counterculture convinced that the misguided hippies had really been on a search for God all along, and had substituted sex and drugs for what can only be satisfied in religious faith. I suggested to him that in our day and age, the real cultural radicals are the faithful Catholic families showing up with their six or seven kids in tow to the Latin Mass at some inner-city parish forgotten by the bishop, or perhaps grudgingly tolerated by him as a sop to the right-wing nuts (as he might see them). Mac said this is not surprising, because those who are most serious about defending the primacy of the spiritual against our materialistic, hedonistic consumer culture are those most willing to commit themselves to a serious spiritual life.

We talked about the disappointments of Catholic life in America today. Mac says that he knew when he came into the Catholic Church years ago that it would be hard, that he was coming in at a bad time. He has held on to his convictions to sustain him through the Amchurch liberal deconstructionists. Yet as his kids grew older and began to drift away from Catholicism, he grew bitter that the church did not offer more to hold them.

“I can remember any number of Sundays when we would come back from mass and the children would pile out of the car and Karen and I would jus sti there morosely for fifteen minutes, trying to articulate exactly what it was about the liturgy that left us feeling this way afterward. I should add that I was and am equally bitter toward the surrounding culture that makes it so very, very hard to raise children these days.”

So why do you hold on? I asked him. “It’s really quite simple: there isn’t anything else,” he said. ‘It’s Catholicism or nihilism for me.”

We ended our conversation on a crucial point. Mac said that crunchy conservatism can’t be practiced without a serious religious commitment, which means submission to a real power greater than the individual. If you merely choose something because it sounds nice, it won’t have any power to bind the will.

“I think one of the underlying psychological shifts that eventually lefdme to the Church was the realization that I could not simply be ‘spiritual’ in any serious way by browsing various religions and selecting what pleased me. It would be necessary to submit on some fundamental level.”

Re: Changing religion
[Rod Dreher 03/22 03:51 PM]

Christian M. writes:

Your comments implied that Diane retreated behind defensible boundaries. In fact, it sounds like she stood firm in her faith, and her old denomination abandoned that faith. So she looked around and found others who were standing firm in the faith. Anyone who lives for the Kingdom of God makes an advance against the gates of Hell, not a retreat, regardless of what name is on the sign outside the church.

Worrying about whether she's retreated because her church left the cause of God for the cause of plurality puts the capital T on tradition, in the sense of Caleb's Bostonian parodist. Faith in God is the fount of the sacramental life you describe. Tradition must be secondary to faith if a holy life is possible.

Oh, I don’t worry about Diane. It sounds to me like she did the right thing. My guess is that she left the Episcopal church, though she didn’t say so in her email. But Catholics and Orthodox are not as free as Protestants, including Anglicans, to leave our churches, because our churches make exclusive claims to authority. What do you do if you’re a Catholic and you feel practically abandoned in your own church? What do you do if you are Orthodox, but the Orthodoxy you find yourself in is an ossified worship of Tradition and the Tribe for its own sake (this really happened to a good friend, who left for Evangelicalism because he was suffocating under the weight of Tradition that had become form without substance)?

Here is Father Richard John Neuhaus, writing about the late Orthodox theologian Father Alexander Schmemann, quoting from the latter’s diaries. I’ve read those diaries, and they’re very, very good. Fr. Schmemann was a man who was deeply in love with his faith and its traditions, but also conscious of how the Tradition often got in the way of the living faith:

“I firmly believe,” he writes, “that Orthodoxy is Truth and Salvation and I shudder when I see what is being offered under the guise of Orthodoxy, what people seem to like in it, what they live for, what the most orthodox, the best people among them, see in Orthodoxy.” The Russian émigrés, who did not share his vision of Orthodoxy’s universal mission, were the cause of endless frustration. As were the émigrés, so to speak, from Protestantism and Catholicism who sought out Orthodoxy as an escape from history. Fr. Alexander wrote, “Since the Orthodox world was and is inevitably and even radically changing, we have to recognize, as the first symptom of the crisis, a deep schizophrenia which has slowly penetrated the Orthodox mentality: life in an unreal, nonexisting world, firmly affirmed as real and existing. Orthodox consciousness did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life. . . . In brief, it did not notice history.”

It is precisely that escape from history that many think is the glory of Orthodoxy. But the escape is delusory. Years later, this entry: “Once more, I am convinced that I am quite alienated from Byzantium, and even hostile to it. In the Bible, there is space and air; in Byzantium the air is always stuffy. All is heavy, static, petrified. . . . Byzantium’s complete indifference to the world is astounding. The drama of Orthodoxy: we did not have a Renaissance, sinful but liberating from the sacred. So we live in nonexistent worlds: in Byzantium, in Russia, wherever, but not in our own time.” (Here and elsewhere, “the sacred” refers to the artificial world of religiosity, churchiness, and clericalism separated from history and everyday experience.) May 24, 1977: “Orthodoxy refuses to recognize the fact of the collapse and the breakup of the Orthodox world; it has decided to live in its illusion; it has turned the Church into that illusion (yesterday we heard again and again about the ‘Patriarch of the great city of Antioch and of all the East’); it made the Church into a nonexistent world. I feel more and more strongly that I must devote the rest of my life to trying to dispel this illusion.”

Break out the torches?
[Bruce Frohnen 03/22 03:39 PM]

I doubt anything I write could cause our emailer Graeme to pause in his move toward the torches and pitchforks, but I would like to address the assumption that seems to underlie his (and other like) charges.

Today most people think of society as a collection of individuals held together by a government. Now, those individuals have certain beliefs and practices that cause them to come in contact with one another. Among those interests is religion. This is fine, the argument goes, in fact a good thing because it teaches people not to kill one another or take their cutlery without asking. But any attempt to infuse the values and/or practices of a religion into the public sphere is by nature tyrannical. After all, there are no real common values, beyond toleration, on which we can build a society, except intolerant values that cause us to oppress if not kill one another.

The other, older, traditional view is quite different. It sees society as a community of communities. Conservatism, as I have understood it my entire adult life, is rooted in a conception of the human person as inherently social. We grow up in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, and a variety of other associations and communities that help shape how we act, think, and feel. We belong to all these communities at the same time that we are Americans and simply human beings. Different things bind us together in different ways. But a key binding element is religion. Christopher Dawson pointed out that culture comes from the cult. That's not wordplay, but an appreciation of the importance of language. Both culture and cult share a latin root meaning to cultivate — as in one's garden, and as in one's own character. Cultures grow from inherited practices, and religious practices historically have been the most important, binding, and long lasting.

Today, of course, many people consider themselves too sophisticated to bother with such backward thinking. They hold to the Whig view of history, which says religion may have been necessary to bind primitive people together, but we've grown out of all that, even if we happen to remain religious ourselves. Of course, what this actually leaves us with is dying religion and an incredibly thin public morality that leaves the government in charge of deciding what's moral (anything not illegal, but just about anything can be made illegal), with whom we can (and must) associate, and how we can live our lives. Those who dissent hardly dare mention any duties, or even virtues, beyond toleration for fear of being called "taliban." Meanwhile, kids murder kids, mothers kill their babies, fathers abandon their families (or worse) and we can't even count on most people to fulfill their contracts, let alone mere "promises." Morality being a thing of one's own making in contemporary thought and practice, it tends to be disposable when it gets in the way of what one wants.

It is wrong — not just unfair but simply wrong — to say that the only alternative to moral vacuum is some horrible, intolerant religio-fascism or theocracy. The alternative to the thin society we now have is not theocracy, but a community of communities. It is a return to an understanding that most of us live most of our lives, not in politics, or in "private" shut up on our houses, but in SOCIETY — in a variety of social groups that can and should be allowed to determine their own existence, as they should cooperate with other, overlapping groups to make up our public life.

America was always a land of many faiths. But those faiths were allowed to take part in public life in ways they aren't any longer. Something as simple as a nativity scene, something as wholesome as a prayer before a graduation ceremony, so many things that help communities express and deepen their faiths and bonds are now illegal. Why? Irrational fear of religion. Fear that anyone who wants to point out the roots of our society in religion (e.g. American constitutionalism's roots in Calvinist church covenants) is going to destroy liberty; fear that anyone who has a faith different from ours must therefore have nothing in common with us, and so be dangerous if allowed into public discussions; fear that anything but the emptiness of our current public life will take away from our ability to do whatever we happen to want to do.

Not good enough.

“Why I’m Not Eastern Orthodox”
[Rod Dreher 03/22 03:37 PM]

J.B. Watson at Likelier Things writes about why he’s not Eastern Orthodox, and has chosen Catholicism instead (he was Evangelical). He doesn’t deny that the Orthodox churches are “real” churches — apostolically valid, he means, with valid Sacraments. But he says that he is a man of the West, and that means he owes his loyalty to the Western church, which formed his consciousness, and the consciousness of our civilization. I don’t agree with him, but it’s a perspective worth considering.

RE: Responses
[Caleb Stegall 03/22 03:36 PM]

Wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever been “vigorously dealt with” before. But hey, bring on the NR thumb screws! I’m all for a return to the scary mean dark ages, right?

I don’t think Graeme is actually reading anything written here, and that’s about as charitable as I can be.

Lawrence on the other hand makes a reasoned, though I think misguided, point. Yes, I affirm the Reformational principle of sola scriptura, but only as it was articulated and practiced by the Reformers who never understood or sought to understand Scripture appart from an authoritative reading community. It is in fact the modern evangelical tendency to think of Scripture wholly apart from any authoritative community that is at odds with most of historical and confessional Protestantism. A fault that leads to increasingly liberal readings from one generation to the next.

Changing religion
[Rod Dreher 03/22 02:27 PM]

Diane from Oklahoma indicates how tricky the idea of holding to Tradition is in our times, with regard to religion:

I didn't change religion but have gone from a mainstream denomination to a small, independent, evangelical Christian church. To my mind, I didn't change. The church (or at least the powers that be) did. Having grown up in the (denomination that shall remain nameless) church, I never envisioned I could go to one of those churches that today's mainstream media depicts as bigoted and backwards. But when my children were taught in confirmation class that hell may not exist, when the pastor believes everyone (and I mean *everyone*) goes to heaven, when an avowed atheist teaches Sunday school, and when the church hierarchy tries to affirm homosexual acts as good, then I found a body of believers (aka church) that more accurately reflects my understanding of what God calls us to do and be.

Is Diane being more traditional by leaving the Tradition she was born into, because she believes the institution has broken with Tradition? I think so, absolutely. What happens when the institutional guardians of religious tradition abandon it, keeping only the form without the substance? This gets complicated. I was talking to an Episcopal priest the other day who is completely outdone with his church, but who says that if the traditionalists leave, who will be left to fight for tradition? Is it nobler to die in what you judge to be a lost cause, or to retreat behind defensible boundaries? Each of us has to decide. I think it’s even harder to make that decision when you have children to raise, and you want to pass the faith on to them and wonder how on earth you’re going to be able to when the substance of the tradition appears to be collapsing around you.

Re: Tradition
[Caleb Stegall 03/22 02:25 PM]

An interesting comment by the parody guy here:

I live in Boston which is in many cultural senses a deeply "crunchy" city. Part of what I love about the city is that tradition here isn't spelled with a capital t, it's an honest and uncompelled aspect of daily life. The Warren Tavern, where revolutionary war heros ate and drank, is still a popular place with locals because it's still a damn good bar. Locke Ober is as sparkling a restaraunt as it was a century ago, but I don't think they served sashimi tuna tartare back then. In college I worked in a cigar shop that had been in business since 1868 and felt like it. On Saturdays regular customers would bring their sons in, and say, "when I was your age you grandfather brought me here, and when you are my age, you will bring your grandson here." Sadly, that store is gone, victim partly of the anti-smoking zealots and partly mismanagement when the store passed from the father to the son. What the crunchies have is Tradition, polished to a mirror finish, sealed in lucite, and placed on a pedestal in a museum.

I do not think I, or any of the traditionalists here have idolized tradition in the manner suggested here. In fact, a perusal of the blog shows that I began with a caution concerning the dangers of overarticulating tradition — or of tradition with a capital T. Instead the focus should be on those “honest and uncompelled aspects of daily life” that arise when one daily disciplines “the body and mind to order themselves according to their place and heritage.” Later, during the Homer Simpson imbroglio, I emphasized the need for traditionalists to have a deep respect for the vernacular; or for the “ways that ordinary people try through all the difficulties to preserve what is good and permanent in life.” Elsewhere I described the need to preserve, protect, and in some cases, revive, a truly social sphere distinct from either the state or the individual which can create a sense of home — which I hear echoed in the comments about Boston above — that is “not just four walls and a roof” but encompasses “the highways and byways that weave together the strands of memory, church, kin, work, and play into a place of belonging; home in this sense is seen and ought to be experienced as the central focal point of man’s contact with God; with the divine and holy ground of being.” None of this is aimed at fetishizing tradition for tradition’s sake.

But then the parody guy follows his sensible comments up with this:

Stegall talks about the allegiance to "abstractions" as being somehow lesser than fealty to "the land," when it is precisely the fact that we are a nation founded on ideas rather than blood and soil that makes us special.

Here the divisions Lukacs was talking about become more apparent: “the division between a true love of one's country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless ‘growth.’” Ideas are not wholly fungible or portable apart from an embodiment in something particular — some “honest and uncompelled aspect of daily life.” This is a lesson Nisbet discusses in Quest for Community and a lesson I daresay we are learning anew in Iraq right now. What makes the Boston small-t traditionalism that is admired above special is a certain idea incarnate in a whole web of particular places, people, and common practices and memories which can be passed down from one generation to the next. When you see the incarnate places and traditions being destroyed in the name of the idea, you know something has gone really awry. You know battle lines are being drawn; and you ought to know that one side is fighting under false colors. And conservatives, at least, ought to know on which side they stand.

Re: Tradition
[Rod Dreher 03/22 01:57 PM]

Reader Lawrence, a Protestant, says Caleb sure doesn’t sound like much of a Protestant to him. Caleb, I’ll leave answering Lawrence to you; I would only say that “Sola Scriptura” becomes problematic because there is no apparent way to determine whose interpretation of what the Bible says is binding. I don’t want to refight the Reformation on this blog — I don’t think any of us do — and let me restate again that I am not a Protestant, but I find that on most pressing questions of public morality, I have far more in common with my conservative Protestant friends than I do with liberal members of my own tradition. Nevertheless, because the Religion chapter is to a large extent about Tradition, these points are worth discussing:

You asked earlier today, "absent an authentic, authoritative tradition, how is it possible to keep religion from becoming merely the divinization of the Self’s desires? How do we keep God from looking a lot like ourselves in a time and place where individualism and self-expression are among the highest social values?"

There is a simple answer that you would get from the typical Protestant who understands and defends what it means to be a Protestant: Sola scriptura. How do we mitigate against our own selfish desires without authoritative tradition? The Bible. How do we discover what God really looks like in a time of rampant individualism? The Bible.

I would have the same answer to the question if the time and place were where collectivism and deferrence to the group are the highest social values: THE BIBLE.

Caleb Stegall doesn't sound like a Protestant; he sounds like a Catholic. As much as he sings about Tradition, he sounds like Tevye. There *is* a way for those who reject the authority of tradition to be rooted in something more permanent than themselves, and for Protestants that way is to uphold the authority of Scripture.

One could — and probably should — argue that far too many conservative Protestants are reading too much of Rick Warren and not enough of Peter, James, John, and Paul; that we not only embrace new technology (with good reason, since I believe the Reformation would have been next to impossible without the movable-type printing price) but we also make the medium more important than the message.

But unless you want to rewage the Reformation, you should understand first that Caleb Stegall's emphasis on tradition is at odds with much of historical Protestantism, and second that the Bible provides a foundation for faith even in the absence of tradition.

Heretics
[Rod Dreher 03/22 01:10 PM]

Reader Graeme, who thinks our Calvinist friend Caleb is Catholic, is just about ready to see NR give us the Gadarene swine treatment:

Lovely to see Caleb's obscurantism and disgust with the city of man asserting itself again.

As to the tragedy of what we lose with these farmers being dispossessed: what was lost was the power of entrenched providers to extract rents for inferior products from captive victims. To actually see improved nutrition as a negative goes further to show the bankruptcy and deep unattractiveness of this whole Crunchy experiment. The near total ignorance with respects to economics, economic history, the idea of of the corporation, etc is astonishing and tremendously disappointing.

You and yours are following the path of the Left. Complete ignorance of economics and a rejection of how people interact with each other to make each others lives better (otherwise known as markets), combined with a love for finding the heretic. Caleb is saying that anyone that supports or profits from development is unconservative. Excuse me while I proceed to have a heart attack. Your fellows are outing your movement as nothing more but a delusional neo-luddite cult committed to deindustrialization, the abandonment of any concern for material well being, and an inward turn towards only the spiritual. May you so ever pleasantly shove off and never be heard from again.

The absolute ignorance and disrespect for anyone who is not an orthodox catholic coming from Caleb, and the slightly less restrictive vision of Crunchiness as restricted to certain catholic and protestant sects expressed by the rest is exceptionally disgusting. Your intense parochialism and isolation from people of other religions is astounding. You make no attempts to at least acknowledge the (deeply misguided and misanthropic) people of Hindu backgrounds who support your policies in India (keeping the low castes poor, in the village, and subservient to their hereditary masters, all in the name of tradition!). Or, in better cases, to try and not make arguments that exclude anyone who is not a Christian. Quoting people that are arguing for a society with much stronger links to religion, and using people who only discuss it in terms of accepting Christ, is an exceptionally bad idea if one does not want to be called a theocrat. If Caleb and yourself were serious about simply encouraging a stronger turn to the spiritual, it would be the work of but seconds to find appropriate quotes in Judaic, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu, Bahai and other traditions. It is not your comfort zone, but when arguing for an idea that appears to be prima facie theocratic, one is required to demonstrate how their ideas can be open and attractive to all, rather than prescriptive.

You need to vigorously deal with Caleb and to really consider how the rest of the group's arguments (including your own) would appear to others who do not share your tradition. Caleb is a completely lost cause pursuing his crusade against everything that is not his own specific sect that has him living in Kansas and making a living off the back of progress, but you really need to consider how this entire thing looks to other people. I'm Lutheran, but my friends include serious Jews, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists, etc. Most of the above are conservative in their politics, their parents definitely being so, and to see a group of people arguing about how so many of these Christian sects are unconservative and how you need to understand Christ in a certain way to be conservative, well, it just screams BAD IDEA!

I seriously hope that you deal with the problems of your bog, before it becomes imperative on others to have NR take care of it and of you. I'm not one for calling for a witch-hunt and casting out heretics, but if the blog continues like this, well...

Re: Religion
[Rod Dreher 03/22 01:01 PM]

John Adams famously said:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Is cultural renewal in America possible absent a return to religious faith? (No; see John Adams.) Is conservatism possible today without religion, and the recognition of transcendentals entailed by religious belief? (Highly doubtful, if by conservatism we mean a political and cultural sensibility that wishes to preserve — as distinct from petrify — a living tradition shaped by particular moral convictions, and the institutions necessary to embody those abstract ideals.) Is religion possible in a meaningful sense in the Modern era without rootedness in a tradition that transcends time and place? (Maybe, but I have my doubts. The religious sentiment will always be with us; it’s built into the human character. But absent an authentic, authoritative tradition, how is it possible to keep religion from becoming merely the divinization of the Self’s desires? How do we keep God from looking a lot like ourselves in a time and place where individualism and self-expression are among the highest social values?)

Given the direction of American society, is it becoming harder or easier to be a good orthodox Christian or Jew and a good American? (In most ways, yes. The decline of public morality hardly needs commenting on. The deeper problem is that we have lost the vocabulary of moral absolutes, and increasingly, the only “thou shalt not” our pluralistic society recognizes is, “Thou shalt not impose your values on others.” This, of course, is only applicable to religious believers. A believer may keep his or her quaint devotions, but is expected to have the decency to keep them in the closet. And for many of us, the rot in the institutions that are supposed to be guarding the religious traditions leaves us feeling alone and abandoned. On the other hand, as Father Joseph Wilson says about Catholics, no Catholic who wants to know what their own Church teaches and believes needs to depend on priest and bishop; he can go straight to an online bookseller and buy whatever he likes, and he can easily find like-minded Catholics on the Internet. Technology, then, can serve to renew Tradition. But in my experience — yours may differ, and I hope it does — it is next to impossible to find any guidance in living an authentically religious life from one’s parish. Much religious life in America today seems to have accommodated itself quite nicely to the culture. Which makes it harder to live in an orthodox fashion. What are you supposed to do when the only doctrine ever heard from the pulpit is “I’m OK, You’re OK,” and you cannot be certain what anybody else in your church believes, other than the near-certainty that they believe they have the sovereign right to decide for themselves — that they are their own Pope?)

Tradition and Truth
[Bruce Frohnen 03/22 11:14 AM]

Rod's questions get to some universal problems, as well as to the particular problem we have in America after several generations of active hostility toward the traditions at the root of our society and civilization.

Truth is real, Goodness is real, and Beauty is real. But we don't experience them in the abstract. We experience A truth, A good society, A beautiful piece of art, music or poetry. And this is where tradition must come in. We have an instinct in us that helps us recognize what is true, good, and beautiful, but it has to be developed; we need to be shown things that are true, good, and beautiful. And that process of education has to make sense to us, both in terms of explaining what it is that it true, good, beautiful about an object, and in connecting it with our everyday experience — it's harder for an American child to understand the beauty of, say, Japanese art, particularly if he doesn't know his own tradition.

You have to know your own tradition — the habits, beliefs, and practices that shape you, your family, your town, your parish, your workplace, etc. — in order to make sense of them. What happens if you ignore it all, or dismiss it as reactionary garbage? You still function, but at a very superficial level, accepting all kinds of prejudices handed to you by the mass media and the people who happen to be around you. Your life, like your society, becomes increasingly incoherent.

This, of course, is where we are right now. People get their culture the same place they get their food, news, and groceries — from the Big Box Mart, the mass produced purveyors of watered down garbage for television, news, education, and just about everything else. Now, some people will claim that this is all changing through the growth of "niche markets." But what you actually find is that people begin with Big Box Mart, be it TV, Wal-Mart, the political parties, or what have you, then choose one or two areas in which to become specialist consumers (but still consumers, rarely ever producers of anything cultural).

Sadly, the same kinds of bad, superficial habits that have taken over our lives in cultural issues have affected us at least as much in our religious lives. Liturgy, where it remains, is so watered down and banal as to be all but useless as spiritual exercise. Theology is reduced to "God wants you to be nice, especially to x, y, and z oppressed groups." And few even acknowledge that beauty should even be an issue for the faithful.

Alexis de Tocqueville strove mightily to save his nation from the cultural chaos into which it had descended in the decades after the French Revolution. That Revolution had overthrown utterly his nation's traditional society, leaving only the mechanisms of centralized power, which had been abused by a succession of destructive tyrants. Tocqueville commented that he at times despaired that his nation ever could reach a place of stability and peace. But he did know one thing: that stability and peace could not be had if people looked only to the moment, ignoring the fact that man is made for something more than animal pleasures. And to make our transcendent good real to us in a time of anti-traditional ideology, we have no choice but to look back beyond the time of destruction to reconnect with the deeper traditions of our people.

We must reconnect with the deeper traditions of our nation, in constitutionalism, in local communities, in an integrated vision of faith and public life, if our nation is to be culturally vibrant again. In the same way, we must reconnect with the springs of faith in our faith traditions. This means the Magisterium for the Catholic Church, along with the often conflicting traditions of various faith communities that for so long made the Church alive to its adherents, minimizing both flaccid nonconformity and clericalism; it also means a return to real liturgical art and practice. For other faiths the traditions are and must be different, but must be re-rooted if real growth is to come. For Protestantism it seems to me the answer would have to lie at least in part in a reinvigoration of place, of geographical localism as key to living a Godly life in community.
But I am no Protestant.

In general terms, it seems to me we have to remember that in seeking to live as we ought we need to look, not just to those who are generally viewed as having authority (which today generally means those who control the branch of Big Box Mart we happen to frequent) but rather look beyond those in power toward a higher authority, and also behind them to the long stretch of tradition that can point us in the right direction in finding our duties.

Generational Work
[Caleb Stegall 03/22 10:03 AM]

Rod, I’ll try to sketch out some answers to your questions.

First, I thought Spengler’s review was excellent and zeroed in on many of the key issues. However, I think he got the relationship between tradition and conversion slightly wrong. Tradition and conversion are two sides of the same coin which is, essentially, faithfulness to the truth about us, God, and reality. Or rather, they should be two sides of the same coin. I don’t think either is less important. When one is emphasized above the other, the result tends to be bad. Conversion brings people to the truth, tradition keeps them rooted in it. “Reformational” and modern tendencies reestablished the importance of conversion over and against a calcified tradition, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way into an endless fascination with conversion — from one thing to the next to the next.

The purpose of a functioning tradition is in fact to renew the original conversion. Tradition is the symbolic reenactment and therefore communication of the original engendering experience of conversion. The symbols, rites, and rituals of tradition become, in Voegelin’s words, “luminous for the truth” of the originary experience of conversion. In Plato’s terms, this is the work of anamnesis; a specific manner of remembering that recapitulates and recalls to consciousness the truth that is thereby made luminous.

If this were not necessary, once converted, one could just go on about one’s business and never give it another thought. Why go to church? Why “do this in remembrance of me”? The existence of a tradition is a concession to the real problems of human consciousness existing in time — lots of good Eliot on that subject — and is a recognition that conversion must be “consolidated;” it must be rooted in renewing “good” soil per Jesus’ parable. Otherwise, when the next snake oil salesman rolls into town, the first conversion experience is forgotten and it is off to seek a new one.

This is generational work. That is one of the most important things to keep in mind; though it is so easy to lose sight of it in a culture which rarely thinks past the weekend. As John Senior used to say, it takes three generations to make a farmer. It may take many more to make one a native to a chosen religious tradition. This is generational work. But it can be done.

On the other hand, sometimes a tradition is so rotten that it must be abandoned, even by a traditionalist, though always with sadness, regret, and a profound sense of loss. Mostly, however, there are always imperfect traditions that must be renewed and tested from within. This is why the endless quest for a new conversion experience is so dangerous, for it depletes traditions’ own source of renewal. And the Gnostic denial of original sin (which is present in groups across the spectrum, from Puritans to secular utopians) is the source of this wandering spirit; a spirit which “lusts for a massively possessive experience” to use another of Voegelin’s terms; a spirit which is unsatisfied with the vagaries of faith and is incapable of living with a humble acceptance of a certain amount of evil, with sadness, but for the sake of a greater joy.

It is fascinating to me to observe the internal feedback loop of the American soul cut adrift from an Augustinian conception of reality. The Puritanical conservative sects and the universalist liberal sects are at separate ends of the same spectrum of belief in man’s perfectability in the here and now. And each has fixated his gaze on the other as that which is to be most feared and loathed; as that mirror image — one of the other — which each is terrified of becoming. And the irony is, of course, that the Puritans did become universalists, and the universalists have now become the new Puritan kill-joys, propagating all kinds of puritanical regulations on human happiness (anti-smoking campaigns come to mind) in the name of progress and continuing enlightenment.

Religion
[Rod Dreher 03/22 09:08 AM]

Today we're going on to the Religion chapter, which is in some ways the most important one in Crunchy Cons. I didn't set out to write this book with this in mind, but it became clear to me that the base of this entire neo-traditionalist sensibility is religious conviction. It quickly became clear in doing my research that almost everyone to whom I'd spoken was in some serious way a religious believer. Why is that? I think it's because people who are serious about their religion understand in their bones how devotion to God and to His laws must be the basis for ordering our own lives, and that of our society.

That does not have to mean a theocracy, I hasten to add; I doubt anyone here would want to live in a theocracy, and the idea that the bishop could call the magistrate and have me put in jail is a revolting idea. But it seems to me clear that T.S. Eliot, in his essay "The Idea of a Christian Society," was right to say that the idea that a Christian (and I might add a serious Jew or Muslim) can accomodate himself easily to a liberal society in which religion is entirely privatized, and which consents to treat the believer good-naturedly, so long as he doesn't presume to think his belief has nothing to do with life and how to live it — well, that attitude is becoming "less and less tenable."

In no case did I find what most of us (well, us conservatives at least) would call religious fanaticism. Rather, I found quite a few people struggling with more or less the same dilemma that a British Muslim woman I met last December in Dubai is: she told me that she and her husband are faithful Muslims who worry about losing their children to Islamic fundamentalism; but they are equally worried about the eroticized, materialistic, go-go culture that is now mainstream in Britain. She said she and her husband are increasingly alienated from British society, not because they are religious radicals (far from it; they despise the Islamists), but because they are sincere believers in God, who has been discarded by British society. We religious Americans are better off than those believers in the UK, but I believe many of us share this woman's anxieties.

Eliot said that Christians should be aiming for "a society in wich the natural end of man — virtue and well-being in community — is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end — beatitude — for those who have the eyes to see it." There is an entire worldview there in those few words, and I think it's a pretty accurate summation of the crunchy-con social ideal. We should talk about that in over the next few days.

It is also worth discussing the observation first made (to my knowledge) by the scholar James Davison Hunter: that the fault lines in American culture no longer run between religious confessions, but between liberals and conservatives across churches and faiths. (Terry Mattingly sums Hunter's observation up
here.) Why do I find it much easier as a Catholic to talk to a Southern Baptist or an Orthodox Jew about matters of faith, politics, society, etc., than with liberal members of my own church? It has to do with the way we view religious truth, and indeed Truth itself. Conservatives in whatever religion view Truth as transcendent, as something that can be known, however imperfectly, and as an objective standard that humans have to conform our own consciences to. The modern, liberal view is that Truth is mutable, and can be reinterpreted in every generation to suit the perceived needs of the community. I have more in common with Tikva Crolius, the Orthodox Jew I interview in Crunchy Cons, than I do with liberal Catholics, chiefly because we both see Truth as transcendent and objective, even though we disagree over the precise nature of that Truth. Yet it must be admitted that there are potentially dark implications for this exclusivist view. How do we hold onto exclusivist truth (which to me is just Truth) in a pluralistic society?

Finally, I hope we can talk about a point Spengler and some others have raised, namely: is it possible to embrace a tradition that is not your own? Caleb is the only person in the Religion chapter who remains in the faith in which he was raised. Everyone else is a convert. Does migrating to another religion indicate a true subjectivism masked by a superficial quest for Truth? What do you do when you find yourself questing for Truth in a deracinated society that has effectively destroyed tradition? What about Evangelicalism, the most politically conservative American faith, but also the one most radically rooted in the individual experience, and therefore most adaptable to the way Americans live today? Is their success a sign of hope for our increasingly rootless country, or at bottom something that should make traditionalists despair? As Spengler observes:

I agree with Dreher that the Chartres Cathedral is more conducive to spirituality than a shopping-mall megachurch, but there is a reason why Chartres is full of tourists and the megachurches are full of worshippers. What if this is as good as it gets?

Ratzinger on "Progress"
[Angelo Matera 03/22 09:04 AM]

There is truth to Nick’s comment about traditionalist thought – its rarefied arguments have played little to no part in the conservative ascendancy of the past 25 years. Reagan certainly never questioned progress, and as for the Neo Cons, Irving Kristol recently made the point that, unlike traditional conservatism, neoconservatism was “a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”

The only traditionalist voices questioning “progress” with any real weight in the world have been those of the Popes, JPII, and now Pope Benedict XVI. In 2001, then Cardinal Ratzinger made this comment in an interview with Le Figaro:

“I have always been skeptical of the concept of progress. There is, of course, a progress in the amount of knowledge, in science and technology. But this progress does not necessarily bring about a progress in moral values, nor in our ability to put to good use the power granted by knowledge. On the contrary, power can be a factor of destruction. I have always been contrary to the Utopian spirit, to faith in a perfect society–conceiving of a perfect society once and for all means excluding the freedom of every day….

…For modern man, the idea of placing limits on research sounds like blasphemy. However, an intrinsic limit exists, and this is human dignity. Progress obtained at the price of the violation of human dignity is unacceptable. If research attacks man, it is a deviation of science. Even if we protest that this or that research will open possibilities for the future, we must say no when man is at stake.”

Re: Cult of Tradition
[Caleb Stegall 03/22 09:02 AM]

Nick, while effectiveness may be a virtue, it is certainly secondary to truth. The questions remain. Is Voegelin right? Is Lukacs right? If they are, you have a problem and no amount of reification of progress will make it go away.

This — that critiques of progress only come from obscurantist priests of hidebound tradition — on the other hand, is simply the voice of one seeking to silence the questioner and squelch threatening lines of inquiry. Voegelin diagnosed this tendency in the Gnostic mind and labeled it an “intellectual swindle.”

In actually fact, contra Nick’s statement, most conservative critics of progress also developed a sophisticated understanding of social change and development. Voegelin, for example, made an incisive and thoroughgoing critique of calcified traditionalism.

The question is not tradition versus progress, it is what is the truth about God, man, his condition, and the right ordering of things? (For those who would (mis)hear the coming theocracy in those words and beat a swift retreat to the barricades of tolerance and personal choice, please note that I am speaking the language of Plato, not the language of John Winthrop).

As for “resonance,” who knows? The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism, progressivism, and materialism may lead to a renewal of thought that goes beyond the reductive and instrumentalist level of the empiricists. At one time, this was a primary conservative impulse. It ought to be again.

Lukacs in context
[Caleb Stegall 03/21 06:05 PM]

Well, prompted by Nick's question and my own curiosity, I pulled Lukacs's End of the Modern Age and found this. Looks like my reading of that line was the correct one:

[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of "progress." ... Our "conservatives" care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of "nature" against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one's country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless "growth."

Cult of Tradition
[Nick Schulz 03/21 05:51 PM]

Of course there’s a long-running conservative critique of the cult of progress – it’s comes from the cult of tradition — and in the 20th century in particular this critique of progress was mostly ineffectual; which is why I’m surprised it’s so lovingly embraced here. One of the great contributions to conservatism made by the neoconservatives was in recognizing the limits of the trad argument in a post-Enlightenment age; neocons encouraged a turning away from the obscurantism of trad con writing and thinking. What is different today that would convince crunchy cons that trad arguments will have any greater resonance than when neocons replaced them with a reliance on empiricism?

Cement
[Jonah Goldberg 03/21 04:31 PM]

An excerpt from a reader:

....Anyway, I did want to mention, since I happen to work for a cement and concrete producer (though not one with plants in Texas), that there is more to the story than Rod surmises. Restrictions surrounding the development of cement plants (which involve huge capital expenditures) make it nearly impossible to build a new plant, and a long, arduous and expensive procedure to update one. It would sure make sense to have the owners of Rod's nearby plants spend capital to invest in a newer, cleaner facility somewhere further outside the sprawling Dallas metro area (which was not quite as much of an issue when the plant was built, I'd bet). However, since that's all but impossible for regulatory reasons, even if a new plant could be built, it would have to be built on the exact same spot that already hosts it, and the additional expense related to permits and regulations even for that move probably contribute to a reluctance to consider such a move.

So, for what it's worth, well-meant environmental regulations are probably making the problem worse. Of course, you could just shut all cement plants down, but I doubt Rod would go that far in opposing development. Though perhaps John Lukacs would.

Re: Progress
[Rod Dreher 03/21 04:19 PM]

For an staggering example of the ambiguity, or one should say the tragedy, of progress, read this Philip Longman essay about how patriarchy is returning because secular liberalism, for all the real material advances it has brought, has been unable to sustain itself. Rich, progressive Europe is literally wasting away to nothing because it has failed to reproduce succeeding generations. Looked at from a macrohistorical point of view, was it really progress if — if — it led to the death of European civilization from decadence and its poisonous fruits?

Of course, to some of us reactionaries, the return of a form of patriarchy is progress. A society in which many, possibly most, women have to leave the home and enter the workforce simply to make enough to keep the family together is not a society that can lay claim to having made progress, at least not in my view.

OK, back to trees. DC area readers might remember the big debate years ago over whether or not to build that big Disney theme park out on or near a Civil War battlefield in northern Virginia. Some on the Right said that the jobs the project would bring were needed, and would constitute progress. Others on the Right — including, if memory serves, George F. Will and Pat Buchanan — argued that the commercialization of what should be sacred space is tawdry and unworthy of this country. I also seem to recall that at least some of the conservative critics of the proposed theme park were reported to own country property that would be adversely affected by the park, were it to be built (in the end, it wasn’t). So it’s possible at least some of the Disney critics’ motives weren’t entirely pure. Still, it was a worthwhile argument to have. And we have the chance to have the same basic argument often in this dynamic country.

Re: Cult of Progress
[Caleb Stegall 03/21 03:45 PM]

Come, come. There are multiple treatments of the negative aspects of progressivism or the "cult of progress" in the conservative canon. In some respects this discussion proves difficult if not impossible due to an apparent lack of a common lexicon. From the Puritans to today's secular progressives, the idea of man's perfectability and the notion that we can in some real sense remake this world according to our own dictates has had a strong grip on the modern mind, and it has often fallen to the conservative to apply the brakes. The conservative recognizes that there can never be any "progress" in a meta sense. That for every gain there is likely a loss. That the work of right ordering is often the work of weighing between one good and a competing good because one cannot have both. Material gain on the one hand, yes. The conservative wants to count the cost. Who stands to benefit? Who loses? The answer to these questions is not prejudged, but the fact that they are asked at all sets one apart from progressives of all political stripes.

There are so many serious conservative thinkers to which one can turn to find an analysis of the problem of progress that one hardly knows where to begin. But let me start with a passage by Eric Voegelin — in my view our best and most comprehensive thinker on this problem — from his 1952 book The New Science of Politics (emphasis mine):

On the one hand ... there begins in the eighteenth century a continuous stream of literature on the decline of Western civilization; and, whatever misgivings one may entertain on this or that special argument, one cannot deny that the theorists of decline on the whole have a case. On the other hand, the same period is characterized, if by anything, by an exuberantly expansive vitality in the sciences, in technology, in the material control of environment, in the increase of population, of the standard of living, of health and comfort, of mass education, of social consciousness and responsiblity; and again, whatever misgivings one may entertain with regard to this or that item on the list, one cannot deny that the progressivists have a case, too. This conflict of interpretations leaves in its wake the adumbrated thorny question, that is, the question how a civilization can advance and decline at the same tiem.

Voegelin then says that an understanding of what he calls "modern gnosticism" — that is, the attempt in modern people to overcome the uncertainty of faith by endowing this world and our range of action in the here and now with an ultimacy of meaning that properly lies over the eschatological horizon — will help us to understand this quandry of a civilization moving forward and backward at the same time. After which, he continues:

The spiritual strength of the soul that in Christianity was devoted to the sactification of life could now be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise. Civilizational action became ... a divertissement that demonically absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man and substituted for the life of the spirit. Nietzsche most tersely expressed the nature of this demonic diversion when he raised the question why anyone sould live in the embarrassing condition of a being in need of the love and grace of God. "Love yourself through grace" was his solution — "then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." And how can this miracle be achieved, this miracle of self-salvation, and how this redemption by extending grace to yourself? The great historical answer was given by the successive types of gnostic action that have made modern civilization what it is. The miracle was worked successively through the literary and artistic achievement that secured the immortality of fame for the humanistic intellectual, through the discipline and economic success that certified salvation to the Puritan saint, through the civilizational contributions of the liberals and Progressives, and, finally, through the revolutionary action that will establish the Communist or some other gnostic millennium. ...

The historical result [of the gnostic idea of self-salvation through progress] was stupendous. ... On this apocalyptic spectacle, however, falls a shadow .... [W]hat should in this order of things become of men who would rather follow God [than the priests of self-salvation]? ...

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. ... The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.

A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time — but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect that represents the gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

There is something worth meditating on.

Re: You call this progress?
[Rod Dreher 03/21 03:21 PM]

Nick, I certainly am not against progress per se, and certainly improving access to potable water has to count as the kind of progress all sensible people should welcome. What I oppose is the idea that all change, especially technological change, amounts to progress. It is quite possible that it could amount to regress in some important ways. When I hear the phrase “cult of progress,” I think of a mindset that fosters an uncritical acceptance of whatever is new, not only as good, but as inevitable.

In my book, I bring up the visit the Dallas Morning News editorial board received from a delegation of Latin American ambassadors and U.S. business representatives, lobbying for our backing for a regional free-trade agreement. I was struck by a part of the meeting in which the visitors spoke of a group of small Mexican farmers who opposed the deal as troubled eccentrics who could be taken care of without much difficulty. There was not the least question but that the new trade deal, which would wipe these farmers out, was progress. There would be more commerce among nations, and the collective GDP would rise. That’s certainly progress from a certain perspective. But nobody thought to examine what social and cultural things of value would be lost as well. Perhaps in the end, they wouldn’t be worth saving. But the cult of progress doesn’t think to ask.

Another example, also from the book. I tell of a friend in DC who worked at a university there. He overheard one day his boss, a black woman of a certain age, talking to a childhood friend from the old neighborhood, reminiscing about back in the day. My friend said it eventually dawned on him that they had grown up poor, and had lived through seeing their traditional neighborhood destroyed to make way for Great Society public housing projects. We all know how well that turned out. My friend told me he had never stopped to consider what a complex and fragile web of social relations had been destroyed by the Master Planners who only set out to do good, and to bring Progress to the benighted residents of Washington DC. The cult of progress strikes again, with unintended consequences.

You Call This Progress?
[Nick Schulz 03/21 02:04 PM]

Crunchy Cons, one problem I have with the critique of the ‘cult of progress’ is its imprecision. To what is one referring? Concrete pourers are emblematic of it apparently. That’s not helpful.

That said, I can guess what I think the cult is given the context of the attacks on it (and markets, the individual, etc.). I assume the cult of progress includes those who favor stronger property rights and would employ cost-benefit and risk-benefit analyses to problems. Including environmental problems. Tomorrow is World Water Day – the lack of potable water in the developing world being one of the fetishes of the progress cult. It’s an enormous environmental problem and, dare I say it, an affront to the Almighty. Now, what does it say about cult of progress that those parts of the world where water is, relatively speaking, not an issue of serious environmental and humanitarian concern, are those areas where the cult of progress has taken its deepest hold?

More progress, please.

Free Market Environmentalism
[Bruce Frohnen 03/21 01:51 PM]

Jonathan Adler argues for a "true" free market approach to environmentalism.

I have some sympathy for this, mostly because I believe deeply in the importance of property rights. But it is important to keep sight of the fact that markets themselves are institutional products. One of the fundmantal jobs of government is to enforce contracts. Even that job over recent decades has become increasingly difficult for the government as people's willingness to say what they mean and mean what they say has diminished (no good society without virtue, whatever the laws) and as the effects of past bad policy decisions have caught up with us. Lest we forget, corporations are granted by the state huge advantages that often harm innocent investors and even bystanders seeking to recover damages. The current code allows lawyers to hide behind limited liability even in partnerships, and allows developers to form shell corporations for each subdivision they build, avoiding liability for wrongdoing even as they sell themselves as "in the business for 50 years."

Relevance? "True" free market environmentalism assumes people will be able to enforce their property rights against those who pollute on them, etc.
How? You'd have to come up with a legal regime to handle that, and the legal regime is already far out of hand in terms of the time and cost of litigation, leaving most who are not rich effectively without recourse to defend or prosecute even the most basic rights in even the most egregious circumstances.

I'm not saying we shouldn't look for ways to improve on crazy laws like superfund, if possible by depending more on property rights. But there is no magic bullet, here, and we shouldn't forget that there is such a thing as a public good.

Our Furry Friends
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/21 01:34 PM]

I appreciate Christian's citation of Smith's critique of Scully's book. And if someone will respond "I affirm Frederica's appreciation of Christian's citation of Smith's critique of Scully's book" we might get a good game of Gossip going.

As I read the book, I didn't get the impression that Scully was forbidding any use of animals (which, Smith claims, would be unBiblical). It's his choice to be vegetarian, but he recognized that most people use animals for food, leather, and other purposes. He just argued that, specifically because these lives are *not* equal to human lives, because they are comparatively diminished in so many ways, and because they are wholly at our mercy, they deserve to be treated with respect for their brief, natural lives. To treat them as cogs in a machine diminishes *us*, dehumanizes. The examples in the book were so much worse than I'd ever imagined. Indeed, you wonder how any human can bear to work in such conditions and ignore such bewildered and helpless suffering.

The Scriptures definitely permit, and even demand eating meat; see St Peter's vision, where he is shown every kind of animal and told, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). But there is a tradition, at least in the Orthodox Church, of keeping a vegetarian diet among monks and nuns (others may also adopt it), in order to begin now living the life we'll have in heaven, where death will be no more. It is a way of participating in "the angelic life." Our fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, and in longer fast periods such as the present Great Lent, includes abstaining from meat, fish, and dairy; a time when there is no participation in death. This custom of fasting is mentioned in Christian writings as early as the Didache, circa 70 - 80 AD.

Earlier I said that I wondered if it was a distinctively crunchy response, on learning the details of factory farming, to be so personally revolted that you want to avoid eating such meat in future. When I mentioned this, somebody — Caleb? — responded that a decision not to buy factory meat would make so little impact on the market that it wasn't necessary. it would be "superogatory."

That's what I don't get. If "crunchy" is a sensibility, it's one that has to do with how things impact us personally, on the Small, Local, Old, Particular level. It doesn't matter that my abstaining from factory meat won't stop the industry in its tracks. What matters is that I don't want that suffering on my table. I don't want to chew that tragic flesh. "Superogatory"? I don't get it.

RE: Concrete Pourers
[Caleb Stegall 03/21 01:13 PM]

Nick, I suppose you would have to ask Lukacs as to his precise meaning. I take him to be saying that one cannot be a conservative and be, in any fundamental sense, on the side of the cult of progress — those who preach it, profit from it, and drive its engines. Concrete pourers are, in Lukacs formula, emblamatic of the cult of progress. As C.S. Lewis remarked through one of his characters, "I've seen progress in an egg. I call it going bad."

Is the GOP really pro-family?
[Rod Dreher 03/21 01:04 PM]

I interrupt this discussion of grass and cows and such to point the room’s attention to this provocative Allan Carlson essay up at The Weekly Standard’s site. He argues that the GOP became the pro-family party after the Democrats sold out to the sexual revolution, but that in recent years, the Republican Party has in many instances paid lip service to its constituents who favor traditional family values — especially the traditional family, with Mom staying at home. Financial interests have instead been taken care of, says Carlson. Excerpt:

Democrats often dream of wooing the "Reagan Democrats" back into the fold. Bill Clinton, who could speak "evangelical" and who embraced pro-family tax and welfare reforms, succeeded to some degree. Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, who actually coined the phrase "Reagan Democrats," argues that "a new, family-centered politics can define and revitalize the Democratic party." Its message should highlight "family integrity and parental responsibility" and offer a "progressive vision of family support." Greenberg even theorizes that "Roman Catholics would [again] rally to a Democratic party respectful of family and committed to defending government's unique role in supporting it."

If the Democratic party remains the party of the sexual revolution, as its open yearning for same-sex marriage suggests it may, such dreams will remain just that. However, if a Democratic leader can ever shake that monkey off his — or her — back, and if this occurs in conjunction with an economic downturn, the prospects for another broad political realignment are fairly high. A new economic populism, delivering child-sensitive benefits and skewering predatory banks and bureaucrats, could work politically for a clever Democrat.

Moreover, when push comes to shove, social conservatives remain second class citizens under the Republican tent. During the 2004 Republican convention, they were virtually confined to the party's attic, kept off the main stage, treated like slightly lunatic children. Republican lobbyist Michael Scanlon's infamous candid comment — "The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right [and] Christian radio" — suggests a common opinion among the dominant "K Street" Republicans toward their coalition allies.

Contemporary Republican leaders need to do better — much better — toward social conservatives. They must creatively address pressing new family issues centered on debt burden. And they must learn to say "no" sometimes to Wall Street, lest they squander the revolutionary political legacy of Ronald Reagan.

On Scully
[Rod Dreher 03/21 12:19 PM]

Reader Christian writes:

I read “Dominion” a couple of years ago, after reading Fred Barnes’ recommendation of the book in The Weekly Standard. Like Rod, I was moved by the call to compassion in the book. It did indeed change my thinking about how we treat animals, and it persuaded me that factory farming is abominable.

But because “Crunchy Cons” is rooted in religious instincts, I was surprised Dreher didn’t go into the book’s theological weaknesses. For that, we should look to NRO contributor Wesley Smith, who reviewed Scully’s book in The Weekly Standard. He writes:

“Although Scully says he is not ‘particularly a pious or devout person,’ he claims that there is a model for the ethical treatment of animals contained in Scripture. In the Garden of Eden, he points out, there was no predation. He also reminds us of the prediction that — as Isaiah 11:6 puts it—‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. These are biblical suggestions that God does not want us to harm animals or cause them to suffer.

”While there are serious Judeo-Christian principles that could be used to make an argument for, say, vegetarianism, significant problems exist with this line. It is, for example, God who first kills animals, when he clothes the wayward Adam and Eve with animal skins in Genesis 3:21. Moreover, there seems no way around God's establishment of the animal sacrifice practiced at Shilo and Jerusalem. The New Testament offers little additional help to Scully. The Gospel of Luke reports that Mary and Joseph sacrificed turtle doves at the temple to celebrate the birth of Jesus — who would go on to speak approvingly of the killing of the fattened calf. Not only were there fishes among the loaves, but, after the Resurrection, the risen Christ fed the disciples a fish breakfast.”

More troubling is Scully’s tendency to label those who hunt animals for sport, rather than merely for food, as “pure evil.” Smith writes:

“[Scully] is, for example, obsessed with trophy hunters and a trade association called the Safari Club International, which he loathes to the point of insisting that its tax-exempt status be revoked. Now, trophy hunting seems little more than killing for ego. But Scully is so outraged, he cites approvingly a description of it as ‘pure evil.’ One could reasonably call trophy hunting disgusting, even reprehensible. But our ethical impulses go seriously astray if we do not reserve "pure evil" for the worst wrongs perpetrated against people: the Holocaust, crashing hijacked airliners into skyscrapers, raping little children.”

Smith was not persuaded by Scully’s arguments against factory farming, but here he doesn’t rest on biblical texts so much, so I was happy to disagree with Smith on that point. However, I find it hard to dispute Smith’s bottom-line on Scully’s book:

"’Dominion’ should have been the text that taught us how to practice kindness without falling into the trap of Peter Singer. Unfortunately, ‘Dominion’ fails at that task, mostly because Scully will not temper his emotional fervor long enough to explore the good humans receive from animals or the consequences that would befall us if we ceased to benefit from them. Animal suffering is crucial to a proper analysis, but so is human welfare.”

I realize this e-mail is provocative, and Smith’s review has its debatable points, but I think it’s only fair to cite a negative take on Scully’s book, which, however persuasive in spots, is a mixed bag overall.

I’m afraid I don’t have time today to get into an exegesis of Matt’s book, but I will point out that he tells me, in Crunchy Cons, that he is not calling for the whole world to go vegetarian:

"Conservatives have assumed this posture of disdain and even contempt for people concerned about the natural world and animals, but you don’t need anything more complicated than a simple standard of animal husbandry.”

As Matthew sees it, proper animal “husbandry,” which comes from word roots meaning “bound to the house” – that is, the animals were seen as organically connected to the farmer’s home – means that man asserts his own legitimate demands on animals, but gives them something in return. You protect them from predators, and you breed them in a way that accentuates their strengths.

“And you let them live their lives as animals,” he said, not as biological products mass-produced in a factory farm.

Re: Conservatives and Conservation
[Jonathan Adler 03/21 12:16 PM]

The discussion about environmental policy here seems to be confusing what is and is not "free market" or "conservative" about various approaches to environmental policy. Those of us who embrace "free market environmentalism" are not calling for taxes and various market-oriented regulatory instruments. That is "faux market environmentalism." What we call for is the expansion of market institutions — property rights and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law — to environmental resources. This was the foundation upon which America's initial conservation movement was built and, we would contend, provides the basis for an environmental policy that advances environmental values in a manner consistent with individual liberty and conservative principle. For an overview of FME, see this description from The Commons Blog. A longer case for FME, including specific policy recommendations, can be found here.

I should also add that one need not hold efficiency as the highest good to espouse "free market" or property-based approaches to environmental protection. Yes, markets grounded in property rights are the most efficient way of ordering economic affairs, but they are also the most moral — and they should be preferred to governmental regulation. Property is, in Richard Weaver's words, the "last metaphysical right." It is property, more than anything else, that enables communities to define themselves and protect their values. Property is also the foundation for stewardship. Some environmentalists are beginning to recognize the importance of property rights to environmental conservation (a point I make here). I would hope that conservatives, crunchy and otherwise, would recognize this as well.

Dam the Concrete Pourers!
[Nick Schulz 03/21 11:05 AM]

Caleb, I'm struggling with a few things here. I don't know what to make of the line "You cannot be conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers." What does that even mean? Does it mean you can't be in favor of development and be a conservative?

If anyone can truly be said to be on the side of the concrete pourers and cement mixers it's the folks at government agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation - the dam builders. Interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt — lionized (I believe) by crunchy cons — was a big dam enthusiast. even though conservationists now loathe dams.

Re: Just for the record
[Rod Dreher 03/21 10:58 AM]

Jonah, I deliberately avoided saying, “Those cement kilns gave my kid asthma,” because I can’t say that for sure, and I doubt that it’s true. It might be true, but there’s all kinds of other environmental factors that play into the rise in asthma. But it is certainly the case that the noxious output of those plants is a contributing factor to the respiratory disease and distress that people in north Texas suffer. Ozone pollution is huge here in the summer, owing partly to geographical/meteorological factors. The point is that we need to be doing whatever we can, within reason, to reduce those pollutants, to make the air in north Texas more breathable. It would be wrong to blame those cement kilns alone. Traffic around here is probably as big or bigger a contributor. It’s a complex problem. But what I appreciate about the local Republican leadership is that they recognize that this really is a problem, that it’s costing our community, and that we have a responsibility to attend to it as good stewards of the community and the land.

Re: Conservatives and conservation
[Rod Dreher 03/21 10:51 AM]

I write in Crunchy Cons how reading former Bush speechwriter (and NR writer) Matthew Scully’s book Dominion turned me around on the way I see the natural world. Frederica brought it up earlier in the Food chapter discussion, where its take on factory farming had obvious resonance. I chose to put my discussion of the Scully book in the Environment chapter, because the philosophical ideas informing Matthew’s important book had more to do with mankind’s view of the natural world, of which food is a subset.

As I write in my own book, I was one of those conservatives who had vague positive feelings about the natural world, but who despised environmentalists as neopagan loons. I was unwilling to examine my own assumptions and prejudices, until I picked up Matthew’s book — and the only reason I picked it up was because I know Matthew is a good man and a staunch conservative. In other words, I trusted him. What did he see that I didn’t? Here is a passage from Crunchy Cons in which I have a dialogue with Matthew:

In a world where efficiency is the highest value, honor comes at too high a price. If you think about it, conservatism today often takes on the characteristics of what conservatives say they hate most of all about liberalism: self-interest above anything else. It is a vision of man as an autonomous being who has only needs to meet and demands to make, no obligations to fulfill.

“At a certain point, they tend to see people more as consumers,” Matthew said. “I remember when a particular conservative columnist strolled into my office one day at the White House. We started talking about this issue” – animal welfare – “and I told him I was writing a chapter in my book about how we needed to get away from factory farming. His response was ‘But that’s going to cost more money.’ Conservatives should be the first to understand that we’re not just here to make money, that we have other duties in life.”

I admitted to Matthew that for years I had looked at environmentalism, especially animal welfare, as something essentially trivial, something that I could shrug off. I found lots of company on the right.

“My response to that is that you don’t get to shrug things off just because they’re little things,” he said. “Little moral wrongs have a way of growing into much greater moral problems unless you take care of them. And that has happened in the case of industrial farming. All moral values have been subordinated to economic values.”

The philosophical dynamic in this conversation can be seen across the political spectrum in contemporary America. A pastor’s wife I know who recently moved to a conservative suburb told me how shocked she was to find out that many of the moms in her neighborhood group — not liberals! — were taking fertility treatments that would inevitably result in the creation of human life that would be aborted or otherwise discarded. All they could think about was the end — a baby — and not the monstrous means it took to get them to that good end. The cover story in Sunday’s NYT Magazine is all about how prosperous but unmarried American women today are shopping for sperm donors to give them the child they want. On stem cell research, even some conservatives can’t understand the fuss about it; so what if it can involve taking embryonic life, or even creating human life to be destroyed — hey, we might cure some dread disease.

Taking human life is obviously a graver moral problem than factory farming or despoiling the environment. But the instrumentalist mentality that dominates American life undergirds all these things.

Conservatives and Conservation
[Jonah Goldberg 03/21 10:40 AM]

Rod - You certainly sounded like you were claiming that air pollution caused your kid's asthma troubles. In the Corner you wrote:

Come on, Ramesh, get outside the Beltway bubble and try to understand what Republican politics are like elsewhere. Here in Dallas, there are lots of Republicans who see Rep. Joe Barton, the powerful Republican Congressman who represents the district south of Dallas where these cement plants are located, as a major part of the problem. You can snicker all you want about the apparent obviousness of the issue, but the plain fact is those cement plants would have been forced to clean up their act if Rep. Barton weren't so obstructionist on the issue and dedicated to protecting that polluting industry — an industry that has a lot to do with the fact that so many people here in north Texas, including my son, suffer from respiratory disease. The childhood asthma problem here is incredible.
Where I live, there are plenty of summer days when authorities warn parents to keep their kids inside because of all the junk in the air. As Judge Keliher told me yesterday, Dallas wasn't like that when she grew up. Her predecessor as Dallas County Judge, a Republican named Lee Jackson, reportedly woke up to the importance of this issue when he saw girls' soccer teams here having to run to the sidelines to use their inhalers. I don't want my kids to grow up breathing this stuff. If Republicans in general — as distinct from local pols like Judge Keliher — are talking about clean air and water as a conservative issue, I'm not hearing them. And that's too bad.

And:

I live with an asthmatic child, so this is not an abstract situation for me. Which is the point I was trying to make: there is a direct connection between my sick child and polluting industries located south of my city, industries whose practices are staunchly defended by a Republican congressman. There are a lot of sick kids (and adults) in north Texas, which suffers from a high rate of respiratory disease.

Just for the record.

Balance
[Rod Dreher 03/21 10:09 AM]

Steve from Mississippi, who teaches at a Protestant seminary, writes:

Your thoughts on environmentalism strike, it seems to me, the proper balance. My recycling wife, who single-handedly keeps our house tilting "green," would rise up and call you blessed.

Your comment about the evangelical Christian and the idea of the world as merely our resource is unsurprising to me. Many things about evangelical spirituality (which produced me, so I don't bash it) are way too other-worldly.

Also, your thoughts about the necessity for the market forces to sense a non-market pressure (or at least a pressure that forces environmental concerns to become a market concerns) is a much needed remedy to purely laissez-faire capitalism. The "walling-off" of the market from other human concerns strikes me as as a kind of economic gnosticism, in which economics is a mystery which one must bow to, rather than a merely part of the human endeavor to have a sustainable and humane world.

That doesn't, of course, imply that a regulative regime is the answer (which is the leftist agenda). The alternative is, I think, serious minded conversation about what really makes for a good life in the most holistic (and holy) sense.

Thanks again for continuing to press that kind of conversation.

Conservatives and conservation again
[Bruce Frohnen 03/21 09:14 AM]

One of the more ironic facets of the debate over the environment is the extent to which each side shares the fault of the other — left greens engage in the worst kind of junk science in an attempt to make their pantheistic drives look "practical," while those on the right who want to take a practical approach to protecting public goods (e.g. air) insist on dressing their programs up as "free market."

I think readers of this blog know something of the junk science argument, and I've seen the junk science do a lot of harm in practice, wasting huge amounts of public money to pick up "recyclables" that end up in the landfill, creating toxic waste in the drive for "clean energy," etc. This is something we need to continue fighting, hard.

As for "free market environmentalism," it would be helpful if we could recognize its limits, and the extent to which it is ideological poppycock. I'm not saying the programs themselves are not often good and effective (e.g. cap and trade) but to call them "free market" is worse than silly. A tax is a tax. It is a government program. When you use a tax as a disincentive for certain behavior (e.g. polluting) you are engaging in government policy for a public end. You will be more or less effective according to how high the tax is, but won't necessarily tax at the highest rate out of concern for other ends (e.g. jobs). The "free market" aspect of taxing pollution has only to do with allowing for the trading of allowable units of pollution. That has to be limited, especially geographically (what if we let companies in Dallas do all the polluting?). Moreover, it is simply a structured market — structured by the government. We are not arguing about whether to regulate, then, but how. And the mindset that says it's okay for the government to structure the market so long as everything in it has a price already has led to too much socialism and too much faith in the power and goodness of placing a pricetag on everything.

We see the alternatives in arguments over development. I for one am very much in favor of marking large, even huge tracts of land "off-limits" to full development. I want to be able to take my kids to wild places. I even want to know that there are wild places I may never visit off in the mountains, but which others might. I think we lose something important when beasts die out, and when we lose the opportunity to simply climb a mountain and look out on God's natural creation. So both parks and wilderness areas make sense to me. But programs to have local governments buy up land around the town are worse than useless, most of the time, because that simply increases the price of land — until eventually crowding and land prices cause the city to decide to sell off that land, at a higher price. The city, in effect, is trying to structure the market in land, and failing. If the land can't be taken permanently off the market, it should be developed properly from the start. The problem is that we structure our markets in land very badly. Why? Because we have lost our understanding of what it means to build and live in a community. Sorry, that's the last chapter, but all these are part of the same problem. A conservative is someone who wants people to be able to lead good lives. Part of that is living with respect for God's natural creation; part is understanding of how we should build on that world so as to make our lives better.

Reviewing Crunchy Cons
[NRO Staff 03/21 08:58 AM]

From The Advocate (no, not that one):

Drawing heavily from Dreher's domestic scene and letters from other crunchy
cons, the book is, by its nature, heavily anecdotal. Dreher does not rely on
statistics or demographical studies to support his argument, but then again,
when Thoreau observed that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, he
didn't offer a pie chart for his proposition, either.

The ebulliently elongated subtitle of Dreher's book, and a "Crunchy Con
Manifesto" on the back cover, attempt to distill Dreher's premise into some
basic talking points.

But the best thing that one can say about Crunchy Cons is that it refuses to
be simplified into talk show cliches or bumper sticker bromides.

In other words, the book makes its finest arguments in the text, not the dust
jacket. When's the last time you could say that about a political opus?

Re: Conservatives and Conservation
[Rod Dreher 03/20 09:23 PM]

I’m not quite sure how to respond to that. I don’t claim, nor did I claim, that my child’s breathing condition are caused by the dismal air pollution situation in Dallas, but I do know that the dangerous ozone levels in the Dallas air – which are affected by the junk put into the air by regional cement kilns – makes it harder for those with breathing problems in the summer. Judge Margaret Keliher, the chief executive in Dallas County and a Republican, told me about seeing more and more kids around here having to use inhalers at summer sports games, and how that affected her. Her counterpart in Collin County, Judge Ron Harris, told my newspaper that until relatively recently, federal smog requirements were greeted around here with “a reflex instead of an acknowledgment.” Judge Harris, also a Republican, said “I think it just took us – me – a long time to even acknowledge that there was a problem. Now I am a believer and am working accordingly.”

But let me say that I’m not going to open up that “debate” here again. That was one of the less edifying recent episodes in The Corner.

I’m not sure which conservatives are endorsing left-liberal environmental strategies. Not the green-minded Evangelicals, who are quite clear where they diverge from the mainstream environmentalists. Not Wendell Berry, who is no conservative, but who refuses to endorse this or that campaign by the environmentalists because of what he sees as the movement’s refusal to accept that human communities have legitimate needs and rights. The history of the Soviet bloc (and of contemporary China) makes it abundantly clear that the state cannot be relied on to clean up the environment. But common sense should tell us that industry itself, absent state pressure, likely won’t do it either. I don’t believe in demonizing the private sector on the environment – indeed, some of the most innovative ideas for pollution clean-up, such as cap-and-trade, have come from using market forces – but too many conservatives have too little concern about the environment, thinking it’s merely something for liberals to worry about. I spoke to one conservative Evangelical who told me at his church, the common view is that God gave us this world to use as we like. That is a deeply unconservative point of view. But as long as we on the Right respond to legitimate concerns about the environment with what Judge Harris called “a reflex instead of an acknowledgement,” we leave this important area of moral, political and public policy inquiry largely to the Left. Why would we do that?

Conservatives & Conservation
[Jonah Goldberg 03/20 04:42 PM]

Just a few thoughts.

I'm not opposed to the idea that conservatives should be more assertive, less apologetic and a good deal more creative when it comes to the environment. In fact, from Caleb's post below, I can't find that much to disagree with. Where I think conservatives, crunchy and otherwise, often go wrong is to leap from this first principle (conservation=good) to the assumption that leftwing greens have the right solutions to environmental problems. This is obviously part of what Jeremy and Lukacs are getting at. Maybe they're right that conservative abdication of the issue pushed the Greens toward radicalism. Though I have my doubts.

Regardless, there's been a lot of talk around here about the problems and pitfalls of ideology and what is, or is not, a mere "sentiment" as opposed to an ideology or a program. If love of nature and a desire to preserve it for posterity is going to be a core conservative value — and I see no reason why it shouldn't be — we should still be cautious about making it into an ideological stance or political program defined by those who preach the loudest about the environment.

Indeed, one major disagreement I have with Rod's prescription is his tendency to conflate love of nature with Green public policies. His concerns about asthma in Dallas support many of his positions on this front and I simply don't find them persuasive. See this, for example.

Part of the problem is that it is taken as something of a given that the "cult of individual freedom" — to use Jeremy's phrase — is bad for the environment. I would like to see more evidence of this. Obviously, free market economics can be bad for some environmental goods — sometimes in the short run, sometimes in the long run. But free market systems on the whole are better at protecting the environment than non-free-market systems. Indeed, America's environment is indisputably better off than it was fifty or a hundred years ago (periods many in here are quite nostalgic for). If you talk to libertarians who study environmental issues — Steve Hayward, Ron Bailey, Jonathan Adler, Peter Huber et al — they will make very persuasive arguments in favor of free-market solutions to envrionmental problems. These solutions depend on property rights and other notions central to conservative principles. And, they depend on getting outside of the cliché that "environmentalists" always know what's best for the environment.

In order to give these voices a fair hearing, the first thing one must do is drop the caricature of free market economics as inherently bad for nature and fundamentally uotpian. Neither of these things are true.

Re: Followup
[Rod Dreher 03/20 04:12 PM]

Frederica, I am being prescriptive in the book. But it’s also the case that I’m interested in starting a conversation. I don’t see that the two conflict. “This is where I think we’ve gone wrong, this is what I think we should do to rectify it, what do you think?” Why is it so difficult to hold a civil conversation about these things? The title was supposed to be kind of tongue in cheek — the book clearly doesn’t offer a Ten Point Plan for Saving the GOP, and doesn’t aspire to. I thought the spirit of the title would lead people to conclude that I was being pretty freewheeling … but that might be one reason why the subtitle is going to change for the paperback edition.

re: Followup
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/20 03:08 PM]

Reader Tom makes a point re my Friday morning post titled "Followup":

On the Crunch Con blog, you wrote, "So, Rod, would you say that you were trying to start a conversation, rather than hand down prescriptions?"

I'm sorry, but a fellow simply can't write a book whose title claims that he and the likeminded "plan to save America," then claim he's just trying to start a conversation.

Bingo.

Maybe I'm the only person interested in this question — I've been taken aback by the rancor on this blog and wondering what set it off. As I was putt-putting along on the tiny plane to Shreveport Friday afternoon, it hit me: it's gotta be the subtitle.

Rod wrote a book that was fresh, genial, thought-provoking, and then came up with a playful subtitle. But just about everybody is going to encounter them in the opposite order: they'll read the subtitle first, then open the book.

And they're likely to have the impression that the book will present a "plan to save America;" that a parade of lifestyle heroes are going to set the Republican Party straight, if not the entire country. Well, yeah, if you take that at face value, it sure looks like throwing down the gauntlet. And how would people know not to take it literally? Yup, there's your problem.

Conservatives and Conservationists
[Caleb Stegall 03/20 02:11 PM]

Any discussion of the environment among conservatives ought to start with this wonderful article on the subject by Jeremy Beer which was first published in the predecessor magazine to The New Pantagruel, Re:Generation Quarterly. First, Beer cites eminent conservative historian John Lukacs’ provocative statement that “You cannot be conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers.” (It might be interesting just to have a discussion of this one line.) Beer goes on to recite the historical alliance between conservation and conservatism:

You might not know it from the exhibit tables at most conservative gatherings, stacked as they are with explicitly anti-environmental flyers, articles, and books, but America’s conservative movement was once intimately linked with conservation. The influential conservative thinker Russell Kirk wrote warmly about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when it was published in 1962 and frequently held forth on the dangers of pesticides, the protection of endangered species, and the preservation of farmland. In fact, a near-apocalyptic tone suffused the environmental writing of many conservatives during the first decades after World War II. So, how did we get from there to where we are now, with environmentalists firmly established as the favorite whipping boys of conservative intellectuals, pundits, and politicians?

… This issue is particularly important to Christians, whose faith counsels a sacramental vision of nature and opposition to the hubris underlying the modern economy and its institutionalized disregard for the care of God’s creation. “You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility,” writes Wendell Berry.

He then traces the origins of today’s antipathy between the two to “fusionism”:

The appeal of fusionism lay in its promise that the West could embrace, at one and the same time, both traditional morality and the cult of individual freedom. At a time when the West had only just defeated one totalitarian tyranny (Nazism) and was seemingly locked in a death struggle with another (communism), that promise was especially attractive. But in the face of the totalitarian threat, religious, communitarian, localist, and romantic aspects of conservatism, which could have been sources of a positive environmental approach, were intentionally de-emphasized. Over time, most conservatives came to see the state, not individualistic capitalism, as the primary evil facing the world. The rise of fusionism prevented the development of a conservative environmentalism. Think tanks depend on money to survive, and the funding for such institutions came—and still comes—largely from wealthy individuals, a few relatively small foundations, and a handful of big corporations. Not only does this system discourage intellectual risk-taking among conservatives, it also clearly biases conservative organizations toward the promotion of those things that wealthy individuals and corporations are comfortable with. (Woe to the outspoken conservative critic of individualist, free-market ideology who seeks to raise funds from those who most benefit from that ideology!)

After describing how this has driven an environmentalist movement which has more in common philosophically with traditionalist conservatism into the arms of leftist revolutionaries, Beer writes:

However, the environmentalist movement itself must deal with its own confusing and contradictory alliances with the left. As John Lukacs has written, Greens are often the self-made prisoners of their leftist and anti-establishment inclinations. They are split-minded: traditionalists and anti-traditionalists at the same time. They want to conserve the land, and they are opposed to the inhuman progress of bureaucracy, automation, technology. In that respect they are conservatives, in the proper, larger-than-political sense of that word. Yet at the same time they favor abortion, feminism, unlimited immigration, nomadism—at the expense of the traditional family, of traditional patriotism, of traditional humanism, of the traditional respect for rights of property.

Who knows? Perhaps Greens would not have been driven to embrace such allegiances if conservatives had not abandoned their conservationist roots. The crowd that forms around Lukacs whenever he speaks to young audiences is an encouraging sign that someday soon, there may be a conservative movement that is dedicated to healing that schism.

The lesson here, even for those who may dispute some of the particulars, is that there is an opportunity for those on the right to make inroads on the left. Given the forces at work, however, and given the right’s mixed record in pursuing such opportunities, Beer’s optimism may be misplaced.