Kissinger or Day?
[Caleb Stegall  02/25 12:07 PM]

Jonah is right, in a sense: what serious person defends promiscuity? But by reducing the argument to such a trivial level, the bigger questions are all begged. Perhaps this is by design.

Of course, the first two words that might pop into your head upon hearing Jonah’s plea for “even a serious anecdote that makes this even the slightest bit credible” are: Rupert Murdoch. But maybe the corporate cons are really libertarians. Or just good business men. It’s all so complicated. Maybe a better approach would be to simply say that everyone swimming in the swamp (cons included) is really confused on the point of promiscuity and lasciviousness. What cool con wants to be a boy scout and side with church ladies against immodesty and in favor of real propriety which today seems too strict even for the most earnest cons? Who could articulate a coherent reason for doing so?

But that is a sidetrack. The real problem with Jonah’s response is that it amounts to a version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. By repeatedly falling back to “that doesn’t apply to any conservative I know, mainstream or otherwise!” Jonah really begs the central question being asked, which is what makes one a “conservative” in the context of the specific issue being discussed? A better way to approach this is to go back to my original comment which prompted Rod to quote the Berry in the first place. Is it true that “our hyper-materialist post WWII economy of creative destruction made common cause with the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movements to create the political/economic/cultural order we now inhabit—and that Rod critiques”? Or as Bruce said that: “Most of society, from the local library to the museum and even the school, used to be largely in the hands of so-called "homemakers." In fact, women were more ‘community makers’ in that they ran all the civil institutions that literally civilized our lives. Now we demand a specialized degree and a salary (pathetically small though it be) for every job. This hasn't made our libraries, etc. better or more respected, far from it. But it has destroyed the fabric of familiarity, friendship and, yes, social pressure that once helped us civilize our kids (and ourselves).” Or as I remarked even earlier: “Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-and-entitlement economy and 100% out-of-the-home servitude.” Is that true? These are the real truth claims that need to be either admitted or contested.

And once they are admitted (as they must be), then the question that drives the analysis to the bedrock is: How ought the conservative to respond to this reality? Then we will be getting somewhere. Then we may reach some clarity on the overall point about there being such a thing as “mainstream conservatives” (for lack of a better term) who vote Republican, pay lip service to a culture of life, etc. etc., but who do not actually live, act, or think in a manner consistent with conservatism.

Let me illustrate this another way by asking a different question. Who was the truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? This is how John Lukacs—one of the conservatives Jonah most wants to meet—answered the question after attending NR’s 25th anniversary dinner:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.