FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Jonah's dilemma, and mine
[Caleb Stegall 02/27 09:45 AM]I too am sympathetic with what I think I will call Jonah’s Dilemma, which appears to be the flip side of what he describes as my dilemma: he dislikes being “strawmanned” by Rod’s critique yet he cannot come out and wholly endorse the critique of the alleged strawman either because to do so would necessarily be to critique something very real. Thus he’s left to hunt the edges, picking off the occasional stray or weak argument from the main — and there are some stray arguments I think, as I pointed out earlier — and then fall back to vague assertions of agreement with any talk of permanent things.
One blogger I’ve seen makes a good point: I think one would be hard pressed to find someone who chooses not to discourage promiscuity specifically because he does not want to diminish some corporation's profits or corporate profits in general …. But the basic insight that many "conservatives" conventionally acquiesce in the debauched, passion-soaked, spiritually deformed marketing culture that feeds sexual sin and social disorder, both generally and sometimes in their own purchases, is so spot on that Goldberg is fortunate that the problem was posed that awkwardly. He would have no riposte to this, except to shrug his shoulders and mutter something about freedom of choice. And a U. of Chicago reader emails the following: It occurred to me as I was looking over the many "should" statements in Rod's book that Rod's book is a fine assortment of prescriptions. It is a collection of rules or directions derived from experience aimed at a sane and humane life. That reminded me that Kirk took the idea of prescription very seriously. Prescription is derived from lived experience more than from theory—this is what distinguishes it from an ideology or a philosophy as such, and why it was so important for conservatism, as conservatism was "anti-ideology" for Kirk.
It then occurred to me that it is the prescriptive nature of the book that has bothered its critics. Rod has not simply written about some interesting people he met on the road, but has gone further and enjoined other people to live in similar fashion by appealing to prior philosophical claims they have already accepted. If a person believes there are permanent things, eternal goods that it behooves man to seek for his edification and increase in virtue, they naturally make certain claims on how he lives. Goldberg could evade the whole problem by denying that conservatives care about permanent things, but that is a move he could not credibly make even if he wanted to do so. What he is reduced to arguing is that we all believe in the permanent things, but that shouldn't dictate any particular way how we live. Virtue is great, as long as we don't get hung up on detail and don't necessarily take it too seriously. Rod wants conservatives to take virtue seriously, and it is hard to miss that the people who recoil at this suggestion have recourse to fairly unserious arguments. That is what makes the critics nervous—Rod's statements are making claims on what they ought to be doing in a way that calls them to a live according to a broadly defined conservative ethos, which may require them to change something about themselves.
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