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Re: Which side
[Rod Dreher 03/01 11:42 AM]Jonah: On the other hand, he invokes Marxist and other leftist writers and thinkers to back up his case. Aren't these two things at odds? Did Kirk quote a lot of Marxists? Does a conservative who lays his hands upon a Marxist make the Marxist a conservative? Me: One of the points I make in Crunchy Cons is that we have gotten to the point where we are very quick to slap a label on a person, a thing or an idea, seemingly as a way from keeping ourselves from having to understand it, rather than advancing understanding of it. Why not deal with Illich’s ideas as they are instead of rushing to find some ideological impurity that means we can safely dismiss them as having nothing to say to us conservatives? In Crunchy Cons, I praise the Italian communist Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, for having done something deeply conservative. Here’s a guy who saw the local food products and culinary traditions in Italy threatened by the modern rush to pre-package, process and industrialize food production, and rather than call on the state to step in and start passing laws, instead started a grassroots movement to teach people to love their native food and heritage, and to conserve it by making it a part of their everyday lives. What could be more conservative than that? Don’t we conservatives have something to learn from Carlo Petrini? Or should we be satisfied to shriek, “Eek! A commie!,” so we don’t have to think about whether or not the leftist has something to teach us conservatives about our own principles.
Go back and read Peter Kreeft’s excellent short First Things essay about “The Politics of Architecture,” and ponder why he, a self-described “traditionalist,” felt more affinity with his “radical” colleague on certain matters than he did with the conventional liberal and conservative. Kreeft says it has to do with matters of the spirit.
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