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A couple of perspectives
[Caleb Stegall 03/15 12:04 PM]A blogger: An important point should be made here: Podhoretz used the word ideologically in a rather clumsy way that later allowed him to accuse the "crunchies" of being self-conscious ideologues. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. A man who lives according to a vision of the good life does not live ideologically. He lives according to principles, or better still we might say simply that he lives virtuously. There is something programmatic and artificial about living "ideologically" that distinguishes it, and most people are capable of recognising it when they see it. But that is not what the "crunchies" do, and it is not what Podhoretz can be referring to when he applies it to them.
Ideology is one of those words, like fascist (and perhaps conservative!), whose original meaning is so far gone and lost for most people that it would be easier to retire the word and start over with some new term. Nowadays many people, including apparently John Podhoretz, think that it means consciously adhering to ideas or principles (which, apparently, he thinks the vast majority of Americans does not do). If Podhoretz thinks that someone must be able to articulate and defend a philosophy justifying his way of life to be considered as someone who adheres to principles or ideas, he is kidding himself.
Men reproduce or fail to reproduce customs and traditions all the time depending on the meaning these things have for them (this is not to deny that they are shaped and formed by those traditions in ways they do not always notice or know). In myriad ways in everyday life, people consciously adhere to or depart from their traditions. Traditions endure, among other reasons, because they fulfill so many functions that we do not even recognise that we need until they are no longer being provided, but this does not make our adherence to the tradition any less conscious or deliberate. If we cannot articulate a reason why we do something, we nonetheless do understand the reason at some level. This is why the details of everyday life are a vital part of realising the common good. It is by these customs and habits supposedly "unthinkingly" repeated, but in reality consciously embraced, that traditions live or die.
One of the things that distinguishes the ideologue from the man of principle is that the former scarcely has substantial ideas, or when he does have substantial ideas he is perfectly willing to contort, distort and manipulate them to serve those in power. It is in that sense, I believe, that Kirk pejoratively used the term ideology and it was against that kind of ideology that he set up conservatism as the antithesis and antidote. It is, incidentally, one of the principal criticisms of the book against modern conservatism that it has become just this kind of coat-holding lackey for Republican Party interests and has engaged in the contortions and betrayals of real conservatism to facilitate the party's exercise of power. The "crunchy" idea, as I understand it, is in its simplest form an attempt to correct that perversion of conservatism and to seek the Good once more.And an email: How can you start loving a community — which involves being settled, committed, even disciplined to a place — if one has to search high and low to find a community amenable to such settling, one that has those extant traditions or the resources to begin new ones? Doesn't that give the game away right from the beginning, having made it a matter of individual, abstract choice?
I don't think it does, it one needs to think carefully about what one is doing. Consider holidays, for example.
It is popular for some people to assume that, since modern scholarship has made it clear to us that all holidays were simply "invented" at one point or another, that must mean they can be revised or dismissed willy-nilly; it's all just a construct, after all. It is true that we understand the past, that we look upon the ways in which we mark the calendar and honor the seasons, differently than did people many generations ago who had far fewer options, far fewer cultural resources, than we do today. But I don't think the increased subjective awareness which attends our own rituals and observances means that our appreciation of them is categorically different from what came before; we may well be consciously engaged in a little "invention" when we celebrate holidays (or settle in a community, or change our consumer habits, or whatever) today, but whatever we come up with need NOT be an arbitrary invention, because our inventing can very possibly be a kind of adaptive remembering, a connecting that is — potentially at least — every bit as morally grounding as that which was experienced by those who went through the same process as the seasons turned a hundred or even a thousand years ago.
One of my girls' favorite holiday books is Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving, by Laurie Halse Anderson and Matt Faulkner. It very entertainingly tells the story of Sarah Hale, the abolitionist, editor and social reformer, who spent thirty years writing letters and publishing articles, trying to get the U.S. government to officially acknowledge (and thus hopefully resuscitate) Thanksgiving, the observance of which in the mid-19th century was slowing dying out. She finally succeeded, and the book makes President Lincoln's declaration of a national Thanksgiving holiday out to be Sarah's greatest triumph. I think we can take a lesson from that.
Sure, you could cynically dismiss Hale as a sentimental busybody — even an "elitist," trying to inject a little "crunchy" culture and ritual into an America hell-bent on war and the industrial revolution. But maybe she was more; maybe she was committed to helping her country engage in a little creative remembering. The fact that what she accomplished was, strictly speaking, a political invention doesn't, I think, take anything away from the REAL traditions and connections it made possible for all Americans.
No crunchy political program or policy is going to be sufficient, and none will be above critique: the CC blog has been filled with numerous good arguments about how certain efforts to preserve neighborhoods, equalize families, promote farming and community agriculture, get away from the corporate rat-race, etc., can have harmful, unintended consequences. Because something comes through a process of adaptation and invention, it can always be reconsidered. But I don't think the simple FACT that adaptation and invention are involved in our attempts to recover and recreate communities and traditions makes them, somehow, morally bankrupt.
Gallagher suggests that it's too late; we live in a world of choice, and Dreher's attempt to "abstractly" choose something more durable in that a choice-driven environment is laughable. She's wrong.
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