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Re: Quirky cons
[Rod Dreher 03/15 03:34 PM]Jonah: Rod - Come on. I'm not going to second guess your move to Dallas or your choice of houses. But think for a moment how some perfectly decent conservative — or liberal for that matter — might read your choice of picking a house near gun play. Is it really so absurd to think that a reasonable person would choose to live much farther away from gun shots in the sort of planned, pre-fabbed suburban community you hate precisely because he concluded that while nice old bungalows are nice, safe streets are better? One can value all the things you value and conclude that "family values" militate toward a safer environment over pleasing architecture. The particular choice we made is certainly open to question; in fact, we turned down the opportunity to buy a bigger, better house because it was in an unsafe neighborhood (ours is actually a lot safer than I let on, judging by the crime stats). And as I said in the book, and on this blog, and will have to keep saying until the Parousia, I know that people move to the suburbs for all kinds of defensible reasons. It is not my wish that every single person move into an Arts & Crafts bungalow. Those who believe that I am trying to dictate housing styles for everyone, kindly stop it. The reasons why we chose this particular house in this particular neighborhood, however, are something that I think all conservatives should consider when making their own decision about where to live. And thinking about beauty, and human-scaled neighborhoods, and how neighborhood design helps build, or fails to help build, neigborliness are things that we should all think and talk about. I'm sure you don't really disagree, but in your rush to prove the authenticity of your domicile you sound really, really quirky to a lot of us. Quirkiness is good. Quirkiness is valuable. Quirkiness is fun. Why, right now I'm wearing a very quirky hat. But quirkiness is not a foundation for a political philosophy or even a conservative "sentiment" nor is it sufficient grounds to condemn those who don't subscribe to your definition of the good life. A conservative philosophy or sentiment creates room for quirkiness, not the other way around. "The nature of man is intricate," wrote Edmund Burke, "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs."
Your constant insinuation that Maggie didn't read your book closely enough suggests to me that you don't grasp how many readers conclude in good faith that you've over-read the significance of your personal experience and the experiences of the people you went looking for — and found — who verified what you already believed.In Maggie’s telling, we chose to worship at the Maronite Catholic church simply because we wanted to be quirky (she even called it “pathetic,” which is awfully graceful of her). In the plain text of the book she presumably read, I say that we sought this church out because we were starving for substance. Does that sound like “quirkiness”? Similarly, I wrote an entire book in which I tried to tie in various aspects of the way we live today to traditionalist principles. For some reason, Jonah, you write not as if I failed to do this — which I might have — but as if such a thing weren’t even possible, that I just woke up one day and decided to baptize my own tastes as conservative. In fact, you say pretty much exactly this in the current issue of NRODT. I believe this is a perversely unfair and inaccurate reading of my book. I don’t mind you disagreeing with me; in fact, I’ve learned a lot from critics of the book. What I find maddening to deal with is the persistence of this idea that the kinds of things I and sympathetic bloggers here write about is merely a matter of taste, and has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas and principles. It’s simply not true.
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