March 24, 2006

Rod writes of the importance of traditional forms of faith as a basis for, well, traditionalism - another way of describing the particular form of Crunchy Con-ness we are discussing. What you describe, Rod, over and over, is what amounts to a sacramental sensibility (as you yourself call it) - basically that our beliefs manifest themselves in what we do in the world, and conversely, what we do in the world can deepen our experience of the transcendent.

But as I was mulling over this and the conversations of the past month, a thought came to me. The sensibility that Rod is describing, whatever you want to call it, is vital to conservatism..and any other ideology or institution. Why? Because it is a constant reminder of what lasts and what doesn't.

That brings us to a knotty, perhaps paradoxical place
- a subgenre of an ideology focused on drawing meaning from how we live draws its power, ultimately, from being a reminder that the way we live will not be around forever.

What the Crunchy Con manifesto brings to the debate, I think, is skepticism about the powers and principalities. This is ironic, as I said, because Crunchy Con-ness is anything but abstract and ethereal. It is about the earth, other creatures and our relationship to them. But the point is that Crunchy Con-ness, as a reflection of a religious sensibility, ultimately values the creatures and the stuff and the relationship because they point, not to themselves, but to what lasts. Or, if I may be so bold, to Who lasts.

That's a useful, if sometimes irritating and discomfiting reminder, I think.

First, apologies for being such a loser blog participant. I have excuses: Right when the blog began, I went to Rome for 9 days. Then I came back, and have been recovering from going to Rome in various ways, including catching up on work, reading through these very brainy posts and being thoroughly intimidated by them, and simply adjusting to life back in northern Indiana.

In a way I've not recovered, and the reason why ties in a bit with the subject of the moment. But first, let me take on a couple of other matters forthrightly.

I think Rod has raised quite important issues via this book, and I'm grateful. I can see some of the objections, but part of my problem is that I sit at a certain distance from the project and the conversations here, simply because I have little to no interest in how ideological conservatives define themselves. It's not *my* fundamental identity, not even politically. It's not that I don't find myself in agreement with many elements of conservative ideological self-identification, but at the end of the day, the arguments about the definition of "conservative" and its subgenres is not someting I can get really, really invested in.

If Rod interprets his conservativism in a Crunchy way, and sees his Crunchiness as rooted in conservative principles - so what? Personally, it makes a lot more sense than the whole South Park Republican subgenre, but then again, at a certain level I can see that too.

Contra much of the discussion here and comments in certain reviews, I didn't experience Crunchy Cons as work in which the emphasis was on telling other self-identified conservatives how to live. It was, for the most part, an explanation of how the life that the Drehers and others like them lead is rooted in conservative principles. It all comes back to the intial experience of being at the end of "conservative" scorn for shopping at the food co-op and wearking Birkenstocks. "Wow, that's liberal of you." "Well, no it's not, and let me explain why."

Granted, Rod does get in the prophet groove, and it's strong, and it's challenging. But given the flux within conservatives and the constant conversations about conservative identity, I see this as one more interesting ingredient to the mix.

But as I said, that is a wrap-up digression, so on to religion.

Reader Dan writes from Wisconsin:

There is indeed a problem for traditionalist Christians and social conservatives to the extent that other "Conservatives" hitch themselves with too little or no qualification to a modernist liberalism. Western religious traditionalists along with members of the true Left may indeed find some consensus with Muslims about the threat of a materialistic, unrestrained free-market order that madly preaches the spread of porn as a solvent to militant moral and religious particularisms which are accused of disenfranchising women and children. Turn the world into Las Vegas, and everyone will be too "happy"--i.e., sedated and distracted--to cause much trouble. This somehow takes care of the disenfranchisement problem?

That reasoning is the madness that all serious Muslims feel compelled to oppose, including the radical, militant sort. However, it is a real stretch of guilt by association reasoning to lump Muslims, Christians, Jews, Mormons, and others together with the likes of Sayyid Qutb simply because they're all unwilling to live in a degrading Jerry Springer and "Girls Gone WIld" world.

With much better justification you could argue instead that western traditionalists and the majority of serious and non-militant Muslims have the only viable and legitimate basis for dialogue and partnership. The "porn and prophylactics for progress" party is the dead-end European gambit; pursuing it is certain to provoke deep reaction and resistance.

It is not as if there are no examples of positive Christian-Muslim coexistence and collaboration. In the latest issue of First Things, Stephen Schwartz notes, "Paradoxically, the only support the struggling [Albanian] Catholics have found is from the Muslim intelligentsia in northern Albania, who admire the Roman apostolate for its contribution to local and national progress. People like the Muslim journalist Blendi Kraja are more avid in their promotion of Catholic culture than local Church representatives... Tens of thousands of Albanians have returned from Islam to Catholic Christianity, the faith of their ancestors before the Turkish conquest of the country in the fifteenth century. Local Muslim clerics make no protest against these religious revisions, arguing that the descendants of Catholics have the right to reaffirm their traditional faith."

Would Vince argue that the Balkans and "women's rights" would be better served by the arrival of activist shock-troops representing the values and agendas of the likes of the ACLU, NOW, and NARAL?

Well, this will certainly cause a stir. It's a long review essay from The New Republic, taking on Father Richard John Neuhaus's new book. The review's author is Damon Linker, the former editor of Fr. Neuhaus's magazine First Things. It's rather critical, and raises a number of serious questions about theological conservatism and its shaky compatability with the American order.

Vince, no crunchy-con he, writes:

To what degree does traditional conservatism resemble traditional (sometimes militant) Islam? Minus the violence, there are similarities which trouble me, even more after 9/11. Have you considered the extent to which 9/11 shook out many of our assumptions like an old rug? Moving the Middle East forward means championing some things which conservatives have previously been neutral or hostile to (women’s rights, for example). In order to drain the swamps of terrorism, anything that looks isolationist, antidemocratic, anti-industrial, and antimodern has to go. That means traditional conservatism has to adapt or finally be rejected. After 9/11, we necessarily have to become champions of democracy, modernity, and progress, all of which terrorists despise. There is something wrong when traditional conservatives and militant Islamists speak the same language in their disgust with America.

Roger Scruton wrote a wonderful short book about terrorism and modernity, called The West and the Rest, in which he says:

It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence [Western-educated, wealthy Islamist ideologues]. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocated, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is thte price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God’s law, the impact of porongraphy is devastating.

I posted something yesterday by J.B. Watson, who argued that he chooses to be Catholic, not Orthodox, in part because he is a man of the West, and wishes to be fully part of the Western Christian tradition. I don’t endorse his view, but I thought it was an interesting one. Now, Daniel Larison, a convert to Orthodoxy, has answered him, an excerpt of which I post here to contribute to the conversation about choosing one’s Tradition:

Then there is the claim that "they are Eastern churches, and I am a Western man." If we are speaking in terms of a civilisation as a basis for determining which "valid" church Westerners will choose, we are speaking of a Christian civilisation. That civilisation encompasses the heirs of Byzantium as well as the heirs of Latin Christendom. If that is the case, the distinction between what is Eastern and Western collapses rather quickly. What is an authentic measure of the mind of that civilisation, if not the common mind it possessed prior to the schism? If it is that mind that created the fundamental, defining doctrines of the Faith, and that mind was possessed equally throughout the oikoumene before the schism and was expressed in ecumenical councils that were, because of particular historical reasons, all located in the East, we cannot dismiss the "Eastern" churches for being Eastern if we grant, as Mr. Watson does, that they have a valid apostolic succession, valid sacraments and the correct definition of faith. Once we accept the latter, their "Easternness" ought to be immaterial to Western peoples. Indeed, if we see the continuities in the Orthodox Church from the early centuries until today we will be more hard-pressed to mark them off anachronistically as simply Eastern and thus unfit for "Western men."

March 23, 2006

To clarify my earlier remarks, Bruce, I don’t think it is necessary to be religious to be a conservative, as we understand that in America today. I count libertarians as part of the broader conservative movement, and certainly religion is not required to their understanding of conservatism. But for us traditionalists, of whatever iteration, I don’t see how what we uphold as conservative can be sustained without reference to religion--either formal religion, or a sincere belief in the existence of transcendentals, i.e., the Permanent Things.

Dave from Georgia:

Far as I could tell, I never changed, but the United Presbyterian Church sure did, so now I'm all-over Southern Baptist. Membership in any of the old mainline Protestant denominations for a conservative either means fighting all the time, or looking for a church that doesn't make you angry on Sunday. As Mom says now, "I'm too old to change, but I don't like going to church knowing that I'll feel worse on the way home."

I don't know that it is absolutely essential to be a religious believer in order to be a conservative. I do believe that it is necessary to have religious faith in order to realize one's conservatism to its fullest extent--but then one needs faith to realize anything to its fullest proper extent in this life. More to the point, it seems clear to me, from what I've seen around me, that while one can be conservative without being personally religious, one cannot be a conservative without recognizing the crucial role religion plays in forming a culture and maintaining a common public life. Long before he found faith in God, for example, Willmoore Kendall upheld the importance of religion as key to the American political tradition. The same goes for Russell Kirk.

The corollary question, "whether real Christian faith, particularly of the conservative kind, is really reconcilable with American nationalism," is trickier. Historically America left more room than most nations for real religion combined with real variety because it was literally a community of communities. Federalism, localism and the sheer size of our country allowed for many communities to form and thrive, rooted in religious identities. As we've become more homogenized, superficial and thin as a culture, under the pressures of mass production, consumerism, hyper-mobility, and the cult of efficiency, this has become more difficult. Everyone wants to be comfortable wherever the highest paycheck happens to lead them. And many ideologues are now insisting that to be an American means solely to buy into our nation as an abstract ideal of maximum individual autonomy--a principle destructive of faith and, not coincidentally, of real liberty because it undermines the local associations that make meaningful freedom possible and protect it from the centralized state.

John Courtney Murray wrote of our nation's founding as establishing articles of peace, which Catholics in particular (but this goes for people of faith in general) should accept as a kind of minimum basis for living with other people in, well, peace. But these articles (e.g. religious freedom) are minimal in the sense that they only tell us how to order our political life, and what is most important is our religious life, then our social life. Politics, in this view, in the conservative view and I think in any really rational view, is important only to the extent that it is relevant to how we lead our lives in general. Governments are good or bad according to how well they protect and foster our families, churches, and local associations, not according to how equal they make us all, how good they are at destroying anything that may get in the way of our satisfying various appetites, etc.

Because constitutionalism and decentralization are so crucial to the flowering of religious community, real religious faith historically has been more consistent with the American way of life than most any other. Sadly, the more America becomes centralized and homogenized, the less special it becomes, and the less friendly toward meaningful religion. Which is why I agree so strongly with the crunchy drive to return to more locally based communities in which people can live their faith with their fellows.

A reader writes:

Not that you asked, but a debate about the assertion you posted today--- "Mac said that crunchy conservatism can’t be practiced without a serious religious commitment, which means submission to a real power greater than the individual"---seems at the heart of what the online conversation about your book needs to address. The corollary, which is whether real Christian faith, particularly of the conservative kind, is really reconcilable with American nationalism might also be worth considering.

I will say (again) that I’ve come to believe that the kind of neotraditionalism I espouse in the book only really makes sense to religious conservatives. You don’t have to be religious to share some of its precepts, but it only really hangs together for those who--Christian, Jewish or whatnot--believe that the material world is built on spiritual realities.

One of the most interesting people I interviewed for Crunchy Cons was Maclin Horton (who blogs here), a Catholic convert who went from 1960s counterculturalist to faithful orthodox Catholic without ever losing his sense that something was seriously wrong with mainstream American society. He thinks that we’ve gone so far into “Brave New World”-dom that contemporary Americans wouldn’t understand why the comfort-mad dystopia Aldous Huxley portrayed is a bad thing. “They might balk at the stratification of the population by intelligence level, but otherwise would not see anything wrong with this vision of a scientifically controlled hedonistic paradise. I’ll die fighting that in whatever way I can,” he tells me in the book.

Mac added that he loves America, and sees nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to ease suffering. The problem comes in when maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain become ends in themselves, he said, and a society that places those things as its ultimate ends will justify anything to achieve those ends. Mac tells me in the Religion chapter that Woodstock was the epitome of the meeting of amoral capitalism and Baby Boomer hedonism: you had masses of people willing to do anything to satisfy their desires, and businessmen willing to give them what they wanted:

“It was the very acme of consumerism. You had several hundred thousand people willingly reducing themselves to a condition of infantile dependence and passivity in the expectation that competent adults would take care of their physical needs. It was that, more than the doping and fornicating, that was really most disgusting and even frightening about it.”

We talked about the disappointments of Catholic life in America today. Mac says that he knew when he came into the Catholic Church years ago that it would be hard, that he was coming in at a bad time. He has held on to his convictions to sustain him through the Amchurch liberal deconstructionists. Yet as his kids grew older and began to drift away from Catholicism, he grew bitter that the church did not offer more to hold them.

“I can remember any number of Sundays when we would come back from mass and the children would pile out of the car and Karen and I would jus sti there morosely for fifteen minutes, trying to articulate exactly what it was about the liturgy that left us feeling this way afterward. I should add that I was and am equally bitter toward the surrounding culture that makes it so very, very hard to raise children these days.”

We ended our conversation on a crucial point. Mac said that crunchy conservatism can’t be practiced without a serious religious commitment, which means submission to a real power greater than the individual. If you merely choose something because it sounds nice, it won’t have any power to bind the will.

“I think one of the underlying psychological shifts that eventually lefdme to the Church was the realization that I could not simply be ‘spiritual’ in any serious way by browsing various religions and selecting what pleased me. It would be necessary to submit on some fundamental level.”

March 22, 2006

Christian M. writes:

Your comments implied that Diane retreated behind defensible boundaries. In fact, it sounds like she stood firm in her faith, and her old denomination abandoned that faith. So she looked around and found others who were standing firm in the faith. Anyone who lives for the Kingdom of God makes an advance against the gates of Hell, not a retreat, regardless of what name is on the sign outside the church.

Worrying about whether she's retreated because her church left the cause of God for the cause of plurality puts the capital T on tradition, in the sense of Caleb's Bostonian parodist. Faith in God is the fount of the sacramental life you describe. Tradition must be secondary to faith if a holy life is possible.

Here is Father Richard John Neuhaus, writing about the late Orthodox theologian Father Alexander Schmemann, quoting from the latter’s diaries. I’ve read those diaries, and they’re very, very good. Fr. Schmemann was a man who was deeply in love with his faith and its traditions, but also conscious of how the Tradition often got in the way of the living faith:

“I firmly believe,” he writes, “that Orthodoxy is Truth and Salvation and I shudder when I see what is being offered under the guise of Orthodoxy, what people seem to like in it, what they live for, what the most orthodox, the best people among them, see in Orthodoxy.” The Russian émigrés, who did not share his vision of Orthodoxy’s universal mission, were the cause of endless frustration. As were the émigrés, so to speak, from Protestantism and Catholicism who sought out Orthodoxy as an escape from history. Fr. Alexander wrote, “Since the Orthodox world was and is inevitably and even radically changing, we have to recognize, as the first symptom of the crisis, a deep schizophrenia which has slowly penetrated the Orthodox mentality: life in an unreal, nonexisting world, firmly affirmed as real and existing. Orthodox consciousness did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life. . . . In brief, it did not notice history.”

It is precisely that escape from history that many think is the glory of Orthodoxy. But the escape is delusory. Years later, this entry: “Once more, I am convinced that I am quite alienated from Byzantium, and even hostile to it. In the Bible, there is space and air; in Byzantium the air is always stuffy. All is heavy, static, petrified. . . . Byzantium’s complete indifference to the world is astounding. The drama of Orthodoxy: we did not have a Renaissance, sinful but liberating from the sacred. So we live in nonexistent worlds: in Byzantium, in Russia, wherever, but not in our own time.” (Here and elsewhere, “the sacred” refers to the artificial world of religiosity, churchiness, and clericalism separated from history and everyday experience.) May 24, 1977: “Orthodoxy refuses to recognize the fact of the collapse and the breakup of the Orthodox world; it has decided to live in its illusion; it has turned the Church into that illusion (yesterday we heard again and again about the ‘Patriarch of the great city of Antioch and of all the East’); it made the Church into a nonexistent world. I feel more and more strongly that I must devote the rest of my life to trying to dispel this illusion.”

I doubt anything I write could cause our emailer Graeme to pause in his move toward the torches and pitchforks, but I would like to address the assumption that seems to underlie his (and other like) charges.

Today most people think of society as a collection of individuals held together by a government. Now, those individuals have certain beliefs and practices that cause them to come in contact with one another. Among those interests is religion. This is fine, the argument goes, in fact a good thing because it teaches people not to kill one another or take their cutlery without asking. But any attempt to infuse the values and/or practices of a religion into the public sphere is by nature tyrannical. After all, there are no real common values, beyond toleration, on which we can build a society, except intolerant values that cause us to oppress if not kill one another.

The other, older, traditional view is quite different. It sees society as a community of communities. Conservatism, as I have understood it my entire adult life, is rooted in a conception of the human person as inherently social. We grow up in families, in churches, in neighborhoods, and a variety of other associations and communities that help shape how we act, think, and feel. We belong to all these communities at the same time that we are Americans and simply human beings. Different things bind us together in different ways. But a key binding element is religion. Christopher Dawson pointed out that culture comes from the cult. That's not wordplay, but an appreciation of the importance of language. Both culture and cult share a latin root meaning to cultivate--as in one's garden, and as in one's own character. Cultures grow from inherited practices, and religious practices historically have been the most important, binding, and long lasting.

Today, of course, many people consider themselves too sophisticated to bother with such backward thinking. They hold to the Whig view of history, which says religion may have been necessary to bind primitive people together, but we've grown out of all that, even if we happen to remain religious ourselves. Of course, what this actually leaves us with is dying religion and an incredibly thin public morality that leaves the government in charge of deciding what's moral (anything not illegal, but just about anything can be made illegal), with whom we can (and must) associate, and how we can live our lives. Those who dissent hardly dare mention any duties, or even virtues, beyond toleration for fear of being called "taliban." Meanwhile, kids murder kids, mothers kill their babies, fathers abandon their families (or worse) and we can't even count on most people to fulfill their contracts, let alone mere "promises." Morality being a thing of one's own making in contemporary thought and practice, it tends to be disposable when it gets in the way of what one wants.

It is wrong--not just unfair but simply wrong--to say that the only alternative to moral vacuum is some horrible, intolerant religio-fascism or theocracy. The alternative to the thin society we now have is not theocracy, but a community of communities. It is a return to an understanding that most of us live most of our lives, not in politics, or in "private" shut up on our houses, but in SOCIETY--in a variety of social groups that can and should be allowed to determine their own existence, as they should cooperate with other, overlapping groups to make up our public life.

America was always a land of many faiths. But those faiths were allowed to take part in public life in ways they aren't any longer. Something as simple as a nativity scene, something as wholesome as a prayer before a graduation ceremony, so many things that help communities express and deepen their faiths and bonds are now illegal. Why? Irrational fear of religion. Fear that anyone who wants to point out the roots of our society in religion (e.g. American constitutionalism's roots in Calvinist church covenants) is going to destroy liberty; fear that anyone who has a faith different from ours must therefore have nothing in common with us, and so be dangerous if allowed into public discussions; fear that anything but the emptiness of our current public life will take away from our ability to do whatever we happen to want to do.

Not good enough.

J.B. Watson at Likelier Things writes about why he’s not Eastern Orthodox, and has chosen Catholicism instead (he was Evangelical). He doesn’t deny that the Orthodox churches are “real” churches--apostolically valid, he means, with valid Sacraments. But he says that he is a man of the West, and that means he owes his loyalty to the Western church, which formed his consciousness, and the consciousness of our civilization. I don’t agree with him, but it’s a perspective worth considering.

Wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever been “vigorously dealt with” before. But hey, bring on the NR thumb screws! I’m all for a return to the scary mean dark ages, right?

I don’t think Graeme is actually reading anything written here, and that’s about as charitable as I can be.

Lawrence on the other hand makes a reasoned, though I think misguided, point. Yes, I affirm the Reformational principle of sola scriptura, but only as it was articulated and practiced by the Reformers who never understood or sought to understand Scripture appart from an authoritative reading community. It is in fact the modern evangelical tendency to think of Scripture wholly apart from any authoritative community that is at odds with most of historical and confessional Protestantism. A fault that leads to increasingly liberal readings from one generation to the next.

Diane from Oklahoma indicates how tricky the idea of holding to Tradition is in our times, with regard to religion:

I didn't change religion but have gone from a mainstream denomination to a small, independent, evangelical Christian church. To my mind, I didn't change. The church (or at least the powers that be) did. Having grown up in the (denomination that shall remain nameless) church, I never envisioned I could go to one of those churches that today's mainstream media depicts as bigoted and backwards. But when my children were taught in confirmation class that hell may not exist, when the pastor believes everyone (and I mean *everyone*) goes to heaven, when an avowed atheist teaches Sunday school, and when the church hierarchy tries to affirm homosexual acts as good, then I found a body of believers (aka church) that more accurately reflects my understanding of what God calls us to do and be.

An interesting comment by the parody guy here:

I live in Boston which is in many cultural senses a deeply "crunchy" city. Part of what I love about the city is that tradition here isn't spelled with a capital t, it's an honest and uncompelled aspect of daily life. The Warren Tavern, where revolutionary war heros ate and drank, is still a popular place with locals because it's still a damn good bar. Locke Ober is as sparkling a restaraunt as it was a century ago, but I don't think they served sashimi tuna tartare back then. In college I worked in a cigar shop that had been in business since 1868 and felt like it. On Saturdays regular customers would bring their sons in, and say, "when I was your age you grandfather brought me here, and when you are my age, you will bring your grandson here." Sadly, that store is gone, victim partly of the anti-smoking zealots and partly mismanagement when the store passed from the father to the son. What the crunchies have is Tradition, polished to a mirror finish, sealed in lucite, and placed on a pedestal in a museum.

But then the parody guy follows his sensible comments up with this:

Stegall talks about the allegiance to "abstractions" as being somehow lesser than fealty to "the land," when it is precisely the fact that we are a nation founded on ideas rather than blood and soil that makes us special.

Reader Lawrence, a Protestant, says Caleb sure doesn’t sound like much of a Protestant to him. Caleb, I’ll leave answering Lawrence to you; I would only say that “Sola Scriptura” becomes problematic because there is no apparent way to determine whose interpretation of what the Bible says is binding. I don’t want to refight the Reformation on this blog--I don’t think any of us do--and let me restate again that I am not a Protestant, but I find that on most pressing questions of public morality, I have far more in common with my conservative Protestant friends than I do with liberal members of my own tradition. Nevertheless, because the Religion chapter is to a large extent about Tradition, these points are worth discussing:

You asked earlier today, "absent an authentic, authoritative tradition, how is it possible to keep religion from becoming merely the divinization of the Self’s desires? How do we keep God from looking a lot like ourselves in a time and place where individualism and self-expression are among the highest social values?"

There is a simple answer that you would get from the typical Protestant who understands and defends what it means to be a Protestant: Sola scriptura. How do we mitigate against our own selfish desires without authoritative tradition? The Bible. How do we discover what God really looks like in a time of rampant individualism? The Bible.

I would have the same answer to the question if the time and place were where collectivism and deferrence to the group are the highest social values: THE BIBLE.

Caleb Stegall doesn't sound like a Protestant; he sounds like a Catholic. As much as he sings about Tradition, he sounds like Tevye. There *is* a way for those who reject the authority of tradition to be rooted in something more permanent than themselves, and for Protestants that way is to uphold the authority of Scripture.

One could -- and probably should -- argue that far too many conservative Protestants are reading too much of Rick Warren and not enough of Peter, James, John, and Paul; that we not only embrace new technology (with good reason, since I believe the Reformation would have been next to impossible without the movable-type printing price) but we also make the medium more important than the message.

But unless you want to rewage the Reformation, you should understand first that Caleb Stegall's emphasis on tradition is at odds with much of historical Protestantism, and second that the Bible provides a foundation for faith even in the absence of tradition.

Reader Graeme, who thinks our Calvinist friend Caleb is Catholic, is just about ready to see NR give us the Gadarene swine treatment:

Lovely to see Caleb's obscurantism and disgust with the city of man asserting itself again.

As to the tragedy of what we lose with these farmers being dispossessed: what was lost was the power of entrenched providers to extract rents for inferior products from captive victims. To actually see improved nutrition as a negative goes further to show the bankruptcy and deep unattractiveness of this whole Crunchy experiment. The near total ignorance with respects to economics, economic history, the idea of of the corporation, etc is astonishing and tremendously disappointing.

You and yours are following the path of the Left. Complete ignorance of economics and a rejection of how people interact with each other to make each others lives better (otherwise known as markets), combined with a love for finding the heretic. Caleb is saying that anyone that supports or profits from development is unconservative. Excuse me while I proceed to have a heart attack. Your fellows are outing your movement as nothing more but a delusional neo-luddite cult committed to deindustrialization, the abandonment of any concern for material well being, and an inward turn towards only the spiritual. May you so ever pleasantly shove off and never be heard from again.

The absolute ignorance and disrespect for anyone who is not an orthodox catholic coming from Caleb, and the slightly less restrictive vision of Crunchiness as restricted to certain catholic and protestant sects expressed by the rest is exceptionally disgusting. Your intense parochialism and isolation from people of other religions is astounding. You make no attempts to at least acknowledge the (deeply misguided and misanthropic) people of Hindu backgrounds who support your policies in India (keeping the low castes poor, in the village, and subservient to their hereditary masters, all in the name of tradition!). Or, in better cases, to try and not make arguments that exclude anyone who is not a Christian. Quoting people that are arguing for a society with much stronger links to religion, and using people who only discuss it in terms of accepting Christ, is an exceptionally bad idea if one does not want to be called a theocrat. If Caleb and yourself were serious about simply encouraging a stronger turn to the spiritual, it would be the work of but seconds to find appropriate quotes in Judaic, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu, Bahai and other traditions. It is not your comfort zone, but when arguing for an idea that appears to be prima facie theocratic, one is required to demonstrate how their ideas can be open and attractive to all, rather than prescriptive.

You need to vigorously deal with Caleb and to really consider how the rest of the group's arguments (including your own) would appear to others who do not share your tradition. Caleb is a completely lost cause pursuing his crusade against everything that is not his own specific sect that has him living in Kansas and making a living off the back of progress, but you really need to consider how this entire thing looks to other people. I'm Lutheran, but my friends include serious Jews, Jains, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Catholics, Anglicans, Buddhists, etc. Most of the above are conservative in their politics, their parents definitely being so, and to see a group of people arguing about how so many of these Christian sects are unconservative and how you need to understand Christ in a certain way to be conservative, well, it just screams BAD IDEA!

I seriously hope that you deal with the problems of your bog, before it becomes imperative on others to have NR take care of it and of you. I'm not one for calling for a witch-hunt and casting out heretics, but if the blog continues like this, well...

John Adams famously said:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Given the direction of American society, is it becoming harder or easier to be a good orthodox Christian or Jew and a good American? (In most ways, yes. The decline of public morality hardly needs commenting on. The deeper problem is that we have lost the vocabulary of moral absolutes, and increasingly, the only “thou shalt not” our pluralistic society recognizes is, “Thou shalt not impose your values on others.” This, of course, is only applicable to religious believers. A believer may keep his or her quaint devotions, but is expected to have the decency to keep them in the closet. And for many of us, the rot in the institutions that are supposed to be guarding the religious traditions leaves us feeling alone and abandoned. On the other hand, as Father Joseph Wilson says about Catholics, no Catholic who wants to know what their own Church teaches and believes needs to depend on priest and bishop; he can go straight to an online bookseller and buy whatever he likes, and he can easily find like-minded Catholics on the Internet. Technology, then, can serve to renew Tradition. But in my experience--yours may differ, and I hope it does--it is next to impossible to find any guidance in living an authentically religious life from one’s parish. Much religious life in America today seems to have accommodated itself quite nicely to the culture. Which makes it harder to live in an orthodox fashion. What are you supposed to do when the only doctrine ever heard from the pulpit is “I’m OK, You’re OK,” and you cannot be certain what anybody else in your church believes, other than the near-certainty that they believe they have the sovereign right to decide for themselves--that they are their own Pope?)

Rod's questions get to some universal problems, as well as to the particular problem we have in America after several generations of active hostility toward the traditions at the root of our society and civilization.

Truth is real, Goodness is real, and Beauty is real. But we don't experience them in the abstract. We experience A truth, A good society, A beautiful piece of art, music or poetry. And this is where tradition must come in. We have an instinct in us that helps us recognize what is true, good, and beautiful, but it has to be developed; we need to be shown things that are true, good, and beautiful. And that process of education has to make sense to us, both in terms of explaining what it is that it true, good, beautiful about an object, and in connecting it with our everyday experience--it's harder for an American child to understand the beauty of, say, Japanese art, particularly if he doesn't know his own tradition.

You have to know your own tradition--the habits, beliefs, and practices that shape you, your family, your town, your parish, your workplace, etc.--in order to make sense of them. What happens if you ignore it all, or dismiss it as reactionary garbage? You still function, but at a very superficial level, accepting all kinds of prejudices handed to you by the mass media and the people who happen to be around you. Your life, like your society, becomes increasingly incoherent.

This, of course, is where we are right now. People get their culture the same place they get their food, news, and groceries--from the Big Box Mart, the mass produced purveyors of watered down garbage for television, news, education, and just about everything else. Now, some people will claim that this is all changing through the growth of "niche markets." But what you actually find is that people begin with Big Box Mart, be it TV, Wal-Mart, the political parties, or what have you, then choose one or two areas in which to become specialist consumers (but still consumers, rarely ever producers of anything cultural).

Sadly, the same kinds of bad, superficial habits that have taken over our lives in cultural issues have affected us at least as much in our religious lives. Liturgy, where it remains, is so watered down and banal as to be all but useless as spiritual exercise. Theology is reduced to "God wants you to be nice, especially to x, y, and z oppressed groups." And few even acknowledge that beauty should even be an issue for the faithful.

Alexis de Tocqueville strove mightily to save his nation from the cultural chaos into which it had descended in the decades after the French Revolution. That Revolution had overthrown utterly his nation's traditional society, leaving only the mechanisms of centralized power, which had been abused by a succession of destructive tyrants. Tocqueville commented that he at times despaired that his nation ever could reach a place of stability and peace. But he did know one thing: that stability and peace could not be had if people looked only to the moment, ignoring the fact that man is made for something more than animal pleasures. And to make our transcendent good real to us in a time of anti-traditional ideology, we have no choice but to look back beyond the time of destruction to reconnect with the deeper traditions of our people.

We must reconnect with the deeper traditions of our nation, in constitutionalism, in local communities, in an integrated vision of faith and public life, if our nation is to be culturally vibrant again. In the same way, we must reconnect with the springs of faith in our faith traditions. This means the Magisterium for the Catholic Church, along with the often conflicting traditions of various faith communities that for so long made the Church alive to its adherents, minimizing both flaccid nonconformity and clericalism; it also means a return to real liturgical art and practice. For other faiths the traditions are and must be different, but must be re-rooted if real growth is to come. For Protestantism it seems to me the answer would have to lie at least in part in a reinvigoration of place, of geographical localism as key to living a Godly life in community.
But I am no Protestant.

In general terms, it seems to me we have to remember that in seeking to live as we ought we need to look, not just to those who are generally viewed as having authority (which today generally means those who control the branch of Big Box Mart we happen to frequent) but rather look beyond those in power toward a higher authority, and also behind them to the long stretch of tradition that can point us in the right direction in finding our duties.

Rod, I’ll try to sketch out some answers to your questions.

First, I thought Spengler’s review was excellent and zeroed in on many of the key issues. However, I think he got the relationship between tradition and conversion slightly wrong. Tradition and conversion are two sides of the same coin which is, essentially, faithfulness to the truth about us, God, and reality. Or rather, they should be two sides of the same coin. I don’t think either is less important. When one is emphasized above the other, the result tends to be bad. Conversion brings people to the truth, tradition keeps them rooted in it. “Reformational” and modern tendencies reestablished the importance of conversion over and against a calcified tradition, but the pendulum has swung too far the other way into an endless fascination with conversion--from one thing to the next to the next.

The purpose of a functioning tradition is in fact to renew the original conversion. Tradition is the symbolic reenactment and therefore communication of the original engendering experience of conversion. The symbols, rites, and rituals of tradition become, in Voegelin’s words, “luminous for the truth” of the originary experience of conversion. In Plato’s terms, this is the work of anamnesis; a specific manner of remembering that recapitulates and recalls to consciousness the truth that is thereby made luminous.

If this were not necessary, once converted, one could just go on about one’s business and never give it another thought. Why go to church? Why “do this in remembrance of me”? The existence of a tradition is a concession to the real problems of human consciousness existing in time--lots of good Eliot on that subject--and is a recognition that conversion must be “consolidated;” it must be rooted in renewing “good” soil per Jesus’ parable. Otherwise, when the next snake oil salesman rolls into town, the first conversion experience is forgotten and it is off to seek a new one.

This is generational work. That is one of the most important things to keep in mind; though it is so easy to lose sight of it in a culture which rarely thinks past the weekend. As John Senior used to say, it takes three generations to make a farmer. It may take many more to make one a native to a chosen religious tradition. This is generational work. But it can be done.

On the other hand, sometimes a tradition is so rotten that it must be abandoned, even by a traditionalist, though always with sadness, regret, and a profound sense of loss. Mostly, however, there are always imperfect traditions that must be renewed and tested from within. This is why the endless quest for a new conversion experience is so dangerous, for it depletes traditions’ own source of renewal. And the Gnostic denial of original sin (which is present in groups across the spectrum, from Puritans to secular utopians) is the source of this wandering spirit; a spirit which “lusts for a massively possessive experience” to use another of Voegelin’s terms; a spirit which is unsatisfied with the vagaries of faith and is incapable of living with a humble acceptance of a certain amount of evil, with sadness, but for the sake of a greater joy.

It is fascinating to me to observe the internal feedback loop of the American soul cut adrift from an Augustinian conception of reality. The Puritanical conservative sects and the universalist liberal sects are at separate ends of the same spectrum of belief in man’s perfectability in the here and now. And each has fixated his gaze on the other as that which is to be most feared and loathed; as that mirror image--one of the other--which each is terrified of becoming. And the irony is, of course, that the Puritans did become universalists, and the universalists have now become the new Puritan kill-joys, propagating all kinds of puritanical regulations on human happiness (anti-smoking campaigns come to mind) in the name of progress and continuing enlightenment.

Today we're going on to the Religion chapter, which is in some ways the most important one in Crunchy Cons. I didn't set out to write this book with this in mind, but it became clear to me that the base of this entire neo-traditionalist sensibility is religious conviction. It quickly became clear in doing my research that almost everyone to whom I'd spoken was in some serious way a religious believer. Why is that? I think it's because people who are serious about their religion understand in their bones how devotion to God and to His laws must be the basis for ordering our own lives, and that of our society.

That does not have to mean a theocracy, I hasten to add; I doubt anyone here would want to live in a theocracy, and the idea that the bishop could call the magistrate and have me put in jail is a revolting idea. But it seems to me clear that T.S. Eliot, in his essay "The Idea of a Christian Society," was right to say that the idea that a Christian (and I might add a serious Jew or Muslim) can accomodate himself easily to a liberal society in which religion is entirely privatized, and which consents to treat the believer good-naturedly, so long as he doesn't presume to think his belief has nothing to do with life and how to live it--well, that attitude is becoming "less and less tenable."

In no case did I find what most of us (well, us conservatives at least) would call religious fanaticism. Rather, I found quite a few people struggling with more or less the same dilemma that a British Muslim woman I met last December in Dubai is: she told me that she and her husband are faithful Muslims who worry about losing their children to Islamic fundamentalism; but they are equally worried about the eroticized, materialistic, go-go culture that is now mainstream in Britain. She said she and her husband are increasingly alienated from British society, not because they are religious radicals (far from it; they despise the Islamists), but because they are sincere believers in God, who has been discarded by British society. We religious Americans are better off than those believers in the UK, but I believe many of us share this woman's anxieties.

Eliot said that Christians should be aiming for "a society in wich the natural end of man--virtue and well-being in community--is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end--beatitude--for those who have the eyes to see it." There is an entire worldview there in those few words, and I think it's a pretty accurate summation of the crunchy-con social ideal. We should talk about that in over the next few days.

It is also worth discussing the observation first made (to my knowledge) by the scholar James Davison Hunter: that the fault lines in American culture no longer run between religious confessions, but between liberals and conservatives across churches and faiths. (Terry Mattingly sums Hunter's observation up
here.) Why do I find it much easier as a Catholic to talk to a Southern Baptist or an Orthodox Jew about matters of faith, politics, society, etc., than with liberal members of my own church? It has to do with the way we view religious truth, and indeed Truth itself. Conservatives in whatever religion view Truth as transcendent, as something that can be known, however imperfectly, and as an objective standard that humans have to conform our own consciences to. The modern, liberal view is that Truth is mutable, and can be reinterpreted in every generation to suit the perceived needs of the community. I have more in common with Tikva Crolius, the Orthodox Jew I interview in Crunchy Cons, than I do with liberal Catholics, chiefly because we both see Truth as transcendent and objective, even though we disagree over the precise nature of that Truth. Yet it must be admitted that there are potentially dark implications for this exclusivist view. How do we hold onto exclusivist truth (which to me is just Truth) in a pluralistic society?

Finally, I hope we can talk about a point Spengler and some others have raised, namely: is it possible to embrace a tradition that is not your own? Caleb is the only person in the Religion chapter who remains in the faith in which he was raised. Everyone else is a convert. Does migrating to another religion indicate a true subjectivism masked by a superficial quest for Truth? What do you do when you find yourself questing for Truth in a deracinated society that has effectively destroyed tradition? What about Evangelicalism, the most politically conservative American faith, but also the one most radically rooted in the individual experience, and therefore most adaptable to the way Americans live today? Is their success a sign of hope for our increasingly rootless country, or at bottom something that should make traditionalists despair? As Spengler observes:

I agree with Dreher that the Chartres Cathedral is more conducive to spirituality than a shopping-mall megachurch, but there is a reason why Chartres is full of tourists and the megachurches are full of worshippers. What if this is as good as it gets?

There is truth to Nick’s comment about traditionalist thought – its rarefied arguments have played little to no part in the conservative ascendancy of the past 25 years. Reagan certainly never questioned progress, and as for the Neo Cons, Irving Kristol recently made the point that, unlike traditional conservatism, neoconservatism was “a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”

The only traditionalist voices questioning “progress” with any real weight in the world have been those of the Popes, JPII, and now Pope Benedict XVI. In 2001, then Cardinal Ratzinger made this comment in an interview with Le Figaro:

“I have always been skeptical of the concept of progress. There is, of course, a progress in the amount of knowledge, in science and technology. But this progress does not necessarily bring about a progress in moral values, nor in our ability to put to good use the power granted by knowledge. On the contrary, power can be a factor of destruction. I have always been contrary to the Utopian spirit, to faith in a perfect society–conceiving of a perfect society once and for all means excluding the freedom of every day….

…For modern man, the idea of placing limits on research sounds like blasphemy. However, an intrinsic limit exists, and this is human dignity. Progress obtained at the price of the violation of human dignity is unacceptable. If research attacks man, it is a deviation of science. Even if we protest that this or that research will open possibilities for the future, we must say no when man is at stake.”

Nick, while effectiveness may be a virtue, it is certainly secondary to truth. The questions remain. Is Voegelin right? Is Lukacs right? If they are, you have a problem and no amount of reification of progress will make it go away.

This--that critiques of progress only come from obscurantist priests of hidebound tradition--on the other hand, is simply the voice of one seeking to silence the questioner and squelch threatening lines of inquiry. Voegelin diagnosed this tendency in the Gnostic mind and labeled it an “intellectual swindle.”

In actually fact, contra Nick’s statement, most conservative critics of progress also developed a sophisticated understanding of social change and development. Voegelin, for example, made an incisive and thoroughgoing critique of calcified traditionalism.

The question is not tradition versus progress, it is what is the truth about God, man, his condition, and the right ordering of things? (For those who would (mis)hear the coming theocracy in those words and beat a swift retreat to the barricades of tolerance and personal choice, please note that I am speaking the language of Plato, not the language of John Winthrop).

As for “resonance,” who knows? The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism, progressivism, and materialism may lead to a renewal of thought that goes beyond the reductive and instrumentalist level of the empiricists. At one time, this was a primary conservative impulse. It ought to be again.

March 21, 2006

Well, prompted by Nick's question and my own curiosity, I pulled Lukacs's End of the Modern Age and found this. Looks like my reading of that line was the correct one:

[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of "progress." ... Our "conservatives" care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of "nature" against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one's country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless "growth."

Cult of Tradition
[Schulz  03/21 05:51 PM]

Of course there’s a long-running conservative critique of the cult of progress – it’s comes from the cult of tradition -- and in the 20th century in particular this critique of progress was mostly ineffectual; which is why I’m surprised it’s so lovingly embraced here. One of the great contributions to conservatism made by the neoconservatives was in recognizing the limits of the trad argument in a post-Enlightenment age; neocons encouraged a turning away from the obscurantism of trad con writing and thinking. What is different today that would convince crunchy cons that trad arguments will have any greater resonance than when neocons replaced them with a reliance on empiricism?

Cement
[Goldberg  03/21 04:31 PM]

An excerpt from a reader:

....Anyway, I did want to mention, since I happen to work for a cement and concrete producer (though not one with plants in Texas), that there is more to the story than Rod surmises. Restrictions surrounding the development of cement plants (which involve huge capital expenditures) make it nearly impossible to build a new plant, and a long, arduous and expensive procedure to update one. It would sure make sense to have the owners of Rod's nearby plants spend capital to invest in a newer, cleaner facility somewhere further outside the sprawling Dallas metro area (which was not quite as much of an issue when the plant was built, I'd bet). However, since that's all but impossible for regulatory reasons, even if a new plant could be built, it would have to be built on the exact same spot that already hosts it, and the additional expense related to permits and regulations even for that move probably contribute to a reluctance to consider such a move.

So, for what it's worth, well-meant environmental regulations are probably making the problem worse. Of course, you could just shut all cement plants down, but I doubt Rod would go that far in opposing development. Though perhaps John Lukacs would.

Re: Progress
[Dreher  03/21 04:19 PM]

For an staggering example of the ambiguity, or one should say the tragedy, of progress, read this Philip Longman essay about how patriarchy is returning because secular liberalism, for all the real material advances it has brought, has been unable to sustain itself. Rich, progressive Europe is literally wasting away to nothing because it has failed to reproduce succeeding generations. Looked at from a macrohistorical point of view, was it really progress if--if--it led to the death of European civilization from decadence and its poisonous fruits?

Of course, to some of us reactionaries, the return of a form of patriarchy is progress. A society in which many, possibly most, women have to leave the home and enter the workforce simply to make enough to keep the family together is not a society that can lay claim to having made progress, at least not in my view.

OK, back to trees. DC area readers might remember the big debate years ago over whether or not to build that big Disney theme park out on or near a Civil War battlefield in northern Virginia. Some on the Right said that the jobs the project would bring were needed, and would constitute progress. Others on the Right--including, if memory serves, George F. Will and Pat Buchanan--argued that the commercialization of what should be sacred space is tawdry and unworthy of this country. I also seem to recall that at least some of the conservative critics of the proposed theme park were reported to own country property that would be adversely affected by the park, were it to be built (in the end, it wasn’t). So it’s possible at least some of the Disney critics’ motives weren’t entirely pure. Still, it was a worthwhile argument to have. And we have the chance to have the same basic argument often in this dynamic country.

Re: Cult of Progress
[Stegall  03/21 03:45 PM]

Come, come. There are multiple treatments of the negative aspects of progressivism or the "cult of progress" in the conservative canon. In some respects this discussion proves difficult if not impossible due to an apparent lack of a common lexicon. From the Puritans to today's secular progressives, the idea of man's perfectability and the notion that we can in some real sense remake this world according to our own dictates has had a strong grip on the modern mind, and it has often fallen to the conservative to apply the brakes. The conservative recognizes that there can never be any "progress" in a meta sense. That for every gain there is likely a loss. That the work of right ordering is often the work of weighing between one good and a competing good because one cannot have both. Material gain on the one hand, yes. The conservative wants to count the cost. Who stands to benefit? Who loses? The answer to these questions is not prejudged, but the fact that they are asked at all sets one apart from progressives of all political stripes.

There are so many serious conservative thinkers to which one can turn to find an analysis of the problem of progress that one hardly knows where to begin. But let me start with a passage by Eric Voegelin--in my view our best and most comprehensive thinker on this problem--from his 1952 book The New Science of Politics (emphasis mine):

On the one hand ... there begins in the eighteenth century a continuous stream of literature on the decline of Western civilization; and, whatever misgivings one may entertain on this or that special argument, one cannot deny that the theorists of decline on the whole have a case. On the other hand, the same period is characterized, if by anything, by an exuberantly expansive vitality in the sciences, in technology, in the material control of environment, in the increase of population, of the standard of living, of health and comfort, of mass education, of social consciousness and responsiblity; and again, whatever misgivings one may entertain with regard to this or that item on the list, one cannot deny that the progressivists have a case, too. This conflict of interpretations leaves in its wake the adumbrated thorny question, that is, the question how a civilization can advance and decline at the same tiem.

Voegelin then says that an understanding of what he calls "modern gnosticism"--that is, the attempt in modern people to overcome the uncertainty of faith by endowing this world and our range of action in the here and now with an ultimacy of meaning that properly lies over the eschatological horizon--will help us to understand this quandry of a civilization moving forward and backward at the same time. After which, he continues:

The spiritual strength of the soul that in Christianity was devoted to the sactification of life could now be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise. Civilizational action became ... a divertissement that demonically absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man and substituted for the life of the spirit. Nietzsche most tersely expressed the nature of this demonic diversion when he raised the question why anyone sould live in the embarrassing condition of a being in need of the love and grace of God. "Love yourself through grace" was his solution--"then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." And how can this miracle be achieved, this miracle of self-salvation, and how this redemption by extending grace to yourself? The great historical answer was given by the successive types of gnostic action that have made modern civilization what it is. The miracle was worked successively through the literary and artistic achievement that secured the immortality of fame for the humanistic intellectual, through the discipline and economic success that certified salvation to the Puritan saint, through the civilizational contributions of the liberals and Progressives, and, finally, through the revolutionary action that will establish the Communist or some other gnostic millennium. ...

The historical result [of the gnostic idea of self-salvation through progress] was stupendous. ... On this apocalyptic spectacle, however, falls a shadow .... [W]hat should in this order of things become of men who would rather follow God [than the priests of self-salvation]? ...

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. ... The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.

A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time--but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect that represents the gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

There is something worth meditating on.

Re: You call this progress?
[Dreher  03/21 03:21 PM]

Nick, I certainly am not against progress per se, and certainly improving access to potable water has to count as the kind of progress all sensible people should welcome. What I oppose is the idea that all change, especially technological change, amounts to progress. It is quite possible that it could amount to regress in some important ways. When I hear the phrase “cult of progress,” I think of a mindset that fosters an uncritical acceptance of whatever is new, not only as good, but as inevitable.

In my book, I bring up the visit the Dallas Morning News editorial board received from a delegation of Latin American ambassadors and U.S. business representatives, lobbying for our backing for a regional free-trade agreement. I was struck by a part of the meeting in which the visitors spoke of a group of small Mexican farmers who opposed the deal as troubled eccentrics who could be taken care of without much difficulty. There was not the least question but that the new trade deal, which would wipe these farmers out, was progress. There would be more commerce among nations, and the collective GDP would rise. That’s certainly progress from a certain perspective. But nobody thought to examine what social and cultural things of value would be lost as well. Perhaps in the end, they wouldn’t be worth saving. But the cult of progress doesn’t think to ask.

Another example, also from the book. I tell of a friend in DC who worked at a university there. He overheard one day his boss, a black woman of a certain age, talking to a childhood friend from the old neighborhood, reminiscing about back in the day. My friend said it eventually dawned on him that they had grown up poor, and had lived through seeing their traditional neighborhood destroyed to make way for Great Society public housing projects. We all know how well that turned out. My friend told me he had never stopped to consider what a complex and fragile web of social relations had been destroyed by the Master Planners who only set out to do good, and to bring Progress to the benighted residents of Washington DC. The cult of progress strikes again, with unintended consequences.

You Call This Progress?
[Schulz  03/21 02:04 PM]

Crunchy Cons, one problem I have with the critique of the ‘cult of progress’ is its imprecision. To what is one referring? Concrete pourers are emblematic of it apparently. That’s not helpful.

That said, I can guess what I think the cult is given the context of the attacks on it (and markets, the individual, etc.). I assume the cult of progress includes those who favor stronger property rights and would employ cost-benefit and risk-benefit analyses to problems. Including environmental problems. Tomorrow is World Water Day – the lack of potable water in the developing world being one of the fetishes of the progress cult. It’s an enormous environmental problem and, dare I say it, an affront to the Almighty. Now, what does it say about cult of progress that those parts of the world where water is, relatively speaking, not an issue of serious environmental and humanitarian concern, are those areas where the cult of progress has taken its deepest hold?

More progress, please.

Free Market Environmentalism
[Frohnen  03/21 01:51 PM]

Jonathan Adler argues for a "true" free market approach to environmentalism.

I have some sympathy for this, mostly because I believe deeply in the importance of property rights. But it is important to keep sight of the fact that markets themselves are institutional products. One of the fundmantal jobs of government is to enforce contracts. Even that job over recent decades has become increasingly difficult for the government as people's willingness to say what they mean and mean what they say has diminished (no good society without virtue, whatever the laws) and as the effects of past bad policy decisions have caught up with us. Lest we forget, corporations are granted by the state huge advantages that often harm innocent investors and even bystanders seeking to recover damages. The current code allows lawyers to hide behind limited liability even in partnerships, and allows developers to form shell corporations for each subdivision they build, avoiding liability for wrongdoing even as they sell themselves as "in the business for 50 years."

Relevance? "True" free market environmentalism assumes people will be able to enforce their property rights against those who pollute on them, etc.
How? You'd have to come up with a legal regime to handle that, and the legal regime is already far out of hand in terms of the time and cost of litigation, leaving most who are not rich effectively without recourse to defend or prosecute even the most basic rights in even the most egregious circumstances.

I'm not saying we shouldn't look for ways to improve on crazy laws like superfund, if possible by depending more on property rights. But there is no magic bullet, here, and we shouldn't forget that there is such a thing as a public good.

Our Furry Friends
[Mathewes-Green  03/21 01:34 PM]

I appreciate Christian's citation of Smith's critique of Scully's book. And if someone will respond "I affirm Frederica's appreciation of Christian's citation of Smith's critique of Scully's book" we might get a good game of Gossip going.

As I read the book, I didn't get the impression that Scully was forbidding any use of animals (which, Smith claims, would be unBiblical). It's his choice to be vegetarian, but he recognized that most people use animals for food, leather, and other purposes. He just argued that, specifically because these lives are *not* equal to human lives, because they are comparatively diminished in so many ways, and because they are wholly at our mercy, they deserve to be treated with respect for their brief, natural lives. To treat them as cogs in a machine diminishes *us*, dehumanizes. The examples in the book were so much worse than I'd ever imagined. Indeed, you wonder how any human can bear to work in such conditions and ignore such bewildered and helpless suffering.

The Scriptures definitely permit, and even demand eating meat; see St Peter's vision, where he is shown every kind of animal and told, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). But there is a tradition, at least in the Orthodox Church, of keeping a vegetarian diet among monks and nuns (others may also adopt it), in order to begin now living the life we'll have in heaven, where death will be no more. It is a way of participating in "the angelic life." Our fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, and in longer fast periods such as the present Great Lent, includes abstaining from meat, fish, and dairy; a time when there is no participation in death. This custom of fasting is mentioned in Christian writings as early as the Didache, circa 70 - 80 AD.

Earlier I said that I wondered if it was a distinctively crunchy response, on learning the details of factory farming, to be so personally revolted that you want to avoid eating such meat in future. When I mentioned this, somebody--Caleb?--responded that a decision not to buy factory meat would make so little impact on the market that it wasn't necessary. it would be "superogatory."

That's what I don't get. If "crunchy" is a sensibility, it's one that has to do with how things impact us personally, on the Small, Local, Old, Particular level. It doesn't matter that my abstaining from factory meat won't stop the industry in its tracks. What matters is that I don't want that suffering on my table. I don't want to chew that tragic flesh. "Superogatory"? I don't get it.

RE: Concrete Pourers
[Stegall  03/21 01:13 PM]

Nick, I suppose you would have to ask Lukacs as to his precise meaning. I take him to be saying that one cannot be a conservative and be, in any fundamental sense, on the side of the cult of progress--those who preach it, profit from it, and drive its engines. Concrete pourers are, in Lukacs formula, emblamatic of the cult of progress. As C.S. Lewis remarked through one of his characters, "I've seen progress in an egg. I call it going bad."

Is the GOP really pro-family?
[Dreher  03/21 01:04 PM]

I interrupt this discussion of grass and cows and such to point the room’s attention to this provocative Allan Carlson essay up at The Weekly Standard’s site. He argues that the GOP became the pro-family party after the Democrats sold out to the sexual revolution, but that in recent years, the Republican Party has in many instances paid lip service to its constituents who favor traditional family values--especially the traditional family, with Mom staying at home. Financial interests have instead been taken care of, says Carlson. Excerpt:

Democrats often dream of wooing the "Reagan Democrats" back into the fold. Bill Clinton, who could speak "evangelical" and who embraced pro-family tax and welfare reforms, succeeded to some degree. Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, who actually coined the phrase "Reagan Democrats," argues that "a new, family-centered politics can define and revitalize the Democratic party." Its message should highlight "family integrity and parental responsibility" and offer a "progressive vision of family support." Greenberg even theorizes that "Roman Catholics would [again] rally to a Democratic party respectful of family and committed to defending government's unique role in supporting it."

If the Democratic party remains the party of the sexual revolution, as its open yearning for same-sex marriage suggests it may, such dreams will remain just that. However, if a Democratic leader can ever shake that monkey off his--or her--back, and if this occurs in conjunction with an economic downturn, the prospects for another broad political realignment are fairly high. A new economic populism, delivering child-sensitive benefits and skewering predatory banks and bureaucrats, could work politically for a clever Democrat.

Moreover, when push comes to shove, social conservatives remain second class citizens under the Republican tent. During the 2004 Republican convention, they were virtually confined to the party's attic, kept off the main stage, treated like slightly lunatic children. Republican lobbyist Michael Scanlon's infamous candid comment--"The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right [and] Christian radio"--suggests a common opinion among the dominant "K Street" Republicans toward their coalition allies.

Contemporary Republican leaders need to do better--much better--toward social conservatives. They must creatively address pressing new family issues centered on debt burden. And they must learn to say "no" sometimes to Wall Street, lest they squander the revolutionary political legacy of Ronald Reagan.

On Scully
[Dreher  03/21 12:19 PM]

Reader Christian writes:

I read “Dominion” a couple of years ago, after reading Fred Barnes’ recommendation of the book in The Weekly Standard. Like Rod, I was moved by the call to compassion in the book. It did indeed change my thinking about how we treat animals, and it persuaded me that factory farming is abominable.

But because “Crunchy Cons” is rooted in religious instincts, I was surprised Dreher didn’t go into the book’s theological weaknesses. For that, we should look to NRO contributor Wesley Smith, who reviewed Scully’s book in The Weekly Standard. He writes:

“Although Scully says he is not ‘particularly a pious or devout person,’ he claims that there is a model for the ethical treatment of animals contained in Scripture. In the Garden of Eden, he points out, there was no predation. He also reminds us of the prediction that--as Isaiah 11:6 puts it—‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. These are biblical suggestions that God does not want us to harm animals or cause them to suffer.

”While there are serious Judeo-Christian principles that could be used to make an argument for, say, vegetarianism, significant problems exist with this line. It is, for example, God who first kills animals, when he clothes the wayward Adam and Eve with animal skins in Genesis 3:21. Moreover, there seems no way around God's establishment of the animal sacrifice practiced at Shilo and Jerusalem. The New Testament offers little additional help to Scully. The Gospel of Luke reports that Mary and Joseph sacrificed turtle doves at the temple to celebrate the birth of Jesus--who would go on to speak approvingly of the killing of the fattened calf. Not only were there fishes among the loaves, but, after the Resurrection, the risen Christ fed the disciples a fish breakfast.”

More troubling is Scully’s tendency to label those who hunt animals for sport, rather than merely for food, as “pure evil.” Smith writes:

“[Scully] is, for example, obsessed with trophy hunters and a trade association called the Safari Club International, which he loathes to the point of insisting that its tax-exempt status be revoked. Now, trophy hunting seems little more than killing for ego. But Scully is so outraged, he cites approvingly a description of it as ‘pure evil.’ One could reasonably call trophy hunting disgusting, even reprehensible. But our ethical impulses go seriously astray if we do not reserve "pure evil" for the worst wrongs perpetrated against people: the Holocaust, crashing hijacked airliners into skyscrapers, raping little children.”

Smith was not persuaded by Scully’s arguments against factory farming, but here he doesn’t rest on biblical texts so much, so I was happy to disagree with Smith on that point. However, I find it hard to dispute Smith’s bottom-line on Scully’s book:

"’Dominion’ should have been the text that taught us how to practice kindness without falling into the trap of Peter Singer. Unfortunately, ‘Dominion’ fails at that task, mostly because Scully will not temper his emotional fervor long enough to explore the good humans receive from animals or the consequences that would befall us if we ceased to benefit from them. Animal suffering is crucial to a proper analysis, but so is human welfare.”

I realize this e-mail is provocative, and Smith’s review has its debatable points, but I think it’s only fair to cite a negative take on Scully’s book, which, however persuasive in spots, is a mixed bag overall.

I’m afraid I don’t have time today to get into an exegesis of Matt’s book, but I will point out that he tells me, in Crunchy Cons, that he is not calling for the whole world to go vegetarian:

"Conservatives have assumed this posture of disdain and even contempt for people concerned about the natural world and animals, but you don’t need anything more complicated than a simple standard of animal husbandry.”

As Matthew sees it, proper animal “husbandry,” which comes from word roots meaning “bound to the house” – that is, the animals were seen as organically connected to the farmer’s home – means that man asserts his own legitimate demands on animals, but gives them something in return. You protect them from predators, and you breed them in a way that accentuates their strengths.

“And you let them live their lives as animals,” he said, not as biological products mass-produced in a factory farm.

Re: Conservatives and Conservation
[Adler  03/21 12:16 PM]

The discussion about environmental policy here seems to be confusing what is and is not "free market" or "conservative" about various approaches to environmental policy. Those of us who embrace "free market environmentalism" are not calling for taxes and various market-oriented regulatory instruments. That is "faux market environmentalism." What we call for is the expansion of market institutions--property rights and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law--to environmental resources. This was the foundation upon which America's initial conservation movement was built and, we would contend, provides the basis for an environmental policy that advances environmental values in a manner consistent with individual liberty and conservative principle. For an overview of FME, see this description from The Commons Blog. A longer case for FME, including specific policy recommendations, can be found here.

I should also add that one need not hold efficiency as the highest good to espouse "free market" or property-based approaches to environmental protection. Yes, markets grounded in property rights are the most efficient way of ordering economic affairs, but they are also the most moral -- and they should be preferred to governmental regulation. Property is, in Richard Weaver's words, the "last metaphysical right." It is property, more than anything else, that enables communities to define themselves and protect their values. Property is also the foundation for stewardship. Some environmentalists are beginning to recognize the importance of property rights to environmental conservation (a point I make here). I would hope that conservatives, crunchy and otherwise, would recognize this as well.

Dam the Concrete Pourers!
[Schulz  03/21 11:05 AM]

Caleb, I'm struggling with a few things here. I don't know what to make of the line "You cannot be conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers." What does that even mean? Does it mean you can't be in favor of development and be a conservative?

If anyone can truly be said to be on the side of the concrete pourers and cement mixers it's the folks at government agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation - the dam builders. Interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt -- lionized (I believe) by crunchy cons -- was a big dam enthusiast. even though conservationists now loathe dams.

Re: Just for the record
[Dreher  03/21 10:58 AM]

Jonah, I deliberately avoided saying, “Those cement kilns gave my kid asthma,” because I can’t say that for sure, and I doubt that it’s true. It might be true, but there’s all kinds of other environmental factors that play into the rise in asthma. But it is certainly the case that the noxious output of those plants is a contributing factor to the respiratory disease and distress that people in north Texas suffer. Ozone pollution is huge here in the summer, owing partly to geographical/meteorological factors. The point is that we need to be doing whatever we can, within reason, to reduce those pollutants, to make the air in north Texas more breathable. It would be wrong to blame those cement kilns alone. Traffic around here is probably as big or bigger a contributor. It’s a complex problem. But what I appreciate about the local Republican leadership is that they recognize that this really is a problem, that it’s costing our community, and that we have a responsibility to attend to it as good stewards of the community and the land.

Re: Conservatives and conservation
[Dreher  03/21 10:51 AM]

I write in Crunchy Cons how reading former Bush speechwriter (and NR writer) Matthew Scully’s book Dominion turned me around on the way I see the natural world. Frederica brought it up earlier in the Food chapter discussion, where its take on factory farming had obvious resonance. I chose to put my discussion of the Scully book in the Environment chapter, because the philosophical ideas informing Matthew’s important book had more to do with mankind’s view of the natural world, of which food is a subset.

As I write in my own book, I was one of those conservatives who had vague positive feelings about the natural world, but who despised environmentalists as neopagan loons. I was unwilling to examine my own assumptions and prejudices, until I picked up Matthew’s book--and the only reason I picked it up was because I know Matthew is a good man and a staunch conservative. In other words, I trusted him. What did he see that I didn’t? Here is a passage from Crunchy Cons in which I have a dialogue with Matthew:

In a world where efficiency is the highest value, honor comes at too high a price. If you think about it, conservatism today often takes on the characteristics of what conservatives say they hate most of all about liberalism: self-interest above anything else. It is a vision of man as an autonomous being who has only needs to meet and demands to make, no obligations to fulfill.

“At a certain point, they tend to see people more as consumers,” Matthew said. “I remember when a particular conservative columnist strolled into my office one day at the White House. We started talking about this issue” – animal welfare – “and I told him I was writing a chapter in my book about how we needed to get away from factory farming. His response was ‘But that’s going to cost more money.’ Conservatives should be the first to understand that we’re not just here to make money, that we have other duties in life.”

I admitted to Matthew that for years I had looked at environmentalism, especially animal welfare, as something essentially trivial, something that I could shrug off. I found lots of company on the right.

“My response to that is that you don’t get to shrug things off just because they’re little things,” he said. “Little moral wrongs have a way of growing into much greater moral problems unless you take care of them. And that has happened in the case of industrial farming. All moral values have been subordinated to economic values.”

The philosophical dynamic in this conversation can be seen across the political spectrum in contemporary America. A pastor’s wife I know who recently moved to a conservative suburb told me how shocked she was to find out that many of the moms in her neighborhood group--not liberals!--were taking fertility treatments that would inevitably result in the creation of human life that would be aborted or otherwise discarded. All they could think about was the end--a baby--and not the monstrous means it took to get them to that good end. The cover story in Sunday’s NYT Magazine is all about how prosperous but unmarried American women today are shopping for sperm donors to give them the child they want. On stem cell research, even some conservatives can’t understand the fuss about it; so what if it can involve taking embryonic life, or even creating human life to be destroyed--hey, we might cure some dread disease.

Taking human life is obviously a graver moral problem than factory farming or despoiling the environment. But the instrumentalist mentality that dominates American life undergirds all these things.

Conservatives and Conservation
[  03/21 10:40 AM]

Rod - You certainly sounded like you were claiming that air pollution caused your kid's asthma troubles. In the Corner you wrote:

Come on, Ramesh, get outside the Beltway bubble and try to understand what Republican politics are like elsewhere. Here in Dallas, there are lots of Republicans who see Rep. Joe Barton, the powerful Republican Congressman who represents the district south of Dallas where these cement plants are located, as a major part of the problem. You can snicker all you want about the apparent obviousness of the issue, but the plain fact is those cement plants would have been forced to clean up their act if Rep. Barton weren't so obstructionist on the issue and dedicated to protecting that polluting industry--an industry that has a lot to do with the fact that so many people here in north Texas, including my son, suffer from respiratory disease. The childhood asthma problem here is incredible.

Where I live, there are plenty of summer days when authorities warn parents to keep their kids inside because of all the junk in the air. As Judge Keliher told me yesterday, Dallas wasn't like that when she grew up. Her predecessor as Dallas County Judge, a Republican named Lee Jackson, reportedly woke up to the importance of this issue when he saw girls' soccer teams here having to run to the sidelines to use their inhalers. I don't want my kids to grow up breathing this stuff. If Republicans in general--as distinct from local pols like Judge Keliher--are talking about clean air and water as a conservative issue, I'm not hearing them. And that's too bad.

And:

I live with an asthmatic child, so this is not an abstract situation for me. Which is the point I was trying to make: there is a direct connection between my sick child and polluting industries located south of my city, industries whose practices are staunchly defended by a Republican congressman. There are a lot of sick kids (and adults) in north Texas, which suffers from a high rate of respiratory disease.

Just for the record.

Balance
[Dreher  03/21 10:09 AM]

Steve from Mississippi, who teaches at a Protestant seminary, writes:

Your thoughts on environmentalism strike, it seems to me, the proper balance. My recycling wife, who single-handedly keeps our house tilting "green," would rise up and call you blessed.

Your comment about the evangelical Christian and the idea of the world as merely our resource is unsurprising to me. Many things about evangelical spirituality (which produced me, so I don't bash it) are way too other-worldly.

Also, your thoughts about the necessity for the market forces to sense a non-market pressure (or at least a pressure that forces environmental concerns to become a market concerns) is a much needed remedy to purely laissez-faire capitalism. The "walling-off" of the market from other human concerns strikes me as as a kind of economic gnosticism, in which economics is a mystery which one must bow to, rather than a merely part of the human endeavor to have a sustainable and humane world.

That doesn't, of course, imply that a regulative regime is the answer (which is the leftist agenda). The alternative is, I think, serious minded conversation about what really makes for a good life in the most holistic (and holy) sense.

Thanks again for continuing to press that kind of conversation.

Conservatives and conservation again
[Frohnen  03/21 09:14 AM]

One of the more ironic facets of the debate over the environment is the extent to which each side shares the fault of the other--left greens engage in the worst kind of junk science in an attempt to make their pantheistic drives look "practical," while those on the right who want to take a practical approach to protecting public goods (e.g. air) insist on dressing their programs up as "free market."

I think readers of this blog know something of the junk science argument, and I've seen the junk science do a lot of harm in practice, wasting huge amounts of public money to pick up "recyclables" that end up in the landfill, creating toxic waste in the drive for "clean energy," etc. This is something we need to continue fighting, hard.

As for "free market environmentalism," it would be helpful if we could recognize its limits, and the extent to which it is ideological poppycock. I'm not saying the programs themselves are not often good and effective (e.g. cap and trade) but to call them "free market" is worse than silly. A tax is a tax. It is a government program. When you use a tax as a disincentive for certain behavior (e.g. polluting) you are engaging in government policy for a public end. You will be more or less effective according to how high the tax is, but won't necessarily tax at the highest rate out of concern for other ends (e.g. jobs). The "free market" aspect of taxing pollution has only to do with allowing for the trading of allowable units of pollution. That has to be limited, especially geographically (what if we let companies in Dallas do all the polluting?). Moreover, it is simply a structured market--structured by the government. We are not arguing about whether to regulate, then, but how. And the mindset that says it's okay for the government to structure the market so long as everything in it has a price already has led to too much socialism and too much faith in the power and goodness of placing a pricetag on everything.

We see the alternatives in arguments over development. I for one am very much in favor of marking large, even huge tracts of land "off-limits" to full development. I want to be able to take my kids to wild places. I even want to know that there are wild places I may never visit off in the mountains, but which others might. I think we lose something important when beasts die out, and when we lose the opportunity to simply climb a mountain and look out on God's natural creation. So both parks and wilderness areas make sense to me. But programs to have local governments buy up land around the town are worse than useless, most of the time, because that simply increases the price of land--until eventually crowding and land prices cause the city to decide to sell off that land, at a higher price. The city, in effect, is trying to structure the market in land, and failing. If the land can't be taken permanently off the market, it should be developed properly from the start. The problem is that we structure our markets in land very badly. Why? Because we have lost our understanding of what it means to build and live in a community. Sorry, that's the last chapter, but all these are part of the same problem. A conservative is someone who wants people to be able to lead good lives. Part of that is living with respect for God's natural creation; part is understanding of how we should build on that world so as to make our lives better.

Reviewing Crunchy Cons
[NRO Staff  03/21 08:58 AM]

From The Advocate (no, not that one):

Drawing heavily from Dreher's domestic scene and letters from other crunchy
cons, the book is, by its nature, heavily anecdotal. Dreher does not rely on
statistics or demographical studies to support his argument, but then again,
when Thoreau observed that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, he
didn't offer a pie chart for his proposition, either.

The ebulliently elongated subtitle of Dreher's book, and a "Crunchy Con
Manifesto" on the back cover, attempt to distill Dreher's premise into some
basic talking points.

But the best thing that one can say about Crunchy Cons is that it refuses to
be simplified int