The brilliant blogger Lawrence Auster has once again revealed the persistence of his liberal instincts. After the Pope died, Auster launched into numerous, detailed postings designed to show that the Pope was above all else an evil liberal, e.g., by supporting Vatican II, by speaking out for immigrants and ecumenism, by failing to control the liberal elements in the Church. While some of these arguments are serious ones, worthy of consideration, they will be given short shrift, and deservedly so, because of their indecency. The Pope is not even buried yet!
Conservatism is as much about its political and social goals as it is about a certain way of life, that is, a life where people are restrained by respect for others and the past, observation of social conventions, and the whole host of manners and artifce designed to channel our baser passions and elevate our nobler ones. This is not mere window-dressing to be discarded as soon as one is sure he’s right or what he’s pursuing is very important. Auster has zeal, but it’s the “zeal of the convert.” His conservatism is of the head, not the heart, as anyone of conservative instincts knows that it is rude, cruel, and indecent to speak ill of the (recently) dead, particular a man of the dignity and holiness of John Paul II. The Pope may rightly be called a liberal–if so, the best kind!–but surely he can under no circumstances be called a bad man.
In his own defense, Auster writes, “There is thus a pressing need for someone to speak the truth about this. To me, this is more important than civility or traditional deference.” This is the eternal defense of the radical. What they’re doing is so important, so true, so certain, so obviously correct, that it justifies running roughshod over social conventions, whether they be good manners, republican institutions, the laws, or whatever. (No surprise, just weeks ago Auster was similarly calling on Jeb Bush to ignore the Florida courts in violation of the law).
This is simply Jacobinism in reverse, and instead of making society more peaceful and more harmonious, it makes its disagreements too raw and heated for any kind of order and mutual respect to remain in place. Burke wrote, of such sentiments, “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.” When conservatives proceed in this fashion, it is no more justified. It is one thing to take the gloves off when dealing with the avowed enemies of civilization, but intra-conservative and intra-Christian disagreements should be characterized by fellow-feeling and ordinary manners.
The foundation of conservatism is piety: respect for the past, respect for God, respect for the unknown, respect for tradition, respect for country and countrymen, and a humility in all things, especially change. Since Plato’s Euthyphro, where the son was eagerly prosecuting father, we’ve known that an all-too-certain impiety of one stripe or another is the height of un-wisdom. It’s too bad this basic knowledge is lost on Auster.
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I’ll quote someone greater than I on the temperment of a conservative:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate, and enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to oneââ¬â¢s fortune, to live at the level of oneââ¬â¢s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs to itself and oneââ¬â¢s circumstances. – Michael Oakeschott
Mr. Roach’s criticisms of me perfectly reveal the limitations of the Burkean-style conservatism he espouses. Burkean-style reverence for the past and for existing institutions only makes sense in a society in which traditional ways have not yet been destroyed by radicalism. In a society that has already been radicalized, such reverence means surrender to radicalism.
This is why I prefer to call myself a traditionalist rather than a conservative. Traditionalism means a belief in transcendent truth, as mediated through a particular tradition. It thus has an adherence to a specific tradition and is not infinitely malleable. By contrast, conservatism, by which I mean here small “c” conservatism, is about upholding and validating the existing values and institutions of one’s society. But if that’s all the conservative stands for, he ends up validating and defending whatever happens to be broadly accepted in his society, no matter what it may be. And this indeed is the manner of today’s conservatives, notably the neoconservatives in their steady surrender to the cultural left over the past decade. On one issue after another, when a radical innovation, which the neocons had once opposed on principle, wins and becomes accepted in mainstream opinion, the neocons drop their opposition to it and begin denouncing as an “extremist” anyone who still holds to the neocons’ former principles. Thus the neocons have progressively surrendered on racial preferences and surrendered to moral liberationism, issues that were once their signature domestic issues.
In one of most notorious incidents of Burkean-style neoconservatism in recent years, Norman Podhoretz brutally shot down the important “End of Democracy?” symposium at First Things in 1996 because he felt that its questioning of the legitimacy of our current regime of judicial usurpation was “disruptive” of social order, as dangerous to our society, as he put it, as the radicalism of the 1960s. As a result of Podhoretz’s inordinate attachment to the existing, radicalized judicial regime, any mainstream challenge to that regime was put on hold for years, even as the courts continued to re-write the U.S. Constitution. Ironically, even as Podhoretz was attacking serious conservatism as radicalism, because he feared it would be “disruptive,” he praised the movement for homosexual marriage as a “victory for conservatism,” because it showed that homosexuals were no longer seeking to “disrupt” the society but to “join” its institutions. Thus Podhoretz, in Burkean fashion, made non-disruptiveness his all-ruling criterion. If radicals could take over society in a non-disruptive fashion, that was fine with him.
(On the question of neocon surrender to moral liberationsim, see my article “The Neocons Go Left,” http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000412.html )
Mr. Roach’s specific criticisms of me are based on nothing more than an appeal to deference. The fact is, the whole world is lauding John Paul II NOW, is saying NOW that he’s a “great conservative,” an “upholder of tradition,” an “enemy of secularism,” etc. So the whole world is making specific assertions about the late pope that I regard as false and dangerous. Yet I, virtually the only dissident to this chorus of encomia, am not allowed to disagree, and if I do, Mr. Roach calls me a “Jacobin.” Mr. Roach thus uses the same kind of ad hominem attack to delegitimize my critique of John Paul II’s disastrous record, that Norman Podhoretz used to silence First Thing’s critique of judicial usurpation, when he compared the writers at Frist Things to Sixties radicals.
I invite readers to visit VFR, http://www.amnation.com/vfr and read the blog entries of the last week and see if I am really being so terrible as Mr. Roach claims.
To be a traditionalist conservative today requires both patience and seriousness.
Too often we lack seriousness. This is shown, most of all, in a lack of intellectual rigour.
We so often carelessly mix up all kinds of political ideas, some drawn from liberalism itself, and so we never adequately stake out our own political ground.
That’s why I am impressed by Lawrence Auster’s willingness to critically examine the Pope’s legacy. It’s an example of an intellectual rigour which has been sorely lacking in conservative politics.
As to the timing, I can only observe that the media in general began discussing the Pope’s legacy immediately, as did a large number of independent conservative Catholic websites.
Expanding on my comment above, here is something I wrote a couple of years ago explaining why true conservatism means being a dissident from the current order:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000413.html
I’m Catholic and have been reading Lawrence Auster’s analyses and critiques of various aspects of the late Pope’s papacy with a feeling of relief that things which have “needed saying” for a long time are finally getting said — and said with impressive clarity, accuracy, and no small display of wisdom — and also gratitude for the promptness of Auster’s very valuable contributions. Each day that passes since the Pope’s death is an opportunity for public commentators to make a statement that might have an influence however small or indirect on the choice of the next pope.
Lech Walesa describes the potential power of a pope to change the course of events in the modern world:
“We know what the Pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing,” said Walesa. “More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations. Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn’t do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us.” ( http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/04/power-of-karol-wojtyla.html )
The importance of seeing that this power be invested in the right man can be incalculable.
This Pope who together with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan achieved a great victory over communism failed in other ways, ways no less important and perhaps even more important than the contention with communism. We are on the eve of the start of a new papacy, one which will be confronted with civilizational challenges that persist only because JP II didn’t deal with them. The next pope will deal with these challenges or Christendom and the West may find themselves in peril from, respectively, Islam and the immigration crisis, and other mortal threats to each and to both together: there are church-wide and society-wide degenerative processes which can be hard or impossible to stop or slow once set in motion (we see how homosexualism, for example, already set in motion in the Episcopalian Church, is very hard to stop, and excessive incompatible immigration, set in motion in so many Western countries, likewise). In furtherance of vitally important discussions of the meaning of this papacy come Auster’s welcome, respectful, appropriate, and timely critiques. Auster is rendering us invaluable service! There isn’t time to lose in regard to the publishing of ideas on what went right and what went wrong with this papacy: the Vatican is choosing the next pope now and any who can influence that choice in a good direction must try.
On April 2nd Peter Brimelow wrote:
“Regardless of religion, I donââ¬â¢t think any human heart could be untouched by the passing of the Pope. But there is a ruthless reality in the traditional English announcement: the King is dead! Long live the King!” ( http://www.vdare.com/blog/040205_blog.htm#b1 )
“The king is dead! Long live the king!” Where princes are concerned we may have to mourn and respectfully plan the succession both at the same time: “ruthless reality” may call for it. The affairs surrounding the papal succession will not wait, but call for respectful, solemn, timely critiques to be furnished by all thinkers with a contribution to make: the challenges the next pope will face, some of them, will be unprecedented in Western history and the man who will bear that burden for all of us is being chosen right now. By all means, Mr. Auster, speak!
Well, I doubt any lengthy debate on this will resolve anything, but it seems to me the question is whether there is anything on which we can rebuild a viable Western Civilization. Because the alternative, it seems, is starting from scratch. But on what basis would we build such a new civilization, and where would we find the raw materials. It seems to me that it’s always, in the most decrepid of times, better to work with existing or forgotten materials. Not everyone in this country is young or a product of the sixties; there are those with a living tie to what was superior in the past.
And so it seems particularly unseemly to attack one of what will likely be one of the foundations of a rebuilt western civilization, namely, the Catholic Church. Even if you aim to criticize the Pope and his specific stances from Vatican II to immigration to whatever, it seems to me that one could easily say, I shall have more to say on this when a decent interval has passed. There is a convention of focusing on the postiive of the legacy of someone deceased even when one disagreed with much of what he did.
There are two Americas and it varies greatly by region. I concede that much of America may be nearly beyond hope. But I choose to live in one of America’s healthier regions and perhaps that’s why I’m more content to build upon what is healthy and use the scattered bricks of what was once halthy and real to do so rather than start from scratch. Perhaps that’s why I’m not devoid of hope for a conservative restoration.