Austin Bramwell Responds
November 21, 2006
Austin Bramwell has taken spirited exception to my critique of his recent essay “Good-Bye to All That” (which is now available on-line.) I shall, of course, have a few words to say in reply as weather, soul-saving duties, and the goat herd allow. +G.J.
Fr. Jape is angered by three paragraph in my essay in which I dismiss styles of “conservatism” that he, and, I daresay, The New Pantagruel, prefer. Good. I was hoping in my essay to shake certain conservatives out of their dogmatic slumbers. Perhaps, having read Fr. Jape’s elegant dissection of my essay, his readers feel that it is safe to go back to sleep. This would be a mistake. Fr. Jape’s comments typify some of the very misguided tendencies against which I was trying to warn.
Before going further, I should make an important clarification. Fr. Jape wrongly imputes to me the view that even the brightest minds of the conservative movement “are no more capable of real analysis than the dumb brutes [his words] at NR.” I said no such thing. On the contrary, the brightest conservative minds–I would name Steve Sailer and Andrew Bacevich–are more than capable of real analysis, which is why I call them bright to begin with. These writers are “ostracized” in the straightforward sense that the mainstream movement, as far as I know, will no longer publish what they have to say (no doubt because what they have to say is deeply embarrassing to the movement). Many other conservatives outside the mainstream, meanwhile, are merely “disgruntled”–that is, they dislike mainstream, but without solid grounds for their dislike. In any case, it is not true, as some have charged, that I declared a pox on all houses.
Turning to Fr. Jape’s comments, I wish to show that, contrary to protestations, what Fr. Jape advocates is a distorting ideology like any other. That ideology so far lacks a useful name (probably the best would be “socialism,” a term monopolized long ago by opponents of private property), so I will call it “Ignatiusreillyism” or “Reillyism” for short. Having met and had affection for many Reillysts in my life, I believe that I know well their habits, tropes, prejudices, and blind spots.
First, Reillyists believe, as the slogan goes, that “ideas have consequences.” That is, they view past and current events as the working out of certain (usually, in their view, pernicious) ideas. Thus, Fr. Jape, for example, his prose fairly groaning under the weight of important concepts gathered from Western intellectual history, takes it for granted that “the modern west followed the path set forth by the great Enlightenment theorists of liberalism such as Rousseau.” By what causal mechanism did Rousseau and Locke legislate the modern world into being (or did the modern world come to “follow” Rousseau and Locke)? Reillyists neither know nor (it seems) care to specify. In their minds, the big ideas brood over history like Spirit over the deep-that it is to say, mysteriously. It would be one thing if Reillyists adhered to an Hegelian metaphysic of history-as-universal-consciousness-that at least is fully developed philosophical theory–but they don’t. For Reillyists, the belief that “ideas have consequences” comes not as one hypothesis among many but as a Revelation whose authenticity must be defended at all costs.
With that Revelation comes a conventional intellectual typology into which Reillyists struggle to fit all unfamiliar utterances. To save the typology is always the goal! Thus, Fr. Jape says that I am a “Rousseauian” who champions “the general will”; therefore, I am trying, against the resistance of all “authentic” conservative thinkers, to “strip the altars in the name of pure reason.” (Fr. Jape also infers without warrant that I admire power for its own sake, and wrongly imputes to me the rather silly view that anyone who has clearly-defined political opinions must have arrived at them through rigorous analysis.) This strange interpretation of my essay is made possible only by doing violence to Rousseau’s words, my own, and those of “authentic” conservative thinkers.
Start with Rousseau. At the center of almost every Reillyist typology is some Simon Magus responsible for the all the evils modern world. Of these, Rousseau is probably the most routinely vilified. In Fr. Jape’s mind (following, I take it, Robert Nisbet), Rousseau stands for proto-totalitarian opposition to anything that comes between the individual and the state. As it happens, however, this is not the only view of Rousseau; on the contrary, many scholars see the diabolical Rousseau as in fundamental agreement with our beloved Burke. Both use the metaphor of contract to understand society, both imply that the contract cannot be broken, and both seek to prove that the chains into which we are born are legitimate. Burke saw deeply into the problem of order and freedom, but Rousseau saw even deeper. His most notorious remark, that man must “be forced to be free,” contains much of the wisdom for which Burke was himself striving.
As for my words, because I have the gall to question the value of “pre-political” loyalties, Fr. Jape calls me “bizarrely” Rousseauian. But there was nothing “Rousseauian” about my words at all, bizarrely or not. Conceding that I was being provocative, in discussing “ancestral loyalties,” I made nothing more than the self-evident-to-the-point-of-banal observation that not all “pre-political” loyalties are good things. On the contrary, just like political loyalties, they are sometimes good and sometimes bad. Would it not be sensible to favor the good ones and discourage the bad ones-just as the most admirable regimes (I pointed in particular to the United States and Britain) have always done? Reillyists just take it as self-evident that love of family, God, and community are Good Things. But they are not, at least not all the time. To make this observation is not to say that “everything is radically connected to politics” (whatever that means, anyway).
Next, as to “authentic” conservatives, I take it that Fr. Jape will agree with me that Edmund Burke would count as one. Thus, according to Fr. Jape, Burke must oppose the cutting short of “pre-political loyalties.” But it is not clear that Burke did categorically oppose the cutting short of “pre-political” loyalties. On the contrary, it strikes me as quite imprudent and un-Burkean to set “pre-political” against “political” loyalties in the first place, rather than to say, sensibly, that both, within limits, have their place. Part of Burke’s genius, after all, was to imagine a Britain that theretofore had not existed-that is, the lovely, stable and harmonious kingdom evoked by Burke’s image of the constitutional oak shading the cattle beneath. In fact, however, 18th century Britain-like Britain in every previous century–was a violent cauldron of opposing factions often threatening civil war. Burke created a national mythology (albeit a moderate and “conservative” one) under which they all could live together in peace. This national mythology necessarily required that the various groups relinquish their “pre-political” loyalties in favor of loyalty to the state. If I may say so, Reillyists often seem so enamored of “pre-political” attachments as to be almost oblivious to the problem of order. In that respect, they are the ones who stand outside the “authentic” conservative tradition.
Next, Reillyists regard the results of modern science as simply verboten subjects of discussion. Fr. Jape’s aversion to science isn’t readily apparent from his comments. How else, however, could one explain his bizarre and invidious comparison of my understanding of ideology to Erik Voegelin’s? Of course my thoughts about ideology don’t go very keep into the “psycho-spiritual” sources of ideology: that’s because, in my view, ideology has no such sources (or, at least, there’s no need to think that it has such sources). I stated that the roots of ideology lay in (i) our cognitive limitations and (ii) our coalitional psychology. In other words, I was talking Darwinian cognitive science. Fr. Jape imperiously suggests that I need to read Voegelin before I will understand anything. Well, as it happens, scientists are doing quite well these days explaining the causes of ideology and so far they haven’t needed recourse to Voegelinian notions like “Gnosticism,” “apocolypticism,” &c &c. Let’s be serious here: even scholars who have spent a lifetime studying Voegelin aren’t sure if his writings add up to anything in the end. Whatever may be said of cognitive scientists, by contrast, at least they’re actually adding something to the store of human knowledge.
Reillyists also express contempt for styles of conservatism (indeed, all styles of thought) other than their own. (This contempt is a bit ungracious, given that Reillyists recruit from the same farm system as the rest of the conservative movement, including the much despised mainstream.) Hence, Fr. Jape’s distinction between “authentic” and (presumably) “inauthentic” conservatives. But Reillyist claims to authenticity are hard to take seriously. I take it that to plausibly claim that a given idea or set of ideas constitutes true “conservatism”, one must show either (1) that the idea or set is found or follows readily from the writings of Edmund Burke or (2) that it identifies the “core” assumptions shared, as an empirical matter, by nearly all who call themselves “conservative.” Reillyism, as discussed, does not obviously follow from the writings of Edmund Burke; on the contrary, Reillyists seem to reject much Burkean wisdom. As for capturing the hidden essence of conservatism, Reillyism never even comes close. For all their raging against the modern world, Reillyists are preoccupied by a surprisingly narrow set of concerns-largely, the Tocquevillian concerns of community and individualism. On questions of peace, prosperity and justice, however, they have almost nothing to say, and, in fact, seem determined to ignore them. In my mind, however, ideas that have nothing to say about peace, prosperity and justice are hardly even political, much less politically conservative.
Finally, even when it comes to their preoccupations, Reillyists don’t penetrate very deeply. Against the supposed alienation and individualism of modern man, for example, Reillyists pose the thick, rich bonds of family, religion and community. They allude frequently a certain vision of the Middle Ages-the same one that we get from Henry Adams-where each man knows his place in the order of things and unquestioningly does his duty. It seems to me, however, that Reillyists understand neither family, community nor the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, first, were a revolutionary age. Nobody tried harder to “immanentize the eschaton” than Hildebrand. (In this regard, I highly recommend Harold Berman’s extraordinary work Law and Revolution.) Second, the family is not the locus of harmony from which all further social bonds may flow. Rather, as nearly all great works of literature show, it is a primary source of strife, anger, jealousy, rage, and violence. The harmonious, traditionalist society of Reillyist imagination-medieval or otherwise-never existed and never can exist, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of modern biology could see. The best a nation can do is to contain familial and ancestral attachments; woe unto the nation that defers to them blindly.
In closing, I should state what I believe is *not* an ideology, since I must appear inordinately fond of calling everyone an ideologue. The world is generally too complex to understand without resort to simplifying assumptions; hence, for the most part, everyone who has informed political opinions is an ideologue, myself included. The only persons are who are not ideologues are, first, radical quietists like Oakeshott who hew rigorously to the belief that political wisdom can’t be expressed in propositional form. They’re probably right. Second, those geniuses are not ideologues who are capable of seeing so far that they can recognize their own assumptions as such. These are the paragons of what Weber called the “ethics of responsibility.” All others, even the Reillyists, remain imprisoned in cages that they cannot see.
- Austin Bramwell
This is Austin Bramwell Responds in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Another Conservative Taxonomy | Next: Reillyists Unite! | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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