Reillyists Unite!
November 21, 2006
Austin Bramwell wants me to know that he has awakened me from a dogmatic slumber, and this only to inform me that I am advocating a distorting ideology. Readers might forgive me if I confess that foregoing the pleasures of sleep for the hackneyed jabs of Mr. Bramwell is not a fair exchange. Though the back and forth at least has the virtue of forcing Mr. Bramwell to show himself a bit more clearly. And if I am to be charged by close association with Tocqueville, Nisbet, and Ignatius Reilly, I am only too cheerful to declare my guilt. A great deal could be said, but I will restrain myself to three basic areas of comment.**
In the first place, Bramwell continues to use the term “ideology” in an overly broad manner disconnected from history and prior analysis. For Bramwell, whose heavy breathing on behalf of science and cognitive biology is telling, ideology is little more than the undeniable fact of the contingent nature of knowledge. Human beings cannot escape contingency, in thought any more than in birth. This has long been a principal conservative insight into man’s condition. Bramwell expresses the conservative notion of contingency in an appropriate, though cynical fashion: we are all “imprisoned in cages” we “cannot see.” Bramwell admits to being so imprisoned himself and reserves escape only for certain “geniuses” like Oakeshott who at least have the decency to carry the logic of contingency to its conclusion and completely shut up.
I suppose there ought to be a room or two in the conservative mansion for aesthetes who respond to this problem with Oakeshottian quietism, though it is certainly not the preferred approach. Rather, conservatives have tended to emphasize prudence, wisdom, recourse to tradition, strong pre-political ties, and separation of powers as means of checking the hopelessly colored outlook of all men and compensating for the contingency of knowledge in general. From the conservative view, to reject the contingency of knowledge is the defining feature of ideology. A point confirmed by even a brief review of thinkers from Burke to Voegelin to Orwell (whom Bramwell relies on almost exclusively in his original article).
Now, by some strange alchemy, Bramwell has managed to turn the historical definition of ideology completely on its head. So, instead of finding ideology at the point of denying man’s contingent existence in time and space (this is, in fact, how even Oakeshott defined it), Bramwell wants to make ideology omnipresent and thus defines it as suffering under the contingency of existence (whether we know it or not). Bramwell goes so far as to make the universality of ideology the central, indeed the only, conservative insight. The only truly conservative move left on Bramwell’s chess board is a retreat to various hermitages in the Oakeshottian hills of quietism. (Or perhaps a retreat to the hermitage of the lab which Bramwell places far too much faith in for its ability to unlock our cages.)
In the second place, Bramwell slings Weaver’s “ideas have consequences” as a sobriquet against what he perceives to be an under-theorized reliance on intellectual history and “typology.” Unfortunately, he uses the term in ways entirely disconnected with Weaver’s life and thought. Rather than engage in his own kind of intellectual sloganeering through typecasting and endless taxonomy, Bramwell would do well to consult just the first and last paragraphs of M.E. Bradford’s article on Weaver in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia:
Intellectual historian, rhetorician, and political philosopher, Richard Malcolm Weaver Jr. was born in Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina. He was the son of Richard Malcolm Weaver Sr. and of Carolyn Embry Weaver, originally of Fayette County, Kentucky. Professor Weaver was also the great-grandson of the Reverend Jacob Weaver of Reem’s Creek, who was the patriarch of the Weaver family in western North Carolina and whose descendants continue to gather at Weaverville each summer. …
Weaver returned to North Carolina and Weaverville at every opportunity, to reassuring places, friends, and the magic circle of the blood. … His public life was the solitary life of the mind. Yet a passion for dialectics was not the source of his achievements. During a 1950 family reunion, Weaver spoke of the necessity of knowing who you are and where you are from. Concerning these home truths he was not confused. Weaver died in Chicago. He is buried at Weaverville.
Ideas are not much present, though kinship, friends, place, home, and common memory are more than adequate to take up the slack in defining Weaver the man and giving an indispensable insight into his intellectual life. Does Bramwell know who he is and where he is from? I see nothing to indicate that he does, though admittedly, it may be uncharitable of me to say so. The point is that the “disgruntled-cons” Bramwell derides as suffering under an impotent and false rendering of intellectual history have always started, not with Rousseau, but with the various loves and loyalties of their own particular lives. Existential threats to those loves and loyalties most often come from the quarters of true ideologues such as Rousseau and yes, Mr. Bramwell, who would suggest that the carefully cultivated wisdom of the past is no longer necessary (and is in fact an obstacle to be torn asunder) in the face of the fully realized knowledge of the “general will” or, Jesu save us, “cognitive biology.”
In the third place, Bramwell resorts, a number of times, to flying under false colors and making standard academic namby-pamby rhetorical feints. For example, he backs significantly and disingenuously off of his earlier claims about the need to extirpate pre-political loyalties and now says he only meant the more modest claim that both political and pre-political loyalties can be either good or bad. I suppose I could have dreamed that gem up myself, even from within a dogmatic slumber. But others have already utilized a pandy-bat on this particular point to good effect, so I shall say no more about it.
But it is Bramwell’s silly references to my supposed glorification of the middle ages that is so galling. Perhaps he did not notice the art decorating this page. Bramwell’s is a typical deconstructive feint—whatever you see as a model in the past existed alongside or on top of competing, rival, and different models. It is an implied relativistic retort, or more properly, a loss of courage and nerve. Because there is no pure person or society, we can’t look to any for direction? This is not a serious argument but the diversionary tactic of a weak sister anxious to get to the red meat of a horrible big religious and paternalist bogeyman. Look at the crazy priest, he wants to take us back to the middle ages! What a nut! Needless to say, I am certain Mr. Bramwell does not wear a hair shirt under his coat of many colors.
** I will add, by way of footnote, that Mr. Bramwell’s claim that Rousseau and Burke essentially advocated the same thing is provocative. He will forgive me if I do not say it is convincing. However, I should like to know his source for such a, shall we say, unconventional view.
This is Reillyists Unite! in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Austin Bramwell Responds | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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