I have just finished reading Lionel Trilling’s 1940 Partisan Review essay “Elements That Are Wanted.” More than sixty years after its publication, it remains a galvanizing read, though perhaps now in a different way. For a thorough account of the piece, and its important impact at the time, see this fine essay by long time First Things friend and contributor, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Since Ms. Himmelfarb has done the hard work of summarizing and contextualizing Trilling’s essay, my account will be brief. Suffice it to say that in the piece, Trilling commends to his leftist readers certain central elements of T.S. Eliot’s (markedly conservative) political thought. Trilling expounds what he calls Eliot’s “moral Platonism” which recognizes a moral / social ideal, but contents itself with what is possible for actual, living men and women, here and now. By contrast, Trilling argues that the left is afflicted with a sickly case of contemptus mundi – hatred of the world. Its Utopian willingness to break actual eggs in the creation of an eschatalogical omelet is, he thinks, animated by a deep-seated “disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.”
Readers of First Things will, no doubt, find themselves in agreement with this little bit of Trilling’s analysis, and will feel encouraged that so eminent a liberal thinker has perceived the wisdom of Eliot’s conservative outlook. And rightly so. But there is also, in Trilling’s piece, a challenge that we on the right would do well to take up. No conservative needs to read Trilling to see that Eliot had something to teach mid-century high-brow leftists. But we could read Trilling in order to see what a genuine, honest, self-critical thinker can look like, even while maintaining a principled allegiance to one movement or another. Trilling was a man of the left, but he was honest enough, and he cared enough about the intellectual rectitude of his movement, to acknowledge when an infamously conservative thinker like Eliot supplied something his own tribe lacked. Liberals, he saw, were wrong about something, and conservatives were right. As an earnest liberal intellectual, Trilling publicized this embarrassing fact in the most prestigious organ of American liberal thought.
Where, and I ask this with all sincerity, would one see this on the American right? Which journals, which thinkers, would trot out an essay by Herbert Marcuse, Peter Singer or Paul Krugman, and say “Look – this person is right, and we conservatives are wrong. Let’s take a hard look at some of our most basic intellectual commitments.”? It’s hard, for me at least, to answer this question with any speed or certainty. It seems, rather, that conservative discourse is calibrated mainly towards the winning of elections. In this bolshevik reality, the purification of the tribe’s language and thought gets run under the wheels of the electoral train. Many readers of First Things have likely heard of Trilling’s statement that there were no conservative ideas in America, merely “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” If that was true at the time, which I doubt, it’s not true now. But when Trilling says that there is no conservative intellectual tradition in America, we might do well to hold the rebuttal for a moment, and ask ourselves how he might be right. Specifically, what role do authentic self-criticism and openness to ideas of far-flung provenance, the sorts of virtues Trilling demonstrates in his essay on Eliot, play in the constitution of an intellectual tradition? And where, when, how do contemporary conservative thinkers demonstrate these virtues?
If the answer is nowhere, or practically nowhere, then conservatives are making the same mistake that Trilling ascribed to his leftist comrades, for whom, he argued, “immediate ends have become more important than ultimate ends.” A strategy of short-term victory that precludes or damages the building of an authentic, durable, vital tradition is ultimately, in the long view, suicidal. An ossified, closed tradition, as both Eliot and Alasdair MacIntyre have pointed out, is not merely a weak tradition, it is no tradition at all. The best it can manage is a bleating swan song. Or to put it otherwise, it can stand athwart history yelling “stop!”
Yes, I know, by the standards of Trilling, the contemporary left is little better than the right. The universities, mainstream magazines, and yes, my beloved NPR, usually fail to take conservative ideas seriously, if they are even aware that conservatives have ideas at all. They are poor stewards of their own intellectual tradition, and conservatives never tire of pointing this out. Alas, partisan blindness and an ethos of intellectual trench warfare have become the order of the day on most corners. But if you’re reading this, you are likely not a leftist, so I’ll spare you a sermon about the failings of of The Nation or Fresh Air. Besides, whatever their failings, Trilling was right that the dominant intellectual patrimony for us Americans is a progressive one. My native Boston is, for good and ill, the cardinal birthplace of the American mind, and it is still occupied, for good and ill, by the shades of progressives like Emerson, Thoreau and T.S. Eliot’s Harvard-ruling kin. Theirs is the most august and ingrained tradition in American thought and culture, and as long as the right is content to mark its gains and losses in congressional seats, the overwhelming prestige and momentum of this tradition can only be mitigated, and not even by very much.
If conservative intellectuals hope to make a significant, long-term dent in this hegemony, they will need to employ every tool at the disposal of a serious, honest thinker. Including those wielded by Trilling in the aforementioned essay. His are, incidentally, tools that should fit comfortably in the conservative hand. Russell Kirk famously said that conservativism is the negation of ideology. We who find something compelling about this negation ought to be, if such a description is in any way accurate, the most willing and able to think generously, honestly, openly. Are we? Or, as I’m obviously suggesting, does the liberal Trilling demonstrate some elements that are badly wanted in the conservative mind?
March 18th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
Here in South Dakota, absurdly permissive laws allow revolving debt, “title” and “payday” lenders to operate freely. Any critique of suckering one’s neighbor into a ceaseless debt cycle is rebutted with ostensibly “conservative” values – usually that this is “the free market creating jobs.”
Meanwhile, other “conservative” values are cited to prohibit prostitution, recreational drug use/vending and other possible ways for “the free market to create jobs.”
It is ironic that the only allies a moral conservative can find around here when it comes to usury are hard leftists.
There is i
March 18th, 2011 | 3:32 pm
Timothy is right. To the extent that conservatives take up the cause of unfettered commerce at the expense of one’s moral obligations to neighbor, we’re in trouble. The bottom feeder lenders, legalized gambling (or worse, government-sponsored lottos) and other vice-dependent enterprises have a corrosive effect on ethics across the board.
I know many self-described conservatives who really thing that the value of something can be measured by how much money it makes. It’s a simple measure that completely devalues charitable work and the work of non-profits that makes this country great (and, by the way, provides a voluntary alternative to the nanny state.)
March 18th, 2011 | 4:34 pm
This essay points out why, for the good of both Christianity and conservatism, each cannot see the other as a subset of itself. Christianity remains the best critique of political conservatism, even as many or most political conservatives remain Christians.
March 18th, 2011 | 8:01 pm
Here’s one: trickle-down economics doesn’t actually work. As the gains of labor and the ideals of the New Deal have been steadily lost over the second half of the 20th century, the real spending power of the middle and working classes has declined, whereas the wealthiest 5% have seen huge gains.
Part of the reason for this is outsourcing to cheaper labor markets, and another part is lack of taxation on corporations (who often feel no loyalty to any particular nation). Corporate tax increases might actually be a good idea. (Note: this is not an argument for redistribution of wealth but only for everyone paying their fair share in taxes.)
March 18th, 2011 | 10:13 pm
The post is quite unfair to conservatives. There are abundant examples of leaders of the conservative movement accepting the arguments of intelligent liberals and criticizing their own. Think of the reaction among conservatives to those who advance anti-semitic or racist arguments, or who long to preserve the “traditions” of the Confederacy, who or who think that killing abortionists is an acceptable response to the tragedy of abortion. Think of the serious-minded debates regarding the End of Democracy? issue of First Things (November 1996), in which members of First Things’ own board resigned because they thought it alarmist.
If Trilling gets points for arguing against leftist utopianism in favor of more liberal pragmatism, then mightn’t conservatives get points for arguing against utopian idealists on the right, such as drug-legalizing libertarians or Chestertonian distribitutivists or those who think cutting taxes is sufficient for fiscal discipline? Alternatively, mightn’t conservatives get credit for arguing in favor of idealism against the entrenched pragmatists of the right, for example by promoting human rights and democracy rather than “realism”?
Finally, should George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” count as an example of accepting a criticism of the left (i.e. that Reagan conservatism neglected the poor and less fortunate)? Or does that not count because it fizzled? May Reagan conservatives predicted that compassionate conservatism would fizzle, because the critique by the left was, in a word, wrong. Perhaps if conservatives are to have a lasting impact, they might be well-served to just be smarter conservatives?
The Right has had more intellectual energy than the left for over a generation, and so it’s not surprising that there aren’t many instances today of conservatives agreeing with a liberal on some big principle. But there’s still a lot of intelligent thinking and debating going on.
March 18th, 2011 | 11:35 pm
A comment of Triling about Freud: In the Freudian id there is the experience of one billion years of life on earth which no tryant can reach.
The issue with the social engineers is not if they are going to fail, but when and how much damage they cause in the mean time.
March 19th, 2011 | 9:14 am
Fellow Bostonian,
I wouldn’t argue that there is no variation within conservativism. There manifestly is, certainly at the policy level that you point to. I’d hoped it was clear that my topic was a narrow one: conservative intellectuals, and the institutions that give them voice (chiefly publications, but while we’re at it, think tanks and foundations too). From where I stand, there seems to be a real deficit of imagination and openness in this world, an unwillingness to be surprised by the truth. It sometimes seems like all of the really big, difficult philosophical questions have been neatly resolved long before the inquiry begins. I don’t say, of course, that this problem is unique to the right. For a particularly dour (but not unattractive) assessment of the intellectual situation writ large, see this http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/jewish-encyclopedia article by the writer (and long-time Commentary contributor) Joseph Epstein: Here’s a sample:
“The chief problem facing John Podhoretz in his editorship of the current-day Commentary, I would say, is . . . how to run an intellectual magazine without genuine intellectuals. For it is far from clear that we even have intellectuals any longer—at least not in the old sense of men and women living on and for ideas, imbued with high culture, willing to sacrifice financially to live the undeterred life of the mind.”
My initial sense (and I’m open to being contradicted – please!) is that Epstein is basically correct. We have lots of conservative pundits, but few serious conservative intellectuals. My further contention, scantily developed here, is that in the long term this is bad for the right. Then again, I’m an aspiring writer and thinker, so I would think that, wouldn’t I?
March 19th, 2011 | 10:38 am
Read Front Porch Republic or Chronicles instead of National Review and the Weekly Standard.
March 19th, 2011 | 11:03 am
Intelligent conservatives are rarely intellectuals. Their instinct is to manage their own lives, help their families and neighbors and solve community problems within the community. They are not primarily interested in collectivist utopias except from motives of self-defense. Consequently, their response to the left is visceral – incoherent grunts. The typical conservative intellectual is a convert – someone who was an intellectual first and having been mugged by reality becomes conservative. Conservative intellectuals will always be a minority among intellectuals.
March 19th, 2011 | 1:56 pm
I am somewhat confused about what a conservative is. There are Paleo, Neo, conservative liberatarians, libertarian conservatives etc. and then there are the millions of Americans that refer to themselves as conservative, usually with some caveat relating to an issue dear to them that doesn’t neatly fit the conservative mold.
A similar confusion exists about what an intellectual is. If the reference point is me, well, the world is full of them.
Whatever the answer is to the above questions the fact remains that many of our contemporary issues are implicitly or explicitly being fought over principles. For all of the raucusness of both the Tea Party and the Left fundamental principles are at stake. For many on the right the heavy lifting has already been done by the giants of the past and to them the positions they champion, while not the product of their effort, have been intellectually vetted and found worthy of defending and advocating. For many rehashing these fundamentals is akin to reinventing the wheel. For them intelligence not intellectuality is what is required.
On the Left, while there is a legacy of intellectual stars, the need to fill in the perceived holes in our polity and culture is an never ending task requiring prodigious mental energy to upend the intransigence of the right by creating ever more imaginative justifications for their escape from history and entry into the new day freed from the ludniks. And the intellectuals will lead the way.This just proves that many intellectuals are stupid.
March 20th, 2011 | 2:27 am
Conservatives are bilingual, in John Podhoretz’s memorable description. We comprehend and can speak Liberal because we went to school, read mainstream publications, and breathe the air around us.
To acquire fluency in this second language, Conservative, we had to go out of our way. That experience has sharpened our minds and expanded our knowledge base. Herbert Mancuse was on the syllabus at college and so, like everyone else, we read him. John Paul II on the subject of Marxism was not on the syllabus, but we read him anyway and are better for it.
This characterization of conservatives is a conceit among some of us. There is some truth in it, though less now than sixty years ago, when Trilling could write that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant intellectual tradition but the only intellectual tradition.” That’s no longer true. It’s no longer the only intellectual tradition.
Since he wrote that in his preface to The Liberal Imagination in 1949, National Review, First Things, and The Weekly Standard have all been founded. Commentary turned right in the sixties. Fox News was launched in the nineties. Think tanks have been established. Critique, if you like, the conservative intellectual tradition that these venues represent, or critique how they represent it. But clearly Conservative is no longer a dead language. The literature (I use that term broadly) in it is vast and growing.
Like Ross Douthat (“Does Conservatism Need Fox News?” April 26, 2010), Ian worries that in this more comfortable environment we conservatives are neglecting our liberal interlocutors, becoming complacent, and letting our game go flat. I agree that, in print, we could use more exchanges like the one that First Things ran fifteen years ago between Richard Neuhaus and Stanley Fish. On talk radio, let’s have more Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt and their fruitful conversations with guests who eloquently argue for ideas that neither host nor audience agree with.
Still. While sparring with people who disagree with you leads you to clarify and develop your thoughts, thinking has more aspects than just the polemical. In politics, yes, we think primarily /against/ injustice, error, call it what you will. In religion, we do that too, but we also do a lot of thinking /with/ — with all those who, dead as well as living, contribute to the long tradition we call “the faith.” This tradition of “thinking with the Church” is to apologetics, for which there is a time and a place, what clubhouse camaraderie is to the hard-fought game on the field. We need both.
I think that what its readers appreciate most about First Things is how it integrates these two aspects of intellectual life, the competitive and the cooperative. It provides a forum for authors to articulate sharp ideas that we admire because they’re true and because, being true, they’re precision weapons against untruth.
Readers of First Things do follow the rivalry between left and right. And most of us pull for the right. But do you really think we’re “content to mark its gains and losses in congressional seats”? Sure, we mark them down, and a lot more else besides, but mostly as glosses on the main text, which is love of learning and desire for God.
Ian, you’ve taken Trilling’s healthy skepticism about liberal pieties and applied it to conservatives, asking whether for us too “immediate ends have become more important than ultimate ends.” I enjoyed reading your post and the responses to it so far. But in this forum aren’t you preaching mostly to the choir?
March 20th, 2011 | 9:36 am
Timothy and Barbara:
You single out “bottom-feeding” lenders (such as pay-day loan shops) for heavy fire. You’re wrong. These places prosper because poor people feel they need them desperately. The poor person’s paycheck lasts three weeks but the person has to live four weeks on it. Solution: short-term loan. Say your daughter needs a new dress for school on Tuesday (not Wednesdsay). You have no money. You go to the payday loan shop and borrow $50, for which you’ll pay back $70 in two weeks. For you that’s a bargain. For critics it’s robbery. All right, then, open your own shop and give the loan for $1. The poor need these places and that’s why they thrive. Moralize all you want: you have nothing better to offer.
March 20th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
I am somewhat confused about what a conservative is. —Michael Currie
So am I. The problem, as I see it, is that conservatives do not agree on what should be conserved. Their (almost) universal claim that we should conserve tradition only masks their disagreements. For no one (other than a few cranks) wants to conserve all of tradition. There are too many things that even self-professed conservatives agree need fixing. And it doesn’t help (contrary to popular opinion) to add that we should conserve the good things while changing the bad. For such a proposal amounts to little more than a platitude. (Even liberals can agree with it.) So what conservatism needs is a theory that distinguishes between what is worthy of being conserved and what isn’t. And that’s the purview of intellectuals. But, as Ian Marcus Corbin has noted, conservative intellectuals seem to be devoting the majority of their time these days to politically expedient agendas. Perhaps they have good reasons for doing so, but I agree with Corbin that such an approach is likely to result, at best, in little more than short-term political gains. Meanwhile, our universities are filled with liberal intellectuals cranking out liberal theories.
March 20th, 2011 | 3:22 pm
Bob G: It looks like you’re arguing from “is” to “ought”: Because it is the case that the poor willingly borrow from loan sharks, then it ought to be the case that they do so. But I bet you wouldn’t apply that same logic to theft: Because it is the case that the poor willingly steal from the rich, then it ought to be the case that they do so.
March 20th, 2011 | 7:02 pm
Nicholas,
Thanks for your questions. To be honest I thought I’d get called out in this way earlier and more vociferously. The initial post was rife with question marks because it was an attempt to get an inchoate intuition on “paper”, knowing that it was underdeveloped. Yes, I agree with Podhoretz’s figure of bilingualism, based on my own experience. And most of the conservatives I’ve met have a similar story. It is an immense advantage, I think. But if the typical well-educated conservative is blessed with an above average catholicity in intellectual and cultural matters, it does not follow that conservative institutions mirror that catholicity. In fact, I find that many, if not most of my intellectually inclined conservative friends are fairly dismayed with the state of, say, conservative intellectual journalism, the world of the think tanks, etc. These are, by and large, not looking for broadly cultured, generous, honest thinkers. They are looking for devastating point scorers who can affect a sheen of objectivity. I’ll refrain from naming names for now, but I’ll bet you can come up with a few yourself.
It’s largely an issue of funding. “Serious” magazines (which are more my concern than think tanks) generally need to be subsidized by wealthy donors. So a magazine editor, however serious and erudite himself, needs to woo, and keep wooing, wealthy donors who are likely not as sophisticated as him, and who keep the money coming because they want someone to stick it to the bad guys. There’s a natural pressure towards ideological ossification. Try this experiment. Look at the table of contents for a conservative magazine (or, yes, yes, a liberal one) and read just the title of a couple of the opinion pieces, book reviews, etc. And see whether you can construct the argument in your mind, prior to reading the article. If you have any familiarity w/ the publication, I bet you’ll have a pretty good chance of knowing what it’s going to say. That kind of predictability is a sign that an arena of discourse has ceased to be a vital zone for intellectual exploration. Or so it seems to me. To be sure, not all magazines are so moribund – but again, I’ll refrain from naming names.
It takes a really singular leader to keep a magazine open, agile, capacious while also keeping the funders happy. The conservative magazines in America were founded in the second half of the twentieth century. The best of them were run by such singular leaders. But not all of the second or third generation editors are capable of such a balancing act. I have several friends who are, or have been, lower-level editors at conservative magazines. To hear them tell it, party discipline is rigid and severe. Attempts to deviate from the script – by attacking a sacred cow, or expressing some anathema view point – are met with explicit threats of firing. I myself have on more than one occasion pitched an article or review, only to be told what my verdict would have to be in order for the journal to print it. This is, on the surface, an argument just about institutions, but writers and intellectuals, poor fragile dears, need institutions to get their writing published, so if the lion’s share of the magazines are monolingual, the polyglot conservatives on the ground will want for a public voice.
Does this seem right, or do I still seem to be preaching to the choir?
March 21st, 2011 | 1:55 pm
Ian, I wonder how many self-described conservatives, with all their polyglot ideological credentials, are seriously familiar with the thinking of some great and good recent figures whose overall or particular positions do not always fall neatly into a recognized place on the left/right spectrum (or congeries of spectra)?
I’m thinking of some of the best exemplars of post-1950s Catholic general philosophy (why is contemporary philosophy so much stronger than today’s theology?), like Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Michael Dummett, Eleonore Stump, Linda Zagzebski, J. M. Cameron.
Venues like this one are happy once in a while to cite, say, Anscombe’s positions on abortion and contraception, but they basically go silent about her equally strong and well-argued views on just war, nuclear war, aerial bombardment, the wrongness of usury, the demand under justice (let alone charity) that those who have plenty actually owe things to those in need, etc. Or: has anyone in the conservative press reviewed Michael Dummett’s recent book on immigration and refugees? Perhaps relevantly, it is also very difficult to get people to read the plain sense of what St. Thomas says (as Anscombe, Geach and Stump have done) and apply it credibly to the present. An Oxford philosopher friend of mine has remarked that Thomas was pretty radical in some respects. Maybe Ian can start a little flame burning here, and we may again be surprised by the truth.
March 21st, 2011 | 3:51 pm
You single out “bottom-feeding” lenders (such as pay-day loan shops) for heavy fire. You’re wrong. These places prosper because poor people feel they need them desperately.
Payday loans are not the problem. People who go through payday loan services are aware that they are paying a premium – but the service itself is very useful, as cash flow situations can be very costly to people who do not have backup reserves. (Example: you will lose your job if you cannot get your car fixed.)
Credit cards are much more damaging. Especially credit cards that include provisions to jump from a low introductory rate to a higher one. Most credit cards taken by less affluent people include a provision that says if they are late with their payment just once, their rate will jump to 29.9%.
March 23rd, 2011 | 3:38 am
Thanks for the amplification, Ian. You say you’ve had direct experience of the problem you describe here. I take that as an important data point in my own view of the landscape you’ve charted.
You can take one of two courses, as I see it. Start up your own journal, magazine, or blog. You wouldn’t be the first. Partisan Review was founded by a few writers and editors whose frustration with the party line on the left back then was close to your own frustration with present-day journalism on the right.
Or try to work within the system of those publications that are already established. I think this one is about as promising in that regard as you’ll find.
First Things does receive some subvention from a conservative foundation, though only enough to cover a fraction of its costs. Over the years, some readers who are critical of some of the magazine’s leanings have remarked that concern not to alienate donors must be the reason for content published here that, in economics, has been pro-business and, in foreign policy, neoconservative. I’ve never shared their suspicions.
“Political ideas cluster,” as George Will once wrote, “and people cluster politically.” In the United States, it’s so common for pro-life, pro-Israel (which typically involves a willingness to be labeled a hawk), and pro-business to cluster on the right that I don’t see any reason to invoke foundation money as a cause for their clustering here, where, true, that cluster is amply (and eloquently, in my opinion) reflected.
My impression is that writers who disagree with First Things are more likely to shun it than vice versa. Three examples come to mind. Gertrude Himmelfarb and Peter Berger resigned from the editorial board after publication of a symposium on whether Supreme Court decisions hostile to the right to life spelled the end of American democracy. Stanley Hauerwas, a pacifist, resigned because he saw (correctly, most would agree) the magazine as supportive of U.S. military force in the war on terrorism.
For most people most of the time, the argument follows the moral intuition, which apprehends more than cool reason ever comprehends. We already know what we think is right or wrong. But often we can’t articulate it so well. So we read opinion journals, hoping to find there a better, more cogent explanation.
Rare is the writer whose sympathy for those he disagrees with is so apparent that he can persuade them to listen. Thomas Aquinas could be our model. It’s sometimes said that he presented the arguments of heretics more persuasively than did the heretics themselves.
Readers stop reading an opinion article not so much when they see that it’s headed somewhere they don’t believe in as when they sense that the author has never called the mental universe that he’s criticizing home, that he’s never made friends there, that he’s never had more than an arm’s-length, anthropologist’s appreciation for the convictions that most people there share.
Let’s say you think the Indians need more right-handed bats if they’re going to challenge the Twins and the White Sox. There’s an article that could find a place on a Cleveland blog. Write it slightly differently, saying that the Indians are never going to be a serious threat to the Twins and the White Sox because their lineup is so vulnerable to right-handed pitching, and, no, the subliminal message becomes that you don’t like the Tribe. Pitch it to a Minneapolis or a Chicago blog instead.
Most sportswriters and announcers take pride in calling ‘em as they see ‘em, in not being a “homer.” That necessitates that on occasion they report bad news to the hometown fans. The local announcers here in Cleveland report a lot of bad news, but no one resents it, because somehow, from their inflection or choice of words, or something, the listener is given to understand whose side they’re on, although from a transcript of the broadcast you might never be able to tell. How a listener interprets the lyrics often depends on the music that accompanies them.
If you have a dissenting argument, write it up and submit it rather than pitching it. If the editor doesn’t know your writing, he or she may feel that it’s necessary to explain to you what the rules are generally. Some rules, of course, are made to be broken — but only by those who know the rules, respect the rules, and can demonstrate that their reason for breaking them on a fine point is to conform more closely to them in principle. It’s why Jesus dared to heal on the Sabbath. I’m not saying that you’ll necessarily do a better job of winning over the Pharisees but that maybe among the editors of conservative journals you’ll find your Nicodemus.
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