The literature of American conservatism is vast and varied, but one missing and vital question is of its authenticity. If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the two most empirically verifiable aspects of our nature are original sin and the world’s oldest belief system of “you shall be as gods,” then a continuously constructed inauthenticity of reaction as well as the (hopefully occasional) forces of democratizing and quasi-utopian zeal is entirely plausible as the source material of authenticity. (Is the desire for freedom really written in every human heart, as opposed to, say, tribalist loyalty?) America, after all, was born of revolution and is strongly infused with the constant cousins of political tension – the left-liberalism of a state-sponsored, totalizing strain for equality of station and the atomizing effects of the right-liberalism of “freedom and liberty,” often accompanied by the revolutionary zeal of capitalism. The most pointed criticisms of these ideological tensions come from traditionalist European Catholicism, an awkward source of authenticity for any of our country’s newish and modern temporal mental exercises. And so, despite efforts to source American conservatism in the anti-ideology of Edmund Burke and others figures skeptical of ever greater enlightenment and progress, the author of the founding text of Anglo-American conservatism was a Whig, a (mostly) Protestant, and a staunch defender of the revolution of 1688. This can easily be made to fit American sentiments, especially in a broad electoral coalition not dominated by the idea of Christian salvation. But those Catholics within the coalition tend to view the Sacramental nature of humanity as best expressed in a polity based upon a comprehensive union of two persons then extended outward in the coordination of achieving the biological purpose of the organism as a whole. This regeneration of spirit and character, seeking to address the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul and a restoration of ethical understanding, is authentic not by the practical realities of a political philosophy but by a Triune God reflected in the reality of salvation practice and history through the coming together of persons in one family. If this vision of our state of nature is reality, then I would suggest there is an unresolvable tension at the root of all socio-political thought, rendering it eternally restless and inauthentic: man cannot be as a god, and man cannot escape the various, seemingly endless mechanisms set in place to satisfy that truth.
Monday, March 21, 2011, 2:34 PM
March 22nd, 2011 | 12:25 am
Jonathan, This is a good post, but some of the tensions you identify remain unclear to me. If I understand you correctly, you speak of Burke as providing a “Whig” account of the American revolution that nonetheless maintains a decent skepticism regarding the increased enlightenment and progress of reason–i.e., the popularization of modern science and its attendant technologies. Is it that he sees the proper limitations of reason in terms of its application as pure principles of equality, freedom and consent to all areas of practical life? Is he similar to Rousseau on this issue regarding the affects of the progress of the arts and sciences on morality? Abstractly considered, you claim that European style traditionalist Catholicism perhaps better deals with this issue than even Burke. But what is the issue? The emancipation of the will through extreme political action in the name of freedom and reason and its inexorable march through human history? Admittedly, I am overstating the case in an attempt to try to gain some clarity.
Burke seems to understand the American revolution as being limited in this radical sense by the colonies’ own inherited traditions of English law and custom, at least when their revolution is compared to France a decade or so later.
So Burke was a professed Whig who was able to make distinctions between the political and the moral, between the law and abstract justice. You claim this position is more amenable to American political traditions than traditional European Catholicism, and I agree. Whether compared to Jacobinism or later ecclesiastical condemnations of Americanism, Burke’s conservative Whiggism makes for a healthier balance in the USA.
However, then you point to the uneasy place that (some) American Catholics (as opposed to Catholic Americans) find themselves in a coalition of American conservative Whiggery. Given their profound understanding of the sacramental nature of love and the family stemming from the biological nature of the union between two–male and female–American Catholics try to expand this notion to a sacramental(?) understanding inclusive of an organic whole of the community. The trinity and its love in three persons offers a rebuke to the modern and American liberal separations–separations indicative of liberal modernity as as Pierre Manent describes it.
I’m not sure this “oranisicm” of catholicism accounts for a catholicism based on natural law. Surely the natural law considers distinctions (separations?) between the household and the city? While these two realms are not separate, a prudent statesman (even a Christian one) would not try to conflate all sorts of rule into one type of rule. While one must be concerned with the proper formation of the other, the city is not the household, and vice versa. This distinction is at least defensible in terms of the natural law.
But I think you are right in the larger Augustinian doctrine of the two cities. Man is not God, and his city is terrestrial and temporal (and fallen). The two truths of human nature of which you speak are correct–original sin and the belief that you shall be as gods (nice phrase btw–”the world’s oldest belief system.” It is like the world’s oldest profession as I heard Peter Kreeft once say).
We are truly restless hearts, or in a Pascalian understanding of modernity, restless minds to boot. This is an unresolvable tension that the natural law (which in some circles is a contradiction in terms) cannot seem to resolve. But reason is available by nature to figure out the truth too. It may be ultimately insufficient, but is is what we humans have in common nonetheless.
Once again, this was a thought provoking post.
March 22nd, 2011 | 12:42 am
Also, I’m not sure what you mean by authenticity. Are you thinking of Heidegger? I apologize for my obtuseness here.
March 23rd, 2011 | 3:26 pm
John, thank you for the thoughtful response.
In Burke’s letters, as elsewhere, (specifically on questions “penal” and “popery” and certainly a few decades later during the French Revolution), he might echo a medieval Thomist. Kirk, Stanlis, Canavan would I think argue so, but unfortunately a good case can also be made for the Whiggish and utilitarian Burke of Morley and Macpherson, which was the dominant interpretation prior to the traditionalist intellectual revival of the 40s and 50s. This was the tension I had in mind, and it leads to the uneasy question of “conservatism” as it relates to a country with a lot of revolution and liberalism in its bones. We are quite “inauthentic” by comparison to the Spain and France of hundreds of years ago!
And you have pinpointed the issue well: the emancipation of the will through political action in the name of freedom and reason and the march of “progress” through human history. The view that reason, fundamentally, comes from us, and that we are capable of something like a utopia.
A conservative Whiggism is an acceptable compromise, perhaps, given the foundations, but how much hubristic damage can even a mild revolutionary mindset do? I think what a Triune and Sacramental mindset offers is a rebuke to personal and political hubris. However hubris plays out in the personal and political spheres, in ways large and small, hubris of ambition should almost always be checked. And as for “oranisism” (that’s a good phrase too), you are probably right to suggest it does not account for a Catholicism based on natural law. It deserves more thought. Can liberalism be escaped in our socio-cultural contexts? Possibly not. What a depressing thought.
And so what I am thinking is that an “authentic conservatism” does not exist. There are sentiments that are conservative, and I believe that conservatism in the abstract is the “negation of ideology”, even as its coalitions may contain ideologies, but it is best reflected in the traditionalist family, where the political can diminish. Primarily Political People – a particular disease of the Left – fill up too much life space with matters of systematic organization. Such actions are the opposite of conservatism.
March 25th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
So good post and better response. So the Randians too are against Primarily Political People, maybe even more than you. But they are close to the opposite your understanding of conservatism too.
April 4th, 2011 | 11:37 am
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