Over at the Confabulum I’ve tried to continue rolling out my conceptual brief against ideology . Part of my contention there is that in democratic times the allure of ideology is the condensation of politics, religion, and culture into a single, concise, comprehensive doctrine. A political manifesto sets forth a list of goals and objectives in which a disposition concerning power is concretized in a judgment as to the fruits of its proper excercise; a religious creed is altogether different, stating convictions rather than interests; and a cultural compendium sets forth a series of interrelated inherited commitments.
These are distinct, but they are not atomized, and it is misleading to characterize them as having ‘walls’ between them. If Josh Mitchell is right about this, and I think he is, the important thing about the interrelationship of religion, culture, and politics is that there are spillover effects: political dispositions are heavily influenced by mores, and mores are heavily influenced by creeds. People who would like to simplify matters for the center-right by focusing more exclusively on religion or culture or politics at the expense of the others are in danger of missing the truth about spillover effects and quite possibly inhibiting them in the process. There is something of what Rieff called spiritual snobbery in the impulse within some quarters of the right to repudiate politics — although Washington, indeed, is too fevered and dramatic a locus of alternating panic, elation, drudgery, and despair. The smugness of those who seem to think that a centralized ideological powerhouse makes the faithful practice of culture and creed irrelevant to political success has hopefully just been cracked beyond repair — although the Benedict Option does imply too strongly that we can escape the reality of the necessity of politics simply by denying it.
Probably a number of conservatives, then, have become too impatient with spillover effects, wanting a single giant broth. The kind of renovation that conservatives should be interested in operates, and has to operate, on a number of different levels — conviction, commitment, disposition, practical politics, and partisan politics, all distinct but all interrelated.
I recognize this is, for now, a pretty theoretical discussion.
