1. Pinch hitting at Schwenkler’s, William R. Brafford solicits my comment on the friendly R.R. Reno’s latest:
I hope it’s clear that I see the problem of stability and dynamism as one of balance, of figuring out where to set limits. And here Reno asserts that it is most important for conservatism to set its sights on creating cultural stability through “a convincing public philosophy of cultural authority.” (I’m surprised that James Poulos hasn’t commented on this part yet.) One could see this as just another attempt to get some attention for the social conservative agenda, but I’m inclined to take it as a philosophical point. If we don’t attend to our culture, we won’t be able to handle instability that would be otherwise salutary. And I don’t mean attending to culture through government; I mean working through cultural institutions.
That’s the part of conservatism I’m most interested in. So many of my most talented peers are confused, rootless, and often depressed. Extra instability doesn’t help: it just makes the future look bleaker. I hate to have to come back to MacIntyre again, but Stanley Hauerwas draws on him to make this point in his inimitable (i.e. hyperbolic) style:
“Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher, has suggested that one of the worst things our society does to the young is to tell them they ought to be happy. MacIntyre thinks if you are happy, particularly when you are young, you are probably deeply self-deceived. Your appropriate stance is to be miserable. What a terrible time to be young. Shorn of any clear account for what it means to grow up, you are forced to make up your own lives. But you know that any life you make up is not a life you will want to live.”
This is what is at stake in questions of cultural authority. And I’m by no means convinced that conservatives have the best side of the argument. But I think conservatives have to recognize that in the absence of a public philosophy of cultural authority, an obsession with tax cuts and aggressive foreign policy is going to keep losing. The trick is that cultural authority can’t be primarily created through politics.
There is a deeper trick or problem. It may be the case that the practice, and thus now the idea, of the sacred family of mother, father, and children is dispersing into the breeze. This may be a consequence of certain tendencies in secular and spiritual life. If that’s so, and if it’s also so that the sacredness of the mother-father-children family trinity has been a central pillar of cultural authority, then the deeper trick than (re)creating cultural authority without being able to "use" politics is (re)creating it without the sacred family. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure which resources there are that comport with liberty as we know it which we might draw from in such a situation. The direst or least generous version of this story, as far as MacIntyre is concerned, is that he may not only be somewhat useless for politics but of limited aid in culture as well. Even a sunnier version, which might hold that the recovery of our ‘sacred pillars’ will be the slowly spontaneous consequence of our inescapable collective memory, might leave MacIntyre’s finely honed moral reasoning as redundant and superfluous as any piece of standard academic writing.
2. Freddie — I love wrangling with Freddie — now accuses me of Helenism. He would do better to accuse me of Hellenism! For starters, we are way apart on ideology . But here’s the gist from Freddie:
It is the emotional, mental and spiritual divides which man shores up against other men that have greatly contributed to the modern default of alienation and ennui. This defensiveness, and this use of other men as means instead of ends, ensures a society of callousness, though largely prevents one of brutality.
This is the state which Helen, and I believe James Poulos, want all of our casual interactions and associations to take place in. No content, only form, all human interaction divided and ordered by the set of rules and mores we casually call manners. This is our " politics of love / politics of rules " divide. I’ve been remiss in not defending my politics of love, mostly because it’s hard to defend, haha. But I equally find this society of well-mannered automatons that James and Helen imagine to be much more problematic than either supposes. Manners are as insufficient as any list of rules to the job of crafting a working civic polity. Surely James, who chafes at our ubiquitous talk of rights, recognizes that. The fact of the matter is that manners are no defense against evil, or sociopathy, and reducing our societal responsibility to being well-mannered ensures that people will obey the form of civility while working actively to undermine what we desire its effects to be. Our literature and cinema is filled with charming psychopaths and well-mannered devils because such people exist. Helen would like to believe that by painting lines of good form and decorum, people will play within them. They might. History tells us they can do so while (charmingly, politely) slitting our throat. No, courtesy is not enough.
This is very close to the mark but still a complete miss, but then again there are certain things about which I keep being coy, and that probably won’t end soon, because in my hierarchy of manners the Queen of Good Manners — and, for that matter, virtues — is due distance . But lest anyone think manners, for me, ARE virtues, let me be clear that as far as I’m concerned the cultivation of well-mannered automatons defeats the purpose of cultivating good manners altogether. What I find problematic, to traffic in straw men, is the idea that the public sphere ought to be the one in which people who refuse to demonstrate their love for others overtly and convincingly enough are to be cajoled, prodded, and all but physically coerced into breaking down into blubbering, loving acknowledgment of our mere equality. There are good manners involved in not making lots of movies that prove how sexy and charismatic devilish souls can be. There are good manners involved in refraining from dragging knowledge not worth knowing out into the street and parading it up and down proudly in celebration of the fact that the well-mannered think too highly of themselves to sully things further by trying to pull you off stage. But those manners are greatly beside the point if unaccompanied by the virtue involved in recognizing the perils of spiritual snobbery, in recognizing the humility that must appertain to the temptation to physically pull anyone or anything offstage.
The fundamental point is that Freddie can be right that reducing our responsibilities down to having the right manners is a profanation and truncation of real virtue (pagan or Christian!) while still being wrong that manners are useless in warding off sociopathy. The followon point is that Freddie is, of course, chillingly correct that a religion of manners corrupts itself toward Machiavellianism privatized, toward usurpation privatized, because manners ultimately orient the soul toward self-reflection of a firmly surface kind. The soul is called too alluringly to the knowledge not worth knowing about how talented we really can become at seeming good without being good. One thing manners are not very good at is defending us against the therapeutic justification for transgression — and just so, it’s on this basis that our interdictory manners have been crumbling and our remissive manners (to speak Rieffian for Brafford and Reno’s sake) have been taking their place.
The line between internally-oriented self-reflective virtue and externally-oriented self-reflective manner is a fragile one, as Rieff and Weber and other smart Germans knew. Part of the reticence on my part that Freddie takes for Helenism is an attempt at implementing a wisdom of due distance, in which the virtue of not closing the civilizing (and civilized) interdictory space between (and among) us is practiced not-too-reflectively . In that way it seeks to back off from the excesses, to take advantage of Dr. Ceaser’s schema, of both conservative virtue-ism and postmodern conservative manner-ism in their most pompous or obsessive or prideful self-awareness. It seeks, then, too, to avoid the complementary despair or envy that comes from excessive self-awareness of either (and any!) kind. The self, alone, is too empty for either to truly nourish the soul, no matter how hard we think about it or how deeply we strain to feel about it. And, finally, it seeks to privilege the secret, hidden, private, domestic site of virtue. I have said elsewhere that I like the idea that Freddie’s politics of love is merely one in which our various loves and our uniquely erotic or spirited selves peep occasionally through the boring work of practical politics. But I think there is more afoot, and it seems, to hazard a guess, disturbingly incompatible with my ethic of due distance, which really I don’t take to be "mine" but a specific articulation or instance of the truth about our souls.
