A nice thing about spending several days away from computers is relief from chronic headaches (I knew they couldn’t all be hangovers). Another is that one returns to find plenty of content worth reading—which cannot, contrary to present fashion, be whipped up in thirty seconds and posted in 140 character “tweets”. One item that caught my attention is Daniel McCarthy’s defense of “high church conservatism” in the new issue of the American Conservative. It’s an appealing suggestion—but I’m too pessimistic to think that it’s got much chance of getting off the ground.
McCarthy departs from Robert Nisbet’s important observation that conservatism developed in response to three parallel but distinct social revolutions. Two are familiar: the democratic revolution of 1789; and the industrial revolution already underway. The third has received less attention: the theological revolution associated with Wesleyanism in England and the Great Awakening in the American colonies. Nisbet argued that conservatives like Burke and Coleridge were at least as concerned with the new religious currents as with the political rational they’re famous for opposing. It’s a quirk of history, McCarthy points out, that the “low church” movement should have provided the basis for the conservatism in the United States, at least in the last several decades.
In its religious form, the “low church” opposed religious establishment and the formality of the Anglican ritual. But it can be conceived more broadly as opposition to what Coleridge called the “clerisy”: a humanistically-educated elite with the responsibility to “to diffuse through the whole community, and every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent.” From the low-church point of view, every normally constituted individual is capable of doing this for himself. The clerisy is, at best, unnecessary—and at worst a kind of tyranny.
In England, high church conservatism could, until the 20 th century, be meant literally. Since then, and almost always in America, it has had to take a more abstracted form. McCarthy gives some useful suggestions for its features. Above, all the high church conservative “believes politics should be nomocratic—a matter of upholding a constitutional framework within which diverse ends can be pursued” rather than an association for the pursuit of specific purposes. Oakeshott is perhaps the most obvious protagonist of this view. But so were Kirk (at least in certain moments), Peter Viereck and Nisbet himself.
I’m grateful to McCarthy for directing readers to the latter two authors, who don’t get enough attention. I’m also pleased by his recognition that the spiritual home of the American high church is New England—a useful counterpoint to many conservatives’ fetishization of the South. The question is whether there’s any basis for a revival high-church conservatism. Partly as consequence of the trahison des clercs described long ago by Julien Benda, the intellectuals and the masses seem equally hostile to any notion of clerisy. And really, who wants a Secretary of Culture , as some Obamistas have recently proposed?
On the other hand, there’s much to said for a position that emphasizes high culture, the mediating institutions and practices Tocqueville called “forms”, and national identity rather than populism and regionalism. Personally, I find much more to admire in Adlai Stevenson, whom Viereck described as a Tory democrat, than in Sarah Palin. But is there anything more difficult for an American conservative than to publicly criticize the crude, the low, and the vulgar?
