Why I am a conservative

Publicado por Fundación Burke el 26 de Febrero de 2008 en American Review.

When I first became associated with ISI, in 1953, it was called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. ISI had only a handful of members so I began visiting college campuses in an effort to bolster membership. It was amazing how many students gleefully informed me, of what I already knew, that an Intercollegiate Society of Individualists was an oxymoron. The name also posed some problems for fund raising since many potential contributors had to first be convinced that ISI was not a group of student radicals. Consequently, the name was changed to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. That name does not carry any baggage and is more descriptive of ISI’s focus on college students and their education within the matrix of knowledge and values that form our heritage of Western Culture and our American patrimony.

However, many people are enamored of the term individualist, especially in times of bloated government, and we are now and then chided even at this late date for having surrendered the term. I must confess that I was not in agreement with its philosophical roots from the outset. Alexis de Tocqueville held that egotism and individualism were related. “Egotism,” he wrote in Democracy in America, “blights the germ of all virtue: individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life: but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism.” In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver noted that “individuality signifies a cutting-off or separation. . . . A more accurate designation would be personality, for this recognizes the irreducible character in every person . . . that little private area of selfhood in which the person is at once conscious of his relationship to the transcendental and the living community. He is a particular vessel, but carries some part of the universal mind.”

I have been asked to write an essay on “Why I am a Conservative.” In mulling over this question I wondered if I wanted to confess publicly to being a Conservative. If that meant subscribing to Russell Kirk’s six canons of conservative thought in The Conservative Mind it would be easy. But conservatism is so hyphenated at present that no one has any idea of what one is signing on to. The reason I believe this to be the case is that conservatism has been overly politicized. Kirk alluded to this in his Foreword to the seventh edition of The Conservative Mind when he wrote:

Being no leader of the crowd, the author was surprised to find that he had contributed through the power of the word to a large political movement in America-to a movement which, within a few years, would supplant in power America’s latter-day liberalism.

These words were written in the mid-eighties when Ronald Reagan was president whom I greatly esteemed for his wisdom and his actions concerning the panoply of issues, events, and crises he dealt with in his eight years in office. However, Kirk also writes that “The Conservative Mind describes a cast of intellect or a type of character, an inclination to cherish the permanent things in human existence . . . to join in resistance to the destruction of old patterns of life [and] damage to the footings of the civil social order. . . .” I believe that would be a fair description of Ronald Reagan, and, if I may be bold, of me. We were both formed in a different era, a time when parents, and even public schools, taught spiritual norms and the historic beginnings of our nation. The fact remains, however, that one administration, no matter how great, does not constitute a rout of latter-day liberalism. Time and events since then tell a different tale.

However, in his first chapter “The Idea of Conservatism,” Kirk writes:

In the following chapters, the conservative is described as statesman, as critic, as metaphysician, as man of letters. Men of imagination, rather than party leaders, determine the ultimate course of things, . . . and I have chosen my . . . conservatives accordingly. . . . If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it. . . .

That suggests to me that the real work of conservatism is in the realm of ideas and with youth. In the first decade of ISI, when Frank Chodorov and I were the only staff, I would drive Kirk to a college lecture when I was in Michigan. The importance of conservatism to the student community was frequently a part of our conversation. We spoke about politics, but he knew that it was not the principal concern of my existence.

Consequently, though I may be critical of the idea that a political movement will vanquish liberalism and lead us to the promised land, I have no doubt regarding the inestimable worth of Russell Kirk and his writings in teaching new generations of youth the constituent elements of our cultural heritage and tradition. Most important is the influence his writings have had on scholars, on the scholarship of his generation, and on the young scholars, and teachers, in generations since. And that is precisely where conservative attention, it seems to me, will produce the most good.

Nevertheless, I must register my concern with the currently ubiquitous use of the term “conservatism” in the political arena. Government, federal or state, when it has been under the aegis of professed conservatives, has done little if anything to secure a better balance of funding, through vouchers or some form of tax forgiveness, and between private and public education. Government has claimed a virtual monopoly on the power to educate youth, and on all of the funds necessary to expedite that claim. Under the blanket of the separation of church and state, it has done its utmost to separate the most basic element of western culture, our Judeo-Christian tradition, from the primary and secondary educational curricula. The historian, Christopher Dawson, wrote:

[T]he fact that secular education is universal and compulsory, while religious education is partial and voluntary, inevitably favors the former and places the church at a very great disadvantage in educational matters. This is not merely due to the disproportion of wealth and power of a religious minority as compared with the modern state. Even more important is the all- pervading influence of secular standards and values which affects the whole educational system and makes the idea of an integrated religious culture seem antiquated and absurd to the politicians and the publicists and the technical experts who are the makers of public opinion. Moreover we must remember that modern secularism, in education as in politics, is not a purely negative force. . . . [I]t has its own ideals and its dogmas-we may almost say that it has its own religion.

Those “ideals” and “dogmas” as they concern education give primary, almost total, emphasis to the needs of the state, democracy, and community as though the only end of the person is citizenship. “The modern mind,” Jacob Burckhardt wrote in Force and Freedom, “aims at a solution of the supreme enigma of life independent of Christianity.”

There was some talk of reining in or abolishing the Department of Education during the Reagan administration, but neither happened. And vouchers have not made significant headway either. If the former had occurred, perhaps, control of primary and secondary education would have returned to the states. And this is precisely where political effort in the form of an educational campaign might produce a favorable result. Perhaps there was not enough public or parental concern for the matter or too much apathy to energize the issue. Thinking about it, I was reminded of the farmer who bought a horse at auction. After he paid his bill he mounted the horse to return to his farm. The horse promptly rode into a tree. The farmer confronted the auctioneer with what had happened, saying “this horse is blind.” The auctioneer responded, “naw he ain’t blind he jes don’t give a damn.” There may be a majority of conservatives in America, but if so, they are so silent on the matter of secular education that they appear not to give a damn.

Such things do happen, as William Buckley’s sister, Aloise Heath, recounted in her essay, “I Raised Money for the Ivy League,” in the first issue, November 19, 1955, of National Review. Heath, an alumna of Smith College, wrote to other alumnae of Smith that five faculty members had been cited for past or present association with organizations cited as Communist or Communist-front by the Attorney General of the United States. The letter elicited a sizable number of letters of condemnation of Heath, “confidence” in Smith College and gifts of just a shade under two-hundred-eighty-five thousand dollars. Only two alumnae requested further clarification of the charges. The majority of the alumnae were mute. The essay appeared two years after I joined ISI and was an eye-opener not so much in terms of the response as it was in the non-response of the majority of the 28,000 alumnae. The answer, later, was in Buckley’s “Publishers Statement,” where he wrote:

The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

They could have read Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, but with relativism in the saddle, many were (and are) incapable of making intelligent judgments in such matters. “It is,” wrote Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences, “the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational set of values to attach these predicates with value?” If the current refrain of youth, “whatever,” is a reflection of the present mindset, one would have to say No!

T. S. Eliot wrote that, “as individuals, we find that our development depends upon the people whom we meet in the course of our lives. (These people include the authors whose books we read, and characters in works of fiction and history.) The benefit of these meetings is due as much to the differences as to the resemblances; to the conflict, as well as the sympathy between persons.” That seems to me to be an aspect of the formation of “personality” which, Weaver holds, constitutes the real uniqueness of each person. Eliot also wrote, “fortunate the man who at the right moment meets the right friend.” In my case the friend was my father whom I loved and with whom I had a warm friendship. We had many long conversations; I mostly listened and asked questions, on the historic founding of our nation and the founders. My father was a sculptor and had done two six-feet-by-thirty-inch bas-reliefs on the signing and reading of the Declaration of Independence for, if I recall correctly, the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence. I received the benefit of his research and readings on the project.

My father gave me an edition of The Federalist published in 1888 with an introduction titled “The Authorship of the Federalist” by Henry Cabot Lodge detailing the research done to identify the author of each essay. I found the introduction as well as the essays as fascinating and enlightening then as I do now. Re-reading them today, I believe they represent the crystallization of years of the best thought and experience in the governance of men along with the unique contribution of the founders. Years ago, after I read an excerpt from The Federalist, my father would point out a certain passage related to a then current event. For instance, my father did not admire FDR and believed his attempt to pack the Supreme Court if successful would have signified the end of strict adherence to the Constitution and constitutional limitations. He also believed that the 16th Amendment was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution in that it set no limit to the power of the federal government to tax income. I would later in life find that same thought in The Reconciliation of Government With Liberty, by John W. Burgess. My father taught me that the liberty we cherish in America was a result of a system of law that is intended to limit all power, even that of a majority.

My father was an avid gardener and our conversations frequently took place while he was tending his rose beds or other plants. He taught me that arrogance was not an attribute of wisdom. “Your mind,” he said, “will be fallow if is not seeded with the knowledge and experience of those who were here before you.” My father did not write books, but he was great at modeling in clay or carving figures or groups out of limestone or marble. Yet he was multifaceted and “modeled” me and my character by passing on that wide-ranging knowledge and the wisdom he had gleaned in his lifetime. With that help, “I did not have to reinvent the wheel,” as my old friend Lem Boulware would say. It was also my parents who led me to my faith, or made me receptive to the gift of faith. My studies and readings since then in St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, St. Paul, Chesterton, and others have confirmed that faith. However, the family in the first instance transmitted the tradition and culture.

“Culture,” José Ortega y Gasset wrote in Mission of the University,

is either received, or else it is invented. He who exposes himself to the labor of inventing it for himself, accomplishing alone what thirty centuries of humanity have already accomplished, is the only man who has the right to deny the proposition that the university must undertake to impart culture. But the unfortunate truth is that this lone person, who could oppose my thesis would have to be a madman!

Think for a moment. If the original settlers had come to America from a nearby island wilderness with no knowledge of England, its government, laws, or traditions would they have been able to fashion a constitution and government such as the Founding Fathers did? I doubt it. And an America which is unable or unwilling to transmit the vital essence of that knowledge and that tradition to new generations will make it difficult for those new generations to retain any of the good institutions, wisdom, and experience we have received from the past. That is why I seek to conserve the best thought and experience of the past to enable the new generations to improve their lot-to let them know that “they don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” so to speak.

The problem with our concentration on politics is that it takes our minds off other matters of importance. For example, in The Crisis of Our Age (1940) Pitirim A. Sorokin writes about the change that came about several centuries ago in man’s conception of reality, when

modern sensate culture emerged with a major belief that true reality and true value were mainly or exclusively sensory. Anything that was supersensory . . . from conception of God to the mind of man, anything that was nonmaterial, . . . was either doubtful as a reality or fictitious as a value. It either did not exist or, being unperceivable by the senses, amounted to the nonexistent.

Richard Weaver also notes this change and cites “William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism which denies that universals have a real existence . . . as the best representative of this change in man’s conception of reality. . . . The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.”

What sensate culture says about man is that he is not a created being in the image of God. “His reality and value” are “reduced,” Sorokin writes, “to his biological organism. Certainly there is nothing sacred in an imperfect human organism.” In short, humankind has no destiny beyond the present and no allegiance beyond the state. Jacob Burckhart, defining a great crisis of civilization, put forth the following general phenomenon:

In that extraordinarily complex condition of life in which the state, religion, and culture in extremely derivative forms are intimately associated, and in which most things, as they exist, have forfeited the link with their origin which justified their existence, one of the three will long since have attained an undue expansion of power and, after the fashion of all earthly things, will abuse it, while the other powers must suffer undue restriction.

The state in our day, it seems to me, has “attained an undue expansion” of power and religion and culture have suffered as a consequence. Fortunately the sensate culture, which has predominated over the centuries, has, in the process, increased the power of the state, has almost totally decimated the metaphysical and theological truth of the ideational culture which preceeded it.

Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences was not only a trenchant analysis of the ills besetting our culture but also a remedy. He was for the “restoration of values,” but made it clear that it was not a turning back of the clock. “The believer in truth,” Weaver wrote,

is bound to maintain that the things of the highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideals and values, we are looking toward an ontological realm which is timeless. Now the return which the idealists propose is . . . a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth.

This task was once performed by the university, but as Walter Lippmann noted, in an address, “Education vs. Western Civilization,” given at Irvine Auditorium, University of Pennsylvania, December 29, 1940, that task had been forfeited:

The men who wrote the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights were educated in schools and colleges in which the classic works of this culture were the substance of the curriculum. In these schools the transmission of this culture was held to be the end and aim of education.

Modern education, however, is based on a denial that it is necessary or useful or desirable for the schools and colleges to continue to transmit from generation to generation the religious and classical culture of the Western world.

Thus there is an enormous vacuum where until a few decades ago there was the substance of education. And that vacuum is filled with the elective, the specialized, the accidental and incidental improvisations and spontaneous curiosities of teachers and students. There is no common faith, no common body of principle, no common body of knowledge, no common moral and intellectual discipline. Yet the graduates of modern schools are expected to form a civilized community.

Over the years ISI has made an heroic effort to fill that vacuum with an educational program that, in its formative years, gained its sense of direction. and organizational culture from The Idea of a University by Cardinal Newman, Liberal Education by Mark Van Doren, and from thinkers such as Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Will Herberg. Our aim was to give attention to a variety of disciplines which would convey the truth in constituent elements of our Western culture and our American patrimony. Lecturers and essayists were chosen who had excellent reputations for sound scholarship and an equally important regard for the “concept of truth.” ISI was interested in bright students who were troubled by the lack of concern for or hostility to Western civilization and our American Patrimony in course content.

The quality of ISI’s membership ultimately enabled it to grant over 500 Weaver Fellowships for graduate study. You cannot transmit a cultural heritage without the right teachers. Unfortunately, it is difficult to raise funds for fellowships. In Cold Friday, Buckley makes reference to a letter from Whittaker Chambers on the future of Western civilization in which he wrote, “no youth, no future.” It is well and good to revere a heritage, but a more serious concern for posterity will insure its continuance.