Arbitrary Meanderings
In working on a longer post reflecting on Romano Guardini’s End of the Modern World it occurred to me how similar some of its analysis is to Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. It also struck me how profoundly different these old traditionalist conservatives were to not only the loudest faux “conservatives” of our time, such as the people over at the Daily Wire, but also to the online Alt Right and its bourgeoning New Rightism. This New Right— which is more of a Post-New Right, since the “Right” that preceded it was itself a New Right that replaced the Old Right—has elements of intrigue for me. For instance, they are more willing to employ power against their political enemies; a feature of the Left that helped them to defeat the politically pacifistic conservatives. But my ultimate dispositions lie with the traditionalists more than with the tech-optimism of the Post-New Right.
This is likely why I tend to be more culturally pessimistic than the Post-New Right; so much of my soul has absorbed the reactionary traditionalism of people like Robert Nisbet and the Southern Agrarians. I see therefore within the logic of a civilization built on technology and industrially-driven prosperity a strong force that fights against the structures which are prerequisite to our Old Culture. Our age of hysterical technological development has, as Guardini develops at length, a certain logic to it that drives the social order to its own ends, regardless of how people try to use it. A logic, implies an inhuman mind, an entity, an anti-Logos. Guardini feels justified to call the power that exists in the warlike dynamic between technology and human nature “demonic.”
In any case, it is hard for me to understand cultural optimism when the greatest eras of our Western history were built up on cultural institutions that were 750 years in the making, as if we can just do it again within a generation or two. Institutions become foundational of society not when they are well intentioned or built on the right premises, but when the entire social order is constructed on the basis of these institutions, an evolutionary process that takes at least 400 years. “Institutions” that have only been around for decades are better thought of as “businesses” than social institutions. And in any case, the ones leading the charge for repudiating the last 50 years of ideological absurdity are not part of any obvious elite, and therefore have no power.
And of course, if one wanted to get the social order back on track, he would have to build up an elite that has a positive vision of the old medieval mind; he would have to repudiate all the major facets of Modernity, the Scientific Revolution, Industrial Society, and economic individualism. Consider Michael Warren Davis’ comment in his The Reactionary Mind:
If we are ever to re-Christianize the West, the result will necessarily look like the Middle Ages—and for the reactionary, that is a happy outcome, because he knows, better than anyone, that the worship of progress is the worship of a false god. But before we can reclaim what we’ve lost, including our easy access to happiness, we must humiliate our pride, our idolization of progress, and give a fair hearing to the ages and the peoples that have gone before us.
Among the Christian spheres of the post-New Right there is also a renewed interest in concepts such as theonomy and theocracy (which is more vague than theonomy). Neither of these much intrigue me. Both of them are actually rationalistic, universalistic approaches to constructing a social order on ostensibly biblical standards. They are, and were, the result of perhaps well-intentioned Christian minds who have borrowed a similar type of political thinking from modernism and its desire for rationally constructing society.
I’m much more attracted to Doug Wilson’s idea of a Mere Christendom, with a strong emphasis on what I call Political Particularism; that is, the idea that particular societies each have their own body of interests, needs, traditions, customs, threats, problems, norms, etc that need to be mixed together to determine what is politically necessary for the functioning of that specific society. Mere Christendom sets the boundaries for the social order (there is an implicitly agreed upon metaphysical grounding on which the social order stands), and particularism allows a given order craft its own laws in accordance with its needs and particular characteristics.
I have also been struck by one of the greatest sociological quotes in the history of criticism of Modernity and economic liberalism. Karl Marx described the bourgeoning liberal-capitalism as a sustained assault on the stable ties that bind cultures together:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
This is the side of Marx—the sociological side as opposed the economic one— that most appealed to the traditional conservatives who saw as their function the role of preserving ancient ties over against the upsetting influence of liberalism. Of course, Marx saw in Capitalism the opportunity to upset the feudalistic orders, to shake them into dissolution and anxious chaos. This social upset was a prerequisite to the communist future; for only after capitalism could the proletariate see clearly their plight, and band together in pursuit of an economically just world. The liberals of course embraced the new capitalism and its allocation of wealth and status in accordance with market dynamics. The Old Conservatives, on the other hand, would critique the new capitalism (they would also claim it was a political revolution, and capitalism is not some organic, anarchic development) as distorting the traditions and customs of particular peoples.
And here we are in the 21st century: all that is holy is profaned. I remember when I was greatly immersed in libertarianism. One of the great points made by liberal thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises was that in the market economy, it was the mass consumers who directed the employment of resources. After all, they were the ones that purchased products, they were the ones that rewarded entrepreneurs for their anticipations of consumer desire. Aside from the fact that it is increasingly obvious that the masses are duped into buying things they never wanted, or needed, there is now something more striking: why is it some sort of obvious benefit that the decadent and degenerate and distasteful masses should direct the course of the market? The things they demand have ruined us. Man now maintains his dignity and stability of soul in actively avoiding those things demanded by the masses. One cannot avoid thinking of the Rieffian concept of Deathworks; all the elements of what Rieff calls our present anti-culture and its seemingly coordinated assault on our cultural past.
In any case, the above was indeed an unconnected pour-out of thoughts as I work out a multi-part reflection on Guardini. I have been moved by his meta-story of the movement of Western Man from the Classical Age to the Medieval Age to the Modern Age to the Modern Age’s dissolution that found its trajectory from the end of the nineteenth century to, especially, the triumph of Americanism after World War II. The lesson is that “progress” is fraudulent, conservatives are not as their label suggests, and that Modernity has collapsed under the logic of its own tendencies. The future lies in cultural disarray, for no one carries within their heart the visions of the medieval mind.