The Kirk conference

Well, that was fun. It’s really encouraging to get together with people who are intensely interested in the life of the mind, and in traditionalism, to drink wine and talk about ideas. Specifically about Russell Kirk’s ideas, and what we’re supposed to do with them now. Of course a group of students and professors at a Russell Kirk conference is going to be a highly self-selected crowd, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the impression I got is of deep dissatisfaction with contemporary conservatism -- but it was there, at least in most of the conversations I had. It seems to me that no one was under the impression that liberalism had anything to offer. Rather there was frustration that organized conservatism has reached such an impasse, and that we conservatives are, at the moment, pretty much a spent force.

The great and erudite John O’Sullivan gave the closing address last night, but it left me wanting. He spoke on prospects for conservatives, and counseled that the things conservatives should focus their attention on are fighting multiculturalism, opposing open immigration, lowering taxes and rolling back the regulatory state. There’s a case to be made for all of these things, though absent real spending cuts, I would oppose tax reduction. Still, it was strange to think that aside from some remarks about the threat of jihadism and recent developments in the European Union, this was a speech that could have been delivered 10 years ago. In fact, it called to mind the way I felt last year after the Spence dinner in which Phyllis Schlafly spoke with real conviction and passion about the need for conservatives to fight corruption in the judiciary and in public education. I happened to agree with her positions on those matters, but it was hard to escape the sense that she is fighting yesterday’s battles.

I don’t mean to say that conservatives shouldn’t engage in political fights over the judiciary, or public education, or multiculturalism, or any of this. We should, when the opportunity presents itself. It just seems to me that these things amount to scrapping at the margins of the real problem, or set of problems, that we face. Last night at dinner, I was talking to a conservative Catholic professor about the decline of moral order amid America’s prosperity and individualism, and about how feeble the conservative response to it has been – and, to be precise, how inadequate anybody’s response has been. None of us at the table had the prescriptive answers either, though I think it safe to say that we were all in agreement that the answers will have to come from a collective spiritual regeneration. This professor said he feared our society was going to have to undergo some sort of dire collapse before we would collectively begin to return to the sources of moral and civilizational order.

This morning I had breakfast with a conservative Protestant professor who, like me, is raising young children. We share, I think, the same convictions about faith, culture and the moral order. I live in the city; he lives in the country. Yet he said that his children are thought of as freaks by their neighbors because they don’t have a television, and because he reads to them instead. I mentioned to him that at my son Matthew’s school, there’s a policy forbidding the kids to talk about pop culture at school. The professor’s eyes widened. “That’s a huge victory right there!” he said. (And I said silently: “Thank you, God, for our school.”) We talked, the professor and I, and one of his students, about the acute challenge of raising children to be virtuous in a culture informed by mass media to be contemptuous of the virtues. The student had been homeschooled in a fundamentalist Christian community, and she was emphatic about the dangers of giving in to a separatist mentality, in which you start to consider everyone outside the narrowly-bound community to be shunned. We can agree, I think, that we don’t want to go there.

But if you raise your kids to be wide-open to the culture, you’re setting them up for ruin. We talked for a bit about how the children of affluent homes, even ostensibly conservative homes, emerge with values shaped more by the hedonistic and materialistic culture than by the tradition of faith and virtue.

What is the answer? Humans were made to live in community. It really does take a village to raise a child. But what happens when, as Caitlin Flanagan wrote, you’re doing everything you can to keep the village and its values away from your child?

Twenty-five years after Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue,” it is hard to deny what he saw so clearly back then: that the loss of commonly-held faith in transcendentals has become general, and society will not hold – cannot hold – like this indefinitely (although Ross Douthat has pointed outin an essay I can't find to link to that it looks like conservatives were wrong, at least in the short term: it seems that our prosperity means we really can flout tradition and more or less get away with it). But for how long? Various people asked me if I was working on another book, and I told them yes, that I was intending to investigate MacIntyre’s “Benedict option” – that is, the idea of intentionally separating to some degree from an irreformable mainstream society, and constructing new communities where it’s possible to live a life of moral virtue in community. I not only want to investigate the sociological genius of the Benedictine order of the Dark Ages, but I want to look into diverse traditionalist lay communities today who are managing to do this sort of thing in a balanced and sustainable way, without succumbing to an oppressive spirit of separatism. It was encouraging to see people’s eyes light up. More and more conservatives share a sense that our prosperity is merely masking a deeper crisis of decadence (and not just conservatives: Camille Paglia, you’ll remember, said to me the other day that the slothful ignorance and indifference of contemporary students and the cultural elite to tending the roots of our cultural order portends catastrophe). I hope I’m not projecting my own thoughts here onto others, but it seems to me that more people – serious, thoughtful people – are starting (but only starting) to lose faith in shoring up the imperium (to use MacIntyre’s phrase for the Roman spirit in its final days), and are beginning to wonder if the times require a more radical response. In his critical biography of Kirk, James Person writes of a time when Kirk stood with President Nixon at the White House window, looking out at crowds of student protesters on the Mall. The president asked Kirk if there was any hope. Kirk replied that it depended on whether the people thought there was something worth saving. If yes, they could be rallied to save it. If not, not.

That, increasingly, is the question we now face. Understand me clearly: I’m not trying to advocate easy despair, i.e., a casual sense that things are going to hell, and that we shouldn’t fight to reform and save our institutions. That day might come, but we’re not close to there yet. Even so, there is a feeling among many of us that there has been a broad and profound loss of internal moral order, which comes from a loss of the religious sense (by which I mean a pre-rational conviction that we are all bound by the enduring moral norms known as the Permanent Things). Today’s NYTimes reported that many Hispanic immigrants coming to America are losing their religious faith as they assimilate into our materialist, individualist culture. You don’t need God here; the Self suffices. If you listen to the popular preachers on TV, so much of the god-talk is not so much about the Almighty, but about the Almighty Self – with Yahweh playing the role of a personality coach to help us be the richest and happiest Selves that we can be. When it is pointed out that America is more religious than Europe, I am skeptical of how good that news is.

I mentioned at breakfast this morning a story a public school teacher related to me recently. A 12-year-old boy said to her in the bus line after class one day, "Hey Miss [name], this boy here wants you to have his baby!" I was completely shocked by this. I asked the teacher what she did. "Nothing," she said. "What can you do? That's their culture today."

The shocking thing is that a 12-year-old said something like that to a teacher. The more shocking thing is her "whaddaya gonna do?" shrug.

Am I crazy for seeing that as a "canary in the coal mine" moment?

Anyway, despite the gloom-talk, it was encouraging to have so many good conversations with like-minded conservatives, and to meet so many smart, engaged students (Camille ought to come to an ISI conference sometime). If the time is to be redeemed, these are the people who are going to figure out how to do it. Yes, we're going to have to fight multiculturalism and all the rest, but none of that is going to turn things around. It's going to require something deeper. It's going to require lots of thought, action and, yes, prayer. It's going to require, I think, institutions like ISI. And more conferences where people drink wine and laugh and talk about beauty and imagination and tradition.

I left Indianapolis feeling not optimistic, but certainly hopeful.