Against conservative gloominess
Friday May 16, 2008
Categories: Conservatism
Roger Kimball will have none of it: From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition conservatives tend, as a species, to be...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
What David Stove is describing just hasn't existed in any meaningful way within the Republican party since my generation began paying attention to politics. The Republican party for us is corruption, war, torture, and gay bashing.
At any rate, it's one reason why I was so excited about Ron Paul. Who knows how many young people were exposed to, and responded positively to a conversative message, who otherwise would have probably only known the liberal rhetoric of their friends and culture.
I wonder how much of Kimball's observations have more to do with being happy and at ease with "conservatives" and on edge and frustrated with "liberals"? Given my experience of very good-natured, fun liberals I suspect an awful lot. But lets not let plausible alternative explanations get in the way of a bit of good self-congratulation.
The second quote is very interesting. Is Stove suggesting, however, that we watch mass numbers of the primitive society die? Or that we should not, for example, have proceeded with industrialization because of its negative effects? (and so on...) I sort of agree with Stove. His point, combined with a reluctance to live forever exactly as my ancestors did, leads me to conclude that we should go slow with implementing large changes, experiment on small scales until proof of concept, be ready to re-consider, and don't allow bureaucratic or corporate entrenchment (or be prepared to break bureaucracies & oligarchies).
Oh for another Calvin Coolidge. Stove's ideas incarnate.
A proper conservatism is a way of reminding yourself of this essential truth: You can't do just one thing.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences.
There are consequences of inaction. Doing nothing about a problem or fearing change because it makes life less predictable isn't always the best course to take. I prefer to look for solutions to problems and if the first fix doesn't work, then try again.
Liberals can be very funny. I'm rather surprised that you think they have no sense of humor. You must not be going to the right parties.
I think that Rod is funny. He, usually, catches "H-E-double hockey sticks"(my 7 year old taught me that-and conservatives say that public school sucks)when he's joking, but he's funny. For instance, the post about the Mum who was too crunchy for Rod was pretty funny.
I've only read one essay by Stove, but it's a doozy. Make no mistake: Stove is a sort of conservative, but he's a positivist through-and-through, one with little truck for theological language or speculation. That said, "What is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a highly entertaining read and a thought-provoking evisceration of philosophy from, oh, the time of Plato through Foucault, with swipes at the Church Fathers thrown in. Somewhat unsettling to someone like me who actually enjoys theological disputation.
"... summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that 'God made the world and saw that it was good"...
yes...
we conservatives do indeed enjoy such hilarious quotes as that above...
since we are "realistic" about the "imperfection" of Reality...
though...
conservatives who are the "haves" are surely more cheerful than the "have-not" conservatives...
hey...
let's make a world where all are "haves" and there is no gloominess...
all we need is for God to cooperate...
but I guess that's too much to ask...
prosperity faith hope love joy peace to all...
Forgive God...
Booya to Watsy.
The hypothetical situation here is a great thought experiment... from the outside. When you're the one whose child is saved from the disease, however, or when you're the woman who doesn't HAVE to go through round after round of childbearing? It's a whole different story.
Our world is changing, constantly.
Thank God, at least it always stays funny. Rod (et alii!) I hope one day we can, in fact, ask each other the 'next round?' question.
What Kimball calls utopian ambition sadly often leads to totalitarian temptation. And it happens with the noblest (if misguided) of intention: the perfectability of man. Little "c" conservatives know that this is nonsense. Man has always been and will always be fallen (to use the Christian formulation). To assume otherwise is, well, just silly. Unfortunately, assuming otherwise has led to some of the greatest horrors the world has seen.
Rod,
I have a strong feeling that you and David Stove were, in another life, kindred spirits. If you read a bit more of his work, I think you would really appreciate (resonate with?) his ability to slide in witty barbs every few lines.
The Wikipedia entry mentions it only briefly at the end, but the article entitled "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" is a gem. Not the greatest philosophy, but I wrote a paper defending it in one of my classes at the University of Michigan and it was worth it just for the response.
Now wait just a second. This David Stove is somewhat confused, as philosophers often are. :)
He's arguing that we are responsible for our actions, and we are responsible for making sure that our actions don't have unforeseen consequences. Fair enough.
What he has failed to notice is inaction is an action. Actions have consequences, some of which we can't foresee, including the action of doing nothing.
Let's take his own example. Let's say we don't introduce contraceptives. Well, let's assuming this primitive society recently got introduced to the modern world (It's hard to imagine how else this example could work.), and, in addition to whatever you do, they learned about crop rotation from some random person, and suddenly was eating twice as much. So, suddenly, infant mortality drops by 200%, and, tada, population explosion without contraceptives.
If you never do anything, to keep from inadvertently harming others, you are not magically the most moral person ever. If I find myself standing in the ambulance bay at the hospital, blocking ambulances, the correct choice is not to repeatedly choose not to leave the bay in case I trip on and kill some injured person. I don't get bonus points for avoiding bad things that might happen, via my inaction, while I'm not stopping bad things that are happening that I could trivially stop.
Or, to put it almost as succinctly as Lord Karth did something else: There's no such thing as 'inaction'. You're always doing something, and unforeseen events happen no matter what that is. (Especially when you're talking about something as large and randomly-directed as a society.)
Joshua Birk,
Stove's thesis in your article, the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men, is a poor article.
When we look at the IQ bell curve, women and men are roughly equal on average. However, because nature cannot afford variation with breeding women (can a apecies really risk a woman too dumb to feed her kid?), only men have a "broader" bell curve allowing for more risk and variation. Thus, most of the really smart people and the really dumb people are men, and women are oh-so-average. So he is correct, but only by accident that most of the intellectual capacity on the upper end of the bell curve belongs to men. This has been demonstrated time and again.
But Stove is a fool. Why wouldn't he just look at the data and stop guessing? How can a guy write an entire essay and not mention the data once? What a fool.
Living in the San Francisco bay area, there is something else i've noticed about liberals, a certain tension between what they advocate and how they live. If someone is constantly harping about how evil corporations sending "Americn" jobs overseas, that person almostly certainly drives a car made in japan. If their bigbear is community (rarely "family"), it means they gave up their own community to move here. If they spout on about freedom, it means they support banning smoking and speeach codes. And so on. This tension cannot make for a happy camper.
Basically, the belief in progress,thought of as an elimination of problems by social engineering, is the source of a lot of unhappiness. Stove points out, quite rightly, that in reality what we mean by progress is just swapping one set of problems for another. Even some fairly universal aspirations, e.g a long life, has its own trade offs, since you will prbably outlive a lot of your loved ones. Life, even at it's best, carries with it sadness, and the refusal to accept this simple fact is itself the source of a lot of sorrow. Once you accept that we live in a fallen world, you can relax, do your best, and get on with your life.
This borders on the tspilling of trade secrets, but if you think it's tingling, hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie being a "conservative", wait till you sup in the sybarite's lair that awaits you once you come into your own in abandoning *all* off-the-rack, age-of-industrialism ideological labels created by others for the enslavement of your soul:
Infant, one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead. - The Ancient, Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw, 1921
"Living in the Pennsylvania, there is something else i've noticed about conservatives, a certain tension between what they advocate and how they live. Those who harp on supporting the middle class and issues of personal responsibility vote for people who enact tax structures putting our country in debt while largely benefitting the top 0.1% of the population. Those who support free speech want to decide what literature adults can read and deny people the choice about what to put into their bodies. Those who support family, give carte blanche to the corporations who use sex as their primary advertising tool. Those who deny global warming as an issue because those scientists do not know what they are doing confidently predict that technology, developed by those same scientists, will solve all our problems so go ahead and have 12 kids. Homeschooling is always ok, keep government out of our business because parents know best, yet let's use government to force others who do not share our beliefs to force them upon others when it comes to their reproductive choices.
It is pretty easy to make these kinds of lists. Mostly it just proves that politics is messy and/or that we fall short of the glory of God. BTW, I agree with much of what you said Jimmie. I just happen to think there is more than enough hypocrisy to go around.
Steve
mdavid,
I meant that it was a "gem" in that it's hilarious. That is why I followed by saying that it was "not the greatest philosophy". I defended it for the fun of it. Lighten up a bit bud.
Joshua Birk, lighten up a bit bud.
Beer in hand, obeying orders.
Jimmie, great post.
Very true: if people would just accept the first law of Buddhism, All life is suffering, their cross would become much lighter. But no, as you say, progressives forever strive to immanentize the eschaton, making life a living hell for everyone.
Yet conservatives have become defenders of the liberal way, would you not agree? Chesterton: The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected. I find modern "conservatives" to be nearly as opposed to natural law as liberals as of late.
The real conservative, the man who wishes to conserve what is good about the world by embracing natural law, resides in the Shire and smokes Longbottom leaf, blowing smoke rings over a pint while his numerous children climb trees. So-called modern conservatives and liberals would find this state of affairs reprehensible.
Chesterton: The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected.
Coolidge: The business of America is business.
I like Coolidge better.
Chesterton was living proof of the fact that if you say something with wit and charm you can be wrong about everything and people will still quote you.
David Stove: "...our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight."
I gave an example of this in a recent thread: The "Pill" and condoms were going to enable society to practically rid itself of infanticide and VD, while at the same time allowing recreational sex by all--married and single, straight and gay, old and young--until we were satiated. Women would control their own bodies, marriages would be stronger, and Church teaching would be rendered irrelevant by the Great God Science.
Forty some years later? There are more abortions than ever imagined possible (somewhere Margaret Sanger is trying to smile), their is an AIDS catastrophe, divorce is sky rocketing, marriage is declining, VD is out of control, the birth rate is below a self-sustaining level, there is a shortage of labor, and not enough people to take up the SS tax shortfall. Sooner than later it won't matter how high the SS tax gets.
Coincidence is not cause. AIDA was initially spread mostly among gays and IVDA's, neither of which is much affected by the Pill. As I remember, there was a lot of other change going on in the 60's besides the pill that led to changes in divorce. Pills don't make people divorce, people make people divorce.
Steve
Stove wrote an excellent book called "Darwinian Fairytales" that you would like. It has just come back into print.
Steve: "AIDS was initially spread mostly among gays and IVDA's, neither of which is much affected by the Pill."
I said "The 'Pill' and condoms", not just the Pill.
Steve: " Pills don't make people divorce, people make people divorce."
That is a half truth. The fact is that people are affected by things and circumstances which can effect the disintegration of their marriages. It is impossible for people to give themselves completely to their spouses when using contraceptives, and such less than 100% type of love making is one of those circumstances. It would be far better for married people to use Natural Family Planning--a much more effective method than the old rhythm system, and so simple that even primitive people now use it with much success.
Steve, I realize you don't believe anything I am saying. Nevertheless, this non-gloomy Conservative is probably much more experienced than you and knows that Stove is correct. Our significant actions, as a society, almost always have unwelcome consequences. "It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight."
People trying to fool Mother Nature with contraception is one of those arguments never given due weight by liberal society. It's not my intent to point a finger, just stating a fact.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.