The following essay was written for A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition, edited by Paul Gottfried, but was left out (apparently due to an administrative slip-up—editorial changes, author’s bio etc. had all been agreed on). A slightly revised version will be published in the Australian journal Observer and Review.
The Old Right and the Recovery of Social Order
Introduction
“Amerika, du hast es besser,” said Goethe. For a long time the United States seemed exempt from the complexities and conflicts of Europe. It was commercial, prosperous, land-rich, and full of opportunity. Middle-class conformity and a nondoctrinal moralistic Protestantism kept private lives and communities in line. After the violence of the Civil War the order established by the Constitution seemed once again unassailable.
It could not last. As time went by, life became more complicated. Our intellectual life became more like that of Europe, and new tendencies, such as pragmatism and socialism, eroded inherited loyalties. Powerful tendencies—mobility, urbanization, industrialization, mass immigration, the mass media—were disrupting the informal connections that support culture.
So religious and other elements of inherited order weakened, together with their support among thought leaders. Efforts to strengthen social bonds, for example through service clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis, helped some people, but could not possibly replace what had been lost. Our flaws, our crudeness and lack of settled traditions, the economic and ethnic oppositions that undercut our claims about freedom and equality, all worsened.
Concerns over basic issues of social order that had been growing among thoughtful Europeans since the French and Industrial Revolutions began to seem pertinent to our country as well. In response, a variety of independently-minded scholars, such as Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Richard Weaver, and the Southern Agrarians, developed a trenchant critique of modern tendencies and proposed responses that were more profound, if perhaps less practical, than the makeshift arrangements ordinary people were working out for themselves.
Political life was also changing. As modern tendencies developed the New Deal and threat of war led other figures, more journalistic and less scholarly than the earlier cultural critics but more numerous and rooted in American tradition, to oppose the advance of the Leviathan state in defense of an older, less centralized, and more classically liberal America. Their main concerns were political and economic rather than social and cultural. They thought, though, that without government support corruptions would fall of their own weight, and the orderly and productive ways of life traditional in America would regain dominance.
All these writers had intelligence, insight, integrity, and independence of mind. Even so, they got nowhere. To deal with our circumstances, which are even less favorable than theirs, we need to understand their efforts, why they turned out as they did, the features of American life that have made conservatism such a difficult enterprise, and what needs to be done in light of such considerations.
The New Humanists
Developments in America had a deep background in Europe. For centuries changes in fundamental understandings had slowly been transforming social attitudes and practices. These changes included the growth of scientific ways of thinking that emphasized exact observation, measurement, and prediction.
Such ways of thinking have been central to modernity, and proven extremely powerful in some settings. But they have had defects as well. In particular, they have led to a tendency to view man as a self-interested maximizer of preferences, nature as a collection of resources for that end, and social order as a human construction for human purposes. The rise and power of the modern state and modern industry and economic organization confirmed these tendencies. Technology became the model for rational action.
In Europe, these changes had attracted attention from the start. They aroused unqualified support from those who sought wealth and power, and from many progressives and radicals who thought they pointed toward a more free, rational, and materially abundant way of life. Some saw problems, such as growing crudity and conflict between classes and nations. Liberal thinkers like Kant, who generally accepted modern tendencies, thought they could be corrected from within. Others like Marx and Nietzsche expected them to disrupt basic features of Western society but were loyal to the main trend of events.
Still others thought basic modern tendencies were fundamentally at odds with necessary aspects of how we understand the world, and were leading to intellectual decline and a degradation in ways of living. These included religious thinkers like Pascal and Newman, who thought that something beyond logic and scientific inquiry—for example, the ability to discern substantive goods rooted in the order of the world—was needed to deal adequately with life as we find it, and conservative or counterrevolutionary thinkers like Burke and Maistre, who thought nothing could substitute for an authoritative tradition as a source of guidance.
Americans were mostly too provincial, too involved with politics and economic development, and too satisfied with the general shape of their social and intellectual world to take such speculations seriously. Even so, as time went by and our country became more similar to others, intellectual life diversified and questions regarding fundamental social order began to seem more pressing.
So it is not surprising that there eventually arose thinkers who took such issues seriously and doubted the American faith that freedom, progress, and the exceptional nature of the American public order would solve whatever problems we had. These included two literary scholars, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who became surprisingly influential in the teens and twenties of the last century.
Irving Babbitt
Irving Babbitt was perhaps the more prominent. His background was remarkably varied. He was a descendant of New England ministers, and son of a man still remembered as a promoter of the healing powers of light and magnetism. After early wanderings that included work as a cowboy and police reporter, he studied classics at Harvard, Pali and Buddhism in Paris, and then Sanskrit, again at Harvard, where he eventually became professor of French literature. (Later, he also learned classical Chinese.) His students at Harvard included T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, and Van Wyck Brooks.
He combined great learning and his ancestors’ seriousness with his father’s willingness to break with conventional thought. His lectures, essays, and books, such as Democracy and Leadership (1924), severely criticized the quantitative view of progress dominant in America and the resulting destruction of humane standards. That loss of standards, Babbitt thought, had led to commercialism, regimentation, and the single-minded pursuit of amusement. These tendencies trivialized life, and were thoroughly corrupting government.
Babbitt proposed an approach to life, the New Humanism, that he thought could maintain standards and discipline in the face of the forces that were undermining them, but without rejecting the freedom, individuality, and critical thinking that he accepted as valuable achievements of modern civilization.
He linked the problem of standards to the problem of democracy. Like all forms of government, democracy needs good leaders, and he thought American history showed that it could have them. Our history, he said, displayed a conflict between the forces of pure democracy represented by Jefferson and Jackson, and the forces of constitutional democracy represented by Washington, John Marshall, and Lincoln, whom he viewed as the great unionist rather than the great emancipator.
He identified pure democracy with the radicalism of the French Revolution, and with a humanitarianism that loosens standards, and promotes an open-ended expansiveness that leads to imperialism and to ever more complex and ineffective legislation that attempts to make up for a loss of self-control. In contrast, constitutional democracy mitigated its democratic element through concern for standards and social order, and an emphasis on prudence, institutions, and traditions. He associated the latter approach with the thought of the British statesman Edmund Burke.
Babbitt argued that the quality of leaders depends on their quality of “vision,” meaning the depth of their understanding of the world and human conduct. And that, he thought, depends not on high ideals or dedication to “service” (today we would say “compassion”), but on their inner life.
He therefore considered spiritual questions fundamental. Even so, he did not accept any traditional faith, and took a broad view of what answers might work. He wanted to proceed synthetically on such issues, through consideration of features of inner experience, rather than by relying on tradition or dogma. These features of experience included first and foremost the dissatisfaction we feel when we simply follow impulse. That feeling shows that we aspire to something higher and better than our ordinary everyday self. Without attending to that “inner check,” as he called it, measure, balance, and discriminating judgment become impossible. He therefore rejected the modern idealization of natural impulse displayed, for example, in the idealization of the innocent child, the noble savage, and the simple man of the people.
He also emphasized the necessity of imagination. “Illusion,” he said, “is an integral part of reality.” The role of imagination follows from the insufficiency of purely factual knowledge to provide us with a usable picture of the world. Instead, we need to train our way of conceiving things so that we can make sense of the world and deal with it intelligently.
Babbitt’s emphasis on the inner check and on imagination led him to insist on the distinction between a humanistic “law for man” that takes them into account, and a mechanical “law for thing” that does not, but treats man as simply a creature of appetite. Apart from the law for man, he thought, public life becomes simply the pursuit of wealth and domination. He viewed Machiavelli, with his single-minded focus on success and power, and Francis Bacon, with his scientism and naturalism, as leading representatives of the modern Western concentration on the latter concerns.
In spite of the current eclipse of the law for man by the law for thing, he thought that many people sense that there must be something better than a mechanistic approach to human life. But without the law for man and its critical standards they have nothing to bring imagination into order, and become visionaries whose ideals fail to reflect the world as it is. In short, they fall into the cult of creativity.
Babbitt’s prime example of such a visionary was Rousseau, the great theorist of radical democracy and opponent of civilization. His error, Babbitt tells us, was to base politics on the “idyllic imagination,” the vision of a world in which man is naturally good, evil the result of institutions, and fraternity the natural result of abolishing standards and setting our expansive impulses free.
But—as Rousseau himself admitted—the idyllic imagination does not reflect reality. The freeing of impulse leads not to fraternity, a difficult achievement that requires acceptance of limitations, but to imperialism—the unbounded lust for dominion. Rousseau’s thought therefore leads not to utopia but to failure, disillusionment, and violent attempts to force political fantasies onto a recalcitrant world.
Writing in the early 1920s, Babbitt worried that the results would include extreme nationalism, wars of unprecedented violence (for example, with Japan over the Pacific), the destruction of entire cities from the air, the atomic bomb, and possibly the end of white civilization. He tied the last to the likely rise of non-Western civilizations—Russia, China, the Muslim world—and the ill-feeling aroused by Westerners’ “racial swagger” and “Occidental conceit and arrogance.”
(His views on the relations among civilizations were complex. While he was certainly aware of our deficiencies, he also spoke of the “sane moral realism that has made of the English the best ruling race, perhaps, that the world has yet seen.”)
In opposition to Rousseau’s idyllic imagination Babbitt called for the “moral imagination,” a conception borrowed from Burke that emphasized man’s social and hierarchical nature. Burke had tied that conception to models of a life well lived among traditional institutions. But the imaginative appeal of tradition, and of the traditional social order based on throne, sword, and altar, had declined. Burke’s “chirping sectaries,” those who rejected tradition, idealized progress, and backed the French Revolution, had triumphed.
Something more modern, based on the critical spirit and the “law for man,” was therefore needed. An outlook on such lines, combining the achievements of modern thought with civilized standards and an imaginative appeal strong enough to mold behavior, would obviously be extremely difficult to realize socially. But how to proceed?
No single model was sufficient. Babbitt thought the Greek tradition had overestimated reason as a motivating force. To avoid duplicating its post-Platonic devolution into skepticism, his projected Western philosophy of life would need to supplement it with certain insights from the East, notably the importance of humility and the submission of man’s ordinary self to a higher will, conceived as that not of a divine being but of the man’s own higher self.
He greatly admired the East, spent years studying their languages and literatures, and believed they had a great deal to teach the West in religious matters. But Eastern thought had its deficiencies as well. He criticized Christianity, which he considered Eastern, for its suppression of the critical spirit, and Confucianism, which he praised for its emphasis on humanistic self-development, for its overemphasis on social convention. And he criticized Buddhism for its unworldliness, while maintaining a very high opinion of its critical spirit and its single-minded focus on the higher self, the facts of inner experience, and the problem of conduct in a world of flux.
His ultimate goal was a sort of moral aristocracy based on education and self-discipline, rather like a class of Confucian scholars, but with less concern for conventional social duties, and more for individuality and critical thinking. That class, like the ideal Confucian ruler, would promote order more by example than by busying itself, like humanitarian do-gooders, with other people’s business. Its outlook and influence would support the stable combination of liberty with order that for Babbitt constituted true liberalism and the true goal of modern civilization.
The existence if such a class would require a system of education that inculcates the importance of the inner life and the need for each to bring his life in line with what is highest and best in himself. Such an education would not be immediately practical, so it would be largely the pursuit of a propertied class, whose existence it could do a great deal to justify. If that system produced enough educated, ethical, and well-placed men to set the tone for society, Babbitt thought, society would become ethical. That was his extremely ambitious project.
Paul Elmer More
Paul Elmer More was a distinguished literary critic who became a friend and ally of Irving Babbitt at Harvard while studying and teaching Sanskrit there. He soon left the academic world and became an editor, notably at the Nation. After an early retirement from journalism, he taught graduate seminars at Princeton, and published a number of books, including works on the Greek tradition, collections of articles and reviews, and several idiosyncratic volumes of Christian apologetics.
Unlike Babbitt, whose thought settled early into a coherent form that remained very stable, his view of the world changed drastically during his life. Each step, however, represented a natural progression from the preceding one. Thus, he reacted against his early unbridled romanticism by becoming a materialist. He then accepted successively the reality of spirit, the coordinate reality of the material world, a Platonic appreciation of the Good, Beautiful, and True as principles that unify the two, and finally, after the age of 60, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation as the way for Platonism to become concrete and vital.
In spite of differences in intellectual development, his political and ethical views were very similar to Babbitt’s. He disliked indiscipline, direct democracy, humanitarian do-gooders, the subordination of judgment to sympathy, and the demand for liberation of emotion and desire. Instead, he emphasized the importance of ethical striving and personal responsibility, along with private property, strong but limited government, and leadership by a sort of natural aristocracy molded by good upbringing and education. Classical studies would, he thought, be the best basis for such an education.
Also like Babbitt, he was an admirer of Edmund Burke who nonetheless accepted the critical modern spirit, and thought that our times required building an understanding of the world that is less traditional than based on universal features of thought and experience.
With that goal in mind, he too emphasized the importance of an inner check, using the phrase before Babbitt did. And he emphasized imagination, considering it, along with distrust of human nature, a distinguishing feature of philosophical conservatism and a necessity for a stable and humane social order. He noted, for example, that the nation, as a continuing corporate and moral entity that links together the various interests and classes of which the community is composed, is a creature of the imagination.
An important difference from Babbitt was his eventual embrace of Christianity, which he came to see as socially basic and rationally compelling. Part of the reason for the difference in attitude may have been a sort of self-contained quality in Babbitt’s thought that More’s lacked, and that helps account for its remarkable coherence and stability. Another may have been biographical: Babbitt’s father was a religious crank, so he sometimes looked at religion rather as an enemy, while More’s was conventionally Presbyterian.
More’s argument for Christianity, set forth in The Skeptical Approach to Religion (1934), was basically the same as Pascal’s argument in the Pensées. Neither faith nor pure rationalism can be demonstrated to be true, but we live differently if we accept one or the other, so the brute necessity of living one way rather than another compels a decision. The proper criterion for choosing an overall understanding of things is then its ability to illuminate the world and make it possible to act rationally and consistently with our fundamental intuitions of what is right. But only if we view the world as the expression of a higher purpose can life itself have a goal, and we a reason for living well. Since we cannot help but view living well as somehow obligatory, we must choose a teleological view in order to make sense of our own outlook.
Once faith in a purpose-ordered universe is accepted, he thought, we should go with the faith tradition that makes the most sense of the religious strivings of mankind, and succeeds in the sense that it eventually settles into a final form that sums up in a higher synthesis its historical development from primitive animism to monotheism. That tradition, he thought, is Christianity, which recognizes that the sole way God could reveal himself adequately is through his incarnation as man. Other religious traditions, after attaining to monotheism, had either frozen and rejected reason, or lost their way in eddies of pantheism, polytheism, and superstition. And he found that those who follow the way of faith in general and Christianity in particular find it life-sustaining. That verification in experience, he thought, justifies their conviction of the rightness of their choice.
Evaluation
Babbitt and More were remarkable for their learning and the depth, breadth, independence, and power of their thought. Much of what they say about standards, imagination, critical thought, the inner check, and the inner life generally is permanently true and valuable. And they led admirably principled lives, even in their decision to pursue intellectual and scholarly careers without PhDs. (They were early critics of academic credentialism and the cult of “research,” considering teaching and the conservation of knowledge the primary goals of universities.)
Even so, it is hard to see Babbitt in particular as a guide for our time. An age of electronic communications is not a home for a moral elite of the sort he envisioned. Our time lends itself far more to celebrity and sensation than aristocracy and reverence. And in any case the “inner check”hardly strikes the imagination—an odd defect, given Babbitt’s emphasis on that aspect of human life–and is not something to which men are likely to give their lives.
Nor can the “moral imagination” that both men emphasized do much for us if we understand what it presents as imaginary. Divorced from a divine revelation that ties myth to reality, it becomes the Platonic “noble lie,” a story propagated for the sake of its usefulness rather than truth. But so understood it becomes useless. Who wants to live by a lie that is recognized as such?
It is worth noting that More explicitly accepts that his theory of the imagination is similar to Plato’s theory of the Noble Lie. His willingness to do so might have been rooted in his lesser interest in converting others to his own views, allowing him to speak more frankly. But his ultimate acceptance of Christianity also implies acceptance that an imaginative system can be true, a view likely to strengthen awareness of truth and falsity as possible—and crucial—features of grand schemes of understanding.
For that and other reasons More’s ultimate acceptance of Christianity as a tie between the public understanding of the world and something that is understood as both noble and real is a better guide than anything Babbitt has to offer. The West is simply Catholic Christendom 500 years after Luther, and if it is to continue as a civilization it seems likely it will have to continue as Christian and indeed as Catholic. The similarity of his views to those of Pascal, a great theoretician of modernity, suggest that they are well suited to our times. Some people, such as Russell Kirk, have rated him very highly as an apologist to a skeptical age. He has in fact exerted very little influence, but his time may yet come.
The Southern Agrarians
From the high theory of Babbitt and More we turn to the more concrete thought of the Southern Agrarians. They were basically a group of literary men from rural areas and small towns in the South connected by common concerns and common association with Vanderbilt University. A number of them—John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allan Tate, Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren—were or became distinguished men of letters. Their collection of essays, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), by “Twelve Southerners,” set forth their rejection of the industrial society symbolized by the North, and of the industrialized “New South” that wanted to imitate it.
Like the New Humanists, they opposed imperialism, industrialism, the obsession with money, the American ideals of “progress” and “service,” and the emphasis on scientific rather than classical and humanistic education. They complained, however, that the New Humanism was too abstract. It was all very well to reflect critically on inner experience, cultivate the moral imagination, and study the classics of multiple civilizations, but such pursuits would not provide a way of life people could live by.
The Agrarians preferred a more specific and rooted tendency of thought some of them called “Christian Humanism.” What they were truly attached to, though, was the culture of the rural South, and the places and networks of relationships in which it existed. That concern with concrete particulars meant a concern with economics. As a group they had few proposals for specific economic reforms, but most of them joined other writers, including English distributists such as Hilaire Belloc, in contributing essays to another collection, Who Owns America (1936), that discussed more concretely how to achieve a politically and economically more decentralized society.
What they liked about the traditional agrarian South was its connection to nature, acceptance of what is limited and settled, and appreciation of leisure and human connections. They thought these things were necessary for everyday amenities like “manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love.” Industrial society kills such things, along with more basic things like religion and the arts. Religion, they thought, involves “our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable,” while the arts depend on “a free and disinterested observation of nature that occurs only in leisure.” Neither, they thought, was compatible with industrial society.
In spite of the greater concreteness of their views, and the connection of those views to an actual way of life, the Southern Agrarians had no more practical success than the New Humanists. Who Owns America was published in early 1936 so it could affect the elections that year. It was widely reviewed, most reviewers found it unrealistic although well-intentioned, and it had no political effect. Also, it turned out that most Southerners preferred an easier and materially more abundant life to cultural authenticity. The result was that traditional agrarian life continued to decline, and the New South continued to develop and lose its specificity until it simply became part of the Sunbelt. The consequences for religion, social customs, and the arts were as bad as the Agrarians had predicted.
In spite of the practical failure of their efforts, the Southern Agrarians articulated and carried forward an ideal of life that called in question an increasingly inhuman social order, and pointed to a real way of life that had, in important ways, been better and more human. In particular, they drew attention to the connection between culture and economics. These were real contributions that may yet help us.
The journalistic “Old Right”
During the 1930s conflict and instability made political and economic issues seem more pressing than speculations about ultimate sources of social order. Growing barbarism and confusion led to calls for radical solutions that would require a government that was far more active and powerful than American traditions had allowed.
In that setting the focus switched from thinkers and poets to journalists, and the localism of the Agrarians and emphasis on personal responsibility of the New Humanists merged into a more general tendency of opposition to the Leviathan state. (“The Attack on Leviathan” was in fact the title of a book by Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson.) Supporters of the resulting tendency make up what is journalistically if somewhat narrowly referred to as the “Old Right.”
Experience told Americans that if the rule of law and other basic preconditions were present a decent and productive social order would grow up spontaneously. Such an order required active responsible participation by the people, so the state could not force it into existence. The way of freedom, meaning private property and limited and decentralized government, had brought general social peace and widely diffused economic prosperity. So why not keep it?
The writers of the “Old Right,” including Garet Garett, John T. Flynn, Isabel Patterson, H. L. Mencken, and Albert Jay Nock, were therefore attached to the classical liberalism and constitutionalism that had been traditional in America. They were outraged by the New Deal, which they saw as a betrayal of voters’ trust (as a candidate, Roosevelt had promised to slash spending) and a radical break with constitutional understandings that had served us well. They were dubious of the advantages of a more interventionist government, and particularly alarmed by growing foreign involvement and the threat of war.
So they were early critics of a welfare/warfare state that builds its power by promising a solution for every problem at home and abroad. They considered the idea of beneficient big government in part an illusion, put together by theoreticians and meddlers who thought they could run people’s lives better than people themselves, and in part a racket, an excuse for taking the people’s money and using it to line the pockets of themselves and their friends.
These writers gained more followers than the thinkers previously mentioned, but in spite of their previous national prominence, and their more immediate and journalistic focus, they failed to affect events. The New Deal did not succeed in bringing us out of the Depression, but it succeeded politically. Roosevelt won election after election, his administration led us into war, and our government took on the mission to transform American society and the world that it has pursued ever since.
The careers of these writers present an early instance of “cancel culture.” Government and private institutions colluded to smear, silence, and drive from public life anyone who opposed the direction of government policy, especially with regard to foreign involvements. So from prominence and influence in the 1920s the writers of the Old Right became, during the following decades, unpublishable in mainstream channels. Even so, they survived to inspire postwar writers at National Review and various libertarian publications.
Richard Weaver
Born in 1910, Richard Weaver was younger than the figures we have been discussing, and his career mostly overlapped those of postwar conservatives like Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He nonetheless deserves to be grouped with the earlier figures, because his works summed up their analysis and concerns, and exemplify the reasons for their lack of influence.
He was a native of North Carolina, where he returned every year, and a long-time teacher at the University of Chicago. Surprisingly, his intellectual journey began on the socialist Left. His master’s degree thesis at Vanderbilt, supervised by Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom, criticized the New Humanists for what he saw as their cowardly refusal to face the challenges of modernity.
Thought
Such views were soon to change. His doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, supervised by Southern Agrarian sympathizer Cleanth Brooks and published posthumously as The Southern Tradition at Bay (1968), was a sympathetic account of the thought and culture of the Old South. It praised the South as the last non-materialistic civilization, but discussed the deficiencies that led to its decline and increasing irrelevance.
These included a failure to understand and articulate itself at a deep enough level: it had no metaphysicians, only lawyers and orators. His appreciation of the importance of such basic issues soon led him to adopt views like those of the New Humanists he had once criticized. But his mature views incorporated themes from all the thinkers we have discussed. Like the journalistic Old Right, for example, he favored libertarian positions in practical politics, because he shared with them a belief in “a natural order of things which will largely take care of itself if you leave it alone.”
His analysis was nonetheless his own. In Ideas Have Consequences (1948) he traced modern cultural decline to a very remote cause indeed, late Medieval philosophical nominalism. In his account, the rejection of transcendentals like the Good, Beautiful, and True, beginning with scholastic thinkers like William of Ockham in the fourteenth century, had ultimately led to relativism, materialism, the collapse of objective standards, and eventually our current alternation between unmoored sentimentalism on the one hand and worship of wealth and power on the other.
But how should we respond to a trend that has been so enduring and so fundamental? His approach, as set forth in his final book, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (published 1964, but written some years earlier), was critical and constructive rather than based on dogma or tradition.
He was conscious of the difficulty of cultural criticism—how can we know a culture well enough to judge it, but maintain enough perspective for our judgment to be worth anything? Even so, he patiently worked through the issues, and argued that those who claimed civilization was advancing were looking only at quantitative aspects. In contrast, he thought, thoughtful observers were conscious of a long-term decline in quality.
He nonetheless rejected claims of inevitable decay, and called for an alternative to both modernism and cultural pessimism that would “[lead] through free will and effort to some creative result.” Man, he said, is more than an animal. He creates an ideal image of himself, an ideal of excellence that draws everything toward itself and so defines a culture. Culture is thus centripetal, aristocratic, and exclusive. It tells us what should be admired and rejected, thereby providing a pattern for integrating the various aspects of human life. If it falls apart, and no longer provides a reasonable way of doing so, “an unreasonable one may be invented and carried to frightful lengths.”
The world had recently seen that happen, most strikingly in the great totalitarianisms of Europe, but also, more subtly, in the vaunted American Way of Life. The greatest threat to culture among us, he thought, is the imperialism of democracy, its refusal to recognize limits. That refusal makes it no longer simply a method of governing that recognizes the freedom and dignity of every human being, but a comprehensive understanding of how life should be carried on that eventually attempts to abolish all forms and distinctions.
He notes the pervasiveness of that attempt, and suggests a possible origin “in a suicidal determination to write an end to the heritage of Western culture.” That effort is backed by powerful institutions, including an education system that aims not at the transmission of culture but its democratic transformation through “progressive” education. The resulting rejection of organized and objective knowledge, which ultimately meant rejection of reality itself, provoked Weaver to compare progressive educationalists to the ancient Gnostics.
At the time Weaver was writing, the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement had already begin to enlist the courts and other agencies of government in what he saw as the same effort to destroy cultural distinctions. He expected no good to come of it, for reasons that were fundamental:
A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging. The right to self-segregate is then an indispensable ground of its being. Enough has been said to show that our culture today is faced with very serious threats in the form of rationalistic drives to prohibit in the name of equality cultural segregation…. Such “integration” would of course be a failure because where deep inner impulse is lacking cohesiveness for any length of time is impossible.
Such a view has become unspeakable in public discussion today. Even so, the changes in American culture since the 1950s, the radical decline in civility, manners, family life, the arts, and the life of the mind, and most recently the rise of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and cancel culture, confirm it. When examined, the kinder, more decent, and more just society the social changes of recent decades are said to have brought about does not appear so kind, decent, or just.
Since culture itself was threatened, Weaver felt called upon to analyze its fundamental workings. Culture, he tells us, is a creature of myth, which is a system of symbols, based on metaphor and dependent on place, that articulates meanings. In modern times the power and coherence of myth has radically declined, and with it the meaning of social forms and ultimately of life itself.
More concretely, culture involves a balance between status and function. Status refers to social position, function to what people in that position should do. If I am an aristocrat, I have a particular status. That status corresponds to a family tradition of public service that rises above self-interest. Family habit and pride, together with public expectations, then provide a motive to validate that status and carry the tradition forward. Examples of the beneficial workings of status include the Virginia planter aristocracy at the time of American independence.
Status, Weaver tells us, is a necessary part of social life. It provides the long-term stability needed for traditions to develop, values to clarify, people to know who they are, the social order to become comprehensible, and the society as a whole to attract the loyalty of its members.
A society that insistently rejects myth and status in favor of function may achieve a great deal quantitatively, at least for a while, but quality will suffer, and people will lose sight of limits and ultimate purposes. The consequences can be seen in the rise of total war. The loss of the distinction between combatant and noncombatant and the demand for unconditional surrender—in essence, the conversion of war into a rationalized industrial process whose only criterion is effectiveness—had converted the World Wars and subsequent Cold War into absolute oppositions between nations with no defined goals or limits. That change threatened not only Western civilization but the survival of humanity itself.
The recovery of myth, culture, and status would, Weaver thought, require a defense of rhetoric and memory. The tendency today is to treat rhetoric as manipulation, and the past as irrelevant to the present and future. But without the past we cannot make sense of the present or future, and without rhetoric we must limit discussion to pure factuality. An attack on memory and rhetoric is thus an attack on our ability to see life as a whole and evaluate it from an overall perspective.
Weaver thus considers the attempt to discuss the world from a purely analytical—he says “dialectical”—point of view profoundly subversive. That problem, Weaver observes, is what led to the execution of Socrates. In spite of his moral eminence, and the dazzling rhetorical skill with which Plato makes his case, we should recognize that his single-minded emphasis on dialectic at the expense of rhetoric left no room for the authority of history and tradition, or for life as men actually live it.
Weaver thus follows Babbitt in viewing extreme rationalism as a fundamental flaw in the Greek tradition. His solution, like that of the New Humanists, emphasizes the role of the imagination. He called for retrieval of the ability to take seriously the significance of place and the poetic qualities of language. And he tells us that “we must recreate in some vivid way the value of historical consciousness,” and achieve “a restatement of the broadly cultural role of rhetoric.”
More broadly, he follows Babbitt in insisting on a law for man that is different from the law for thing. To that end, he thought, we must reject the scientistic dogma that man is wholly subject to mechanical causality. That view made him a critic of Darwinian evolution. It is circular as a demonstration of universal mechanism, he tells us, since it presumes in advance that mechanical causation is the only permissible form of explanation. And it is unable to explain obvious features of human life, such as language and our immediate experience of consciousness and free choice. Since it cannot be proven, and is a barrier to understanding and dealing with our situation, we should reject it as a comprehensive explanation of human life.
Evaluation
Weaver’s analysis has permanent value, but has had little practical effect, and often seems too abstract to be useful. He might respond that he is providing a general scheme of understanding rather than a practical handbook. Even so, his demands are overly ambitious, and sometimes seem to conflict with each other. He rests his case on the importance of myth, and cultural forms generally, but treats them simply as human creations that respond in various ways to our needs. So his approach to them is external and analytical, surprisingly so for someone who insists so strongly on the essential subversiveness of such an approach.
He thus insists on the ultimate untrustworthiness of social forms. He emphasizes that they become destructive when they lose their connection with their original purpose. Status degenerates into caste, for example, when social position becomes too fixed and loses its connection to function. A standard example is the French aristocracy after Louis XIV supplanted them with intendants and induced them to move to Versailles. In our own times, bureaucracy, with its mindless formalism, and machine culture, with its equally mindless worship of speed and power, provide Weaver with other examples of how basically aesthetic ideals like purity of form can destroy human goods.
That confronts him, like Babbitt and More, with the problem of how authority can be conferred on the creations of our own imagination. But his difficulties are even greater, since he makes a point of rejecting social fictions, going so far as to say that trouble begins when “the individual ceases to ask, what are the forms for me? and asks instead, what can I do to subserve the forms?”
But how can cultural forms affect conduct when they are viewed simply as imaginative and rhetorical constructions to be judged by their ability to serve the individual? Citizens are often asked to sacrifice personal interests, even life itself, for their country. That is the point of talking about “America,” “citizenship,” and “civic duties.” But if the concept of America is an imaginative construction for each individual to judge by reference to his own interests, how can it call forth sacrifice?
Weaver’s talk of creativity and the imagination often sounds like the nominalism he otherwise protested, the view that categories—in this case social and moral categories—are human constructions. He sees the problem, and wants to save the authority of cultural forms by tying them to objective realities. He hopes to do that by connecting them to natural law and “a true theory of the nature of man.” But what is that theory and how do we discover and apply it? He does not say, noting only that the solution “lies in respect for the struggling dignity of man and for his orientation toward something higher than himself which he has not created.”
And that is the solution we are to bring into usable form by our own efforts. without the benefit of the revelation and dogma that have always been necessary to give the social order the sort of foundation “at the level of ontology” that he rightly demands. That proposal, the logical end point of an attempt to create a philosophical conservatism with no specific reference to revealed religion, will obviously not be realized. No one will even take it seriously.
America and social order
The writers and thinkers of the Old Right wrote intelligently about fundamental issues. Even so, they had no visible effect on the course of events. Few read them now, although their names are sometimes mentioned among intellectual conservatives. Otherwise they have for the most part been forgotten.
There are ad hoc explanations for this lack of success: Richard Weaver and the New Humanists were too abstract. The Southern Agrarians were too literary and tied to a dying way of life. The journalistic New Right, which was more concrete and topical, did not go deep enough.
But the problems were more basic. The people were more interested in safety and comfort than maintenance of their independence and traditions. And elites were more concerned with wealth and power than American tradition, the inner check, or the dangers of nominalism. The journalistic Old Right, with its opposition to war and big government, found somewhat of a popular following, in spite of difficulties finding outlets in which it could make its case. But the trend toward all-provident government proved too strong in the midst of fear and uncertainty.
Conservatism wants to conserve an existing social order and its traditions. But if the order is disintegrating, and people are no longer much attached to it, what is there to work with? What can “conservatism” mean, when basic institutions join together in an effort to abolish small-scale informal order in favor of a global order based on money and bureaucracy?
To discuss what has happened and what needs to be done, it will help to look at the traditional American social order: what it was, what supported it, and what has destroyed it.
Stability
The American War for Independence was the first liberal revolution, but the country it established was, in many ways, rather conservative. Among Western countries it has been the most anticommunist, the most visibly religious, the most resistant to the welfare state, the most vocally concerned with “traditional moral values.” It has also been unusually stable politically.
All that is rapidly changing under the stress of globalism, mass immigration, vastly improved communication and transportation, the growth of a technological outlook toward social life, the consolidation of a ruling class that hates what America has been, and the internal instability of liberalism itself.
Even so, our liberal political order lasted a very long time, and the older America retains the loyalty of many, perhaps half, its citizens. How was such enduring stability possible for a political order founded explicitly on liberal principles of freedom and equality, one in which it was not simply laughable for left-wing activists to call themselves “People for the American Way”?
The social contract
The stability of America was the stability of liberalism. The party of Thomas Jefferson is still with us, and the party of Abraham Lincoln and the two Bushes has at bottom been very similar to it. It has been a strange sort of stability, given the liberal emphasis on progress and reform, as well as the changes in the concrete positions considered liberal. But whatever the changes, the most fundamental principles have been consistent.
Liberalism has always emphasized social contract theory. From Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, such theories have treated political society as an arrangement to advance the self-defined interests of equal individuals. That perspective makes equality and the freedom of the individual to pursue his self-defined goals enduring liberal ideals.
For as long as Americans have been a people those ideals have been basic to their political creed. While the ideals have been stable, their implications have evolved. Over the years “down with monarchy and aristocracy” became “down with economic royalism,” “down with racism, sexism, and homophobia,” and most recently “down with cisheteronormativity and white supremacy,” with the last defined so broadly as to include all attachment to Western tradition and civilization.
The failure of the contract
Our liberal order has thus combined durability with abstract, open-ended, and infinitely demanding principles. Whatever its short and mid-term stability, these principles made it logically unstable, and are now destroying it. Their scope of application slowly grows until the degree of dictatorial control needed to bring all aspects of life in line with their ever-more-comprehensive demands makes their claim to promote freedom and equality absurd. Many believe that point has already been reached. If so, America—a nation whose ideals are part of its self-definition—is no longer America.
The instability of liberalism is exacerbated by its demand that the political order have a clear rational justification from the standpoint of all those subject to it. Social contract theory is intended to satisfy that demand, by justifying social obligation in a way that works for every member of a society in which each is looking out for his own interests.
But the justification does not work. Political society cannot be based on a presumed contract, if only because the interpretation of contracts depends on norms that cannot exist outside of political society. In any case, a contract worth trusting requires an independent party to interpret it. But who is that independent party, in the case of the relation between an individual and political society as a whole?
Judicial independence is a beautiful and useful ideal, but judges, like other officials, are members of the ruling class. In an ideological state, as ours has become, they ultimately decide in accordance with the needs of that class and its ideology. Since they decide what the social contract means, in the long run that contract reduces to “I grant you the right to do with me whatever seems good to you.” Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern social contract theory, seems to have found such a contract acceptable, since he thought the alternative was the war of all against all, but it seems a poor basis for a political order supposedly based on individual self-interest.
So the theory and the popular justification for liberalism are failing. A social contract intended to lead to freedom and equality is no longer a contract and leads to dictatorial rule. As a result, more and more people—including many of those most attached to America—are coming to believe that something has gone radically wrong, and that the system they once loved is becoming unrecognizable.
Self-contradiction
But how can liberalism have been stable for so long when the principles on which it prides itself are so self-destructive?
The answer is obfuscation and hypocrisy. Liberalism is supposedly based on the choices of rational individuals, but every political society depends on willing acceptance of principles that are not demonstrated, such as a particular understanding of man, the world, and the human good. We are taught such things in childhood, without our consent, through the beliefs, symbols, practices, attitudes, and institutions to which the people around us are attached. And they are inevitably enforced against dissenters by whatever social sanctions seem necessary.
A society committed to liberalism thus needs an authoritative liberal tradition to define and support its fundamental commitments. That tradition is intolerant: no one is willing to listen patiently to the views of fascists or divine-right monarchists. It thus relies on social compulsion, and so on inequality. And to survive any length of time it needs self-sacrificing loyalty, which its official hedonism and individualism make absurd. So our explicit liberal tradition is necessarily supplemented by concealed illiberal traditions that make possible the stability, cohesion, and willing self-sacrifice any society needs to exist.
Guilt
For that reason a liberal society depends on the traditional connections, loyalties, understandings, and hierarchies it rejects, and the way of life of the ordinary men and women it insults and attacks. So it exists through self-serving contradictions that preserve small-scale social order as well as loyalty to the society as a whole. In a critical age like our own, these cannot stay hidden forever. So liberals constantly feel guilty, because they are constantly waking up to illiberal features of their own society from which they themselves have benefited.
As the liberal state has developed, its disillusionment and feelings of guilt have intensified, and so has its hatred of the traditional arrangements on which it depends. The current attempts to eradicate “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “heteronormativity,” and the like are attempts to destroy traditional arrangements, and thus to destroy normal moral ties to particular people based on specific affiliations such as family, cultural community, and religion.
These are to be replaced with bureaucratic or contractual arrangements thought more just and rational. But bureaucracy and contract, in theory supplemented by abstract altruism, do not have the force of concrete obligations to family, friends, and particular community. Such attempts to rationalize social life weaken the sense of mutual obligation, leading to distrust, resentment, crime, corruption, and general self-seeking.
Since liberalism cannot recognize its dependence on illiberalism without destroying its self-defined legitimacy as a rational system of equal freedom, it cannot deal with the cause of its ills, which remain unremedied and slowly destroy it. In the mean time, the growing disconnection between official doctrine and social reality corrupts political thought and language, resulting in a system of compulsory lies and the intolerant absurdities of “political correctness.”
Traditionalism
The obvious response to such a situation is traditionalism, explicit acceptance of traditional arrangements and authorities in political and social life. Traditionalism rejects rationalism, and treats habit, settled feeling, and informal experience as ways of knowing. And it accepts the necessity of religion and obligations based on particular human connections. All that is evidently legitimate, since these are innate human ways of understanding the world and connecting people to each other in stable and productive ways. It cannot be wrong for human beings to live as such.
By themselves, pleasure, preference, and instrumental reason cannot order life in a way that satisfies people. For actions to make sense to the actor and others they need to be integrated with a durable network of human relations. And they need a higher good as their ultimate standard, one that precedes human purposes, goes beyond human design, and integrates the moral quality of actions with the general order of the world. Divorced from such an order actions seem arbitrary and incomprehensible.
So the basic shape of our lives cannot be created by choice. We are born into our closest human connections, or acquire them in other ways—like becoming a parent—that we do not completely control, and we cannot easily change them. And our higher goods are neither our creation nor purely our choice. We recognize rather than choose them, and grasp them less in the abstract than through the concrete forms they take in the world around us, and thus through the traditions that form that world.
For these reasons, each of us must attain the good life, if at all, through love of a particular tradition accepted as authoritative, and through the community it defines and guides. Traditionalism is therefore a human necessity, and liberalism useless and destructive as a general basis for social life.
American traditionalism
But traditionalism is a difficult position to maintain in liberal society. It means rejecting the actual traditions that are publicly authoritative, as well as what is now understood as rationality—scientism, the identification of knowledge with formal expertise modeled on modern natural science.
So it appeals to history but opposes it, appeals to reason but not what is socially accepted as such, and exalts natural growth but denounces what has actually grown up in the West over the past several hundred years. And for the sake of securing loyalty to authority it denies the principles that are authoritatively proclaimed.
How can such a view survive, especially in a country with no recognized non-liberal political traditions? American traditionalists cannot easily appeal to the authority of the Church, memory of Christendom, myth of common blood, or any old regime of throne, altar, and sword. And American liberals have a better right than traditionalists to basic symbols like the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Statue of Liberty. In any event our national symbols are rapidly losing their function as common points of reference, because they are too closely connected to the particularity of the American past.
In the absence of compelling theories, memories, and symbols, American traditionalism has been hard put to defend itself effectively. It has therefore been inarticulate. An American Burke or Maistre is unthinkable. Traditionalism has survived as an implicit way of thinking and feeling because of its usefulness, the practical success of American institutions, and the national habit of avoiding systematic thought.
As an overt political view, it has most often taken the form of reverence for “the ideals of the Founding Fathers,” that is, for liberalism as it stood at the time of the American Founding. By suppressing the development of liberalism that reverence maximized the good and minimized the harm it did. The American state, especially the federal government, has primarily been a contract for material ends such as national defense and economic development. Social life involves much more than that, so implicit traditionalism has needed arrangements that secure the habits and customs of the people by making them independent of the national state. Such arrangements were a prominent feature of the regime established by the Founders. They included federalism, limited government, local democracy, and informal social control through a combination of moralism, nondoctrinal Protestantism, and traditional habits and prejudices.
While logically weak, this compromise between liberalism and traditionalism worked, and held up remarkably well in the face of Lincoln’s war against the South, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the foreign wars of 20th century internationalists. Both sides gained from it. Traditionalism needed liberalism for legitimacy, and liberalism needed traditionalism for survival, stability, and functionality. The result was a political order that could satisfy both liberal and traditionalist impulses as long as neither went too far.
In recent decades that compromise has fallen apart. In spite of resistance, liberal principles have come to be understood and applied more and more comprehensively. The result is that tradition, as a complex of “deeply rooted social biases and stereotypes,” is now presumed unfounded and oppressive. To make matters worse, traditions are particular, and “American tradition” basically means the traditions of white and especially British Americans. So favoring American political traditions such as limited government and an armed citizenry is now considered white supremacy, and thus tantamount to Nazism.
The result is social and moral crisis. A destructively pure form of liberalism has made, in the name of equal human dignity, the eradication of traditional authority and the human connections that foster it one of the basic responsibilities of government. But government—or at least free government and a functional society—cannot exist without such things.
Now what?
So now what?
American conservatism had to do with defending decentralized traditional institutions in a liberal public order. These institutions, including family, church, local community, and the responsibility of ordinary people for their own well-being, are necessary to preserve basic human goods in that setting.
Conservatives have carried on the defense less by asserting the necessity of such institutions as part of a livable social order than by defending limited government, local control, and freedom of private action. That meant they opposed elites who run centralized national institutions, who are naturally at odds with limitations on their power.
They also rejected elite liberal thought, but without an aristocracy or authoritative hierarchical Church there has been no setting in which opposing traditions of thought could establish themselves. Hence the practical irrelevance of Old Right writers and intellectuals. In the absence of a setting in which their thought could take hold among members of an elite, it could exist only as idiosyncratic opinion.
Lacking both a theoretical grasp and inside understanding of politics, rank-and-file conservatives have been simple-minded, short-sighted, and easily manipulated. The best they could do, in most instances, was temporarily obstruct liberal innovations. Politicians have often taken symbolic stands in favor of popular traditions, but the serious business of governing is carried on by national elites, who are always skeptical of the value of tradition and eager to increase the power of centralized institutions.
Conservatives will continue to mistake the issues, act sporadically and inconsistently, and fight and lose misunderstood battles on ground chosen by their opponents, unless they become historically and theoretically more competent and develop more stable and intelligent leadership.
That has not come close to happening, and the problem has been made worse by by mobility, globalization, antidiscrimination laws, inclusivist ideology, pervasive electronic communications, the growth of the education, expertise, and entertainment industries, the substitution of commercial and bureaucratic relations for local and traditional ones, and the importation of tens of millions of foreigners with no attachment to American traditions.
So the problem is more difficult than ever, but until it is solved intellectual conservatism that is not hopelessly accommodationist will go the way of the movements we have discussed, and popular conservatism will go the way of the Buchanan and Trump movements.
A solution to the problem will require a way of life, backed by networks of institutions important in everyday life, that is able to support stable leadership and alternative traditions of thought. So a revival of conservatism in politics absolutely requires a revival of socially conservative institutions and ways of living. Examples of where that might start include parental control of education and more widely distributed economic power.
As the fate of the Old Right shows, political opposition to Leviathan and philosophical attempts to construct a rational system of social morality are not enough. So a solution would evidently require a religious revival capable of supporting social bonds and a substantive conception of the good life. But a religious revival faces acute difficulties. It depends on developments that are uncontrollable and unforeseeable, since the spirit blows where it listeth. And current liberal ideology views “fundamentalism”—religion that is not simply a poeticized version of liberalism—as hate and bigotry, so that its eradication becomes a fundamental government responsibility.
Even so, the ultimate prospect is favorable. Man is social. Society is concrete, and based on things we cannot master because they make us what we are. It depends on authority, which depends in turn on principles to which only tradition gives adequate access. And the current understanding of expertise cannot support knowledge of the kind needed to deal intelligently with the world. So the more the present order destroys tradition the more it plunges itself into stupidity, incompetence, and disorder.
Since permanent features of human life require political traditionalism, it will outlast whatever suppresses it. We cannot know when or how it will return, but return it will, and in the mean time our part is to keep it alive, live as well as we can, and do what we can to promote better things. The writers of the Old Right, through their intelligence, perspicacity, and courage, can help us do so. For that reason they must still be read.