Timeless Conservative Intellectuals

Four thinkers provide a voice for today’s movement

By Matthew P. Cavedon

In this age in which conservatism, and social conservatism in particular, is ridiculed as backwards and irrelevant, there are a handful of voices crying out in the intellectual wilderness for a more vigorous sense of traditionalism. They are urging us to consider the timeless, the sacred, the true, and the good as guideposts for reviving our culture and society. While their voices comment on and often impact politics, they are about far more than that: these intellectuals devote themselves to an understanding of the human person and ensure that the best the West has offered humanity is not forgotten.

Unfortunately, you’ve never read their essays. Modern academia is interested in the possibility of remaking the world, not bowing before preserved wisdom. Acknowleding ancient wisdom does not offer so many chances to be novel, and it denies academics the opportunity to carve out a superior position in society, a terrifying prospect for the modern academic. Faced with such a prospect, it is far more appealing to elevate modern intellectuals than to honor tradition. Perhaps this is the reason why we read Karl Marx’s utopian ramblings rather than Edmund Burke’s observations on the limitations of revolutionary aspirations, or why Harvard students are better acquainted with Michel Foucault’s theories of socialist academic liberation than Aristotle’s notions of what reality objectively is. Free love, class struggle, deconstructing rational discourse, and the centrally-planned society give academics a far more honored role in changing the world than do religion, tradition, and reason.

Conservative intellectualism continues to flourish, albeit far removed from the classroom. The four thinkers profiled here are not utopians trying to remake humanity and society. Instead, they are contemplating and striving to apply anew those eternal truths that make for the good life worth living. Our generation would do well to listen and abide by their wisdom in a way our parents have not.

Spengler, as channeled by David P. Goldman. After a decade of anonymously writing for Hong Kong’s Asia Times Online under the name of a long dead German thinker, Spengler revealed himself to be Goldman, now an associate editor at First Things, and a former investment banker. Spengler, a student of German, classical music, and Jewish theology, writes regularly about the best and worst of our culture, plus the changing face of the world emerging from globalization. As he put it in his identity-revealing article in April:

“Europe’s high culture and its capacity to train universal minds had deteriorated beyond repair; one of the last truly universal European minds belongs to the octogenarian Pope Benedict XVI. In 1996, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had said in an interview published as Das Salz der Erde, ‘Perhaps we have to abandon the idea of the popular Church. Possibly, we stand before a new epoch of Church history with quite different conditions, in which Christianity will stand under the sign of the mustard seed, in small and apparently insignificant groups, which nonetheless oppose evil intensively and bring the Good into the world.’ The best mind in the Catholic Church squarely considered the possibility that Christianity itself might shrink into seeming insignificance.

“Renewal could not come from music, nor literature, nor the social sciences. The wells of culture had run dry, because they derived from faith to begin with.”

In aiming to restore the West’s confidence in itself by starting at its spiritual roots, Spengler is undoing the damage of generations of academics trying to cut us off from the past, abandoning so much truth in an effort to purge misplaced guilt over the decisions of our ancestors. Balance and wise judgment, as Spengler understands, are far better remedies for past wrongdoing than ignorant modernism.

Columnist Ross G. Douthat ‘02. A Harvard graduate, editor emeritus of this publication, and a former senior editor for the Atlantic. Perhaps the most explicitly political of the four writers listed here, Douthat has co-authored a book with Reihan Salaam on why the GOP needs to embrace the idea of a paternalistic welfare state. Many of his pieces deal with political concerns at their surface, but Douthat’s rhetoric and philosophy are informed by a deeply Catholic, conservative intellectualism. Upon leaving Atlantic Monthly, Douthat praised its editors:

“James Bennet and everyone around him are trying to do the same thing that Michael Kelly tried to do, and William Whitworth before him, and so on all the way back to the bearded eminences of 1850s: Produce a magazine about ideas that isn’t ideological; a magazine about politics that isn’t partisan; a magazine about culture that isn’t boosterish or snobbish; and a magazine that reports the hell out of the biggest stories in the world.”

Douthat is worth reading because he does much the same: Douthat traces differing notions of unborn rights within liberalism, rather than casting stones from a perch on the right. He criticizes the GOP for foolishly supporting open-ended health care entitlements, then hits progressives for trying to control when we die. He tries to find the best in the values expressed in Judd Apatow’s films, without becoming vulgar or common himself. The whole time, he is subtly connecting modern readers with the ideas that formed and will sustain civilization. By seeking the best of the new and the old, Douthat shows a path for conservatism that is neither reactionary nor laughably wed to current fads.

Pope Benedict XVI. As the spiritual leader of over one billion living Catholics, the Pope is a major voice in world affairs. Unfortunately, few Americans read what he has to say about human nature, social morality, and other big questions.

The Pope is far from an ideologue. Following in the steps of his predecessors, he released a letter dealing with the global economy and social morality this summer, addressed to “all people of good will.” Entitled Caritas in veritate, or “Charity through Truth,” it deals with issues ranging from multiculturalism to finance to family values. None of it is meant to be true solely for Catholics or Christians. In Caritas in veritate as well as many of his other addresses, the Pope strives to make his message accessible to everyone by making appeals to universal truth, reason, and human nature.

It would wrong to label the Pope a conservative in a strictly political sense, as he aims for far more essential truths than politics can provide, but his writings breathe with a conservative spirit intent on finding and communicating the truth. The Pope’s reflections on environmentalism and the family in Caritas in Veritate serve as examples of this traditionalist, and engaged, intellect:

“In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.”

The Pope’s thinking is complex, and his blending of foundational morality with worldly concerns is well worth pondering for any serious conservative.

Rod Dreher, the Crunchy Con. A convert to Eastern Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism, Dreher is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and a blogger at Beliefnet. As a homeschooling, organic-eating, television-eschewing lover of nature, Dreher is not your average conservative.

His posts talk about his unique blend of cultural traditionalism and modern conservatism, two concepts that do not always mesh well. In particular, Dreher is quite critical of materialist Republicans who want nothing other than an indulgent economy, all morality aside. In one of his earliest posts, Dreher drew out his out-of-season philosophy and where he and his fellow crunchy-cons are coming from:

“Much of our crunchy conservatism comes from simply being carried along by the tide of our lives, and discovering by trial and error things that work well. But it’s also grounded in the basic attitudes we’ve long held. That, generally speaking, Small and Local and Particular and Old are better. That beauty in all its forms is important to the good life. That the bright glare of television and the cacophony of media culture make it too hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. That we are citizens before we are consumers.”

Reclaiming a sense of humanity and social culture in an isolated, alienating time in history may be a chance for conservatism to reach out to young people once again. Social capital, civil society, and voluntary community that expects people to fulfill responsibilities are a healthy and attractive alternative to commercialism, secularism, and the welfare state that will dominate America in the next few years, and Dreher will be one of the voices showing people the way back to a human lifestyle.

These four men matter because they prove that conservatism is not nearly as outmoded and provincial as many of its opponents gleefully claim that it is. Social conservatism has a tattered image, and is nearly ignored at this point by academia, but Spengler, Douthat, the Pope, and Dreher show that this is more of a political choice than a sign of conservatism’s demise. Conservatism after all, is about the timeless. It is quite willing to be out-of-season when wrong ideas prevail, even for long periods of time.

Certainly, individualism, materialism, and a general disdain for old, dead white men are popular now. But sexual libertinism, radical egalitarianism, and total secularism are anomalies in human history. While they may make sense in the minds of academics, they lead to the devaluation of human life and the forfeiture of precious wisdom.

The price we have paid for our sexual indulgence is fifty million lives lost to abortion, along with any kind of consistent definition of what constitutes a living human person. Our egalitarian assumptions has brought about an unwillingness to let unprofitable industries die so that the gifts of ordinary people can be channeled into productive endeavors, and an education system that considers J-pop and the Eve Ensler’s anatomically and vulgarly titled play to be the equivalents of Mozart and Milton. Our newfound secularism has yielded a belief that apes deserve more legal protection than comatose humans.

Long after the dust has settled on the destructive tendencies and irrational fads of this age, the timeless aspects of humanity shall remain. As Dreher eloquently put it, Family, Beauty, the Natural World, and other Timeless Things are what really matter. Conservatism is the effort to preserve these timeless things.

Conservatism is not going anywhere. If you want to take it more seriously than the dime-a-dozen pundits and political hacks do, either to dismantle it or to bring it into the new century, these men are the ones you ought to be reading. Those who reject their legitimacy lack the ability to rise above that unfortunate fad of our confused time.