As we prepare this final issue of the 2008
volume of Modern Age for the press, a
long, arduous, and often rather bizarre presidential
campaign is drawing to a close, and its
outcome will be known by the time the issue
is in print. No matter which slate of candidates
wins, the result would have been almost
unthinkable a year ago. Barack Obama was
still a little-known long shot, and Joseph
Biden was a perennial also-ran. John McCain’s
campaign seemed to have foundered hopelessly,
and Sarah Palin was virtually unheard
of outside Alaska. For the editors it is a source
of some consolation that Modern Age is not in
the business of political prognostication.
This journal is, however, concerned about
politics in much the same way as conservatism
itself. Just as Modern Age is not involved
with predicting the winners of elections or
endorsing candidates or platforms, so conservatism
is not a political program, but rather a
political vision. Liberal pundits who have in
recent months gleefully proclaimed the end
of an era of conservative political influence
and success begun by Ronald Reagan have,
therefore, mistaken the essence of conservatism.
No political party or electoral outcome
has ever been the ideal fulfillment of conservative
principles. This is true in part because
various conservative thinkers interpret these
principles from contrasting and sometimes
contentious perspectives, and their differences
will not be definitively resolved before
the Parousia. Still more important, there is no
single set of policy prescriptions that any
particular thinker could confidently identify
as the complete realization even of his own
version of conservatism. It is not surprising
that the first President Bush, with his somewhat
equivocal relationship to conservatism,
was bemused by the “vision thing.”
As a comprehensive account of the fundamental
realities of the experience of mankind
and the human situation, the rôle of conservatism
is to serve as the moral and cultural
inspiration practical, electoral politics and a
check on its extravagances. Men and women
of genuine conservative conviction will often
engage in party politics and run for office, but
the very nature of campaigning and governing
will make it virtually impossible that all of their
political activities will be strictly conservative.
Conservative thinkers and voters will sometimes
look upon practical political developments
with approval, but more often with
varying degrees of anxiety and dismay.
Conservatism is thus the antithesis of the
modern liberal or progressive view that there
is a political solution for every problem. For
this reason, conservatives ought to be more
patient than liberals in the face of political setbacks
and less rancorous toward political rivals.
Eschewing abstract ideological imperatives,
conservatives will attempt to see social
arrangements, governmental programs, and
electoral campaigns in an historical perspective
and with a temper that is generous,
humane, and restrained. It is the purpose of
Modern Age to provide a forum for such views.
Ronald Reagan is widely and rightly regarded
as the president who has come closest
to governing according to the norms of the
conservative intellectual movement that
emerged in the United States after World
War II. Nevertheless, it is clear from the
debates within his own Republican Party
and among conservative commentators that
there is a good deal of disagreement about
how to restore the Reagan legacy. In “Fighting
Bob vs. Silent Cal: The Conservative
Tradition from La Follette to Taft and Beyond,”
Jeff Taylor begins by suggesting that
perhaps Reagan himself was mistaken about
the real origin and nature of his project.
Professor Taylor proceeds to suggest that we
may well need to reconsider our usual assumptions
about which politicians have come
closest to articulating truly conservative notions
of government.
His argument that the career of the “progressive”
Robert La Follette is more in keeping
with conservatism and with the Reagan
administration’s policies than the presidency
of Calvin Coolidge will, doubtless, be controversial.
At the very least, however, Professor
Taylor’s essay should stimulate a salutary
debate over how best the conservative vision
might be embodied in a concrete platform at
a time when the political winds seem to have
shifted radically to the left. Such a reconsideration
will necessarily entail, moreover, careful
reflection on the historical development
of conservatism.
Jeffrey Folks’s account of the poet Vachel
Lindsay may, likewise, seem to highlight a
figure of doubtful credentials from a conservative
perspective. Dr. Folks duly notes that
Lindsay was associated with the populism of
William Jennings Bryant, and that he may
easily be perceived as a radical progressive.
Conservatism most assuredly can never be
satisfied with a populist, much less a progressive,
political program; nevertheless, we do
well to remember that Ronald Reagan’s
sensitivity to the worries and aspirations of
ordinary people—his populist touch, as it
were—was an essential element in his success.
If his elusive legacy is to be recovered,
then conservatives may well have to take into
account the issues articulated by La Follette
and by what Dr. Folks calls “Vachel Lindsay’s
Covenant with America.”
Providing a variety of perspectives on
subjects of interest to conservatives is, then, a
principal goal of Modern Age. Our last issue
featured an essay by Meins Coetsier deploying
Eric Voegelin’s concept of symbolization
in order to expound the mystical experience
of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish victim of the Nazi
Holocaust. In this issue, Michael Henry subjects
Voegelin’s own religious views to rigorous
scrutiny and concludes that his relation to
Christian orthodoxy, specifically on the
dogma of the Incarnation, is at best ambiguous.
While Professor Henry finds that
Voegelin’s notion of metaxy enriches our
“understanding of the depths of consciousness,”
he finds “greater depths of wisdom and
mystery” in the doctrine of the Incarnation.
Conservative thought thus proceeds not in
the manner of an ideology, binding itself to
the pronouncements of its sages, but instead
brings the sources of its own ideas within the
scope of its critique. Among conservatives,
no one occupies the place of Marx, Darwin,
or Freud, whose names are attached to “isms.”
As its title assumes, Modern Age is dedicated
to reflection upon the modern world,
broadly conceived. Science is not merely an
inescapable presence in this era; it is one of
the forces that has shaped it. J. F. Johnston, Jr.,
provides a timely reminder that, because of its
powerful and persuasive status in our time, its
standing can be abused and its inherent limitations
ignored in order to denigrate human
dignity by means of false philosophy. P. E.
Hodgson, on the other hand, furnishes an
example of the proper use of modern natural
science in the third of his series of four articles
on the energy crisis. Unlike many conservatives,
Professor Hodgson takes the threat of
global warming very seriously. His sober,
lucid, and thoughtful account of the science
involved, as well as of the possible implications
of the phenomenon, offers a basis for
reflection on the contingencies of our situation
for men of differing views on both the
science and the politics involved.
Finally, we publish an essay that no one
will find controversial: Thomas H. Landess’s
tribute to Mark Royden Winchell, who
passed away earlier this year. Mark Winchell
was undoubtedly one of the most gifted
writers and careful scholars of our time. As
Professor Landess points out, his achievements
were numerous and varied, but he will
be best remembered for his superb literary
biographies. His account of the lives of Cleanth
Brooks and Donald Davidson, two Southern
conservatives, are models of their kind, unlikely
to be superseded in the foreseeable
future. Nevertheless, as Professor Landess
also observes, Winchell devoted equal skill to
his biography of the Northern Jewish liberal,
Leslie Fiedler, blending equal measures of
shrewdness and sympathy. The self-effacing
tone in Mark Winchell’s scholarship was one
important quality that marked him out as a
specifically conservative thinker. True conservatives
are never pinioned by ideological
abstractions, and this freedom affords them
the intellectual flexibility within the matrix
of principled tradition to regard the attitudes
and arguments of rivals with fair-minded
disinterest.
The poems in this issue include an additional
tribute to the memory of Mark Royden
Winchell in the verse of David Middleton.
These two poems highlight Winchell’s gifts
as a biographer and as a reviewer respectively,
and in the latter instance Professor Middleton
finds occasion to extend his poetic meditations
on Millet’s paintings of rural life first
published in The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy.
These poems, like the others in this issue by
William Bedford Clark and Wilmer Mills,
seek to capture in language an intellectually
and emotionally satisfying image of human
experience—in W. K. Wimsatt’s arresting
phrase, a “verbal icon.” Insofar as poetry is an
art of concrete experience, it is a conservative
art, because conservatism seeks to anchor
political activity in concrete realities rather
than utopian idealism. A conservative political
order will, then, in some measure, reflect
the wisdom embodied in literature as well as
in theoretical speculation.
Among the reviews in this fall issue of
Modern Age is our final monument to Mark
Royden Winchell, his own work, a review of
an anthology of pieces first published in the
New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball. The
review is generously appreciative, although
Winchell does take the collection to task for
insularity, for forgetting that Manhattan is just
one island in a very large continent. He notes
that after the model for the New Criterion,
T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, ceased publication, those
journals that took up its task in the 1940s and
1950s of “correcting taste”—the Sewanee Review,
the Kenyon Review, Scrutiny, the Partisan
Review, and such—often published the same
authors. Winchell remarks with sorrow that
this kind of eclectic openness to divergent
views is almost unthinkable on the contemporary
scene.
Among the other reviews in this issue,
Modern Age does offer a certain diversity of
outlook. M. D. Aeschliman’s review of
Chester Finn’s Trouble Maker is a largely
favorable treatment of a polemical memoir by
a man who is generally regarded as an architect
of neoconservative education policy.
George Carey’s review of Bill Kauffman’s
Ain’t My America is, on the other hand, an
equally favorable review of a fierce attack on
neoconservative foreign policy. What the
two pieces both do is to furnish sufficient
evidence and argument to cheer those inclined
to agree and challenge their critics.
Most of the reviews, however, deal with
books that provide a knowledge of various
aspects of the history of Western culture and
thus remind us of what it is we are supposed
to be conserving. There is a biography of
Locke, a treatise on university education, a
history of the struggle between religion and
secular ideologies in the modern world, and
a view of the Asian elements in Russia.
Finally, Thomas B. Fowler’s review of Darwin
Loves You offers a skeptical account of an
attempt by a professor of English to domesticate
Darwin, and R. J. Stove reviews a book
about the undervalued composer, Johann
Nepomuk Hummel, showing that there is
more to music than romantic Angst.
Politicians seeking office always promise
to make things better; that is, to change
things, even if “CHANGE” is not the central
term of their campaign rhetoric. Conservatism
is, as we learn from Russell Kirk, mainly
about the Permanent Things. It is difficult to
imagine a party platform in modern America
promising to preserve traditional mores and
foster virtue. The electronic media with their
high definition sensationalism and “sound
bites” are hardly an amenable venue for
solemn reflection on the hard realities of the
human condition. Although most conservatives
will have little difficulty determining
who among the candidates for various offices
is least inimical to the Permanent Things,
elections are unlikely to be occasions of
elation very often. By the same token, we
shall do well to temper our frustration and
resist the temptation to despair, no matter
how disheartening the judgment of King
Demos may turn out to be. Modern Age will
continue to focus its greatest attention on
culture, society, and longterm political developments:
we need a purified and refined
Polis before day-to-day politics can yield a
satisfactory result. Above all, we must never
forget that politics (like that other distinctively
modern activity, science) is finally
limited in its influence on the real sources of
human happiness: “For we have not here a
lasting city.”
— R.V. Young
