Conservatism and Liberality - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Conservatism and Liberality

In this space, the Winter issue of Modern
Age dwelt briefly on the theme of “conservatism
in winter”; there will be no corresponding
reflection on “the springtime of
liberalism” in this Spring issue. Although
the popular media have in recent months
made much of the putative resurgence of
political liberalism, the liberal spirit thrives
today only among conservatives. Liberalism
is the attempt to make a political program
out of the personal virtue of liberality; that
is, of generosity or magnamity in the sharing
of worldly goods, in one’s attitude
toward his neighbor, in intellect, and in
cultural awareness. Liberality is a moral
habit of decent men and women, but it is a
difficult virtue to attain, because self-centeredness
and greed are besetting vices of
our unregenerate nature. Liberalism is the
futile effort to compensate for the absence
of this virtue among individuals by institutionalizing
it in government. Conservatism
is—over the long run of history—the
normal orientation of government, which
is meant to conserve the constitution, the
political identity of a community, so that
the people can go about their business. A
conservative government thus allows its
citizens to exercise the virtue of liberality
both as individuals and as participants
in families and other local institutions.
Liberalism, which usurps the rhetoric of
liberality, inevitably leads to a regime of
bureaucratic despotism, since virtue is an
attribute of human beings, not of institutions.
Its contemporary avatar is political
correctness, with its monolithic “diversity”
and intolerant enforcement of a highly selective
tolerance.

These observations are illustrated and
exemplified in various ways by the pieces
offered in this issue of Modern Age. In
“Postmodernism and European Memory,”
Ewa Thompson reports on the highly selective
deployment of memory as applied
to the horrors of World War II by a conference
at the German Historical Institute
in Washington, DC. Professsor Thompson
deplores what seems to be a “liberal” undertaking
for its illiberal erasure of any approaches
to the topic that are incompatible
with the prevailing materialist ideology of
the academic world.

Jeffrey Folks brings attention to the novels
of Kent Haruf, who creates a compelling
fictional world in which old-fashioned virtue
is a better answer to the suffering and
sorrow occasioned by what is now called
“family dysfunction” than governmental
intervention. Haruf is not identifiable as a
conservative in a politically partisan sense,
but like every honest literary artist, his
moral vision resonates with a conservative
view of reality.

Dwight Macdonald was a radical critic
and a hero of liberalism in the Fifties and
Sixties, but he has been virtually forgotten
by the Left. It takes the liberality of a conservative
to rescue him from oblivion and
discover his essentially traditional cultural
temperament. Moreover, John Rodden and
John Rossi’s investigation of Macdonald’s
FBI file reminds us that conservatives should
always be skeptical of meddlesome government
agencies, which can so easily become
self-absorbed and self-serving. As we have
recently learned, it is also easy for a federal
administration to turn the attention of
the FBI from the Communist threat to the
“threat” posed by returning veterans of the
Iraq War.

Modernity is—quite fittingly for this
journal—a preoccupation of a number of
the pieces in this issue. Drawing on the
work of Christopher Dawson and Alfred
North Whitehead, among others, Jude
Dougherty reminds us that the specifically
Christian view of the relation between
God and His creation was crucial in the
emergence of modern science and hence
of the “modernity” of the modern world.
Thaddeus J. Kozinski, in a lengthy essay in
review of Charles Taylor’s magnum opus,
A Secular Age, looks at the matter from the
opposite perspective and admonishes us
that Christians and other traditional thinkers
cannot merely vilify modernity as the
enemy. Rather, it is inescapably the world
in which we live, and with which we must
come to terms, and which we must seek to
influence according to conservative principles.

All the remaining reviews likewise deal
with books that confront, with varying
degrees of success according to our reviewers,
some aspect of modernity. Marc
Guerra is impressed with the learning and
force of Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God, but
finds his uncritical acceptance of Enlightenment
rationalism and secularism unsatisfactory.
Hugh Mercer Curtler admires
John Carroll’s postmortem on the world
we seek to conserve in The Wreck of Western
Culture, but finds it premature; while
Michael Henry likewise admires Harvey
Mansfield’s defense of manliness, but
thinks that it perhaps concedes too much
to the egalitarian assumptions of modern
feminism. Finally, Paul Hollander reviews
Lee Congdon’s biography of George Kennan—
a man who played an important role
in the formation of modern American diplomacy,
but who in important ways rejected
the very modernity he helped to
establish.

Under “Documentation,” often a forum
for observations of the contemporary
European scene, we present a translation
of an assessment of the situation of conservatism
in Spain by Antonio Arcones of the
Fundación Burke. It would be difficult to
furnish a better example of how liberalism
in politics leads sooner or later to the
abolition of the actual liberty of individuals
and families and the marginalization of
mediating institutions at the hands of an
ideological bureaucracy.

Verse appears in this issue by the distinguished
North Carolina poet Fred Chappell,
who has provided an adaptation—an
imitation in the Renaissance humanist
sense—of Horace’s Epistles I.xviii. Chappell
appropriates the Roman poet’s format
and structure and applies the same skeptical
and witty gaze to twenty-first century
America as his predecessor had to Augustan
Rome. Readers who take the pains to
consult the Horatian original will be even
more impressed by Chappell’s skill and invention
and more strongly drawn to virtue
as medium vitiorum et utrimque reductum.

—R. V. Young

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