Conservatism in Winter

When the previous issue of Modern
Age was being readied for the press,
the elections of 2008 were yet to be decided.
As this issue is prepared for print, we
approach the presidential inauguration of a
man who is arguably the most radical leftist
ever to have held the office. The winter
2009 issue of the journal might, therefore,
be said to mark the onset of a “winter” for
conservatism in American political affairs.
Modern Age does not, of course, have a political
program or a set of policy prescriptions
to offer as an antidote to this situation;
such is not our mission. It is worth
observing, however, that the election of
any Republican or any conservative hardly
seemed feasible during the past presidential
election, because the terms of political discourse
and hence the popular imagination
had been wholly captured by the rhetoric
of leftist materialism. Hence the mission of
Modern Age is to aid in recapturing the culture:
to make it possible for the American
people to see the world in terms of what
Russell Kirk, following Edmund Burke,
called the moral imagination, instead of mere
sensation; to act according to sober reflection
rather than willful reaction.

In the Republic, Plato famously stresses
the importance of music—by which he
means something like what we should call
the fine arts—to a sound political order. It is
for this reason that Modern Age lays so much
stress on music and literature. Irving Louis
Horowitz provides a remarkably insightful
and ground-breaking consideration of the
effects of high-quality audio recordings
on the way we respond to music, and R.J.
Stove’s review of a new biography of Sibelius
marks a step in the critical rehabilitation
of a composer whose music can actually
be enjoyed by ordinary listeners. In an
era when political campaigns undertake
to “rock the vote,” it behooves conservatives
to take serious account of the kind of
music dominating public spaces as well as
the iPods of our youth. Similarly, Thomas
Bertonneau furnishes more evidence that
compelling literature is almost inevitably
conservative at its core. It is important that
we argue this claim vigorously, since no
one whose assessment depended on the
popular film version of Out of Africa would
have inferred that Karen Blixen’s writings
evoke an essentially conservative vision
of reality, as Professor Bertonneau maintains.

Another sign of the ascendancy of leftist
modes of thought in public discourse,
both in North America and Europe, is
the repression and distortion of the Christian
heritage that is so crucial to Western
civilization. Hence our symposium on
Rémi Brague’s The Law of God could not
be more timely. Comprising essays by
Mark Shiffman, Ivan Kenneally, Ralph
Hancock, and Peter Augustine Lawler,
this symposium investigates the various
strategies, both learned and “waggish,”
by which Brague probes the flaws in the
modern world’s apparently massive structure
of secularism. In a related but more
particular case, John Ferns’s review of a
new edition of the Tudor Book of Homilies
shows that adherence to the wisdom of its
founding documents might have spared a
noble ecclesiastical institution much of its
current disarray and embarrassment.

This issue of Modern Age marks the
publication of the final installment in
Peter Hodgson’s four-part series on the
energy crisis. Conservatives must remain
constantly aware that science and the rapid
technological development that it has
made possible are an inescapable feature
of the modern world that we endeavor to
understand from a conservative perspective.
We hope that Professor Hodgson’s
arguments have provided a stimulus to
continuing discussion of the grave issues
he treats. Stephen Barr’s review of Fowler
and Kuebler’s Evolution Controversy likewise
calls our attention to an extremely important
book involving the impact of science
on public policy. Professor Barr’s piece,
like Professor Hodgson’s, is likely to be
provocative; but, taking into account once
more the recent election, it would seem
that we conservatives must above all spend
some time debating issues of this kind and
reconsidering our assumptions.

Ted McAllister’s review-essay on a
number of recent books on the history of
conservatism as a political movement takes
up precisely this topic of reassessment,
as he seeks to determine how effectively
the works he deals with give us a basis
for comprehending our current political
situation. Gerald Russello’s review of a
collection of conservative “conversion
narratives” also considers the history of
the conservative movement, but from the
personal perspective of individuals. Both
reviews suggest that, although conservatism
has not succumbed to what used to
be called an “identity crisis,” we might do
well to engage in an extended reflection
upon the relationship between conservative
ideas and practical politics, as well as
the way a pattern of ideas may reasonably
come to be regarded as authentically part
of the conservative vision.

The remaining two reviews deal with
books on a major figure of conservative
history and on a fundamental conservative
theme, thereby recalling us to the roots by
which our view of the world must continue
to be nourished. Ian Crowe focuses our
attention on the publication of the second
volume of a major biography of Edmund
Burke, a work of substantial and magisterial
scholarship. Kevin Gutzman reviews a
troubling account of the fate of constitutionalism
in the United States. Both these
reviews and the books they handle recur
to the inevitable tension between conservatism
as a political vision and the always
less-than-satisfactory result of actual political
activity. This tension is visible in the
anomalous relationship between Burke’s
political career and his career as a scholar,
and in the susceptibility of the original
American constitutional order, with all its
wisdom and formal perfection, to subversion
from within even in an era of ostensible
“strict constructionism.”

It is, finally, one of the goals of Modern
Age to publish work that seeks to become
part of the primary substance of conservative
culture as well as pieces whose
principal aim is to discuss the culture.
The poems by James Matthew Wilson
and William Bedford Clark evoke exceptionally
poignant visions of the melancholy
element of human experience most
famously summed up in a line of the Aeneid,
“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia
tangunt.” Richard Cross’s reminiscence of
his days as a newlywed young scholar in
Austria, in contrast, fairly glows with the
warmth of remembered joy. It embodies a
delight in a kind of cultural diversity that
seeks to embrace the roots of the Western
heritage with all its variation finally
resolving in unity; it is the antithesis of
the sterile ideology of “multiculturalism.”
Both the poems and the poetic prose are
efforts—in the phrase of T.S. Eliot—”To
purify the dialect of the tribe.”

—R.V. Young