Moving Soon

I'll be moving Exit Cave Right to WordPress within the next few days, so stay tuned. The new address will just be: http://exitcaveright.com. Check in if you want to see ECR's new look in development. And, as always, please send any comments to exitcaveright@gmail.com.

Searching for the Conservative Soul

By way of Andrew Sullivan, I came across this interesting blessay ("blog essay"--did I just coin that?) by Nicola Karass at Iqra'i. It is a provocative reflection on how the author developed a conservative political-philosophical outlook, and adds some new criteria to my own ongoing study of what separates the conservative from the liberal mind. Karass emphasizes the importance of duty and community (and tradition) as bulwarks against a solipsistic nihilsm that can make us susceptible to totalitarian ideologies. But she seems to see these commitments to society and responsibility as mutually exclusive with the idea of reason. This I find, well, unreasonable.

I do, however, get the point: we should recognize that pure reason can never provide a complete and coherent basis for understanding the meaning of life, so we must emphasize love, family, and society as the fundamental pillars of our existence. This is difficult to accept because it sounds like an argument in support of traditional institutions simply for fear of the consequences of not believing in them. And I have never been comfortable with arguments that say something should be considered "good" simply because the alternative is "bad." If we do accept that community is good because individualism is bad, how are we to take the next step to determine what the right kind of community is? How are we to determine the nature of true human virtue, the kind of virtue that can sustain community over the long-term? How else can we arrive at answers to these questions but through unaided reason?

Speaking of the tension between individualistic rationalism and collectivist traditionalism, here is the author's mini-autobiographical thesis on the history of the twentieth century (one of my favorite topics):

I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man's isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity. Those were the things I had hated in myself, and they were the conditions I saw described in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.

If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he'll cling to ideology as though his life depends on it. (His ego does.) Wherever it takes him, he won't dare to let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating in the abyss again. I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself.

This is a thoughtful diagnosis, but it implies that millions and millions of individual existential crises were what allowed the utopian ideologies of Hitler and Lenin to win the hearts and minds of the people; that the rapid and sweeping acceptance of Enlightenment rationalism, and its subsequent inability to answer our most fundamental questions, paved the way to totalitarianism. But do "the masses" really have existential crises?

There is another take on this old story, and I will paraphrase here from Isaiah Berlin's shrewd analysis of it. Berlin argued, if I have read him correctly, that the roots of totalitarianism (especially Nazism) can be found in German romanticism, and that romanticism was a conscisous response to, and rejection of, the French Enlightenment, rather than an ideology that merely profitted from its abject failure. In other words, there is a simpler explanation for why things turned out the way they did: human beings are naturally inclined to gravitate toward ideology, any ideology, that makes our incoherent world intelligible. This understanding, I think, is what must form the core of any truly conservative outlook, an acceptance of incoherence. On this point, I think that Karass would agree. Indeed, she says that this is exactly what led her away from "Enlightenment fundamentalism." But similarly, an uncritical faith in community and institutions (which I do not believe she is advocating, but that seems to follow from her arguments) was the psychological pathology at the heart of romanticism and its murderous, nihilistic offspring. It was an emphasis on one's own "special" community to the exclusion, and often persecution, of the "other," whether that community was defined as the Aryan race or the workers of the world.

So Karass seems to have gone from one end to the other. I would substitute her categorical rejection of rationalism and a firm commitment to community with the following maxim: It is the conservative's job to remain permanently uncomfortable with existence. Because it is precisely when we think we have arrived at final and comprehensive answers--whether they reside in reason or in community--that we actually become susceptible to totalitarianism. We shoud firmly accept, as the late Judge Learned Hand once declared, that "The true spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right." This belief was at the heart of the American Founding, and it is, sadly, a belief that has all but evaporated in today's destructive partisan politics.

Conservatism should be about ideas and ideals, not about emotional appeals to interpersonal connections, and there is simply no way to arrive at the "right" ideas without reason. This element of balance is what seems to be missing from the worldview that Karass has arrived at.

A final world on politics and its relationship to conservative thought: There have been some largely unnoticed but profoundly important calls for a revival of the great conservative tradition of intellectual discourse--these calls must continue. The Republican Party in the United States has done terrible harm to the conservative tradition, and this is why it is now perhaps more important than ever to separate the party's politics from conservative philosophy. This is why I was a bit concerned with the title that Karras chose for her essay (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy). Though I realize she meant her title as a humurous barb (and I appreciate the allusion to Dr. Strangelove), if true conservatism is to achieve the revival it deserves, we must divorce it completely from the general disaster that has been the presidency of George W. Bush.

As a friend of mine recently remarked about the GOP: "If I want open borders, big government, affirmative action, and a messianic foreign policy I will just vote Democrat." It is a shame that we have come to a point where this comment rings true, and that we have commentators like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, in their book Grand New Party, essentially conceeding defeat to the progressive, administrative state, and trying to determine how to move forward by making big government work for Republican principles, whatever those happen to be today. Despite discouraging treatises such as this one, there is a noble tradition of conservative thought out there in need of a new vanguard. That tradition does not need to be re-crafted today so much as re-emphasized and re-explained. But that will take creativity, time, and an immense amount of effort. I agree with Andrew Sullivan that essays like the one Karass has crafted are essential in this effort, and I applaud her immensely for having had the courage to share her story of intellectual evolution. My story is a similar one. So let us continue our search for the true nature of the conservative soul...

Quote of the Day II

I have just finished the Mailer letters excerpts in the most recent New Yorker and I must say they were fascinating. I have not previously read much of his work, but his writing, even in this casual form, is wonderful. There is an honesty to it, a self-doubt, a willingness to question ideology under the weight of the world's immense complexity--these are rare things to come across in writing these days. I must read more of Mailer...

To William F. Buckley, Jr.

January, 1966

Dear Bill,

I send you the enclosed not because I love National Review so much, for I don’t—it’s not so good as it ought to be, and often it’s tiresome, especially when one knows in advance what your trusted old line contributors are going to say—but as a personal mark of respect to you. Your letter was the best letter I ever read by an editor asking for funds. . . .

One request. Please keep my contribution in the secret crypts. It is not that I fear public opinion so much as ceaseless repetition. Repetition kills the soul and I would not wish to spend one hundred evenings in succession explaining to various outraged and somewhat stupid people in calm clear fashion my complex motives for giving a gift to a magazine for which I feel no affection and to an editor with whom on ninety of a hundred points I must rush to disagree. They would not understand that good writing is good writing, and occasionally carries the day.

Yours,

Norman

Quote of the Day

"I hate Russia (the govt. not the people), I do not admire her as you do. Admitting that her offensiveness and organization were dictated by the pressure of the world, the fact still remains that she stands now as a strangler to freedom of the individual, and I fear she is on a totalitarian trek from which there is no retreat."

-Norman Mailer, from a letter to Beatrice Mailer, February, 1946

This and other letters from Mailer were recently published in The New Yorker article In the Ring: Grappling With the Twentieth Century.

Trilling: The Liberal Imagination and its Discontents

Louis Menand wrote an (occassionally) insightful essay on the novelist and critic Lionel Trilling for this week's New Yorker. It was Trilling's book, The Liberal Imagination, that put him on the map, says Menand, as it was one of the works, along with Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center, George Orwell's 1984, and Richard Crossman's The God That Failed, that "helped make the case for liberal anti-communism." This was of course a weighty debate in the years after World War II, as the Soviet machine made its presence felt and its intentions toward the West clear. There were a great many on the American Left in those days who were so worried about the totalitarian threat from right-wing fascism that they were blind to the totalitarian threat from left-wing Stalinism. It was Trilling and other liberals who had the intellectual courage to stand opposed to the naivete of many of their ideological comrades, and expose Soviet communism for what it truly was. Menand cites this excerpt from Trilling's letters, for example:

I expect a quantum of injustice in any imperium, expect contradictions as the price of order—what brings me to the puking-point is the fine feelings. And what brings me to the fighting-point is the increasingly sure sense that Stalinist power aims at the annihilation of anything that does not contribute to power. There has never been a power-ideology that so wished to destroy every human quality that did not add to itself.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trilling that comes out of Menand's essay is that not only was he critical of leftist supporters of the Soviet system, but that he had the integrity to question the very nature of modern liberalism itself. He saw literature, with its exposition of the great complexities of the human condition, as a kind of rebuttal to the liberal's faith in the possibility of finding a political system that could fulfill every imaginable progressive dream.

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple—for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique
relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

Later in the essay, a similar point is made about the facile liberal hope for unrelenting human progress:

When Freud published “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in 1930, Trilling wrote a review dismissing the book as absurd. But the magazine he wrote it for, The New Freeman, folded, and the review never appeared. That was when Trilling was still a Marxist. After 1950, he became infatuated with “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and especially with Freud’s notion of a “death drive.” The death drive is one of the most fantastic creatures in the Freudian menagerie, and Trilling took the concept exactly as Freud intended it: as naming an innate, biological resistance that people have to being made better. The death drive was designed to discredit the claim, made by renegade Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and, later on, Herbert Marcuse, that the right kind of political and economic change would do away with “discontent,” with neurosis. Freud’s argument, Trilling wrote in his last major work, “Sincerity and Authenticity,” “may be thought to stand like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life.”

Finally, Menand emphasizes Trilling's skepticism over the student revolts of the 1960s era, this not so much a case of liberal naivete over the tragic nature of the universe, but about the errors of political commitment motivated purely by a desire for a cause, rather than by the merits. The subject of Trilling's essay On the Teaching of Modern Literature, Menand tells us, was a complaint about the eagerness of his students at Columbia "to engage in the process that we might call the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive." And a few paragraphs later: "The students didn't really care about the issues; they simply wanted 'the gratifications of being political.'"

It requires vigilance, to be sure, to steer clear of such psychological minefields on the path to philosophical discovery.