I'm a neo-conservative and don't always agree with the "traditional conservative" intellectuals -- holding that social change involving individual behavior is not always a threat to the order -- but still, I often I find myself intrigued by the wisdom and deeper philosophical vision in the writings of the Protestant and Catholic conservative thinkers.
The traditionalists point out certain inescapable truths: freedom and individuality are essential American values, yet despite the fact that leftist progressive or right-wing libertarian movements in the twentieth century have led to brave new thinking; the new secular plans of greater liberty: don't work. We still have a breakdown of morality, a conspicuous shattering of social bonds and family structures, and continue to experience shrinking codes of common decency and interpersonal mores. This happens even when the Right comes to political power. Why?
Here are a few deep books that deal with these subjects from a traditional perspective:
*** First, a book recommended to me by my cousin-in-law Mark Franz of Shafter, California; his son David has studied with the author: The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil by James Davison Hunter (Basic Books, 2000). According to the back cover, the book: "traces the death of character to the disintegration of the moral and social conditions that make character possible in the first place." The author focuses on the problem of the education of character -- and how America hopelessly yearns to encourage character, but without realizing it is only the requisite limits and obligations on individuals which would make it work. Yet this seems impossible to realize since it contradicts American individualism.
Then, Eric Miller's article "Alone in the Academy" in the February 2004 issue of First Things provides three other books:
*** Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills by Christopher Shannon (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Shannon was one of Christopher Lasch's students at the University of Rochester. (Lasch wrote the 1979 best-seller The Culture of Narcissim: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.)
*** Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1980; 2nd edition 1997). Miller says MacIntyre is "perhaps the dominant moral philosopher of the last third of the twentieth century," and that MacIntyre "had moved from Marxism to Thomism" by the publication of this book.
*** George Packer's Blood of the Liberals (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001) is not written by a Christian, but of which Miller writes: "George Packer’s beautifully crafted memoir...provides a poignant personal rendering of [these] development[s]. The grandson of a self-proclaimed Jeffersonian Congressman from Alabama and the son of a self-consciously liberal law professor (and a Stanford University provost during the late 1960s), Packer tells, with disarming frankness, a three-generational story about what has happened to a country that seems unable to bind itself together in ways that honor its venerable, organizing ideals of citizenship."
There you have it. A few more notes about each book, along with quotes, follows....
******* Concerning James Davison Hunter's The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil, here are a few quotes from the opening section of the book -- called "Postmortem":
"Character is dead. Attempts to revive it will yield little. Its time has passed.
"The irony is sharp. The death of character comes at a time when the call to 'renew values' and to 'restore character' is especially loud, persistent, universal -- not to mention urgent....
"Even so, a restoration of character as a common feature within American society and a common trait of its people will not likely occur any time soon. The social and cultural conditions that make character possible are no longer present and no amount of political rhetoric, legal maneuvering, educational policy making, or money can change that reality. Its time has passed.
"Character is formed in relation to convictions and is manifested in the capacity to abide by those convictions even in, especially in, the face of temptation. This being so, the demise of character begins with the destruction of creeds, the convictions, and the 'god-terms' that made those creeds sacred to us and inviolable within us.
"This destruction occurs simultaneously with the rise of 'values.' Values are truths that have been deprived of their commanding character....The very word 'value' signifies the reduction of truth into utility, taboo, to fashion, conviction to mere preference; all provisional, all exchangeable. Both values and 'lifestyle' -- a way of living that reflects the accumulation of one's values -- bespeak a world in which nothing is sacred....
"We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don't really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price to too high for us to pay."
******* Concerning Christopher Shannon's Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills, Eric Miller's article says Shannon is even more pessimistic than Lasch:
"The Culture of Narcissm...summed up and deepened a conviction shared by many that Americans were changing, becoming less able and willing to practice citizenship, exchanging the common life for, as he put it, 'purely personal preoccupations.' Lasch tied this historical shift in character to the ongoing advance of liberal capitalism, with its ever-colonizing market and ever-expanding state. 'The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies,' he said. 'Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence.'
"It was a powerful argument. It was also precisely the type of argument -- a jeremiad -- that Shannon, two decades later, called at once understandable, monotonous, and futile. For Shannon, the ending of the American story was already scripted, and even a collective turning away from corporate capitalism wouldn't remove the fact that America's deepest (and sole) point of unity was the individual, and the individual alone -- a laughably weak foundation upon which to construct anything like a 'commonwealth,' 'republic,' or even a 'community.'"
Miller notes that:
"It was Shannon’s position as a Christian writing within the academy that helped to account for my own grateful and enthusiastic reception of his arguments. I suspected, as I made my way through his book, that Shannon felt as uncomfortable in the modern American university as I did, and his book seemed at least in part an effort to probe the roots of his unease and to explain his findings to his (uncomprehending) peers and colleagues. What provoked Shannon (and me) wasn’t simply a wrongheaded 'worldview,' or some other species of philosophical abstraction in the university. Rather, it was a way of life -- the actual living out by real people of this 'rational alternative to tradition.' By the century’s end this way of life was standard within the American university, where both Shannon and I, as fledgling Christian scholars, found ourselves uneasily living and moving and having our being.
"One obvious feature of this university-sanctioned-and-sustained way of life is its depleted understanding of marriage and sexuality, and its accompanying commitment to oppose any who would speak against this understanding. Although this received wisdom is conveyed in the language of liberation, I discovered that it provided cover for lives that were often full of hopelessness. One of my classmates was about to be married, and I remember hearing another student wisecrack to him about the divorce that was sure to follow -- a barren, ugly cynicism, rooted, sadly, in an all-too-intimate knowledge of the empirical evidence."
******* Concerning Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Miller says:
"On MacIntyre’s view, having gradually abandoned the long-dominant Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics, modern moral thinking had devolved into emotivism, which assumes as a matter of course that 'all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character' 'We live in a specifically emotivist culture,' contended MacIntyre, a culture that locates moral order not in a benevolent, overarching telos but solely within the individual self.
"Like Lasch, MacIntyre looked at the twentieth century and saw chaos; the old moral consensus of Europe and North America had dissolved. 'Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him?'"
******* Concerning George Packer's Blood of the Liberals, Miller writes:
"Repelled by the tendency of twentieth-century liberals like his father to cut themselves off from their own 'blood' to serve the mind (he notes, for instance that his father gave the university 'all his energy, much more than he gave his family, because he believed in the high importance of the life of the mind'), Packer narrates his own journey through his family’s past, subtly intertwining his personal narrative with a broader argument about the direction of American history itself. His conclusion? 'The main problem of our time is a loss of belief in collective self-betterment.' The revolts of the sixties, he contends, may have changed a lot of lives but they 'didn’t leave behind a viable worldview,' making what he calls the post-sixties 'ruins of liberalism' at once understandable and pathetic. 'This was the face of American prosperity at the end of the twentieth century,' he writes, 'racially tolerant, environmentally conscious, and determined to wall itself off from the low-paid countrymen who cut its grass and wait on its tables and look after its children.'
"Packer is a leftist longing for a community that he can’t find. In his mid-thirties he goes so far as to investigate his aunt’s evangelical world, and even travels from his home in Boston to Washington D.C. to attend the massive 1997 Promise Keepers rally, in search of one single experience of social, interracial solidarity. Understanding 'religion' to be a 'challenge' to his 'liberalism,' he nonetheless senses that evangelicals have what he has been unable to locate on the left, 'something that can’t be summoned on demand: vitality.' At the end of his evangelical explorations, he sadly concludes that 'all the years of rational training at home had killed the nerves that might have been receptive to religious stimuli.'
"Packer was looking in the right direction -- cultus -- even if his own search ended in disappointment. The communities that will be forged in our midst will surely be religious in a self-conscious way, for actual religions -- our collective responses to the mystery that lies beyond and within our seeing and touching -- are what have historically made possible the sorts of communities that we in our time so struggle to achieve. Communities need God as children need parents: apart from the ordering presence of a religion, we fly apart and die alone."
Posted by Rick Penner at February 23, 2004 12:45 AM