Before we let the African wisdom conversation die out, Matt Feeney put up a very odd post over at the American Scene yesterday:

Over at the Corner yesterday, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Spruiell were having great mocking fun – which masked something that felt, weirdly, like anger – at Africa’s expense. On the stump in Iowa, Hillary Clinton had cited a supposedly African proverb on the importance of children, which inspired Spruiell to write, “I had forgotten how much wisdom there was to be found in the old sayings of one of the African tribes. Because here in America, people never inquire about the well-being of one another’s offspring.” Goldberg adds his: “Why on Earth do Hillary Clinton et al. think that Africa — never mind African ‘tribes’ — are a compelling philosophical and political role model for the United States of America? Africa? Africa?…. Maybe there are studies that show ‘Africans’ are happier than Americans — when the former aren’t dying of malnutrition or medieval health care, or desperately trying to emigrate to the West, no doubt.” For starters, the sneering hostility in both of their posts is just wildly disproportionate to the provocation. It was just a proverb – folksy, Starbucky, good for a Democratic audience. Nobody was pushing anybody as a “compelling philosophical role model.” But also, the sarcasm – especially Goldberg’s – is a depressing glimpse into what counts as conservatism these days. If there’s something fatuous about the Left’s mau-mauing their primitive betters (which Clinton’s harmless proverb-citing does not even count as), there’s something almost willfully blind about the Right’s modernist triumphalism. Goldberg’s bottom line re. the “Africans” is this: Losers!, which is weird, because one can imagine a conservatism in which the very inability of a continent’s many distinct normative orders to assimilate to an abstract global system of trade and geopolitics (based upon arbitrary “national” borders disastrously drawn across ethnic and tribal boundaries by conquering peoples whose own border disputes would, more or less simultaneously, take something like a hundred million lives) would count in its favor, as evidence that those forms of life were more tradition-based – more organic, if you will – than its conquerors.’

There’s a bit more, but I shouldn’t hog Feeney’s whole post for the Corner.

Okay, first reaction: “Huh?”

For the record, I don’t think I felt any anger at Africa. I have great sympathy for Africa as a collective entity, as problematic as it may be to look at it as a collective entity. I suppose there was a hint of anger in my post, but I find it odd Feeney couldn’t tell where my anger was directed. So let me clarify: it was directed at people who invoke African folk wisdom as if pre-literate, pre-Christian, pre-Monotheistic, pre-Enlightenment, central casting, Epcot Center generic “African tribes” are sources of one-of-a-kind-insight instead of run-of-the-mill Hallmark card clichés.

It seems to me that the condescension of liberals who romanticize “Africa” is only marginally less racist than that of conservatives who write it off as one undifferentiated blob of savages.

Anyway, Feeney’s just plain wrong when he says that Hillary’s invocations of Africa are meaningless. She wrote a whole bestselling book which, by her own admission, was based on the eternal wisdom of an African proverb about how it takes a village to raise a child. And she took the metaphor of an African village and did indeed turn it into a “compelling philosophical and political role model for the United States of America.”

But what I find more interesting is how Feeney seems to think that if Hillary did invoke Africa in a meaningful way, that would be something conservatives should appreciate and support.

After all, objecting to such treacle is, according to Feeney, a sign of the “modernist triumphalism” of the contemporary right. Gadzooks, that sounds bad. Feeney also says he can “imagine” a conservatism where the distilled fortune cookie wisdom of Hillary Clinton’s Africa would be seen as a flickering flame of resistance to abstract global norms or some such.

Where to begin?

How about by noting that it’s really easy to imagine all sorts of conservatisms. I can imagine one in which George Will, Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer and the little blond kid from the last season of the Brady Bunch go through a special wardrobe in the attic and become kings of a wonderful land of exotic creatures and very low taxes.

It’s somewhat harder, however, to imagine a serious American conservatism that goes on a fishing expedition in Africa for insights that it can’t find closer to home in its own history, culture and civilization. This isn’t a nativist point. After all, what’s interesting about these African proverbs isn’t their particularist wisdom, but their banal universalism. I believe it was the Zen troubadour philosopher Sting who asked, in another era, Do the Russians love their children too? The answer was yes. And, it’s also true of Slovenes, Polynesians and, yes, Americans. As Stephen Spruiell noted, it’s hardly as if people in the spiritually de-racinated West don’t ask each other about their kids. However, the fact that concern for children is a universal human characteristic tells us virtually nothing we didn’t know already, but the fact that Hillary thinks she wants to be the kind of President who acts as if this is a deep — and deeply “African” value — tells us a lot about her.

Feeney does make a perfectly fine observation about the endurance of local customs in the face of global change and all that. But he makes it in order to advance this thing about “modernist triumphalism.” It seems to me there is a very strong strain of Rousseauean “noble savage” claptrap in all of this canned African wisdom. Is it really a sign of modernist triumphalism to call B.S. on it? I mean we aren’t talking about postcard perfect farmers in Switzerland or shepherds in New Zealand. Maybe instead of modernist triumphalism, it has more to do with moderately conservative common sense? Maybe the fact that Africa’s life expectancy is 46 and that half the continent lives on a dollar a day cause some on the right to say, “Gee, maybe asking ‘What would the Africans do?’” on a range of public policy issues isn’t the best way to go?

Lastly, let us at least nod to an inconvenient fact: The American founding was modern. American conservatives want to conserve that, not the blood and soil, throne and altar conservatism of Europe nor the earthy, kumbaya folk-genius of a truly imaginary Africa that only exists in Hillary Clinton’s mind.

Update: Ross Douthat agrees with the Corner but thinks Feeney makes some strong points in his critique of “rightwing Africa-bashing.” Okay, except Ross doesn’t say which of Feeney’s points are in fact strong and he doesn’t acknowledge that no one in the Corner was, in fact, Africa-bashing.