Dear Reader (including those of you with enough time on your hands to think of a Dear Reader gag but who declined to share),
I like the new pope, though I really liked Pope Classic. I think it’s pretty cool that the pope took the name “Francis,” though it pains me that it may never be appropriate for me to write “lighten up, Francis” about this pope. Expect to see that headline in Mother Jones or some such very soon.
True story: For the last couple of days, I’ve been trying to work out a joke. Somehow I got the song “Oklahoma” stuck in my head around the time the news of the new pope came out. And I got the wacky idea that pope should take the name “Klahoma.” That way people could sing “POOOOOOOOOOOOOhhhhhhhhhhpe Klahoma where the . . . “ and that’s where the joke dies because I can’t figure out what the lyrics should be. Of course, if the Couch were here (he’s a pretty thin-skinnedUltramontane Catholic, I think. He certainly hated Vatican II), he’d say death had been pronounced on that joke a lot earlier than that.
Yes, that’s right, I said “If the Couch were here.” I’m writing this from the back tables at CPAC. My daughter’s fourth-grade play is Friday morning (normally when I carefully craft this “news”letter) and then I have to record a podcast with Podhoretz and Long, so I can’t write this thing in the a.m. I tried to write it yesterday and it was a bit of a disaster. I basically spent all day tweeting (a statement which in an earlier era would sound like I regretted eating a bean burrito all day long). So I’m starting over.
Why Am I Here?
I hadn’t planned on coming to CPAC this year. I was invited to do a couple of different panels, but for various reasons I declined. Then I wrote this column on why CPAC should have invited Chris Christie to speak and let GOProud set up a booth. As a result, the folks at CEI invited me to their mini-protest panel in support of GOProud. At first I begged off, thinking that it was a bad idea for me to thumb CPAC in the eye after declining other panels. Besides, I loathed the title of the panel: “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.” My objection stemmed not only from the fact that it sounds awfully flouncy to me (like a political panel put on by the air traffic controller in Airplane!), but also that it smacks of the kind of self-congratulatory preening I hate so much in liberalism: “We’re not bigots, like the rest of the people here!” That’s simply not the approach to use if you want to bring people on the right to your side.
But all of this was against the background of the rightwing reaction to my CPAC column. I got a lot of grief from folks, including some people I thought I deserved better from. I don’t mind the disagreement – I like disagreement. But I just have no patience for all this RINO-squish b.s. I particularly loved all of the folks sending me National Review’s mission statement as if I’d never read it before.
I think the column speaks for itself, and having reread it I wouldn’t change the argument one bit (though I’d probably rewrite it a bit because I always want to rewrite anything I’ve written if I read it again).
Anyway, I spent a week getting crap from all of these allegedly purer-than-moi conservatives about how we could not possibly risk letting Chris Christie or GOProud sully the peripatetic temple of conservatism known as CPAC. And then they invited Donald Trump to be one of the keynoters, with more time than nearly any other speaker. And that did it for me. CPAC is free to invite whoever it wants, of course. But spare me the CPAC-is-for-true-conservatives bunk. I consider Trump a ticky-tacky ass-clown of metaphysical proportions. He’s a huckster and a buffoon who thinks he’s a genius because the rubes fall for his act and his reality show gets good ratings with C-list has-beens who wouldn’t make the cut for a remake of The Love Boat. His conservatismconservatism – to the extent it exists at all – is all by the seat of his pants, which makes sense given that is the article of clothing nearest his brain.
So, I agreed to do the panel and I’m glad I did. More on all that another time.
Standing Athwart What Now?
But let’s talk about that “standing athwart history yelling Stop” thing for a second. I’ve always thought Bill made a mistake in not capitalizing the “h” in history, but we can talk about the perfidious influence of Hegelianism another time as well. Some of my more lazy interlocutors think that Buckley’s line is a license to never change your mind or update your thinking. But that is fustian flummery, as Bill might say. Bill changed his mind all the time. He turned his back on the drug war, rethought civil rights, soured on the Iraq war – and those are just off the top of my head.
The mission statement goes on to say:
“I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,” said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.” We have come around to Mr. Holmes’ view, so much so that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater – of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.
What Bill is getting at here is that in the era of non-judgementalism and unthinking relativism, it has become unfashionable to think. Buckley’s relativists (the folks I often refer to as capital-p Pragmatists) pulled off this amazing con. To draw meaningful distinctions – about what is good, better, and best, for instance – is illegitimate and anti-intellectual, according to the relativists. Smashing all foundations – “philosophizing with a hammer” as Nietzsche put it – and slashing all distinctions with the Pragmatists’ razor is the only respectable intellectual game in town.
Conservatism is, in many ways, a reaction against this horse pucky. But it is not a writ to never change your point of view. No conservative believes change is always wrong, merely that when change is unnecessary it is necessary not to change, as the second viscount Falkland said. But here’s the thing: You can only figure out when change is necessary – or unnecessary – by being open to the idea that it might be.
The essence of wisdom, the heart of conservatism, the whole point of thinking, is to draw meaningful distinctions. This was Bill’s great gift. Remember how he responded to arguments about the moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States? He noted that if you have one man who pushes old ladies in front of oncoming buses and another man who pushes old ladies out of the way of oncoming buses, it simply will not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who “push old ladies around.”
The only way one can draw meaningful distinctions is by thinking and re-thinking things through. Thinking doesn’t require giving up your principles. It does require, however, spending a little time working through how you can apply your principles in the messy, changing, real world. This is not only true for ourselves, it is true for others. You can’t convince the convincible they are wrong about the right, if you don’t try. As I said in my column, I wish CPAC and conservatives generally would act a bit more like tourist-board promoters of conservatism and less like border guards keeping the impure out.
It’s Not All Relative
Some three decades after Bill wrote that mission statement, Alan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, in which he offered a more sustained attack on relativism. Writing about the attitudes of his students, he said that “the relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.” Bloom’s students believed that “Openness – and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and ways of life and kinds of human beings – is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger.” Translation: Kids today have such open minds their brains fell out.
This critique remains popular on the right and justifiably so. “Who are you to judge?” is still a debate-winning rhetorical question for liberals on almost any serious moral issue. But let me say a word or two in defense of relativism, or what is often called relativism.
It’s worth noting that in all of The Closing of the American Mind, there’s not a single statistic or appeal to social-science findings. The whole thing is based upon his experience teaching some of the smartest students in America, mostly at the University of Chicago. That is an important and interesting perspective. But it is just one perspective. It reminds me of the story I once heard about Richard Nixon. He was allegedly asked if he believed the world was overpopulated. He v again, allegedly – said, “Of course. It’s obvious the world is overpopulated. Everywhere I go I see huge crowds.”
This doesn’t mean Bloom’s take isn’t true, but it does mean that other perspectives might also be true or, at the very least, honestly offered. There’s a tendency in conservative ranks to mistake what is true for us as simply True with a capital t. Sometimes that is the case. But sometimes it isn’t. Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, argued that the existence of multiple, competing, small-t truths did not deny the existence of larger capital -t truths. The trick lies in distinguishing the practice from the principle it derives from. The way people bury their dead, for example, varies widely from country to country and culture to culture, but virtually everywhere people show reverence for the dead. Everyone loves pizza because pizza is good, but the toppings vary.
The only way to make this distinction is to, first, know what your principles are, and then think through how to apply them.
My Papa and Il Papa
All of this plus all the pope stuff brings to mind sitting with my Dad in his hospital room as we watched JP II’s funeral and the investment of Pope Benedict XVI. I’d write about that, but I already did. From a column I wrote in 2010:
In the spring of 2005, Pope John Paul II died. My father, who passed away that summer, watched the funeral and the inauguration of the current pope, Benedict XVI, from his hospital bed. My dad, a Jew, loved the spectacle of it all. (The Vatican, he said, was the last institution that “really knows how to dress.”)
From what he could tell, he liked this new pope too. “We need more rocks in the river,” my dad explained. What he meant was that change comes so fast, in such a relentless torrent, that we need people and things that stand up to it and offer respite from the current.
I loved the literary quality of the expression “more rocks in the river,” even though the imagery doesn’t quite convey what my dad really believed. Dad was a conservative, properly understood. By that I mean he didn’t think conservatism was merely an act of passive and futile defiance against what Shakespeare called “devouring time.” Unlike human institutions, the rocks do not fight the devouring river of time, it just seems like they do. My dad believed that conservatism was an affirmative act, a choice of prudence and will. In the cacophony of perpetual change, the conservative selects the notes worth savoring and repeats them for others to hear and, hopefully, appreciate.
Various & Sundry
Okay, I’m sorry for the subpar G-File today; it’s been a crazy busy week and I hate writing this thing before Friday mornings. Feels very writer’s block-y.
I’m heading to California next week for some family time. We’re gonna spend a few days in the L.A. area and then a few around San Diego. Always interested in suggestions for where to eat and/or where to take the wee one, who – sniff, sob – is not so wee anymore. I know L.A. okay, but would love suggestions for San Diego. Sea World and the zoo are already on the list. And, of course, you know who really likes great fish tacos? Well, just in case you don’t, that would be me. So if you know where to get them, I’m all ears – and mouth.
I’ll be on Special Report tonight. It’s my one appearance for the whole month, which bums me out. But I’ll try to make it special by snorting extra airplane glue beforehand.
In case you missed it Ramesh and I responded to Sam Tanenhaus’s deeply flawed New Republic essay on conservatism and Calhoun.
Be on the look out for the latest Long-Goldberg-Podhoretz podcast. Should be out later today, I think.
I will be at Canisius College in Buffalo on Monday, speaking on Liberal Fascism, apparently. It’s free and open to the public. Always nice to have friends in the audience. 5:30 p.m. in the Regis Room in the Winter Student Center. I can’t find anything on their website to confirm, but I got this from my friends at YAF.
I didn’t have time to collect much weirdness this week. But, in case you missed it, here’s Game of Thrones 1995
Eleven of the strangest world records.
Belated Bieber backlash begins.