Let me begin by expressing my admiration, once again, for Pete’s efforts to vindicate by improving upon the noble efforts of Paul Ryan’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach to our relatively minimalist system of entitlements. At least Paul is really thinking about the sustainability of both our middle class and a genuinely conservative (and therefore classy, freedom-loving, and somewhat populist) party in our country. And not only is Pete thinking along those lines, his thinking is better than coherent — it’s complicated in the properly empirical and so authentically conservative sense. As our Mr. Ceaser says, conservative creativity is “the blending of different and partly conflicting ideas.” Paul Ryan, sign Pete up!
And I’ve been thinking a lot about the contribution Jim Ceaser makes to conservatism today. I realize that what follows is a rough and rambling draft, and it’s too much “insider baseball” to be of interest to many readers. Sorry. Won’t happen again.
Conservatism, according to JWC, is about the highest and most noble goal of defending the American republic through a philosophy that recognizes that even the original liberal theory that informed the American founding has huge “sustainability issues.” It’s unsustainable because it’s too abstract; it can’t defend as reasonable the attachment citizens have to their nation as more than a contract for personal convenience or the devotion people have to their relational Creator through churches or synagogues. It also can’t defend “the classical and Roman ideals of virtue and excellence.” Original liberalism, in fact, was too much about attacking the classical conception of virtue and “elevating utility at the expense of nobility.” It wasn’t, in fact, republican enough. It also wasn’t aristocratic, in the precise sense, enough; it’s inability to articulate a properly human “hierarchy of standards” points in the direction of modern liberalism’s cultural alliance with relativism, “which is the application of the idea of equality to all thought.” We can say that undermining of moral virtue through utilitarianism and later compassion leads rather inevitably to the undermining of intellectual virtue. Can we say that Locke, for example, is strong on the freedom front but weak on the relational front, the places where you begin to develop adequately empirical accounts of love and loyalty, charity and generosity, as well as our joyful shared openness to the truth about all things?
Ceaser, for that virtuous reason and others, says that American conservatism sees the need to do much better than did original liberal theory’s tolerant coolness in supporting biblical religion. Biblical religion, he says, is “the main source of our ethical system, one of self-restraint.” It’s also the source of our belief “in something beyond material existence.” I might add that biblical religion is an indispensable theoretical source of our devotion to equality. Jim wants to talk up the universal, abstract, timeless natural rights of our Declaration as standing theoretically without any such support. I’m not sure whether he really thinks conservative philosophy can really rest satisfied with that claim. Ceaser does say in his more theoretical writings that the theory of classical political philosophy is, well, less theoretical or abstract than liberal theory, and that there’s a decline of true political philosophy or political theory in the direction of scientism and relativism that begins with, say, Descartes and Locke (or maybe even in St. Augustine) and gets worse and worse until we end up with today’s twin vulgarities of rational-choice theory and nonfoundationalism.
A Christian, however isn’t really completely on board with the straightforward narrative of decline and fall. What’s good and true about Locke is his rejection of classical natural theology and civil theology and his corresponding elevation of personal identity, the person as more than merely a natural or political being. Locke really is stronger on the freedom and on the equality fronts than Plato and Aristotle, even if he is weaker on the relational front. So Christians can support the Declaration theoretically against those who believe that the elevated status given to individuality — to the person — in modern thought is simply some kind of theoretical decline.
How does conservative philosophy really think about the status of liberal theory as theory? Jim, in a memorable article dissing Tocqueville for dissing the Founders and neglecting altogether the Declaration of Independence, seems to agree with Tom West’s view that the Founding and the Declaration should be regarded as theoretically flawless, and so the various American movements away from the founding in thought and deed are to be regarded as theoretical errors that endanger both the truth about and the practice of American liberty.Tom’s approach is to have discovered or created a kind of Lockistotle, to have shown that Locke and Aristotle are theoretically identical. Their difference in approaches and doctrine can be explained by a change in the circumstances they faced. Jim, as far as I know, hasn’t embraced the allegedly natural being Lockistotle; his view really is that liberal theory, in its unrealistic abstraction, is, in practice for sure and seemingly in theory too, unsustainable.
Jim deploys eloquently and in meticulous and innovative detail the three-modern-waves narrative of Leo Strauss as explaining the development or, better, devolution of American political thought. But one problem with wavism, from the point of view of American conservatism, is that for Strauss the move from Locke (or natural rights) to Rousseau and Hegel (or history) to Heidegger (or radical historicism or nonfoundationalism) is a working out of some implications of errors about nature and liberty present in Locke’s thought.
Consider, for example, that Patrick Deneen, a card-carrying wavist in his own way, has concluded that the history of America is the unfolding of the abstract idea of Locke over time, and Patrick — following the lead of Alasdair MacIntrye more and more — has reached the conclusion that the foundational American idea is technology. It is, from my view, disappointing and even dangerous to see conservatives coming to embrace what Jim rightly calls theoretical anti-Americanism – the anti-Americanism, Jim explains in his book I enjoyed the most, Reconstructing America, that reaches its highest self-consciousness in the thought of Heidegger.
One problem of thinking of America in primarily devolutionary terms is that you abstract from the blessings for equality and liberty that flow from technological progress, and you miss the progress toward justice for all that has flowed from the more consistent application of our founding principles, including, of course, the liberation of blacks and the liberation of women to be free and equal citizens and economic actors. And one problem for American biblical believers thinking too much in devolutionary terms is that they end up forgetting and not being properly grateful for how Lockeanism properly understood in America has protected the freedom of the church as an organized body of thought and action. The threat to religious liberty today can be explained only by the movement to nonfoundationalism, which facilitates rather than opposes effectively the perception that America has become technology and nothing more or obsessed with nothing more than the health, safety, and the groundless freedom of the people alive right now. We have to add, in truth, that this movement toward nonfoundationalism was itself facilitated by the tendency of even original liberal theory to be rather self-obsessive, but that theory, at its best, still intentionally left room for each of us to think of himself or herself as more than a material or political — but still a relational — being. The American founding does presuppose the existence of a Creator, of a personal and relational God, at least at its best, even if our brainiest founders were undeniably cool toward — if not downright indifferent about — the possibility of the real existence of such a God.
So it’s actually more clear than ever that we real American conservatives — we defenders of the American republic — need to defend theoretically the proposition or self-evident truth that all men are created equal by nature and its implication that all men and women have inalienable rights. Jim, of course, does so by highlighting the political dimension of the thought of our founders — especially in The Federalist. Part of that dimension, of course, is their genuine concern for justice and not just the effective balancing of interests. Their great work as statesmen was guided in large measure by, but can’t be reduced to or captured by, purely liberal theory. I’ve heard Jim say more than once that he’s a “Federalist 49″ political scientist, and he’s even talked about having a bumper sticker printed up to that effect. He see the indispensable support of tradition or the veneration “time bestows on everything” even to sustain a government and a constitution that any reasonable man would affirm. Veneration these days is promoted by thinking of our Founders and their Constitution as worthy of our deep, republican, even civil-theological devotion. But I’m not as sure that veneration requires viewing their theory uncritically or as as lacking in nothing as the revelation found in the Bible. Jim might say, after all, that it would be better if more of The Federalist were like Federalist 49 and without 49’s too obvious irony, the kind of irony Jim and Tom West struggle so successfully to avoid.
Well, I’ve gone on for way too long. My next step is to suggest some small changes in the conservative strategy for defending the American republic. They will involve taking seriously the theoretical contributions our Calvinist and “Stoic” countercultures make to defending the American republic. I’m especially interested in highlighting the instructive excesses of Southern particularity to counter the liberal drift to abstract humanitarianism (which has been going on for a long time). The aristocratic South is to blamed for its injustice, but it’s also been the most significant American home for the indispensable virtues of magnanimity and generosity, virtues that can’t be properly appreciated by merely reading the praise they’re given by Aristotle.
One neglected resource here, of course, is Southern literature, which, for me, reaches its perfection in Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. Another neglected account of sustainable relationships among American Lockeanism, American Calvinism, and the Southern and American (and in this case democratized and post-racist) appropriation of the classical virtues I can recommend Charles Portis’s True Grit. At the American Political Science Meeting this week, you have the opportunity to observe and participate in a discussion of the grit that’s true (found in the novel and the Coens’ film) that will include our Carl, our Flagg, our Ralph (Hancock), and myself. It’ll be at 8 a.m. on Friday in the Omni Shoreham. We’re still looking for a donor to pay for the after-panel postmodern and conservative breakfast. That could be you too.