Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Taking Back the Culture

By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books.  If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020.

Or perhaps not, because some of those who have routinely claimed that each presidential election since 1992 has been the most important election of our lifetime changed their tune this year: This, they said, was the last election that would ever matter.  After November 8, the deluge.

In the words of everybody’s favorite pseudonymous paleo-Straussian, the 2016 contest was the “Flight 93 Election.”  If we failed to rush the cockpit by prevailing on November 8, this country that we all love so much—even though, to listen to us, we seemingly cannot stand anything about it—would come crashing to the ground.  A few months ago, Donald Trump declared that, if he were not elected president, the Republicans would never win the White House again.  In mid-October, in a speech in Florida, he upped the ante: “This is not simply another four-year election,” Trump said.  “This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization [emphasis mine] that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.”

Forget Flight 93; the pseudonymous paleo-Straussian was thinking too small.  The 2016 election was the Siege of Vienna; it was Charles Martel at Tours; it was Horatio at the bridge.  Pat Buchanan, a veteran of two White Houses and a presidential election of his own, emphatically agreed with the Republican presidential nominee who, in 1999, called him “a very dangerous man” who “has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler.”  Politics, as we know, makes for strange bedfellows, and everyone in this bed agrees that, by 2020, it will be too late to fight back.  The demography of the United States is changing too rapidly, and demographics is destiny.

There are many half-truths in all of these statements, but a half-truth, as John Lukacs has often said, is sometimes more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth makes it easy to ignore the element of untruth.  On virtually every measure that true conservatives care about, the country will almost certainly be worse off in 2020 than it is today—just as, on all of those same measures, the country was worse off in 2008 than it was in 2000, a reality that played no small part in the election of Barack Obama.

One definition of insanity, we are told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Yet that’s exactly what we have done by investing each presidential election with monumental importance—and finally, in this year, apocalyptic importance.

There is a way, though, in which this year was different.  Donald Trump ran the tables and defeated 16 other Republican candidates in the primaries, because he was willing to champion issues that no Republican presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan in 2000 has had any desire to touch.  Those issues are the very ones that we at Chronicles have advocated for the last 30 of our 40 years of publication.  We have known all along that these issues were more important to more of the American people than the things that MSNBC and FOX News, the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR, spend all of their time discussing and debating, and we—and other authors and editors of Chronicles, especially the late Sam Francis—correctly predicted that any presidential candidate who took them on forthrightly would garner tremendous support.

How could we have been so certain?

Because, at root, all of these issues are neither political nor economic but cultural.  Immigration, trade, manufacturing, law and order, even the question of foreign wars and the role of the United States in world affairs—all of these are just as much a matter of culture as are, say, abortion and gay “marriage.”  But just as with abortion and gay “marriage,” we tend to forget the irreducible cultural nature of these issues when we find ourselves in the heat of political battles.  We begin to act as if politics—especially national politics—is all that really matters.  And, as so often happens, thought follows action.  So we convince ourselves that abortion can be brought to an end by Congress passing a “Personhood Amendment” or by the Supreme Court taking up another Roe v. Wade and deciding it rightly this time.  That a president or Congress can somehow reduce local crime without increasing the federal government’s near-tyrannical powers.  That the heads of multinational (or, more correctly, transnational) corporations have shuttered factories in the United States while opening new ones in China and Mexico simply because Congress passed laws and the president signed treaties that made it economically viable to do so, rather than that Congress passed those laws and the president signed those treaties because politicians of both political parties were heavily lobbied to do so by corporate executives who have next to nothing in common with the workers in their factories because those executives long ago quit thinking of themselves as Americans in anything more than a purely accidental way.  That the executives of other companies that cannot take advantage of such trade agreements to move their operations overseas because it costs too much to ship a frozen chicken from China have repeatedly chosen to employ illegal immigrants illegally simply because those immigrants are here, and not because the stock grants that their board has promised them if they beat projections on the next quarterly earnings report are more important to those executives than whether the grandchildren of the farmers whose way of life their corporate forebears destroyed in the middle of the last century are able to provide for their families and to remain within at least driving distance of the graves of their ancestors.

As we have said consistently in these pages, there are no political solutions to cultural problems—and every one of these is, at root, a cultural problem.  And the greatest cultural problem that we face today is the all-encompassing nature of modern politics, which, especially at the national level, has proved to be an extraordinarily efficient means of destruction of traditional society, morality, and culture.  Attempting to harness that destructive power to restore the culture, revitalize morality, and rebuild society is like trying to perform open-heart surgery with a chainsaw.  Anyone who tries to do so is just going to make a huge mess.

In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, an octogenarian grandmother in Indiana vowed to Mike Pence that she would fight a revolution should voters choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.  What that grandmother does not realize—what all of us, to the extent that we are captivated by national politics, do not realize—is that we are living today in the midst of an institutionalized revolution.  Hillary Clinton is part of that revolution, and Barack Obama is, too, but as Billy Joel would say, they didn’t start the fire.  That fire has been burning brightly in the minds of men for two and a half centuries—and not just a few men but all those who, like the French revolutionaries, elevate ideology above truth and politics above culture.

Russell Kirk used to say that “the American Revolution was no revolution truly, but simply a War of Independence—a revolution (in Burke’s phrase concerning the Glorious Revolution of 1688) ‘not made, but prevented.’”  Dr. Kirk was right, of course, but American history did not stop once we had won our independence.  The move from the English unwritten constitution to the written Constitution of the United States of America, and the adoption of a written Bill of Rights, were very good things in the context of their time, but they also gave the modern revolutionary spirit something to take and to twist, and by the time of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the process had begun.  Instead of being confined to its proper sphere, as the Framers of the Constitution wished it to be, national politics took on greater and greater importance, and society and culture were deliberately subordinated to politics.

All of this, as I noted last month, is there from the beginning in the writings of the godfather of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, implicit in his concept of the general or national will that required the destruction of all social and cultural institutions that stand between the individual and the nation-state—especially the family, the Church, and the patriotic attachment to one’s native place and the people therein.  But later philosophers of the revolution, such as Antonio Gramsci, were explicit about the need to subordinate culture to politics.  The point of the “long march through the institutions” was to subvert the family and the Church and the schools and the news and entertainment media from within, by transforming these cultural institutions into political ones.  Once the forces of revolution succeeded in doing that, the revolution would become unstoppable.  Because this is the reality of the modern world: Whenever the battle is confined to the political arena, the revolutionaries always win.  In politics, ideology always trumps tradition.  Why?  Because anyone who elevates politics above culture, abstraction above reality, even if he thinks of himself as a conservative, is, from the vantage point of tradition, an ideologue, a revolutionary.

And that is where we are today.  Historically, we stand at the apotheosis of revolution.  The rapid pace of cultural change over the last few years has been surprising, even astonishing, to most people—not just those of us who are opposed to that cultural change, but even those who are in favor of it.  But we make a grave mistake if we think that political action brought about that change more than such action reflected it.  Gay “marriage” did not come out of the blue (no pun intended), imposed by the political powers that be, any more than, in an earlier day, no-fault divorce and legalized abortion did.  In each case, the courts and the politicians ratified a cultural revolution that had already taken place.

Think back to 2008, when Barack Obama told us that he did not believe in gay marriage.  Or to 2012, when Hillary Clinton continued to say the same.  To dismiss these statements as mere lies is to fail to understand that even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been driven by the long march through the institutions as much as, or even more than, they have driven it.

One of the best insights that true conservatives have had about the Republican Party over the past 30 years is that, when the Democrats have power, they push the revolution forward; and when the Republicans gain power, they institutionalize the revolutionary changes that the Democrats have made.  That analysis is true, as far as it goes; but it doesn’t go far enough.  The reality is that Gramsci and his disciples were right: By its very nature, cultural revolution drives political change.  All of modern politics, Republican or Democratic, left or right, consists of the institutionalization of a revolution that has taken place, and continues to take place, in the culture.

Conservatives have been warning about “Cultural Marxism” for years while fundamentally misunderstanding the underlying strategy of the long march through the institutions.  Rather than resisting any attempt to politicize the institutions of culture—the family, the Church, the schools, arts and literature—we have responded to the revolutionary subversion of these institutions by politicizing them in a different way.  But the end result is the same: Those institutions have become thoroughly politicized; truth has been replaced by ideology; the revolution has advanced.

So we fight for “family values” as if this abstract phrase is more important than the family itself; we march under the banners of “academic freedom” and “free speech” when what we should be promoting are truth and beauty and goodness.  We blithely import Christian language into our political rhetoric, labeling our political adversaries demons or the devil incarnate and ignoring Christ’s injunction to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and God that which is God’s” by citing the fact that God not only could but did use a Constantine for His own purposes as undeniable proof that He is clearly doing so right now, in the United States, in 2016.  We start out by joking about “God Emperor Trump” and end up believing our own joke with a fervor that we should reserve for the clauses of the Nicene Creed.

And along the way we have lost sight of a reality that conservatives of a previous generation understood: that investing secular politics with religious significance is itself a form of the long march through the institutions, a subversion of the Church and the subordination of her divine mission to the revolutionary agenda of modern politics.

In The Screwtape Letters, written in the midst of World War II—long considered an existential crisis of the West, though one, I must admit, that pales in comparison with the election of 2016—C.S. Lewis has the superior demon Uncle Screwtape offer this advice to the novice Wormwood:

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God], are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. . . .

Whichever [the patient] adopts, your main task will be the same.  Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. . . . Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.  Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours.

My point is not to suggest that politics is unimportant—far from it—but that we need to return politics to its proper sphere, to recognize (as I wrote last month) that culture is prior to politics, both in the sense of existing before politics and in the sense of being more important than politics.  When we invest politics with religious importance, we profane religion, we undermine the culture, and we become unwitting soldiers in the long march through the institutions, doing the very work to which our political adversaries have devoted their lives.

Let us turn to Lewis once more, this time from The Weight of Glory:

A man may have to die for his country: but no man must in any exclusive sense live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering unto Caesar that which of all things most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

What, then, should we do?  After all, no true conservative can deny the element of truth in all of those half-truths I mentioned earlier.  The hour is late; the long march through the institutions is nearly complete; we stand, as I said, at the apotheosis of revolution.  And standing here, we face a choice: We can choose to continue on the path of revolution, by accepting the domination of politics over culture, and steel ourselves for an unceasing but always losing battle in the political arena; or we can become counterrevolutionaries, returning politics to its proper place by focusing our efforts on taking back the culture.  And in doing so, we might just win.

If we choose the latter option, the struggle will not be easy.  Nor will it be as exciting as waging political campaigns or watching FOX News or reading political blogs or even tweeting and Facebooking the latest political meme.  What it will be is living our lives the way that we were intended to do so, conforming ourselves to the unchanging truths revealed to us by nature and nature’s God.  It will mean starting our own long march through the institutions, not in order to politicize them but to restore them.  And rather than resembling an army marching in lockstep while wearing redshirts or brownshirts, we will look a lot more like a band of pilgrims, making our way back to the sources of our culture and to the institutions that are closest to those sources—chief among them the family (the natural source) and the Church (the supernatural one).

While the process may be hard, it is also quite simple.  If you’re not married, get married.  If you are married, stay married.  If you can have children, have one.  Have another.  And another.  Keep repeating, not until you can’t afford to have more, but for as long as you can’t afford not to.  Baptize your children.  Raise them in the Faith.  Treat your parish as an extension of your family.  Encourage your fellow churchgoers to have children of their own.  Educate your children well, in whatever way you need to do so.  Make sure they understand that the purpose of education is not to make them good citizens or good workers but to cultivate in them a lifelong desire for goodness and truth and beauty, the critical faculties to discern what is good and true and beautiful, and the imagination to become co-creators with God, increasing the treasury of goodness, truth, and beauty in this world.

Introduce yourself to your neighbor.  Introduce your neighbor to your other neighbor.  Treat your neighborhood as an extension of your family.  If you can share a turkey with Uncle Charlie at Thanksgiving even though he had a Hillary sign in his yard just a month before, you can be civil to your neighbor who had a Hillary sign, too.  If you don’t want to share a turkey with Uncle Charlie because he had a Hillary sign, do it anyway.

Shop at that local store run by the young guy with sleeve tattoos and his wife with the multicolored hair and piercings.  The jobs they create will never be sent overseas by some heartless corporate executive.  Say nice things about the child that they chose to bring into this world rather than to abort.  Don’t worry about whether they think of themselves as liberals or voted for Hillary.  Pray that they stay married and have more children and continue to live in your town and contribute to your shared economic independence.  All of those things mean that their children will be more instinctually conservative—that is, more connected to reality—than they are, just as your children will be more instinctually conservative than you were if you raise them this way.

Every once in a while, turn off FOX News, and MSNBC, and CNN, and NPR.  Pick up a book.  Read poetry to your children.  Read a novel with your spouse.  Study history.  Learn what an existential crisis really looks like.  Watch television shows and movies, but be discriminating.  Don’t worry about whether a particular actor or director holds political views with which you disagree; consider whether what he has created is a worthwhile work of art.  Listen to music.  Make music, if you have the talent to do so.  Make music even if you do not have the talent to do so.  Encourage your children to do the same.

Subscribe to your local newspaper, no matter how poorly written and edited the stories may be, and how biased the national coverage is.  Read it for the local coverage, for the things happening within a few miles of you that will never make the national news.  The quality of your water is more important to you and your family than “global climate change” will ever be.  Use that water to grow a garden.  Plant vegetables and flowers.  Plan for the future by planting fruit trees.  Mow your lawn and paint your house and wax your car and act as if material possessions have spiritual value, because they do.

And don’t forget to vote.  Not just every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but every time there’s an election.  Try to learn enough about the candidates for every office so that you can make an informed decision.  Give every office the weight that it deserves.  The dogcatcher who removes a rabid animal from your neighborhood may do more for you and your family than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ever would.  So, too, the city councilman who fights to have a stoplight installed at the dangerous intersection down the block.  And the sheriff who arrests real criminals whose crimes threaten you and your family.  Spend more time learning about local candidates than you do about state candidates, because they affect more aspects of your everyday life, and it’s easier to learn the truth about them, because they are closer to you.  Spend more time learning about state candidates than about national candidates, for the same reason.  And candidates for Congress more than those for the Senate.  And those for the Senate more than those for president.

Take the long view.  Don’t worry about “winning” within your lifetime.  When Gramsci’s disciple Rudi Dutschke coined the slogan “the long march through the institutions” 50 years ago, the march had already been under way for at least a quarter of a century.  Our countermarch may take just as long.  But we have an advantage that the Cultural Marxists did not: The Gods of the Copybook Headings are on our side.  We’re bringing people back to reality.  And living your life in harmony with reality is its own reward.

After all, what have we got to lose?  Remember: This was not only the most important election of our lifetime, but the last one that will ever matter.  We might as well do something with the rest of our lives. 

First published in the December 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Truth of Blood and Time

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And — every — single — one — of — them — is — right!

—Rudyard Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age”

When I was a college student in the late 1980’s, the obsession of conservative activists in academia was summed up in the buzzword relativism. By the early 90’s, that term had been paired with nihilism, understood to be relativism’s darker and more foreboding big brother. Come to believe that the expression of truth is affected in any way by time, by place, by civilization, and you would eventually wind up believing that there is no basis for morality. And those influenced by the disciples of Leo Strauss (or those who had simply glanced at a copy of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind) often threw a third term—historicism—into the mix. There is truth and falsehood; philosophy and history; white and black —and anyone who suggests that human life is characterized by shades of gray secretly yearns for Auschwitz and the Gulag.

The “success” of conservatism politically in the 1980’s undoubtedly had much to do with such a simplistic view of reality. While most conservative students and professors still knew the name Edmund Burke and recalled that a prominent conservative thinker named Russell Kirk had declared him the father of modern conservatism (something that cannot be said today), their political hero, Ronald Reagan, cited Burke’s great opponent, Thomas Paine, more often than he did any other political thinker. Paine —a radical rabble-rouser, a moral dissolute, and a rabid supporter of the French Revolution —ultimately ended his life as a man without a country and, thus, is a fitting hero for the neoconservatives who, by 1986, had taken full control of the Reagan administration.

Paine foreshadowed the neocons also in his rejection of history, and his adoption by American “conservatives” shows how incorrectly they lay claim to that term:

Even though the political meaning of “liberal” came in the 1820s, the liberal vision of the world came from the eighteenth century. That vision was the dominant vision of the modern age: the vision that society was perfectible, that there was no such thing as original sin, that it was within the power of man . . . to transform the world: a vision which . . . was essentially anti-historical, or at least ahistorical. Against it arose the recognition of history by a thinker such as Burke, who was not behind but ahead of Paine . . . For Burke was not merely a defender of tradition: he recognized and expressed the inevitability of the historical dimension of human nature, something that not many Americans were willing to accept.

Thus writes John Lukacs in “The Problem of American Conservatism,” a chapter of his important 1984 work Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (recently released in a revised edition by Yale University Press as A New Republic). This chapter is one of 67 articles, reviews, excerpts from books, and, in one case, a whole book included in Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge.

In a delicious bit of irony, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, whose publications Intercollegiate Review and Campus often featured those doomsayers of relativism and nihilism and historicism, published this massive reader, which also includes the most complete bibliography of Professor Lukacs’s writings ever assembled. The irony, of course, comes from the fact that John Lukacs, though a self-described reactionary whose political and philosophical views expose American “conservatives,” by contrast, for the liberals they are, has been repeatedly attacked by such “conservatives” as a “relativist” and an “historicist.” Still, ISI has never joined in those attacks (indeed, Lukacs has long served on the editorial board of ISI’s flagship publication, Modern Age), and the publication of this volume makes it clear that the politically oriented articles in Campus and Intercollegiate Review did not express the whole range of thinking at ISI.

Editors Jeffrey O. Nelson and Mark G. Malvasi have, on the whole, shown very good judgment in their selection of pieces for inclusion in this reader, which they have divided into six sections: “The Problem of Historical Knowledge,” “Historians Reviewed,” “Dissenting Opinions (Or: A Few Other Prosaists),” “Places and Times,” “Some Twentieth-Century Questions,” and “Reading, Writing, and Teaching History.” Still, the 67 selections, while making for a volume of 950-plus pages, barely begin to scratch the surface of Professor Lukacs’s body of work, which now extends over 60 years. And thus the highlight of this volume, both for admirers of Professor Lukacs’s work and for those who are being exposed to it for the first time, should be the 48-page bibliography of his published writings, compiled by his granddaughter Helen. Based on Lukacs’s own collection of clippings, even this bibliography, she warns, is only about 95 to 98 percent complete, and it does not contain publications from before his emigration from Hungary or after December 31, 2003. Even so, it is the most complete account available of the phenomenal output of one of the most important, and yet consistently underrated or ignored, historians of the 20th century.

All of the themes that Professor Lukacs has developed over the years are found in this reader: the difference between an historical philosophy and a philosophy of history; the important distinction between motives and purposes (“Motives come from the past; purposes involve the pull of the future”); how what people think is often very different from what they think they think; why “facts” are not the same as truths:

Their statements or expressions can come close to truths—which is the best we can expect. A “fact” is never absolute. Nor is it given to us to fix, to nail down, to state unalterably an absolute truth. We may think that our concept (or idea) of truth is absolute; yet that, too, only hearkens toward the absolute. (Our very language reflects this: “This is true” is not quite the same as: “This is the truth.”)

All of this reflects Lukacs’s understanding of the creative role of imagination (a faculty of which memory is part and parcel) and his recognition of the false dichotomy between subject and object (a point on which he was strongly influenced by the English linguist Owen Barfield, whose book Saving the Appearances rivals Lukacs’s Historical Consciousness in its exposition of an historical philosophy). As Lukacs writes, “Historical thinking accords with the recognition that human knowledge is neither objective nor subjective but personal and participant.” And again:

The recognition of the objectivist illusion does not reduce, it rather enhances, the general validity of personal knowledge. . . . If . . . by historical “relativity” we mean not only the historicity of every form of human cognition but also of every form of human expression, it should be obvious that this idea of relativity is neither a feeble nor a senseless one; for this “relativity” of truths means not the absence but the potential richness, not the nullity but the multiplicity of truth.

It is for passages such as this that Lukacs has been attacked as a relativist in the sense that I have discussed above —even by recent reviewers of this volume, which provides ample evidence to the contrary. Acknowledging the multiplicity of truth is not the same as claiming that truth is a merely human creation; after all, Christians believe (or at least used to believe) that the ultimate Truth Himself is a multiplicity in unity. It is only to those who have lost that belief (or perhaps never had it) that Lukacs’s assertion can appear a denial of truth.

In case any doubt remains, however, here is Lukacs in “The Presence of Historical Thinking” (a chapter reprinted here from his 2002 book At the End of an Age and the very first selection in this volume):

But the historicity of our seeing and speaking does not amount to the relativity of truth. What history gives a mind, at best, is not a dose of relativism; it gives us certain standards, the power to contrast, and the right to estimate. The belief that truth is relative is no longer the assertion merely of cynics or skeptics but of postmodern philosophers, according to whom there were and are no truths, only modes of discourse, structures of thought and of text. Their relativization of truth is absolute. And yet: truths exist. Their existence, unlike the existence of ideas, is not a matter of our choice. But we are responsible for how, and where, and why, and when we try to express them.

Here, we see a manifestation of Lukacs’s persistent (and Catholic) belief in free will. Throughout his work, he attacks the subjectivist determinist idea that men’s actions are somehow the result of their history or circumstances, rather than their own moral choices. To the ideologues and systematizers, he constantly repeats the refrain that “What matters is not what ideas do to men but what men do to their ideas; how and when they choose them, and how and why they accommodate them to their own wishes, interests, lives, circumstances.” The same questions can be asked of the crass materialists of left and right, the Marxists and the free-market economists who argue that human behavior is bound by economic “laws” that represent a monolithic “truth” that, rather than setting man free, binds his will.

Perhaps nowhere is Lukacs’s disdain for simplistic idealism more evident than in his withering review of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, reprinted here from the December 1992 issue of Chronicles. One paragraph alone is worth the ridiculously low price of this book:

Owing to lack of space, but also because history (and human nature) do not follow the laws of physics—meaning that while it is easier to wrestle with a weak body than with a strong one, it is more difficult to wrestle with a weak mind than with a strong one—in this review I must let Fukuyama speak for himself. Fukuyama has given his chapters such titles as “The Weakness of Strong States II, or, Eating Pineapples on the Moon,” and “The Victory of the VCR.” In his introduction, he writes, “In lieu of conventional thanks to a typist for helping to prepare the manuscript, I should perhaps acknowledge the work of the designers of the Intel 80386 microprocessor.” He should. It shows.

Thirteen years later, Fukuyama’s end of history lies in the ruins of the cradle of civilization, while nationalism—the defining phenomenon of the history of the 20th century, which Fukuyama did not even acknowledge (much less address) but to which Lukacs has devoted much of his attention throughout his career—continues to shock and awe.

Though it limited the amount of out-of-print material that could be included in the volume, Nelson’s and Malvasi’s decision to include chapters of books that are still in print or widely available (such as Historical Consciousness and Outgrowing Democracy) is understandable, since this reader is an attempt to introduce the thought of Professor Lukacs to new audiences as well as to collect important pieces for the convenience of those already familiar with his work. In one case, however, I think that their institutional affiliation has clouded their judgment, and that is their decision to include the entire text of A Student’s Guide to the Study of History, a concise pamphlet that ISI published in 2000 as part of their very successful and generally well-prepared series of student’s guides to different subject areas. I have no complaint about the book; indeed, I think it is one of the best of the series and have recommended it both to college students and, most recently, to an 80-year-old man who was looking for some help in focusing his study of history in his twilight years. It adds little to this volume, however, while using up 19 precious pages that might have been better put to use. Two articles that I would have liked to see in its place (and readers may be forgiven if they assume that, here, I am revealing my own institutional loyalty) are “To Hell With Culture” and its sequel, “To Hell With College,” published in the September 1994 and September 1997 issues of Chronicles. In them, Professor Lukacs makes a very forceful case that both culture (as commonly understood to include literature, art, etc.) and higher education are largely the products of civilization, not the other way around. As he writes in the first of the essays:

Whether in an inner-city school or at Harvard, the young are not taught civilization. . . . I mean a respect for life, for an orderly life that is inseparable not only from a respect for learning but from a respect for one’s provenance, for language, and for the ability to read, write, and listen. Almost half of our young now spend nearly 20 years in schools, with the result that most of them cannot read and write and express themselves adequately.

As we enter the 21st century, it is civilization itself (the end of history notwithstanding) that is in danger of destruction.

Should government promote “culture” at all? That is at least arguable. What is not arguable is that government must protect civilization. When it fails to do so, government, as we know it, dissolves, with first anarchy and then barbaric tyranny succeeding it.

While some might argue that the dissolution of our current government would be preferable to its continuation (and even more of us might wistfully entertain that idea), Lukacs points out their mistake. The corruption on display in high places is only a reflection of the corruption of an increasingly uncivilized people, and an uncivilized people will never be free, no matter what their form of government.

Civilization arose when man became aware of his past and thus became conscious of himself as an historical creature, as more than a mere animal. It progressed as that historical consciousness deepened, particularly in the wake of the Incarnation, when it became clear (to those who have eyes to see) that history and tradition reveal truths—including the Truth of God Himself—that could not be accessed otherwise.

And yet:

Nearly four hundred years ago Descartes argued, in his Discourse on Method, that the study of history was wasteful because we cannot acquire any accurate or certain knowledge of the human past, as we can of mathematics and of the world of nature.

The historical lesson of the modern age that Descartes helped usher in is that civilization—indeed, human life itself—is threatened whenever we begin to separate ourselves from our history, to erase our memory, to believe that there is no such thing as truth or—perhaps even worse—to believe that truth is universal in the Enlightenment sense: abstract, radically monolithic, not of this world of flesh and blood and time.

As another great historical philosopher who emigrated to America once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”—and they do so because they have become lesser men. Thankfully, those who still understand that civilization has always depended upon those who do remember the past have Professor Lukacs, and now this splendid volume, as a guide.

[Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, by John Lukacs. (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books), 922 pp., $18.00]

First published in the December 2005 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chronicles of Culture

“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.”  The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets lost in a cloud of abstraction.

For there to be a “context of social relationships,” there must be at least two people.  And those people must be part of a society, because that is what social, as an adjective, not only implies but demands, the fantasy worlds constructed by Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams notwithstanding.  And a society is a community, and a particular type thereof: not simply a random collection of people thrown together in time and bound by geography, but one ordered to the common good, and sharing a common history and customs.  Those customs, deriving from and informed by that history, form the barest skeleton of what we call culture.

Culture, then, is built from the ground up, and from the basic human community—the family—outward.  A culture is resilient to the extent that the society which gave rise to it is healthy, and that health implies a certain stability.  Too much mobility, in the form of either immigration or emigration, disrupts the social relationships that make it possible to order a community to the common good.  Shared history is lost; shared customs break down.  The common culture collapses.

Culture develops organically; it cannot be imposed from the top down.  Anything that we call a culture that does not arise “in the context of social relationships” is at best an ideology.  It takes years, even generations, of social stability to develop the common history and customs that make a true culture possible.

Thus, a true culture has an upper limit as well as a lower one.  Just as an individual cannot a culture make, so too a mass of men among whom any social relationships are tenuous at best cannot truly share a common culture.  Most people would probably recognize that to speak of a “global culture” is abstraction at its worst; but to speak of, say, “Christian culture” is not much better.  There are cultures that are Christian, but each arises from a shared faith in Christ among a people who share a common history and customs within a true community bound by space and time.  Two Christians from different Christian cultures obviously share much; but a single common culture is not one of the things that they share.

I once wrote in these pages that,

The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Furthermore, in a country that spans a continent, there can be no single nation, since a nation is bound together not only by common descent and geography but by a common culture.  That does not mean that there cannot be a governmental confederation (or, more strictly speaking, an empire) that extends over such a large span of territory, nor that the many American cultures do not have more in common with one another than they do with other cultures beyond the physical boundaries of the North American continent.  But unless the word culture is to become the kind of abstraction that Robert Nisbet abhorred, it must always be bound by the limits of a true society—limits imposed by geography, shared history and customs, and social relationships.

In our continental empire, anything that pretends to the title of a national culture is by its very nature a threat to the real cultures that continue to exist (and sometimes even to thrive) in such places as Spring Lake, Michigan; Rockford, Illinois; Huntington, Indiana; and thousands of other villages, towns, and small-to-medium-sized cities across the United States, as well as in neighborhoods within cities that are too large to sustain a true culture of their own. Such cultures are dismissed as backward and parochial not only by liberals, for whom culture must give way to abstract universalism, but by putative conservatives whose nationalist abhorrence of cultural patriotism is less universal but no less abstract.

America, such conservatives say, is not a “proposition nation”—except when the proposition in question is not that “All men are created equal” but that a culture does not need a specific soil and a particular people to give it birth.  But this, too, is a type of abstract equality that denies the importance of the actual social relationships that give rise to and sustain true cultures.  The person—a word that always implies a relationship to another—is replaced by the individual, whose only relationship (tenuous as it is) is to the mass known as the nation.

And thus does culture die, at the hands of those who should be its protectors.

First published in the December 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.