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.

Breeding Mosquitos

“Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.”

That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies.  Burnham died while Reagan was still in office!  What did he know about problems?

Ah, the Golden Age of the 1980’s, when life was good.  At least until we compare it with the Golden Age of the 1950’s, which is darn near perfect until we compare it with the Golden Age of the 1920’s, not to mention . . . Hey, you kids!  Get the hell off my lawn!

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”  The writer of Ecclesiastes, it is true, was divinely inspired, but Burnham’s saying channels the same spirit (and perhaps the same Spirit).  Time and tide rise and fall together, and dust returns to dust; and our vanity of vanities leads us to suppose that our problems are uniquely ours, not to mention that we are uniquely qualified to discover solutions that men for millennia have failed to find.

Empires rise, and empires fall, as they have since man left Eden.  Men grasp for the One Ring, confident that they will be able to resist its temptations, and use it only for good, because no one else in the history of mankind has understood quite so well this particular problem, nor conceived of this particular solution.  That the problem always lies out there, among other men, and not in here, in our own heart and soul, is obvious; so the obvious solution is to deprive other men of power, to consolidate it in ourselves, and to impose the One Right Answer from above.  When the One Right Answer fails—as it always does—the fault, we know, is always to be found in the peculiar evil of the Other Side, unmatched in the history of mankind, and not in the human condition, which can be healed (if at all) only in the personal conversion of hearts and minds to a love of truth (and ultimately the Truth).  That such healing will never be complete in this life should call us back to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and even that of James Burnham; that it never does is, in its own way, confirmation of that wisdom.

In the spring of 1986, I spent a week in Washington, D.C., in the Close Up program.  A year before James Burnham died, that really was a different time.  D.C. was still closer to the sleepy Southern town described by David Brinkley in Washington Goes to War than to the post-Clinton/Bush, Jr. imperial capital of today, but the signs were already there for those who had eyes to see.  Even though I could not fail to note the changes that had come in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis (after my family’s last visit to D.C.), I was not among those who had such eyes.  Though I was heading that fall to Russell Kirk’s Behemoth U. to study physics, I stood on the rooftop of a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, enthralled by the lights of the Capitol, the monuments, and the Mall, and vowed one day to return.

I did, earlier than I thought I would, in the summer of 1989.  As an intern at Accuracy in Media, I attended every public lecture at every conservative think tank in town, and a few that were meant to be private.  I had my picture taken with Jack Kemp and Duncan Hunter and Alan Keyes, hobnobbed with exiled leaders of the Nicaraguan Contras, met Pat Buchanan for the first time, engaged Robert Bork in an argument over the Establishment Clause, and got Newt Gingrich to sign a copy of a program from a Democratic Women’s Club luncheon that I had been assigned to cover for AIM’s weekly newspaper.  At the reception following a lecture by Russell Kirk to the monthly meeting of the Third Generation at the Heritage Foundation, I drank Coors—back then, the beer of every smart young conservative—while wondering why so few of the members had bothered to show up to listen to the wisdom of the man who not only wrote The Conservative Mind but embodied it.

And then, a month or two later, at a meeting of that same group, I discovered why.  While they hadn’t turned out for Kirk, the members descended in droves to hear a young man named Chris Manion, from a conservative think tank in North Carolina, because they thought that he understood The Problem, and would offer The Solution.

Chris did indeed understand The Problem, but those young men and women left disappointed, because they could not countenance The Solution—one with which Kirk would thoroughly agree.  If you want to make a difference, Manion told them, you must first Go Home.

There are no solutions to be found in Washington, D.C., and thus there are no problems.  But there are very real problems with very real solutions right in our own backyards (not to mention our own souls)—problems that we are morally bound to solve, no matter how much we wish to avoid them.  And yet: Drain the Swamp! we cry, though the rainwater in the bucket we can’t bring ourselves to empty is breeding mosquitos in our own backyard.

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

East of Eden

Russell Kirk frequently warned those who read his essays and books and attended his lectures not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Even at the most mundane level of everyday life, the Sage of Mecosta offered good advice.  If we spend all of our days dreaming about what might be—let alone what might have been—we’re liable to end up like Miniver Cheevy (or even Richard Cory).  Insisting that everything be perfect is a great way to ensure that your house suffers irreparable water damage from the minor leak in your roof while you try to decide between the six colors and four shapes of architectural shingles that Home Depot has to offer.

But there are greater depths to Dr. Kirk’s advice than the surface level of pragmatism.  His words of wisdom flowed from the same place as his opposition to ideology.  Leo Strauss argued that the classical and Christian worlds had set the bar too high for man to be able to reach it, and his students declared that the genius of the philosophers of the modern era (starting with Machiavelli) can be found in their embrace of a sort of “idealistic realism”—aiming for a standard that’s just high enough to give men something to strive for, but low enough that the goal is actually possible to reach.

As usual, Strauss was wrong, and his students (perhaps deliberately) more so.  The evidence can be found all around us—or rather, in what’s not around us.  Where are the modern Parthenons and Pantheons?  The Chartreses and Notre Dames of the 20th and 21st centuries?  The Homers and Dantes and Thomas Aquinases?  The various Trump towers may be marvels of engineering, but a mathematical problem solved in steel is different from a monument in word or in stone to the human spirit.

Men of earlier ages aimed high, but they met their aims, in large part because they recognized the limitations of man.  They didn’t demand that everything be planned out in advance.  There was no blueprint for Notre-Dame de Paris; no outline for the Commedia.  They placed stone upon stone, word after word, and from their efforts something glorious took shape.

The fundamental failure of the modern age stems from the refusal to accept the inherent limitations of a fallen world, and the consequent insistence on making the perfect the enemy of the good.  The great successes of the modern world—advances in technology and medicine, for example—are the exceptions that prove the rule, because they were made by men who were willing to experiment, to try something they weren’t sure would succeed, to accept something good (say, a moderate extension of life) rather than to insist on the perfect (the elimination of death).  That the basic techniques of modern science and medicine were established in the late medieval world and only refined since then is more significant than 21st-century man is willing to admit.

Nowhere is the modern tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good more obvious than in the political demand that reality conform to ideology.  Kirk found in Edmund Burke, the prototypical conservative, the source of his pragmatic advice, but “conservatives” today are much more the descendants of Thomas Paine, an atheist radical and Burke’s bête noire on the subject of the French Revolution, than they are of Burke.  Paine is typical of the modern ideologue in his insistence that changes in external social and political institutions are more likely to better the lot of mankind than the conversion of hearts and minds, much less the literal conversion of fallen man to membership in the Body of Christ.  If we can conceive of the perfect world, we can build it, even if that may mean that those whose vision doesn’t match up with ours might need to be sacrificed—literally—for the sake of the glorious future in which they will not share.

As late as 30 years ago, American conservatives still cited Kirk on the dangers of ideology, even as they, in the final days of the Cold War, had fallen prey (as Kirk saw with perfect clarity) to the siren song of ideology themselves.  Today, most self-identified conservatives who remember his name reject Russell Kirk precisely because he wasn’t an ideologue, because he believed that true diversity (rather than the fake diversity that goes under the name of multiculturalism) is a Christian principle that flows from the nature of the Godhead Itself, because he insisted that there are no political solutions to cultural problems (which is why he joined the masthead of Chronicles), because he was a patriot of Mecosta, Michigan, rather than a nationalist of the American empire based in the fever swamps of Washington, D.C.

Whatever their failings, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had read Russell Kirk, and both presidents honored him with invitations to visit the White House.  The thought of a Kirk being invited to an audience with an American president post-1992 is, in the immortal word of Wallace Shawn, “inconceivable!”  There is no left and right anymore, no Burke-Paine debate to speak of in contemporary politics.  There is only ideology, the sword of the revolution—the enemy of the good, in relentless pursuit of a perfection unobtainable here, east of Eden.

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

The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle, like much of Philip K. Dick’s work, is both fascinating and frustrating.  Usually described as an alternative history of the United States in a world in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan defeated the Allies in World War II, this short novel is fascinating because it is, instead, a diagnosis of the actual world that emerged from that conflict.  That accounts for the most frustrating attribute of this book, at least for me: its all-too-brief length.  I have never cared for alternative histories, whether in novelistic or other form; the only things they ever seem to reveal are their respective author’s hang-ups and hobby horses.  And so my frustration in this case lies not with the lack of more “history,” but with the sense that there is far more I wish to learn about Dick’s characters.

Dick, however, didn’t need to develop those characters any further because, when the book ends, he has accomplished his goal.  Juliana Frink, the chief female protagonist, has met the titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, himself the author of a novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which presents an alternative history (to the narrative of The Man in the High Castle), in which the Allies won World War II.  Abendsen’s book itself diverges from history as we know it, but as he and Julia discover through the use of the I Ching, it expresses the “Inner Truth” of history.

And that is Dick’s point: A true novelist is a truth-teller; and in The Man in the High Castle Dick himself is revealing the truth about the United States in 1962 (and beyond).  Our culture is characterized by abstraction, symbolized by the Japanese, and a confusion of efficiency with morality, symbolized by the Nazis.  The two breakthroughs in the book—Juliana’s revelation about the Inner Truth of The Grasshopper, and Trade Minister Tagomi’s trip (through a glass, darkly, as it were) to the world of The Grasshopper—occur through the engagement of their imaginations with works of art.  A revival of the imagination, Dick shows, can revitalize culture and break the stranglehold of abstract ideology and pragmatic morality on American life.

Frank Spotnitz has created a television adaptation of The Man in the High Castle for Amazon that does justice to Dick’s characters, while changing the narrative of the story.  In his version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not a book but a film, one of many newsreels presenting a history closer to our own.  Hawthorne Abend sen is no longer an artist but a consumer of these newsreels—a sign, perhaps, that Spotnitz, understanding Dick’s point about the artist as truth-teller, is revealing a truth about America today.

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