One of the things I find I have diminishing patience for – either in online discourse or in any other public forum – is the lazy equalisation of values that comes from reductive readings of history and a certain lack of education in philosophy. Indeed, this was one of the reasons I wrote that piece late last month on how a right attitude toward the family is necessary to combat nationalism. The Good (and the Beautiful, and the True) may be ontologically one, but it presents itself to us humans in a dizzyingly-vast array of discrete goods necessary to our flourishing, and part of the real work of striving for the good is sorting through these goods in an attempt to properly place them. Even if we assert that justice and the Good at its base requires some form of real equality for people (something which, even as a leftist, I’m not 100% convinced is possible), that very same equality of being requires a hard inequality of values – with differing ranks and degrees of importance being ascribed to each.
It strikes me after reading several pieces that both the Anglo-American tradition of liberal conservatism, and the Continental tradition of national conservatism, have both been losing the plot rather badly in this most essential of conservative endeavours (at least according to Russell Kirk, for whom the transcendent moral order and hierarchies of value were of paramount importance) for about the past two hundred years or so. This point was driven home rather strongly by several articles I read recently, one of which being a Rod Dreher gush piece over Orbán Viktor (the interesting but for various reasons rather troubling Prime Minister of Hungary), and the other being the New York Times review of George Will’s latest book, which appears to be nothing short of a liberal-conservative manifesto in an age where such beliefs seem, to put it politely, quaint.
Both Dreher and Will seem to be in not-quite-equivalent measures guilty of ignoring Kirk, because both of them dangerously collapse the entire project of the transcendent social order in ways which mirror – as Dreher notes with one of his increasingly-sporadic flashes of self-awareness – the Ahmari-French debate at the Catholic University of America, which is in itself a rehash of a theopolitical debate which has been rollicking the English-speaking Catholic world for some time and which does not leave us Orthodox types unscathed.
If we were to take this debate at face value, at its core is the question of whether the state can or should take an interest in substantive questions of justice – including on pelvic issues – to the extent that it should be willing to bring the force of law to bear on them. For French, conservative goals can be best advanced by preserving in the state as much of a neutral arbiter as possible on questions of cultural value, and preserving as much private space as possible for conservative options to be pursued, through the pluralism of a marketplace of ideas. For Ahmari, by contrast, the state cannot be neutral. It is always already an expression of the values implicit in a culture; and the culture war must be fought in order to win a just state, which can be used to pursue both public and private goods.
The confusion of means and ends on both sides of this debate is all too readily apparent, unfortunately. French’s defence of pluralism clearly does not extend to the international sphere; and he is all too willing to use the full coercive strength of the state to force another sovereign people to adopt an entirely different way of life and an entirely different laundry-list of social goods, as seen in his repeated, intellectually-odious defences of the Iraq War (which was indeed a war on truth itself). French’s variant of ‘classical liberalism’, precisely as a comprehensive doctrine of justice replete with its own priests and zealots, justly earned its obsolescence through this very war – along with the prior one in Yugoslavia, and the subsequent one in Libya. For Ahmari’s part, his embrace of Trumpism reeks of the very same sort of ‘sincere irrationality’ that he derides in French. Ahmari derides French for cutting deals with the devils of sexual licence and other forms of cultural progressivism in his pursuit of a level cultural playing field. However, he shows himself all too willing to cut deals with the philosophical devil of post-modernism in his practical political choices.
These are not hypocrisies specific to these two gentlemen or to this specific debate: they point straight to the problems with both ‘classical liberalism’ and Catholic intégrisme. Though both claim to combat progressivism, both are in fact guilty of accommodating progressive arguments about the nature of political reality. Classical liberalism always hides the comprehensive (and, at base, non-Christian) nature of its own truth claims behind various guises of ‘neutrality’ in state and market, precisely because any hint of the specificity of its value-claims undermine its claims to universality. On the opposite side, intégrisme – which in its original instance as now arose as a deliberate counter-narrative to liberal conceptions of politics – has never been as pious as it pretends to be. Maurras was an agnostic. The creative force behind Action française came from the anti-Dreyfusards. From the start, the intégriste project had only a positivist and instrumentalist conception of faith.
Both Frenchian classical-liberalism-via-neoconservatism and Ahmarian intégrisme make the fatal error – fatal, that is, from the temperamental conservative, Burke-and-Kirk perspective – of collapsing necessary distinctions-of-kind within the moral order. These collapses lead each to have a deficient or disordered understanding of the proper rôle of the state. Classical liberalism conflates the limited, procedural state and the negative liberties it safeguards with higher orders of goods, such that it cannot conceive of any potential discrete social or political good or moral priority which that state might sacrifice its neutrality to pursue. In essence, for liberalism, negative liberty becomes a sort of god.
On the other hand, intégrisme in its too-close, ostensibly-religious pursuit of these discrete social and political goods, expounds a religion which smells a bit too much like a state. It arrogates to the religious sphere the responsibility of crafting political projects, and in so doing instrumentalises the religious. Even the innocuous-sounding ‘integralism in three sentences’ makes the Grand Inquisitor’s mistake. Our intégristes think spiritual and temporal goods possess only differences in degree, but belong to the same category. The problem with this, of course, is that it undermines actual religious witness on spiritual goods which don’t rightly belong to the same kind as the temporal ends of politics. Christ did not come to deliver us bread; He came to be our bread and drink and to deliver us from the very need for bread.
Which brings us back to Dreher and Will. Although Dreher seems closer to the truth than Will to me, I must be harder on Dreher here because he should know better than to embrace Orbán and his quasi-intégriste project with both arms open. If Dreher had any interest or even idle curiosity about the religious tradition to which he has attached himself – which also happens to be mine – he would know very well that neither side of this debate is particularly friendly to Orthodox Christians. He would know that neither side appreciates the precarious witness we bear on the theopolitical question, nor the tragic witness we bear on the question of nationalism. These witnesses, both tied to the material and political legacy of Eastern Rome, are not unrelated to each other.
Please do not mistake this for an appeal to false moderation. It’s an appeal to maximalism. In fact, my position here is pure Leont’ev, pure Pobedonostsev. Like both of these great Russians, we should not concede the slightest ground here; nay, neither to classical liberalism nor to the resurgence of nationalisme intégral. An approach which preserves the hierarchy of values in a transcendent moral order, indeed, must be particularly careful not to conflate the different kinds of loyalties which are due in different proportion to different loci of our social context, because to do otherwise would be to risk effeminacy and vulgarisation. However, given the state of our national climate of mutual fear and loathing, I fear that both effeminacy and vulgarisation lie inescapably in our path.
In America, I fear, the way out will be long and difficult. It will involve passing through a protracted period of barbarism. (Partially contra Fallows, though it may not be as bad as advertised, it will still be no cake-walk.) It will involve the near-insurmountable task of building and living out different modes of loyalty to each other than those being presented to us in our political, cultural or social lives. Our bad national habits of embracing bumper-sticker patriotism, totemic brand consumption and other forms of sacrifice-free virtue-signalling voluntaristic affinity that calls for no level of sacrifice, simply won’t cut it anymore.
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