On George Scialabba and the Left Conservative Possibility

[A version of this piece is cross-posted to Current]

How might one politically categorize the following statement?

[M]y apparently disparate-sounding worries....all result from one or another move on the part of the culture away from the immediate, the instinctual, the face-to-face. We are embodied beings, gradually adapted over millions of year to thrive on a certain scale, our metabolisms a delicate orchestration of innumerable biological and geophysical rhythms. The culture of modernity has thrust upon us, sometimes with traumatic abruptness, experiences, relationships, and powers for which we may not yet be ready–to which we may need more time to adapt....If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities–even the potentially liberating ones–the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive. 

For those whose exposure to or engagement with political ideas is fairly minimal–whether by choice or by circumstance or both–the question would likely seem strange. After all, there are no obvious partisan markers anywhere in this statement, no references to presidential candidates or global events or policy disputes. So what is political about it? But for those who have some familiarity with the history of political ideas and arguments, as well as some of their attendant philosophical formulations and literary tropes, there are flags in this statement which suggest an answer–and that answer, in all likelihood, would be “conservative.”

Not “conservative” in the way most Americans would be likely to use the term today, to be sure. The passage doesn’t provide anything that connects to Donald Trump or lower taxes or tighter immigration or anti-LGBTQ positions or the Supreme Court, at least not directly. But astute readers would pick up on the final sentence’s reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man,” his vision of a humanity that has succumbed to nihilism, hedonism, and passivity, and thus falls into a kind of groupthink where all individual accomplishments are lost. The passage also speaks warningly about developments and innovations of modernity which humanity, whose embodiment reflects a deep evolutionary grounding in small-scale interactions, needs to be far more cautious about embracing. Hence, the politics of this passage could be–and, I think, would be, if read without any additional context–plausibly coded as small-c conservative, or at least as philosophically anti-progressive. Its implications include a preference for the local, a suspicion of intellectual abstractions, a discontent with the ennui that consumer wealth and technological ease has enabled, and a fear of a too-rapidly pursued future whose liberating possibilities will likely be lost unless they are approached incrementally (if at all). In short, it communicates a respect for, even a valuation of, a more limited conceptualization of our social world–and, aside from certain strains of environmental concern within the current constellation of liberal thought, talk of “limits” is generally seen as the provenance of conservatives, not progressives.

 And yet, the author of this passage is George Scialabba, a man of–as was once not infrequently said of writers like him–“the left.” Scialabba is a highly regarded essayist, book review, and public intellectual, whose latest collection, Only a Voice: Essays (Verso, 2023), is a brilliant collection of insightful readings and contrarian arguments about some of the most important thinkers and writers of the past century, and some from centuries earlier: Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, Irving Howe, I.F. Stone, and many more. The essay “Last Men and Women,” a survey of criticisms of mass society and modern democracy, includes the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, but also this plain self-description: “[This]...is where I also stand–with the Enlightenment and its contemporary heirs, and against Straussians, religious conservatives, national greatness neoconservatives, Ayn Randian libertarians, and anyone else for whom tolerance, civic equality, international law, and a universal minimum standard of material welfare are less than fundamental commitments.” Whatever else might be said about that self-description (which was published in 2021), it doesn’t sound at all “conservative,” even in the small-c sense. So should we conclude therefore that Scialabba is simply inconsistent? Or might there be a political categorization which can, in a theoretically consistent way, capture both his progressive Enlightenment aspirations, and well as his worries about the same?

I think there is–though, as with all ideological labels, it’s a categorization with greater use as a conversational reference than as an analytical tool. The label is “left conservatism,” and applying it to Scialabba’s writings–or, perhaps more accurately, using Scilabba’s writings to apply the label more broadly–is an intellectual exercise worth engaging in, especially in our moment when so many other political categorizations seem either overthrown or irrelevant or both.

 The term “left conservative” is hardly new; it’s been coined and re-coined multiple times over the decades. Most recently, the term been revived in some conservative publications to describe a mix of anti-globalist, socially conservative, pro-labor, subsidiarian perspectives which recognize the need for protectionist action to strengthen national economies and local cultures. Those considerations are accurate, so far as they go. But to really dig into the idea–and to assess its fit with Scialabba’s incisive considerations of our moment–we need to look to an earlier expression of it, one found in the third-person self-description Norman Mailer provided in his book Armies of the Night: “Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” What is it that Mailer was describing there, this Marxian-style attainment of Burkean principles? By “the style of Marx” one must presumably mean employing a revolutionary, or at least structural, set of intellectual tools, ones addressed to emancipation of persons and goods in society; by “values suggested by Edmund Burke,” one must presumably be talking about local communities and the traditions they give life to, and the need to maintain and strengthen them. So how to put that together?

The most intellectual plausible articulation of this idea, I think, is to say that modernity–whether that is dated to the Protestant Reformation, the Declaration of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, or any other particular historical landmark or era–is simply different from what came before it. The 18^th-century (and earlier) traditions and communities which Burke defended cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, capitalism, democracy: all are genies let out of the bottle, in the face of which traditions of all kinds suffer. (Marx’s famous statement in The Communist Manifesto that, with industrialization, “all-fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away....all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” is an obvious support to this formulation, but Scialabba himself adds one as well, describing Burke’s own writings as “expressions of outraged common sense” in the face of the inevitable—and, he asserts, entirely justified—transformations that came with the expansion of suffrage and other “democratic truths”). Hence, the preservation of Burkean values–acting “conservatively,” in other words--now requires actions which go beyond the expansion of liberal guarantees or the amelioration of socio-economic disruptions.

This reading of Mailer may simply sound like the conservative insight famously expressed by G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy: “If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” But the “revolution” invoked by Chesterton in the name of conserving a particular state of affairs was a formal, not structural one, whereas the better understanding of Mailer’s point about “think[ing] in the style of Marx,” I believe, means something truly “left”in the structural, even radical, sense. Maybe, the left conservative thinks, only a radical shift towards the democratization, the socialization, and the equalization of the products and processes of modernity will be sufficient to enable people to continue to thrive in their communities.

And it really is communities which are central here. (One could argue that “left conservatism” might better be expressed as “left communitarianism,” and there’s some value to putting it that way. But since the connections and commonalities which emerge in the context of communities are, I think, something that human beings, as political animals, always seek to construct and always mourn the absence of–and here I am heavily influenced by the writings of Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, two political philosophers that were frequently labeled “communitarians” when that term enjoyed a boomlet 30 years ago–focusing on the concern to literally conserve that which is genuinely valuable about our communities is appropriate.) Our individualistic age puts an asterisk of suspicion beside all communities, however defined, seeing them all as potential sources of majoritarian abuse or undemocratic tyranny–which, of course, they too often are; as Christians at least ought to be quick to acknowledge, we are fallen beings, after all. But the conservative desire for belonging and rootedness and community, whatever evils it enables, also grounds both democratic and egalitarian possibilities: traditions are forms of meaning and fulfillment which cannot (or at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions and thus be taxed away from you or turned against you by those who wield power. To the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--one could argue, if one is of this particular conservative orientation (as I think Scialabba is, at least partly), that something in the modern world has gone wrong, or at least has gotten too far away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence, truths and necessities which are the necessary (if not sufficient) prerequisites to treating all people as equally capable of self-rule and equally deserving of respect. That’s not necessarily a defense of all communities, especially not national ones, which too regularly employ the coercive power of the state to maintain the definition and borders which those in power decide upon; Mailer’s communitarianism, a term he probably would have blanched at, was decidedly small-scale and anarchic. But the centrality of being in connection with others, and defending those connections, remains.

Not many have picked up on this reading of Mailer’s ideas in the two generations since, to say the least. On the left or progressive liberal side of America’s intellectual divide, as it began to deepen and sharpen in the decades following the upheavals of the 1960s, leftism mostly focused its decreasing energies on various statist parties and platforms, while most liberals came to treat those who worried about the excesses of their individualistic liberatory language as either 1) accidental intellectual traitors (as it was frequently expressed at a UC-Santa Cruz conference on the “specter of  left conservatism” in 1998, these unfortunate folk are genuine leftists whose distaste for the latest theoretical developments has tricked them into allying with conservative forces), or 2) just remnants of an old rural conservative Democrat faction, soon to die out. That’s assuming White voters were the ones being discussed, of course; the religiousity and social conservatism of many Black voters was treated very differently, though not until Bill Clinton was its preferred language given much credence, and even that didn’t last–Barak Obama, our first Black president, reflected very little of that sensibility while in the White House (which, cynically speaking, is perhaps one of the reasons he was able to attain it.)

As for America’s rightward flank, the rise of a pro-business, anti-socialist libertarianism as a component of the Republican coalition from the 1960s through the 1990s made any kind of liberal egalitarianism, much less leftism, unwelcome there. Occasionally you see attempts to import into American conservative discourse “Red Tory” formulations more common to Western European conservatism generally, but despite gestures in that direction (George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” for example), none of them have in any significant way shaped the overall conservative coalition in the U.S. Of course, some would insist upon adding a “until the rise of Donald Trump in 2016” to that sentence, and it is true that Trump’s profound lack of ideological (much less ethical) grounding has arguably presented an opening for leftist ideas to experience a revival in Republican circles. But while in today’s America you are, in fact, more likely to hear talk of structural or revolutionary changes to our liberal capitalist and democratic order coming from the Trumpist corner of the Republican party than from the Democrats led by Joe Biden, that talk is generally, and tragically, reflective of a fascist-adjacent authoritarianism which too many social conservatives, following Trump, seem to have become comfortable with. Even thoughtful and nominally worker-friendly treatments of the integralist argument in favor of more firmly supporting traditional community-based values seem to presume egalitarianism itself to be the real problem, and what limited appreciation for the solidarist approach to building economic equality–meaning unions, mainly–which still exists in America today is found coming the Democrats and the White House, not Mar-a-Lago.

All of which means that the left conservative position lacks a broad constituency in American politics. But that does not mean it lacks a voice. Perhaps most influentially, the historian Christopher Lasch, long a hero to many dissident and contrary conservatives (even as he remained personally a committed Democratic voter and a firm-if-worried supporter of the liberal egalitarian project overall through his life), and someone who himself never used terms like “left conservative” or “communitarian” in a self-descriptive way (even as close students of Lasch work subsequently used both), articulated at least the outlines of what could be called a left conservative ideology as well as anyone. And Scialabba presents, in multiple essays, Lasch as perhaps the most valuable of all the “antiprogressives” (which is not the same as “conservatives”) whom he holds that fans of the Enlightenment, like himself, must learn from.

That learning, he writes, involves grappling with the best thinkers’ “combination of discrimination and democratic passion,” defining the latter as “the constant remembrance that democracy entails not merely that the people should be governed well but also that the people should govern.” Mourning the tendency of intellectuals and politicians of all stripes–including both what he calls “the business party” and “the Progressives”–to ignore this fundamental principle, Scialabba’s cast of heroes includes, as he lays them out in his introduction to Only a Voice, scholars and activists and writers who, in one way or another, demonstrate a “moral intelligence” that “allowed them to make relevant distinctions and get the difficult decisions right.” This means, rather than simple apologists for the Enlightenment, such figures as Randolph Bourne, George Orwell, Irving Howe, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Richard Rorty, Bill McKibben, along with Lasch, earn his praise. These are people who, in his view, take seriously their “democratic obligation to persuade people before legislating for them”–and that means taking seriously the “anxieties about modernity” which confront all those whom these thinkers and writers, like Scialabba himself, attempt to clarify the democratic options for. The responses to this anxiety which these writers all wrestled with obviously vary greatly, from Rorty’s advocacy of setting aside worries about “self-creation” in the name of a bland yet vital “tolerance,” to Howe’s insistence that the ideal of socialism “will need to be reimagined in every generation,” to, perhaps most centrally, Lasch’s populist insistence the “the democratic character can only flourish in a society constructed to the human scale.” Yet Scialabba thoughtfully considers–and by so doing, makes it possible to learn from–them all.

That this practice of thoughtful learning includes giving sympathetic attention to what he calls “perhaps the most significant strain of social criticism in our time,” the “antimodernist radicalism” of limits one can find in writers like D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, or Lasch himself, is not entirely pleasing to even some of Scialabba’s most enthusiastic readers. In a review essay on Only a Voice in Commonweal, Sam Adler-Bell gently suggests that Scialabba misunderstands that modernity’s anxieties and doubts are less to be responded to than embraced as actually one of its strengths: the modern person “is not necessarily a conformist, a face in the crowd, incapable of independent thought,” but rather “is someone who detects these frailties in everyone else.” This is a subtle point, and a good one, but it also strikes me as an inverted application of Robert Frost’s famous comment that a liberal is someone too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument. Scialabba is far too conscientious a thinker to deny the immense accomplishment of Enlightenment liberalism in teaching people to be skeptical of the limits and presumptions they inherit or which have been imposed upon them. But he also recognizes, as anyone with even a smidgen of leftist suspicion of the bourgeoisie should, that such skepticism, without a foundation in practices and places and, yes, even prejudices–in the sense of “pre-judgments”–to draw upon, will often result not in robust, democracy-defending free-thinking, but rather in a literally care-less disconnection, a tendency to abstraction which capitalist overlords will be more than happy to use to manipulate and oppress. As Scialabba writes in “Progress and Prejudice,” the first and most overarching essay in Only a Voice, he has come to recognize “with some reluctance” that thinkers like Lasch are correct: that “as long as modernization is involuntary,” then conserving our ability to draw upon and stay within “our own skins—and even, perhaps, within traditional social forms” is needed, if our “every liberation” is not to be “captured and exploited.”

Left conservatism is one way of articulating a set of political convictions that can, at least as a matter of theory, see this needle, the needle which modernity has presented us with, and thread it, thus enabling the continued project of weaving together (or sewing up tears within) our democratic political fabric. Scialabba, through his writing over the decades, like Lasch himself in decades prior, has been an insightful advocate for the kind of democratic learning which all of America’s diverse communities need–a learning which reminds us of modernity’s liberating and equalizing accomplishments, and what must be conserved if the left’s emancipatory project is to continue. Whether this political categorization fits him well or not, his position is one much worth contemplating–an action which would have to begin with reading his most recent, and excellent, book.

Left (not Liberal) Conservatism (or Communitarianism, if you Prefer): A Restatement

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Recently, Tablet Magazine published a lengthy essay by Eric Kaufmann, heralding the revival of "left-conservative" thinking, which the author defined as "a conservative view on cultural questions like national identity and immigration with left-wing positions on economic issues like public services." Leaving aside for the moment whether this "intellectual force" is, in fact, emerging (and how we would know it if it was), the genealogy and analysis of this constellations of opinions provided by Kaufmann is interesting. Most politically informed Americans would, I suspect, look at the above definition and think "oh yes, that's what those legendary 'conservative Democrats' are said to believe; I'm sure there must be a couple of them still around here somewhere." But Kaufmann is trying to distringuish something rather different than that, I think, something similar to what long-time observers of American conservatism might remember from the "Red Tory" boomlet of a decade ago. I don't believe he's successful in making his claim, because--to give away the end of the essay--I think his conception of liberal nationhood gets in the way of his explanation of what left conservatism is or could be in the first place. Still, it provides some intellectual history worth surveying, at the least.

Kaufmann builds his argument primarily around the intellectual journey of two important mid-century Jewish thinkers, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, both of whom came of age--like many other intellectuals in their cohort--during an era and in an environment of leftist radicalism, and went on to be influential academics whose Cold War, anti-communist sensibilities were deeply disturbed (though, I think, in importantly different ways) by the unrest of the 1960s. Kaufmann quotes Glazer as saying: "When I came to Berkeley in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free speech issue, I was on the side of the free speech people....The key issue that labelled me a conservative, labelled a number of us as conservative, were the student unrest issues post-1964." What changed? Years of student challenges to, in Glazer's view, "free speech, free research and free teaching." As Kaufmann sums it up, the problem for Glazer, and many of his fellow former radicals, was that their preferred "social democratic approach was married to political liberalism," and that meant "standing up for bourgeois liberal democracy." Which is, of course, an obvious course for philosophical liberals to take! But if the ideas Kaufmann traces in this article are rooted in liberalism, in what sense is the "conservatism" they might invoke actually "left."

Ideological terminology and labeling never has been and never will be consistent, so it's a fool's errand to ever claim to definitive identify that one set of beliefs are, or only ever could be, "liberal" as opposed to "left" (to say nothing of "conservative"). Still, attempts to do so are instructive, because if nothing else they can provide landmarks for intellectual wanderers. Most "left" intellectual landmarks that have been articulated ever since the French Revolution--which is when this particular phrasing first arose--have involved have involved one of form or another of liberation from cultural, economic, and social forms and traditions which impose hierarchies and distinctions. In other words, the one thing that can probably almost always be said with confidence about the "left" is that it is egalitarian. Aren't liberals egalitarians too? Obviously much contemporary liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, has certainly turned its long-standing valorization of the God-created individual as a rights-bearing being in the direction of thorough-going egalitarianism. But the fact that libertarian thinkers, making use of the same philosophical convictions about natural rights and individual dignity as liberals, can coherently advance decidedly non-egalitarian claims, suggests that leftist egalitarianism must have different roots.

Norman Mailer's self-description as a "left conservative" can be instructive here. When Mailer called himself a left conservative in his strange and magnificent The Armies of the Night, he said that he aimed to "think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." one possible way of articulating this vision (which Mailer himself admitted was an oxymoron which he had to redefine every day) is to say that modernity is different from what came before it (whether you want to date that to French Revolution or the Declaration of Independence or any other landmark). The traditions and communities which Burke defended simply cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, democracy: all genies let out of the bottle. Which all, of course, rings as conservative in the fullest sense. As I once argued in an attempt to make sense of left conservatism more than 15 years ago, conservatives value tradition and community in part because they are the only things that cannot (at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions which in turn can be taxed away from you or turned against you; to the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--then one could argue that the modern world has gone wrong, gotten away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence.

There are possible reactionary responses to this, whether a jihad-like revolt against modernity or a St. Benedict-like retreat from it. But neither of those were Mailer's response. As the above-linked essay explains, Mailer "hoped to subvert most traditions that governed American life," no doubt in part because so many of those traditions were products of "corporate power and its influence on American culture." So his response, instead, was to imagine a Marxist response, carried out on behalf of Burkean communities and traditions. Marxism was and is, obviously, deeply implicated in grand theories of historical determinism and revolution, which Mailer himself condemned ("I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances"). But you can still make use of Marx's central--and, yes, illiberal--insights regarding alienation, commodification, imperialism, and so forth, without all the historical materialist baggage. Why attempt to do so? Because (and I've suggested before) Marx recognized the anthropological truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the human connection between personal subjectivity and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness does not mean an eternal project of subjective liberation, world without end, which can never do more, I think, than aim to make the burdens of modernity privately manageable (with that emphasis on the private perhaps explaining the tendency many liberal thinkers have for assuming that the liberation of identities will go hand-in-hand with socio-economic equality). Instead, the true leftist must address the issues of power and production which make the transformations of modernity into alienating, divisive, and dependency-inducing burdens in the first place--and that means taking seriously the communal and traditional spaces where those transformations take place.

(An aside: did I just put Rousseau and Burke into the same sentence? Yes. But the only reason that sounds strange, I think, is that the deep Burkean tradition has evolved into a position which basically accepts the collapse of the modern project: with the end of the authority of tradition comes the impossibility of community, a banal emotivist future, and the likely decline (or violent overthrow) of the West. In short, to borrow a point from Michael Walzer, such Burkeans are the sort of communitarians who think that we are at the point, or nearly at the point, where our communal nature is irredeemably broken up. The problem with this argument, however, is that--given that the human race, even in the decadent liberal West is, well, still here--it implies that community and tradition must not have been part of our "deep structure" after all. Whereas the Rousseauian perspective says, fine, okay, our original nature has been lost, we're in chains. The liberal response is to deny the chains, or insist they aren't relevant to individual life anyway; the conservative response, especially in its more religious iterations, is to say something like, yes, the chains are real, it's a catastrophe, but in a sense the chains have been there since the fall of Adam, so let's just make the best of it until the eschaton. Rousseau's response preserves true conservative seriousness, but rejects the identification of specific social and economic and cultural problems with original sin. Instead, it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.)

Kaufmann never mentions Mailer in his piece, which is unfortunate, because the way Mailer expressed his attachment to what he considered a proper conservative sensibility--one which, among other things, made him very sensitive to the need to fight centralizing abstractions and systems, and insist upon the value of realizing equality in terms of empowerment--would have been a helpful correction to Kaufmann's own articulation of the "left conservatism." Kaufmann's historical arguments about the capture of the "adversary culture" by America's corporate class over the past half-century, and how the alignment of those increasingly-elite (and therefore no longer entirely "adversary") conceptions with technological and educational shifts in America's economy over the past 30 years, thus contributing to a deepening of class divides along urban and rural lines--all of those are, I think, both true and worthy of serious thought. But Kaufmann's notion of that which the left conservatives he is imagining want to conserve is rarely actually a matter of local communities or traditions. Rather, the focus is on national stability, particularly ethnic national stability. That high levels of immigration can be a serious challenge for local norms is a truism that no serious person should deny. But to build a model of the conservative sensibility around the nation state, connecting Robert Putnam's important work on social capital to "collective tradition, memory, and nationhood," and posing the proper conservative goal as "a nation-state with a common culture," is to, frankly, ignore the best that conservatism has to offer: a respect for (though not, of course, an unthinking obeisance to) local spaces, and the communal and traditional patterns which emerge there.

Kaufmann concludes with the prediction (or hope?) that soon governing power in Western democracies will be held by--or at least will be regularly and seriously contested for by--"national conservatives endors[ing] left-wing policies such as protectionism, infrastructure spending, and support for welfare programs like Social Security, alongside conservative ideas such as immigration restriction and nationalism." But we know what that is, and it isn't necessarily leftism; rather, it is the redistributive liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, of America's manufacturing unions in their heyday, of finance capitalism given freedom to expand alongside the American state, so long as appropriate levels of taxation keep schools and programs all fully funded. From an egalitarian perspective, there's much to applaud there! That's part of the reason why, from the 1930s to the 1970s, so many radical democratic and socialist thinkers, with intellectual roots extending back to the populist challenges of the early 20th century, found at least some degree of unifying comfort with the Democratic party. But once American capitalism went fully global, the bankruptcy of that egalitarian bargain was, slowly but surely, revealed, and those on the left (including those with whatever degree of conservative sympathies) found themselves having to either embrace or disentangle themselves from the neoliberalism that eventually become dominant. Kaufmann captures some of this, but the orientation of his argument around the likes of Bell and Glazer, two comfortably ensconced academics, members of an ethnically marginalized but nonetheless (at least within university circles) fully vouchsafed members of the American intellectual elite, perhaps inevitably makes him begin with and return to a leftist (but actually liberal) construction that can only conserve a nationalist conception which the aforementioned New Deal world created as a byproduct. Besides Mailer, he would have done better to seriously consider the historian Christopher Lasch.

Lasch--who, to my knowledge, never used the phrase "left conservative," though the political theorist Ronald Beiner used "left-wing conservatism" to describe Lasch's thought--does make a brief appearance in Kaufmann's argument, serving as part of, in his term, the "Protestant Populist-Progressive" complement to the "anti-communist socialism" which, in the thinking of New York intellectuals like Bell and Glazer, he sees the roots of left conservatism. Unfortunately, his use of Lasch's ideas--which shouldn't be at all unfamiliar to students of American conservative thought, though unfortunately still often is--doesn't serve the man's overall philosophy well. He writes that Lasch "castigated America’s elites for their post-national detachment from popular national identity," but that assumes the Lasch made any kind of argument for a genuine "popular national identity" in the first place, which many readers of the man (myself included) would firmly dispute. It's not that Lasch denied that modern individual subjects can and often do build an identity through, and develop cultural attachments in connection with, a community as large as a nation state; he knew that he had himself (as he wrote in 1954, he recognized that he was "a part of America, whatever that means, except that the one thing it means is that wherever I go I cannot not be a part of it"). But the populism which Lasch called for--a populism that was, itself, distinctly left-conservative, at least if we hold to the idea that one can put together both an insistence upon the equal empowerment, in social and economic terms, of all communities, and an equal respect for the local norms and traditions which democratic majorities within those communities wish to live in accordance with--was never nationalist, never statist, and certainly never ethnic. It was, if anything, both cognizant of (even, in a way that many conservatives never are, respectful of) the moral opportunities which which modern subjectivity and the liberation of the individual self had made possible, while insistent upon the need to never valorize such liberal possibilities as foundational. Eric Miller thoughtfully captured Lasch's mature thought this way:

Populism, [Lasch] wrote, "stands for things most American still believe in and are willing to defend," however submerged those beliefs might be beneath the glitter and gigantism of the market and the state....Against those who had argued that "populism" was merely an ideological haven for racially intolerant, ignorant provincials, Lasch began to recover and define a kind of populist cosmopolitanism....

[T]his required that he first deconstruct the self-image of those who fancied themselves the true cosmopolitans....Whereas democracy's health required a rooted loyalty to particular places, the new elites [of America] were "international rather than regional"....Such upper-class cosmopolitanism was of course the true provincialism, a species more dangerous than the variety the despised lower-middle class might possess. 

Against this faux cosmopolitanism Lasch proposed a vision of citizenship rooted in loyalty to place and kin yet also informed, enriched, and instructed, in a dialectical manner, by the fruits of high culture. "Those who welcome cultural fragmentation in the name of pluralism," [Lasch] wrote...."have lost the sense of 'twoness,' as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, that formerly shaped writers attempting to navigate between the subcultures in which they had been raised and the world culture they had acquired through education"....The liberationist project of the elites, premised on the need to free "the imprisoned self," [Lasch] noted...yield[ed] simply a "detached, formless, free-floating self--a self without prejudices, without a point of view of its own that is put at risk by others....Without a home culture, as it used to be called--a background of firmly held standards and beliefs--people will encounter the 'other' merely as consumers of impressions and sensations, as cultural shoppers in pursuit of the latest novelties. It is important for people to measure their own values against others and to run the risk of changing their minds; but exposure the others will do them very little good if they have no minds to risk." [Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 371-373]

While it might seem to take away from the policy focus of Kaufmann's original argument, Lasch's taking of his populist synthesis of a conservative or communitarian concern for place, tradition, and culture, on the one hand, and the leftist concern for equality and empowerment, on the other, in the direction of the arts is, I think, a much truer way of expressing the potential of this ideological construct than by simply endorsing strong welfare provisions and strong immigration restrictions at the same time. The latter is simply a grab-bag of policy positions that can be construed as representing the interests of some particular demographic quadrant of society, however historically important such a constellation of priorities may have appeared to Cold War American intellectuals at the time. The former, by contrast, can, when pushed, be revealed to incorporate a deep engagement with political and social theory, far more than loose talk about the consequences of the rise of immigration and the decline of unions. As a host of critcs, philosophers, and scholars argued in a symposium on left conservatism over 20 years ago, long before anyone at Front Porch Republic rediscovered the term, left conservatism is a way of articularting, while still recognizing the full, degrading and dependency-creating effects of the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of our late capitalist moment, some sometimes discomforting and no easily reputed arguments (none of which the participants in the above symposium were particularly sympathetic to, even as they recognized the challenge they posed). First, that materiality matters, which presents real limits up, or at least complications within, any project which equates equality and empowerment with the liberation of the subject. And second that attacking foundations, whatever the (often quite real and necessary) strategic value of doing so, can never on its own create a politics that truly matters to social life.

There is arguably a parallel to all this, if only Kaufmann could have seen it, in the fate of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. In a recent column titled "The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders," Ross Douthat made the argument that the wave of protests which have arisen in the five weeks since George Floyd's murder, whatever their justice, represent a departure from the democratic socialist vision of Sanders, and its replacement by a leftism that fits right into the ideological movement that Bell, as Kaufmann presents it, sketched out over 40 years ago. Left agitators, according to this prediction, inevitably lose their interest in democratizing the economy so as to empower and equalize conditions for the working class, and focus instead on non-economic hierarchies whose destruction will be more acceptable to cosmopolitan educated members of the capitalist class. The result is a liberalism which consumes the leftist emphasis upon, as Sanders constantly repeated, the deprivations of the billionaire class, thus losing any connection to the poor for the sake of maintaining influence over the educated. As Douthat claimed:

Throughout his career, Sanders has stood for the proposition that left-wing politics lost its way after the 1970s by letting what should be its central purpose--the class struggle, the rectification of economic inequality, the war against the “millionaires and billionaires”--be obscured by cultural battles and displaced by a pro-business, pro-Wall Street economic program....

Now, under these strange coronavirus conditions, we’re watching a different sort of insurgency challenge liberalism, one founded on an intersectional vision of left-wing politics that never came naturally to Sanders. Rather than Medicare for All and taxing plutocrats, the rallying cry is racial justice and defunding the police. Instead of finding its nemeses in corporate suites, the intersectional revolution finds them on antique pedestals and atop the cultural establishment....

[T]his revolution has been more unifying than Sanders’s version--uniting the Democratic establishment that once closed ranks against him, earning support from just about every major corporate and cultural institution, sending anti-racism titles skyrocketing up the best-seller list, even bringing Mitt Romney into the streets as a marcher and inducing Donald Trump to make grudging noises about police reform....All this, from one perspective, vindicates critics who said Sanders’s vision of revolution was too class-bound and race-blind all along....

[But the] anti-racist reckoning unfolding in colleges, media organizations, corporations and public statuary, may seem more unifying than the Sanders revolution precisely because it isn’t as threatening to power. The fact that corporations are “outdistancing” even politicians...in paying fealty to anti-racism is perhaps the tell. It’s not that corporate America is suddenly deeply committed to racial equality; even for woke capital, the capitalism comes first. Rather, it’s that anti-racism as a cultural curriculum, a rhetoric of re-education, is relatively easy to fold into the mechanisms of managerialism, under the tutelage of the human resources department. The idea that you need to retrain your employees so that they can work together without microaggressing isn’t Marxism, cultural or otherwise; it’s just a novel form of Fordism, with white-fragility gurus in place of efficiency experts....

Yes, serious critics of structural racism have an agenda for economic as well as cultural reform. But that agenda isn’t what’s being advanced: Chuck Schumer will take a knee in kente cloth, but he isn’t likely to pass a major reparations bill, and the white liberals buying up the works of Ibram X. Kendi probably aren’t going to abandon private schools or bus their kids to minority neighborhoods. And in five years, it’s more likely that 2020’s legacy will be a cadre of permanently empowered commissars getting people fired for unwise Twitter likes rather than any dramatic interracial wealth redistribution.

I am a cynical conservative, so you can dismiss this as the usual reactionary allergy to the fresh air of revolution. But it’s also what an old-guard leftism, of the sort that Bernie Sanders attempted to revive, would predict of a revolutionary movement that has so much of the establishment on board.


Douthat is honest enough to acknowledge a major hole in his argument: specifically, that "the demand for police reform at the heart of the current protests doesn’t fit this caricature." Which is surely how Sanders would defend himself from this accusation, if he felt inclined to articulate his vision of society in these terms: it is the poor (which includes a proportionally greater number of historically deprived and discriminated against persons) that have suffered so often from police forces which cannot help but be organized more around the interests and priorities of the wealthy; hence, a democratic socialist vision, or really any left vision for that matter, would have to include a challenge to the most visibly coercive of all our racial and class hierarchies.

Yet even with the column's central weakness, Douthat has a point, a point that any properly reflective leftist would have recognize. If the focus of leftism is not simply liberal redistribution, welfare payments, and the recognition of private subjectivities, but rather the public democratization of the social and economic order as a whole, then any movement that is so readily interwoven into the therapeutic managerialism of the corporate and knowledge class, such that Lasch so effectively identified and condemned, has to give believers in real economic democracy pause. And that would include left conservatives. Not so much--as one making use of Kaufmann's articulation of the term might think--because this kind of intersectionality challenges deeply felt ethnic, racial, or sexual hierarchies and thereby troubles our national community. That isn't, I think, a left conservative concern that is worthy of the name. Rather, a Laschian left conservative would recognize that any kind of reform movement, much less a revolutionary one, which allows itself to get centered around emotional or psychological abstractions, as opposed to the material realities of actual social and economic inequalities, whether in education or publishing or policing or anything else, is likely to captured by the forces of capital, and channeled into disputes that, whatever their legitimate need for resolution, will once again fail to connect with the communities where people live, the material lives they live there, and the traditions they build through those lives.

It is those actually existing habits of life which make life worth living. A democratization that does nothing to address the chains and dependencies which restrict and warp the full organic development of those lives, and the attachments they are constructed out of, is only at best a liberal equalization, delivering goods to individuals without much acknowledgement of the communal and local structures they are part of. To the extent that the goods are desperately needed, even a liberal distribution of them is very much worth it, and if the mix progressive economics and conservative politics that Kaufmann sees flowing from the insights of men like Glazer and Bell can effectively, democratically, deliver them, then more power to them. But such deliveries will do little, theoretically anyway, about the place-destroying global unfolding of capitalism; perhaps some small resistance will be made to it, but the neoliberal argument for managed expansion will remain dominant nonetheless. A philosophically consistent left conservatism, such that could be built out of the writings of Marx and Lasch, and perhaps the irascibleness of folks like Mailer and Sanders too, would, I suspect, better serve the human need for both community and equality all around.

Christopher Lasch and the Lasting Delimma of Localism

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

This past weekend, at the annual Front Porch Republic gathering (this year held at SUNY-Geneseo), three scholars reflected upon the writings of the historian and provocateur Christopher Lasch (most of whose career was spent in Rochester, just a short drive from Geneseo), an oft discontented prophet of a more local, more equal, and more humble America whom FPR bloggers like myself have invoked regularly all throughout its history. As I listened to these folks lay out their thoughts, and particularly when it came to the Q&A at the end of the panel, it occurred to me: Lasch's fondness of binaries was at work in all of their presentations and answers, and appropriately so, because such dividedness is perhaps the unavoidable lot of every possible form of modern localism.

That's might seem to be a tragedy, since the retreat from liberal anomie and alienation is conceived by many as a path towards a kind of political wholeness and social integrity, not a stressful balancing act. And perhaps it is. But perhaps it's a blessing as well, a reminder that, in our divided feelings and perceptions, we're rubbing up against limits in both the human self and the communities we create which are meaningful and real.

In the presentation given by Eric Miller--whose recent biography and exploration of the writings of Lasch is must-reading--the unstated binary in question, it seemed to me, was Lasch's revolt against the overly confident, secular and liberal progressivism of the mid-20th-century America's "new class" of professionals, writers, and intellectuals...alongside the fact that, well, that was the class which Lasch was a part of, the class which enabled him (a kid from Omaha) to have access to the cosmopolitan "republic of letters" and the life of the mind. In other words, Lasch's criticism of the flattening corporate, governmental, and therapeutic gigantism America's postwar liberal institutions--their lack of democracy, their condescending compassion, their absence of respect for working class and religious ways of life--constituted a populist defense of the local, and yet that very revolt was, for Lasch, justified in light of a more transcendent tribunal: the judgment of civilization, the good life, and (though Lasch himself fought against admitting this) a kind of Christian decency. Lasch knew that the best case for higher things had to made through an embrace of the particular--though the particular, in itself, could only provide the tiniest evidence of the larger and better sensibilities which give it credence. This is the intellectual localist dilemma in a nutshell: the best understanding of why one's own place and practices ought to be loved and defended involves arguments which partake of something which transcends the local entirely.

Robert Westbrook, a colleague of Lasch's, reflected on a much more stark binary: how the localist, in bringing into her affections for a place and its practices a sense of ends, makes the quotidian everyday-ness of our lives that much more valuable...and yet there could be no greater expression of narcissism than to fail to accept that our own daily-ness will be superseded by that of others, soon enough. The occasion for this was Lasch's own early death from cancer, and how he furiously railed (though he later apologized) against those doctors that attempted to turn him, in his words, into a "professional patient." Westbrook made reference to Martin Heidegger, a philosopher whom Lasch very likely never read, and his understanding that it is the ultimate limit upon our sense of being--that is, our deaths--which makes possible an authentic sense of care. Lasch's writings and example point localists towards that which has inspired so many poets: the brute fact that our ability to most fully be rooted in and contribute to a community is inextricably tied up with the fact that, it too, is a passing thing.

Finally Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Lasch's daughter and one of his most skilled literary executors, brought the matter of binaries forward explicitly, choosing to focus on her father's distinction between "nostalgia" and "memory," and making a moderate defense of the former, which Lasch had criticized. Her argument that the former can trigger and contribute to the latter found a real-world example in the discussion period afterward, when one student shared the story of a tragic death in his hometown, a death which had led to acts of memorialization which, as time went by, had come to be experienced by the deceased's family members as a painful act of "mere" nostalgia. The discussion, then, turned to matters of risk. Since nostalgia is a feeling we have for something we've loved and lost, any recovery of such things is bound to involve regret and pain, something that will be, inevitably, unevenly experienced across a community. Yet is the alternative to privatize pain entirely? That robs us of one of the primary reasons why localism presents itself as an answer to individualism in the first place. Localism, by making possible the sort of practices which enable real and meaningful connections to emerge between people, also makes possible a critical engagement with memory, thus hopefully preventing it from either turning into a mostly meaningless mass and routine genuflection, or being forgotten entirely.

The common thread through all of these presentations, I think? The fact that pursuing the option of sustaining local places and traditions, instead of embracing the easy institutions and ideologies of individual growth and change, means constant negotiation. What will have to be negotiated? The balance between particular instances of plebeian defensiveness and transcendent republican principles, between tightly grasping one's circumstances and letting them go, between moments of memorialization and moments of individual resistance. A lack of resistance against the community and its norms and its ineluctable workings-out would mean we'd become inhuman. But too much resistance robs us of the larger point of what, to quote Michael Sandel, "we can know together."

Lasch whole life was, perhaps, an example of someone who saw the particular and the general equally well, and threw himself into a struggle with them both. May his ideas aid us in our own struggles as well.

Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which I've already had a lot to say), in part because it creates an opportunity to bring in some of Rod's own reflections about what it has meant for him to tell this story about the relationship between himself, his hometown of St. Francisville, LA, and his saintly but judgmental sister Ruthie. Jeremy's review of Rod's story comes to a wise--if necessarily only partial--conclusion: "the truth is that communities need their boundary-challengers as much as they need their boundary-protectors, their Rods as much as their Ruthies—even if the former can never occupy a central place in those communities." This sobering thought, in turn, leads Rod to think about fidelity:

What Little Way is, in part, is a meditation on what it means to live a life of fidelity. You can only judge that by examining the telos of one’s faithfulness, of course. But even that is insufficient, because it is possible that there is nothing at all wrong with the telos of one’s fidelity, but that one has failed to see that it is not one’s nature to be absolutely faithful to a relative good. To put it in less abstract terms, there is nothing wrong with being faithful to one’s family and to one’s place, but not at the expense of one’s nature and calling.

This is a crucially important--though complicating--thought. Can it really be the case that some people are, by nature, constituted to be faithful to something other than those specific things (like family, community, and place) which constituted them, and which therefore arguably enabled their faithfulness in the first place? That would seem to be the implication of Rod's supposition--namely, that the realization of ones telos is not limited solely to a re-embrace of one's particular inheritance--and there are many good philosophical arguments in support of such. (For example, Charles Taylor: "We are now in an age in which...[t]he only way we can explore the order in which we are set, with an aim to defining moral sources, is through...personal resonance"--Sources of the Self, p. 512.) But what does that do to the very idea of valuing such specific things--things like St. Francisville parish--on their on terms, as opposed to transposing whatever it is they are and offer to some individualistic or utilitarian metric? As I wrote once before, "isn't the entire point of embracing stability and putting down roots and learning to live within limits exactly to deny that we our entirely a product of our own preference maximization?" To be sure, insisting on the value of being faithful to one's own resonance doesn't mean leaping (or falling) completely into individualism--but that doesn't mean one shouldn't be careful, all the same.

Such care should be taken by every person attracted to communitarian and localist thought, as I am--as well as by everyone who is critical of such. To put some philosophical meat on the bones of Rod's comment about, the premise of just about every possible expression of the idea that one's community or place or family has some virtue to it is the belief that such forms of attachment constitute in and through ourselves an end, a purpose, a narrative for our own lives--or as Rod put it, a "calling." (And I would insist that talking about callings in this way doesn't at all minimize the religious content implied by Rod's choice of words; as a Christian believer myself, I'm fully on board with the notion that, absent rare incidents of outright revelation, God's ends are ones that we realize in and through ourselves.) I'm leaning on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre here, but not just him: many have argued that the traditions which attachments incubate in us are the essential building blocks of judgment, cognition, and identity: that is, of being human in the fullest sense, being engaged in our lives purposively. But the complicating idea of Rod's story is that showing fidelity to, or giving respect to, those purposes and building blocks isn't necessarily the same as being defined by them. One can (and, at least in the modern United States, many, maybe even most people do) embody their attachment to a tradition by working out a purpose informed by a rejection of that community or place or family which shaped them. A contrarian or dissident or unconventional nature and calling still is--or at least still may be, assuming it does not take a destructive or nihilistic turn--one which remembers within itself a shaping, a tradition, which began with certain attachments, even if the customary implications of those attachments are now rejected. (The distinction between "memory" as "custom," in this context, is quite important, as Christopher Lasch argued in The True and Only Heaven; a community defined by acts of memory is characterized by "judgment," while custom suggests that which is "habitual and unconscious"--p. 133.)

I recently finished reading (after having set the book aside after one attempted reading too long ago) Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a book about which I can't say too much good--and one which, surprisingly, incorporates into it's story a great deal which anticipates and testifies to the complications which Rod's position suggests for any defense of community, identity, and fidelity. There is, for example, the story of Edward, the older brother of the book's narrator, John Ames, an old Congregationalist minister, the son and grandson of ministers, who through the book's narrative looks back with great profundity on his remarkable--and yet remarkably plain--life in the little, abolitionist-founded Iowa town of Gilead:

Edward studied at Göttingen. He was a remarkable man. He was older than me by almost ten years, so I didn't really know him very well while we were children....Edward left home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again for years. There weren't even many letters.

Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr Doktor. He must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind of Feuerbach. He was as samrt as could be, and my father was a little in awe of him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think....[T]he congregation took up collections to put him in college and then sent him to Germany....He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German literature and philosophy, and stayed there till be died. He married a German girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he lived. He was a good man.

He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, "I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir," and the color drained out of my father's face....[T]his was the dreaded confirmation of my parents fears. My father said, "You have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might show some respect for them." And Edward replied, and this was very wrong of him, "When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." My father left the table, my mother sat still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me the potatoes. (Gilead, pp. 24-26)

What I find most thoughtful in that passage is that John Ames, as his life comes to close and he writes the letter which forms the frame of the novel, is not saying that Edward was wrong for becoming a cosmopolitan (later Edward tells his younger brother, "John, you might as well know now what you're sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater--you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance."), not even for becoming an atheist, but for speaking so condescendingly to their father. And yet, the narrative also makes it clear that it is not as thought Edward had somehow lost all contact with or allegiance to the shaping which his religious upbringing had provided. One can't look into the mind of another person, not even a fictional other person, but I suspect that Robinson was allowing us to see, through the eyes of John Ames, that there was a purpose to Edward, an integrity and identity to him, which tied him to the community which John had made his whole life as much as every other character in the book.

And there is another, even more challenging parallel between Robinsons's and Rod's stories, a parallel which fleshes out the careful line regarding tradition and fidelity that forms the heart of this particular problem. Rod's estimation of his own story, as he has expressed it on his blog numerous times, is profoundly conditioned by the late revelation that his own parents--or at least his father--was somewhat dubious of the way he allowed his place, the community of St. Francisville, to define him for so long. When interviewing his father, the following exchange takes place: 

"There's something else I regret even more," he carried on. "I can see now, at the end of my life, that it would have been better if after your Mama and I got married, we had packed up and left here."

I couldn't believe what I had just heard.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I said: we should have left this place."

And then Paw told me how he had spent his entire life sacrificing for his mother, his father, his brother, his aunts, and his cousins--all of whom, in his recollection, worked him like a dog and never gave him a moment's thanks. They could always count on Ray to fix anything, to do any job they asked of him, to give up his free time and spend his own money, to help them. They used him up.

"I was a sucker," he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. "Aunt Lois was the only one of the whole bunch who was ever straight with me. But there was only one of her....Your sister, she was right to stand up to me over marrying Mike....And so were you, when you went back to Washington to be a writer. I was too strong-willed and stubborn back then. I regret that very much."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Daddy, I have to tell you, I don't know what to think about all this," I said. "Here I am, a man who turned his life upside down to move back here for the family, and because of the land. And now here you are telling me that you made an idol of family and place, and that you wish you had left it all behind when you were young, just like I did. What am I supposed to make of that?"

His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and then my father said: "That I'm a sorrier man than you." (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, pp. 258-261)

Anyone who reads Rod's book, and gets into his story of the divide which grew up between himself and Ruthie, the way she identified with the particularities of their hometown while he found himself struggling between his love for his family and his profound disconnect from the lives they lived (and, more importantly, the way they all thought--or didn't think--about the lives they lived), can't help be between surprised by this late revelation. But once again, Robinson had showed us something much the same. Very nearly at the end of his long, rambling, beautiful narrative, John Ames abruptly shares something new:

I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head, and said, "I just can't do it anymore."

He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, "Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago." And that irritated me. He said, "Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it." He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, "I have become aware that we have lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them"....

I don't recall that I actually said anything, taken aback as I was. Well, all he accomplished was to make me homesick for a place I never left. (Gilead, pp. 234-235)

"Homesick for a place I never left": what a powerful line that is. What I'm suggesting here, by way of Rod's story and Robinson's novel, is that a proper notion of fidelity--whether to a place or to the purpose that a place may constitute in and through us--would align all of us, localists and cosmopolitans alike, with that phrase. We all are, or at least can be, and arguably (I think, anyway) should be, homesick: or, to express the psychological state I have in mind more positively, always attendant to and seeking for the kind of purposive fulfillment which occurs when our circumstances match our identity, our calling. Reading Gilead makes me, among many other things, quite conscious of why so many people desire to live in big cities (with their complex economies and invasive regulations and diverse populations): because to experience the anonymity and fecundity and creativity which the busy-ness of humankind makes possible can serve as a salve for the frustration which that seeking so often involves. Edward--who had left home and benefited from the opportunities which a broader world made possible--had the wherewithal to take his and John's parents out of their place; they obviously took to such a displacement as a respite from the difficulty of their circumstances, but accepting that removal from place also changed them, introducing a break between them and their non-prodigal son. John does not judge his parents, he simply notes that change, their turning away from a constant homesickness and the consequent intensifying it had upon him, as one example of the mystery of place.

From Iowa to Florida is perhaps not so much different from St. Francisville to Paris. Rod has also, in thinking about how much his own Parisian experiences liberated and transformed him, and how those experiences were perhaps the crucial divide between his own life and his sister's, noted that making moves like that can only appear to others (and perhaps often to ourselves) as involving an outright rejection of tradition, an act of--here Rod borrows the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates-- "burning down the house":

I esteem devotion to prescriptive Tradition. But my sister lived by that ethic, and so did (does) my father--and it made me miserable. I ran away from here in part because the weight and the strictures of our family’s Tradition was too much to take. If it--if they--had been more flexible, allowing for some modification of the Tradition, I might have chosen a different path. But they could not see any other way. They were not conscious of Tradition as Tradition, which was the very thing that allowed them to be so devoted to it...but was also the same thing that prevented them from accepting any deviation from it.....The thing I have to concede is that I want the benefits of Tradition without the painful strictures. If I “burn down the Big House,” so to speak, where do I shelter? Where do my children shelter? The thing is, it’s not possible to live in the modern world and remain in the Big House. Human flourishing requires building a different house, one more suited to the way we live today. If we want things to stay the same, things have to change.

Figuring out exactly how we make this work--how we defend tradition as so important to providing our world with virtuous sources we may and should show fidelity to, for the sake of our own collective enrichment and identification, while at the same time not locking down what actually grounds those traditions, for the sake of allowing us all as individuals to move from standing in one place to standing in another--is probably a constant, irresolvable mystery, one which will always carry a fair amount of pain along with it. As Rod himself admits, "looking back on [my story] a year after I finished the manuscript, I can see that I was trying to talk myself into something that probably isn’t true, or at least is more mysterious and ambiguous than I was able to accept last yea...that I am outside that blessed circle, and can’t ever cross that boundary, no matter how far I’ve traveled." Rod, because he returned to St. Francisville after having left it, can be a part of that community, but he cannot seamless connect with it--he cannot stand where his sister stood, and enjoy his community's moral sources the way she did, because he changed, and she didn't. (And, of course, that means she can't show any fidelity to the moral sources and traditions which Rod has discovered, and the places where he discovered them, because she was never there, and couldn't ever see them for what they are in any case.)

All this is perhaps partly why Rod has increasingly become less interested in addressing who connects and who doesn't and why and what to do about it, and more interested in the stories of connection and disconnection themselves. I was originally a little put out by Rod's refusal to acknowledge the argument in his story, but after reading Gilead, I think I can appreciate better that, for example, if I tried to turn Robinson's novel into an argument about life in small towns, or the importance of religion, or the pain of growing older, I'd be doing the whole thing a disservice, and that's the sort of disservice Rod clearly doesn't want perform on his memory of Ruthie. Fair enough. But let's not forget what Lasch and Taylor and others have pointed out--that any act of memory, properly speaking, is going to be an action characterized by our own "personal resonance." We're all interpreting, in other words, all the time. And when we find--through experience, or argument, or both--our interpretations to be wrong, we change perspective, and try them again. That is, we argue, we try out new theoretical construals of our own lives, we keep trying to figure out what we are (or should be) showing fidelity to, whether we realize it or not.

The arguments about tradition are lengthy and contentious; perhaps there is no possibility they could be otherwise in our modern world. In fact, I would suspect that, should Rod choose this task, he could find in time that those same arguments and changes were present in Ruthie's world as well. I wonder if there might even be a way for him to someday write his story from Ruthie's point of view: a story of her relationship with a strange, intellectual, perhaps arrogant, yet worldly wise and accomplished older brother, and both the love and dissatisfaction she felt for him, and how those feelings, in their own unaccountable ways, changed and fit themselves into her place. A place where her students grew up and stayed, or grew up and left, and pastors came and stayed or left, and people were married and given in marriage, and the world and its traditions and all its occasions for fidelity just continued to turn.

The (Not So) Radical(ly Conseravtive) Mormon Priesthood

[Cross-listed to By Common Consent]

As any reader of this blog knows, I'm the sort of egghead who likes to speculate about what it means (or at least what it could mean, for purposes of questions of justice or community or whatever) to be something other than liberal. That is, in the philosophical sense, to be something other than an individualist, concerned first and foremost with rights and property and all that. Hence my continuing fascination with almost all things communitarian and utopian.

This arguably fits in well with my religion, of course. That Mormonism was at one time a radical movement which challenged dominant American liberal norms--most famously regarding marriage and sexuality, but also (and I think more importantly) regarding economics and government--is pretty well understood by most who have even a passing familiarity with Mormon history. (If that's not you, see here and here.) That Mormonism today--at least American Mormonism, at least if the dominant voting patterns and preferred modes of discourse amongst the majority of American Mormon wards are taken as evidence--is no longer much committed to radical communitarianism and egalitarianism, to radical re-organizations of social life, to radical distinctions in how one talks about sovereignty and loyalty, is also pretty well understood. (Again, if you're lost, begin here and here.) America is a different place than it was in the late 19th-century, to be sure, when the U.S. government invested considerable effort to imprison church members and break apart church operations...but then, we are also a significantly different church than we were then, far more at peace with, and far more aligned to, dominant American ways of socializing, making money, electing our leaders and living our lives. Sure, we could point to all sorts of contrasting evidence--but we're much more sexually traditional than most Americans! we challenge all sorts of trends regarding divorce and family! we're considered weird by people in Hollywood!--but all that is, I would assert, fairly circumstantial: fundamentally, for better or worse (or both), the "Mormon moment" has come, in all its multicolored variety, and its conclusion is: even allowing for our mostly traditional mores and mostly conservative politics, here in America we are, I think, undeniably a pretty modern mix of mostly independent individuals, just like nearly everybody else (or, more honestly, just like nearly every other mostly white, mostly suburban church in America).

Rosalynde Welch, one of the best thinkers the Mormon community has around, would presumably disagree with me: in her latest Patheos column, she calls Mormonism a "demanding, distinctive, and stubbornly un-modernized—possibly un-modernizable—church." I suspect our disagreement here is more a matter of our focus rather than our conclusions; I am talking about Mormon life, popular culture, and everyday practice, while she is talking about our institutions, doctrines, and forms or organization. This is an important disagreement, because in a church which presents itself in the lives of its members in such a comprehensive fashion, it's not always clear where (or if) one should end and the other begin. (Moreover, I think a good argument can be made that even our forms of organization have become increasingly professionalized and, as a result, assimilated to modern American expectations and practices in such a way as to challenge the thesis of Armand Mauss, who famously saw in the second-half of the 20th-century, at the same the time when a thoroughly correlated bureaucracy was developed throughout the church, a period of retrenchment into the unmodern and distinct. Mauss notes this critique and argues with it in the most recent issue of the Mormon journal Dialogue.) But that argument aside, Rosalynde's disagreement with me is one I take seriously, because in her column she focuses on one element of Mormon life which arguably has remained "un-modernizable": the way notions of "priesthood" leadership function in our community. That is not an easily challenged claims--indeed, I would hardly challenge it at all, especially given that she uses this observation to call attention to one of the greatest theoretical resources which Mormonism has, and one that is extremely appealing to me: namely, a familiarity with the costs and benefits which come from refusing the lure of the liberal meritocracy.

Rosalynde writes:

The hierarchical, authoritarian nature of the church, with its orientation toward group roles and obedience over individual rights and freedoms—that is to say, everything about the Church that rankles in the context of modern liberal democracy—can provide a set of emotional and intellectual tools with which to examine the buried assumptions of that liberal democracy....I want to suggest an example of this dynamic, by which the apparently illiberal features of a conservative church can usefully destabilize the silently-encroaching paradigms of modernity....[by floating] the idea that the all-male LDS priesthood enacts a critique of the notion of meritocracy that vibrates at the center of the American dream....

From some perspectives, an all-male priesthood is nothing more than an atavistic institutional carryover from the days of hard patriarchy, sexism pure and simple; from other perspectives, it's a divinely-ordained reflection of the deep cosmic order that secures and connects individuals in a harmonious chain. Either way, a male priesthood is difficult to explain, much less justify, in the language of liberal meritocracy. Indeed, an organization in which an arbitrary half of its membership has no access to institutional authority is the opposite of meritocracy; leadership is not a reward for ability, hard work, or worthiness—it can't be, since many of the most able, dedicated, and worthy members of the church will never hold positions of executive leadership simply by virtue of their female condition....

A male priesthood, then, stands as an enacted rebuttal to the idea that meritocracy is natural, inevitable, or necessary. The encroachment of merit-based thinking into a Christian community would be disastrously corrosive to gospel teachings on humility, love, dignity, and status; one can never win one's mansion above or compete for salvation. There are no merit-based scholarships to heaven....Spiritual meritocracy is poison. The all-male LDS priesthood, for which no merit-based explanation can be offered, reminds us of that the kingdom of God is not a meritocracy.

There are, of course, some problems with this insight of Rosalynde's. Most crucially, there is the reality that in this mostly voluntary church, despite our affirmation that merit and skill have little or no influence over matters of faithfulness and worthiness, the truth remains that some of the callings to service which are extended are, shall we say, more equal than others. (Please give me a ring the next time a deeply devout, unfailingly generous, but also unemployed, public-transportation-dependent Mormon is called to be his ward's bishop.) This point becomes all the more incontestable the further one moves into the Mormon church hierarchy, away from purely voluntary pastoral responsibilities and into the full-time ecclesia...which nonetheless remains, for all it's adaption to professional norms, also thoroughly committed to some understanding of priesthood authority. This trickles down into ordinary Mormon practice, which inevitably leads to situations where presumably merit-rewarded positions often carry with them traces of priesthood authority (as long as the holders are male), and conversely priesthood callings are often seen to carry some patina of intellectual or administrative competency or merit, so that we not infrequently see the overruling of technical or administrative decisions or policies made by non-priesthood (that is, female) workers who were, until they ran up against some unthinking, perhaps power-jealous individual, providing important service to the church.

For all that, though, her point is an enormously valuable one: in the pews and duties of everyday American Mormon life, hundreds of thousands of people, in millions of day-to-day ways, are arguably taking a break from the competitive, zero-sum, measurement-and-outcome-based meritocratic world they encounter and (unfortunately, I think) mostly take for granted as workers, students, employers, and citizens. Instead are invited into a world of grace, of gifts, through the example of a radically conservative institution--an all-male priesthood--which in principle refuses to acknowledge both the appeal and the dangers of turning every kind of authority into merit-based, process-bound, context-and-culture-be-damned, administrative procedure. That has to mean something--it has to be the sort of thing that could lead Mormons to recognize, even internalize, a critique of the modern liberal project, and open themselves up to alternative (even radical!) forms of organization and behavior, even at the cost of setting themselves against the American behemoth. Doesn't it?

Maybe not. To be sure, some have asked these broader questions. They've been discussed on blogs, and sometimes you even see them reflected in church leaders' warnings about trusting too much in accomplishment and forgetting about grace and gifts. But, in light of my general assertion above, I would continue to argue that Rosalynde's acute observation about the meritocracy-critiquing potential of the Mormon priesthood--a potential that it has by virtue of its radically conservative, and therefore illiberal, presumptions--does not travel: her "enacted rebuttal" to meritocratic liberalism enacts, and thus rebuts, relatively little. Why not?

Forty-five years ago, the social critic Christopher Lasch also wondered why Mormonism--which he didn't like and happily mocked, even while admiring it in some important ways--didn't (or, at least, didn't any longer) follow through on its embedded critique of modern American life. His answer: it's the federal government's fault (or, more particularly: it's the economy, stupid):

From the point of view of liberal Christianity, the Mormon experiment was impossible to understand....In Utah, under Brigham Young's leadership, the Mormons created a self-sufficient, cooperative, egalitarian, and authoritarian economy devoted not to individual enrichment but to the collective well-being of the flock....Cooperation and planning caused the desert to bloom, in marked contrast to the exploitive patterns of agriculture which on other frontiers exhausted natural resources and left the land a smoking waste. These practices of the Mormons, however--so successful both from a human and from a technological point of view--ill accorded with the prevailing drift toward laissez-faire....Beginning with the "Mormon War" of 1857-58, when federal troops tried unsuccessfully to break up the Mormon settlements, the government harried the Saints by a combination of military, legislative, and judicial action....The destruction of the temporal powers of the church put an end, for all practical purposes, to the Mormon enterprise...[though] the Mormon church continues to grow. It grows because it can offer special attractions of its own--more community sense, more social discipline, more mystique than other churches competing for lower-middle-class converts, a combination that is appealing to those reared strictly who find things falling apart. But the growth of the Mormons...has been achieved by sacrificing...the conception of a secular community organized in accordance with religious principles....From posing a challenge to the American way of life Mormonism has become a defense of its most reactionary aspects. (Lasch, "The Mormon Utopia," in The World of Nations [Viking Books, 1974], 66-68)

Lasch's observations are not nearly as careful as Rosalynde's, nor are they as accurate. For one thing, Lasch's comments were written before the 1978 revelation which thankfully ended priesthood discrimination against black males, and thus are historically dated (Proposition 8 notwithstanding, institutional Mormonism almost certainly cannot be legitimately awarded the "most reactionary" prize any longer); for another thing, Lasch fails to appreciate the spiritual important which we believing Mormons attach to our own history. But for all that, there is a sense in which Lasch here provides an important historical correction, or shall we say a complement, to Rosalynde's hypothesis. Lasch acknowledges that modern (post-polygamy, post-theocracy) Mormonism offers much of that Rosalynde herself mentions: "the rewarding communal experience of serving in a Mormon community, the trust, fellow-feeling, practical support, and, yes, the opportunity to practice forgiveness" which dwelling with a context of authority and solidarity may provide. But that isn't the aim of Rosalynde's piece; rather, she is looking for Mormonism, and particularly our Mormon doctrines of priesthood to "provide useful critical views of liberalism's unfinished or unfounded projects." The critical view may be present, but is there any sense of it being used by Mormons to articulate an actual critique of America's meritocracy? Given the accommodation of Mormonism with American public life, civil religion, and state power, I see little evidence of such. Lasch suggests that this absence is the result of the collapse of the Mormon church's temporal power over a hundred years ago, and while that is a simplistic answer, it has the virtue of making good sense. It's hard to rebut liberalism--which, as Rosalynde notes, is "firmly entrenched in the common sense that governs everyday experience in modern America"--when you don't have much of a place to stand apart from it. (This is, of course, a central problem with nearly all so-called conservative thought in America today--which, as Alasdair MacIntyre noted long ago, has become, since its embrace of the mobility and creative destruction of modern industrial capitalism in the decades following the Civil War, almost wholly a species of liberalism itself. For good and for ill, Mormonism was "radically conservative" once, in a way not dissimilar to how the Confederacy was radically conservative: because there were specific forms of community organization which it sought to conserve against modernity. Nowadays, not quite so much.) In short, Lasch's observation takes some (though perhaps not all) of the wind out of the sails of Rosalynde's argument about the Mormon priesthood: even if she is right about her reading of it--and I think she probably is--there is good reason to recognize that, given how our shared church currently constitutes its own place within the American liberal order, probably little will come of it.

Here's one final observation: would any American Mormon today, including Rosalynde herself, even want more to come of it? I frequently and happily express my preferences for a more populist or socialist or communitarian order, and think there is more to learn from radical utopian ideas than progressive ones (particularly in the Mormon sense)...but ultimately, I myself am mostly in favor of mildly distasteful progressive compromises with modernity, and I suspect that nearly every other Mormon I know who has benefited from the way the church has evolved over the past century would agree. Remember that if Lasch is correct, then probably the only way to fully enact Mormon radicalism would be through the re-establishment of real Mormon political and economic sovereignty and territoriality. To be part of such an establishmentarian project would obviously constrain us modernized American Mormons even further--and it would especially constrain women. As someone with real feminist concerns (if not an allegiance to any particularly aggressive feminist agenda), Rosalynde rightly worries about the costs involved in maintaining our radical(ly conservative) priesthood alternative, even if just on the level of theoretical argument: "even if some social good does come of the anti-meritocratic critique embodied in a patriarchal priesthood, who is to judge how that good might compare to the pain and confusion that some women feel as they try to make sense of their own identity in a patriarchal institution?"

This is the liberal side of all us modern American Mormons, peeking around and out of the church we have joined or inherited, filled as it is with much spiritual good and even truth, but also filled with remnants of a radical project--a conservative and authoritarian one, to be sure, but a powerfully egalitarian and communitarian one as well--that now exists mostly (if not entirely) as an echo. There's a part of me which is looking for that echo to once more sound robustly; I want an alternative to the liberal order. Rosalynde, more Burkean than I, isn't sure we should want that, and as one who feels the force of Mormon illiberality much more seriously than a white man like I probably ever will, her caution speaks more authentically than mine, I suppose. But still, thanks to her essay, the next time I sit in church and observe my fellow Mormons and myself go through our highly unmeritocratic ritual practices, I won't be able to do anything but hope that we're learning something.