The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity. 

The preservation of these qualities, the qualities which the remnant of independent local bookstores represent, ought to preoccupy conservatives. It is we, those who most ardently resist the values of our age, who ought to be about the business of actively cultivating all that the small, independent bookstore betokens. Regardless of what they stock, such places serve as an outpost of ideas and attitudes our culture has rejected, an oasis of value in a copious sea of junk.

Unfortunately, we conservatives are too often in the grip of the kind of free-market fanaticism that fetishizes global competition and its twin evil, efficiency. In this, as in so many other things, conservatives have operated in ways counter to our professed goals. Like everything else in modern America, our conservatism is shallow, geared not toward the active cultivation of institutions which, like the neighborhood bookstore, propound in their very being lasting values, but rather geared toward reflexive hatred of Democrats and kneeling football players. 

For this reason, movement conservatism has something dire in common with the local, independent bookstore: Both could disappear. Preventing that will require turning conservatives’ attention away from the daily convulsions of the mainstream media and back to deep reflection on the lasting virtues of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We must deepen our hearts and refine our minds if we desire a future that reflects all we hold dear. Such a change can only happen, of course, on the individual level by those willing to sit a while, willing to read and consider, willing to be quiet and inefficient.

Dean Abbott, "The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores"

Mr. Pruitt is no conservative, and he apparently has no intention of protecting the very things his own life depends upon: clean air, clean water, temperate seasons, and healthy soils in abundant and abiding supplies. More baffling than this is that people to the right of him, afraid that he won’t go far enough to completely bugger these necessities, are mad enough to call themselves “conservatives.” More baffling still is that members of the media, who like to congratulate themselves on how smart they are, are also mad enough to call all of these profligates “conservatives.”

Pruitt and Trump are nothing of the sort. Not a one of their fallen league is a conservative. They’re all wastrels and prodigals and renegades. Like Satan they complain of injured merit; they think themselves impaired. Like Moloch their sentence is for open war. But tell me: what are they conserving? 

To be a conservative you must conserve things. And to do that you must restrain passions.

Jason Peters, "'Conservatism' and the New EPA"

An enormous portion of Burke's (and the conservative) worldview becomes clearer in light of the importance he places on the basic facts and character of human procreation, and an enormous portion of Paine's (and the progressive) worldview becomes clearer in light of the desire he evinces to be liberated from the implications of those facts and that character. Almost all of what we loosely call "the social issues" have to do with the dispute about whether such liberation is possible and desirable and, because it raises the question of the relation between generations, that dispute also shapes a surprising portion of our other prominent debates. Burke takes the human person to be embedded in a web of obligations that give shape to our lives.

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, p. 103

An enormous portion of the conservative worldview becomes clearer when we see the importance this view places on cultural continuity as a function of generational transmission—on the inescapable responsibilities human procreation imposes on each generation. An enormous portion of the progressive worldview becomes clearer when we see the degree to which it is shaped by a desire to be liberated from these obligations—and from the implications of the basic facts and character of human procreation. Many of what we loosely call the “social issues” in our politics involve debates about whether such a liberation is possible or desirable—whether the word choice can be poured like an acid over traditional social arrangements, burning all links of obligation and duty and making responsibility merely optional.

Yuval Levin, "The Roots of a Reforming Conservatism"

There is an open space in the human heart–a void that seeks fulfillment and a hunger that longs for satisfaction. For the progressive this longing looks to the future. A brave new world is envisioned, an ideology is espoused and an action plan that brooks no dissent is put into place. 

For the conservative that same longing is not for a brave new world, but for a serene, old world. The progressive yearns for utopia. The conservative mourns for Eden. The progressive works for a revolution. The conservative seeks a resolution. The progressive destroys the past to build the future. The conservative restores the past to build the future. 

The driving motivation for the progressive is a gnawing unhappiness he wishes to placate by fabricating an untried recipe for happiness, while the conservative longs for a tried and true happiness he has lost and wishes to rediscover. This longing for a good that is gone or a bliss that can be faintly remembered is the beating heart of conservatism and the motor of its creativity. 

The nostalgia of the conservative is more than a reverence for past wisdom or an immature desire to return to the comfort of the nursery. It is more than the antiquarian’s interest in the artifacts of a bygone age. It is instead an intense bittersweet emotion that lifts and unlocks the heart and motivates creative and positive change.

Dwight Longenecker, "Looking for Another Country: Nostalgia and Desire in C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot"

Roger Scruton explains why the modern poet/critic must be essentially conservative:

For let us ask ourselves just what is required of “one who knows” [the poet/critic]. Should he, in the modern world, devote himself like Sartre or Foucault to undermining the “structures” of bourgeois society, to scoffing at manners and morals, and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status? Should he play the part of a modern Socrates, questioning everything and affirming nothing? Should he go along with the mindless culture of play, the post-modernist fantasy world in which all is permitted since neither permission nor interdiction have any sense?

To answer yes to any of those questions is in effect to live by negation, to grant nothing to human life beyond the mockery of it. It is to inaugurate and endorse the new world of “transgression,” a world which will not reproduce itself, since it will undermine the very motive which causes a society to reproduce. The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order and set an example of orderly living. The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order, and allow the future to emerge. But it will not emerge, as we know. These philosophies of the “new world” are lies and delusions, products of a sentimentality which has veiled the facts of human nature.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Roger Scruton on T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding":

These lines take us back to the core belief of modern conservatism, which Burke expressed in the following terms: Society, he wrote, is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And, he argued, only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations. Eliot’s complex theory of tradition gives sense and form to this idea. For he makes clear that the most important thing that future generations can inherit from us is our culture. Culture is the repository of an experience which is at once local and placeless, present and timeless, the experience of a community as sanctified by time. This we can pass on only if we too inherit it. Therefore, we must listen to the voices of the dead, and capture their meaning in those brief, elusive moments when “History is now and England.” In a religious community, such moments are a part of everyday life. For us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice upon which everything depends. Hence, by an extraordinary route, the modernist poet becomes the traditionalist priest: and the stylistic achievement of the first is one with the spiritual achievement of the second.

"T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor"

Prufrock and The Sacred Wood already help us to understand the paradox of T. S. Eliot—that our greatest literary modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative. The man who overthrew the nineteenth century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation, and experiment was also the man who, in 1928, was to describe himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” This seeming paradox contains a clue to Eliot’s greatness as a social and political thinker. For Eliot recognized that it is precisely in modern conditions—conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief—that the conservative project acquires its sense. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this fact lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but rather his desire to live fully in the concrete present, to understand the present in all its imperfections, and to accept the present as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.

Roger Scruton, "T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor" 

For years conservatives have favored the rational left brain at the expense of the right. With apologies to Russell Kirk, the conservative mind is unbalanced — hyper-developed in one respect, completely undeveloped in another. It’s time to correct this imbalance and take the culture war into the field of culture proper.

We need to invest in the conservative right brain. A well-developed feeder system exists to identify and promote mainstream fiction writers, including MFA programs, residencies and fellowships, writers’ colonies, grants and prizes, little magazines, small presses, and a network of established writers and critics. Nothing like that exists on the right.

This is a major oversight that must be urgently addressed. We need our own writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth. We need to build a feeder system so that the cream can rise to the top, and also to make an end run around the gatekeepers of the liberal establishment.

Adam Bellow, "Let Your Right Brain Run Free"

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not a big fan of politics. Honestly, I can’t stand political debates, political ads, campaign speeches, or election season in general. Personally, I’d rather turn the TV off and read a good novel. (And that’s what I often do, unless I have papers to grade.)

But as I’ve gotten older, I am realizing more and more that people who win elections have an enormous impact on the society that my daughters are going to live in. I’ve realized this especially in the last year, as the national debt has continued to grow unsustainable, as politicians push to make education more utilitarian, as the legal definition of marriage keeps changing, and as the government tries to defend spying on its own people.

This country is headed the wrong direction, with a bad combination of increasing government power and decreasing tolerance for people who do not agree with the majority.

So as much as I despise politics, I recognize that political ideas are important. So I am starting to appreciate books like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

What I’ve discovered is that there’s a rich heritage of thought that begins with Edmund Burke and continues with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Richard Weaver, and T.S. Eliot.

This heritage is very different from the utilitarianism/libertarianism of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, which has little regard for a meaningful culture or true community. In contrast, Kirk presents a heritage of true conservatism: a desire to conserve the elements of culture that bring goodness, stability, and meaning to a society.

At the same time, Kirk shows that true conservatives are not opposed to change. But they believe that change should take place carefully. One of Kirk’s “Canons of Conservative Thought” is the “recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress."

As Kirk says in one of his essays, “Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted.”

Here are some of Kirk’s other “Canons of Conservative Thought”:
• "Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience."
• "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems;"
• "Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and the Leviathan becomes master of all."
• "Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters, calculators, and economists' who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs."

Kirk lays these out in the first chapter. In the rest of the book, Kirk analyzes a long line of conservative thinkers, beginning with Burke, and contrasts them with their ideological opponents. He goes into much more detail than I’m interested in reading, but history buffs may enjoy it.

Those who are interested in reading something easier but along the same lines might enjoy Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...).

Here’s another good summary of this brand of conservatism (“Conservatism Needs Less Ayn Rand, More Flannery O’Connor”) by Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University: http://www.theimaginativeconservative...


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From Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

At least five major schools of radical thought have competed for public favor since Burke entered politics: the rationalism of the philosophes, the romantic emancipation of Rousseau and his allies, the utilitarianism of the Benthamites, the positivism of Comte's school, and the collectivistic materialism of Marx and other socialists. (p. 9)

From Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

Radicalism since 1790 has tended to attack the prescriptive arrangement of society on the following grounds:  

(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a proclivity toward violence and sin. 

(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes. 

(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical idea. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.

(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.

(5) Radicals unite in detesting Burke's description of the state as ordained of God, and his concept of society as joined in perpetuity by a moral bond among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born--the community of souls.

Russell Kirk's description of conservatism in The Conservative Mind:

There are six canons of conservative thought:   

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.  

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."  

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.

5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.  

6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America by Rod Dreher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I shouldn’t be doing this—too many papers to grade. But I have to get this review out of my system. So here goes.

Now that I have three children who will have to make their way in this world, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the direction our culture is headed. So in the last couple years, I’ve started to read writers like Wendell Berry (What Are People For?) and others who critique American values and offer a better vision for the future. As a result, I became interested in reading Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. I don’t think I would have been interested in this book before age 30, but a man has to grow up at some point.

Specifically, what got me interested in this book was the eighteenth-century thinker Edmund Burke. I touch on Burke’s thought in one of the classes I teach, and I’ve come to see Burkean conservatism as far superior to the crassly individualist/libertarian values of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where economics tends to be king. That kind of conservatism has little regard for culture, aesthetics, our local communities, or creation itself. But Dreher is a Burkean.

So anyway, I picked up his book. Although the title of this book makes it sound political, Dreher isn’t really discussing politics here. He’s talking about a way of life—one that he calls “sacramental.” (As a Protestant, I would have preferred a term like “pervasively sacred,” but that’s not the issue here.)

According to Dreher, sacramental living isn’t about politics, but about recognizing the sacredness and inherent spiritual value of all people, all aspects of life, and all of creation. This includes things that we often don’t think of as sacred: our work, our families, our homes, our daily meals, our communities, and the natural world. Sacramental living simply involves recognizing and valuing the inherent dignity of these things. As we do, our daily activities take on meaning—activities like choosing where to shop (big impersonal chains vs. local merchants), deciding what to eat (food from massive factory farms vs. food provided by small, local farms where the people have an affection for the land and for God’s creatures), and educating our children. Each of these activities actually has great spiritual significance.

Dreher says that sacramental living leads to several things: a rejection of American consumerism; an appreciation for beauty in the home, at work, and in our places of worship; a high priority on our families (which, in Dreher’s view, often means homeschooling and at least one parent at home full-time); love for and support of our local communities; and a healthy respect for the natural world. (It’s no coincidence that Dreher became very popular after a commentary on “Crunchy Conservatism” on National Public Radio a few years ago.)

But as Dreher shows, many conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads”) show little sense of the sacredness of these things by the way that they live. Here are some of Dreher’s critiques of mainstream conservative values:

• “We right-wingers grimace at the lust celebrated by mainstream culture, but we rarely stop to think that greed is no less deadly a sin, no less destructive of human dignity. We look down on the liberal libertine who asserts the moral primacy of sexual free choice, but somehow miss that the free market we so uncritically accept exalts personal fulfillment through individual choice as the summit of human existence.”

• “[Conservatives seem to believe] that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market.”

• “We conservatives are big on bashing the public schools, which mostly deserve it, but please don’t ask us to think about what education is for. For many of us, it’s about no more than making sure our kids get into the right college, meet the right people, and go on to have a good (read ‘lucrative’) career.” (As someone who lives in Wisconsin and sees what Scott Walker, the Republicans, and the Democrats in our state want to do to higher education, I have to agree with Dreher’s critique here.)

• “We poke fun at the sanctimony of environmentalists, and try hard to convince ourselves that the sprawling crapulence of big-box stores, strip malls, monotonous housing developments, and other degrading manifestations of our built environment somehow represents progress. We abandon or bulldoze old buildings and human-scaled neighborhoods, then create fake environments … to recreate what we have destroyed.”

• “We have unwittingly allowed a consumerist mentality to shape the way we think about nearly all aspects of our private and public lives.”

Dreher gives an example from 9/11 that sums up typical American conservative values: “As the fires in the collapsed towers still raged, [both New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bush] had this advice for us: ‘Go shopping.’”

Sadly, Americans don’t value their own communities, but things. We want personal affluence, and to be left alone. That’s why we build backward-facing “McMansions” in the suburbs. The front porch has disappeared.

This lifestyle has consequences: “Consumerism . . . sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. A culture guided by consumerist values is one that welcomes technology without question, and prizes efficiency. . . . A consumerist society encourages its members both to find and express their personal identity through the consumption of products.” As a result of these values, local communities, the environment, our families, and our quality of life are being destroyed.

But Dreher is not merely critical. On the contrary, the book is actually very positive, since Dreher lays out a wonderful vision of sacramental living. And he shows that many people are, in fact, living this way today. A sacramental life is about quality, and Dreher demonstrates what a good quality life looks like in his chapters on food, the home (in which he includes a fantastic contrast between good architecture and the McBuildings being built today), education, the environment, and religion.

By changing the ideological reference point from economics to a sense of the sacredness of this world, Dreher draws on an older conservative tradition, one that involves thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, and T. S. Eliot. He also draws frequently from writers like Wendell Berry (whom he interviewed at length for this book), E. F. Schumacher, William Morris, and G. K. Chesterton.

Dreher’s conservatism is one with beauty and imagination. It has an appreciation for good art, good music, good food, and good fellowship. It places a high priority on showing compassion for people, because human beings are sacred. It also recognizes the importance of the family, and it desires to make our local communities strong once again.

To give you an idea of where Dreher is coming from, here is his Manifesto:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship — especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

In a few places, I think Dreher is a tad over-opinionated, as well as alarmist. But overall, I really appreciated this book, and I benefited greatly from reading it. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

This is a fantastic article: "Conservatism Needs Less Ayn Rand, More Flannery O’Connor," by Andrew Bacevich.

Rod Dreher interviewed writer Joel Salatin in his book Crunchy Cons about problems with mainstream conservatism.

Salatin: "One of the problems with conservatives is that we tend to be very Western in our thinking. Greco-Roman-linear-segmented-compartmentalized thinking. We in the conservative community love the scientific method, double-blind studies, that sort of thing, as opposed to the Eastern mind-set, which thinks more holistically, and more along the lines of 'we' than 'I.'"

Dreher: "You'll recall that that's what British economist E. F. Schumacher found.... He discovered that thinking of economic questions as distinct from human society, with all its variables, could result in greater material output, but at the cost of a greater harmony needed to sustain the happiness and well-being of the community."

Salatin: "Conservatives tend to ask how we can be more efficient, not how we can be more effective. You can be very efficient at the wrong thing."

Russell Kirk's "Six Canons of Conservative Thought":

• "Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience." 
• "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems;"
• "Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a 'classless society'." 
• "Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and the Leviathan becomes master of all." 
• "Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters, calculators, and economists' who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs." 
• "Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress."

Some highlights from Rod Dreher's "Manifesto" in Crunchy Cons:

• "Modern conservatism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper."
  
• "The economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around."
  
• "Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government."
  
• "We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America's wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as 'the Permanent Things'--those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world's great wisdom traditions."
  
• "A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world."
  
• "A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract."
  
• "Appreciation of aesthetic quality--that is, beauty--is not a luxury, but key to the good life."
  
• "The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important."
  
• "Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve is to create anew."