The State of Conservatism Or Who Is Afraid of the Voltaire Wolf?

The founding principle of this magazine is that America can only be restored if traditionalism and libertarianism are reunited, politically and philosophically, as they were when conservatism began. That fused unity--summarized in the phrase "libertarian voluntary and local means to achieve traditional Judeo-Christian ends" forged the institutions and thinking of the West and created its civilization, whose highpoint was the Constitution of the United States of America. This fusion eroded under the secular progressive assault mounted in the early 20th Century and was not recreated until the modern conservative movement, which culminated in the Ronald Reagan presidency. Reagan succeeded in reviving some of its ideas and re-instituting some of its insights, including shrinking national government domestic discretionary spending--by an average of 1.3 percent a year, the only administration to do so in recent times--returning some power to "states and communities," which he said was the goal.

That revival was dissipating by his second term and ended under the administration of his successor. Yet, the ideas survived and helped disrupt the majority party's forty-year control of Congress a few years later, forcing the following Democratic president to declare: "The era of big government is over," no matter his insincerity in uttering the words. The sentiment eroded further in the following years and was delivered a devastating blow by the terrorist strike of 9/11, which provoked a substantial big-government reaction. As has been the case historically during war, violence and fear pressure people into seeking the protection of the state. With an entitlement mentality demanding rights to welfare privileges of all types from central government already also well advanced by then, local and voluntary institutions from the traditional family, to orthodox churches, to local governments, to the Boy Scouts--all found themselves under direct assault by national bureaucracies and legal and communications elites, with few supporters in the corridors of power to defend them.

We have argued that the goal of all serious conservatives should be to prepare for the next opportunity to advance their principles and rebuild their often shattered or compromised institutions. This cannot be accomplished effectively if conservatives are divided much less if each faction insists upon fighting the others. So, we have been suspicious of hyphenated conservatism--social, economic, Tory, neo, paleo, etc. We have argued that social and economic conservatism are two aspects of the same fused unity and that Toryism might be less forward-looking but, if it accepts the fusion, its cautious attitude can be helpful. On the other hand, neoconservativism, by its own principles, seeks national greatness at the expense of local and voluntary control and would seem to fall outside conservatism as defined historically. Paleoconservatism is more complicated. Its leaders demand a distinct identity and some mainline conservatives have encouraged them in this, to read them out of the movement. Mainline, fusionist conservatism, however, should not be narrowly exclusive but should promote debate leading to reconciliation if that is at all possible.

It is in that context that we turn to Thomas Fleming's new book, "The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition." As the brilliant editor of the major publication of the paleo movement, Chronicles, and an expert former professor of classical literature, no one is more entitled to a serious hearing for this point of view. While he gives many glimpses of the positive elements of his thinking, Fleming focuses his attention on criticism of what he considers the ruling liberal tradition, "rejecting those principles root and branch." The principles of that rejected ideology are "objectivity, universalism, rationalism and human rights," all of which he traces to the errors of the 18th Century Enlightenment. His solution is a return to "the philosophy and literature of ancient Greeks, Romans and Jews; to the Christian traditions of the Middle Ages; and to the humane wisdom, deeper than Descartes or Locke, to be found in our greatest poets and novelists, even in popular literature."

The reason that this "liberal tradition" is pernicious is that "real people and the problems of everyday life are withered under the vision of objective reason in pursuit of universal peace," which is its impossible goal for humanity. Being unrealistic it debilitates and deforms social life. Modern America, in particular, is "cut loose from the local patriotisms and blood and soil nationalisms" of Europe and from its own traditions and so reaps the whirlwind of rootlessness, anomie, homicide, suicide, divorce, and the "celebration of ugliness and perversity for their own sakes" that are characteristic of modern social life. In its place, he offers a "peasant" philosophy that bases decisions on real life experiences in a particular, specific historical, social and physical context of family, locality, region and nation.

Both liberals and conservatives are guilty of supporting the objective rationalism and universal human rights that define the liberal tradition, he claims, with the former emphasizing individual equality and state socialism and the later individual freedom and markets. Both, however, depend upon the legitimacy of universal individual rights, which contrary to the libertarians can only be enforced by a powerful government. The necessary end result of universalistic Enlightenment liberal individualism and human rights of both types is a United Nations that has transformed itself from a forum for practical measures to prevent war into "a transnational government that claims the authority to enforce an international rule of rights." This claim could never be accepted by Israel, by strict Muslim nations or by any other nation with traditional religious claims (including the U.S. at least until recently) that conflict with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, so the end result must be world government and despotism or chaos.

No conservative could disagree that the modern version of human rights is too broad and has led to government enforcement that suppresses local and group vitality. It has led to frivolous claims for rights even for children against their parents, for some preferred minorities but not others (why are women, who are a majority, a protected minority?), and even for animals--and claimants have sought ever more powerful governments, including the U.N., to secure them. Most conservatives agree that federalism and its local, decentralized and humane-scale government, to say nothing of even more basic institutions such as the family and voluntary social associations, including religious institutions, should be supported prior to national or even regional government. The 18th Century observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, found that all social activity then was local in the U.S. and that made the people love their nation all the more. Far away national bureaucracies that rely upon raw power and abstract conceptions of justice cannot understand the complexity of social life. That is why the Soviet Union fell, because its rational planners could not tell what was going on below, as Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek predicted so many years beforehand.

Yet, as referring to Hayek suggests, is it necessary to throw out individualist liberty and rationality to recover a more vibrant community social life? Take the Declaration of Independence's "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Most conservatives would support this as a reasonable summary their basic beliefs as Americans. Yet, Fleming calls them "Jefferson's platitudes" and "a superstition" rather than being self-evident or based on reason. So, is this where paleoconservatism differs from conservatism as its own unique political movement, rejecting the Declaration and its sentiments?

No, contrary to a loose reading by some of his supposed supporters, Fleming rejects the Declaration only if its principles are understood as abstract, self-evident and universal, as natural human rights for all peoples for all times. Fleming even concedes there is "some basis in the hard core of reality for the older theories of rights: the rights to life, liberty and property (however hard to justify in principle) do correspond to what ordinary people regard as natural," which sounds rather close to being natural and universal. He only seems to direct his real fire against 20th Century demands for the more esoteric rights mentioned above that are also opposed by most other modern conservatives. Fleming also objects to rights only being assigned to individuals rather than groups but conservatives believe the First Amendment covers freedom of association too. Fleming finally concludes that the use of the term rights "may simply be a matter of taste." Why then spend all of that energy to criticize the Declaration and its principles and fault conservatives for supporting them?

Fleming remains critical because he believes conservatives and Americans in general have adopted the Declaration as an objective, abstract moral code rather than simply accepting it as their actual history. Yet, after pages and pages of criticism of objectivity and abstraction, Fleming admits "moral distance and the objective point of view are relevant approaches" in math and science, in the pursuit of fairness and self-knowledge, keeping us in balance against our desires, and in checking self- love. He calls these "negative" virtues but virtues nonetheless. He is especially critical, as the initial quote suggests, of "the universal moral abstractions of Locke," the English thinker most identified with the Declaration. John Locke, like Rene Descartes, "looked at the everyday world and saw a few universal rules reducible to a universal formula," Fleming claims. By the 20th Century, the "earlier and more complex Christian ethic" was overcome by the abstract "liberal philosophy of John Locke." Yet, he admits Locke's ideas "were in the very air" the American Founders breathed (rather than were simple abstractions). He will just not concede they were concrete to Locke too, even though they were based on traditional rights of Englishmen to him as well as to Fleming.

Actually, Fleming finally concedes: "Locke, more a man of the world, was not so blind as to suppose that self-denying rationality could be taught exclusively by proofs and maxims" and quotes him on the need for custom and for early training from the family. So, why take so much effort to attack him? Fleming only claims it was a "small step" to later distortions of Locke's position. But is not the point that it was a step that Locke did not take? Unlike those who took the step, Locke based his principles not only on reason but also upon Christian revelation (see The Reasonableness of Christianity), the "complex Christian ethic" in Fleming's terms, and taught the importance of family obligation (see, Second Treatise, Ch. VI, Sec. 66). While he cites Locke's technical and political works, Fleming does not mention his religious writings.

Actually, beneath it all, Fleming does not reject the "liberal tradition" at all. He only opposes calling the liberal tradition universal. "Natural equality and individualism are political myths that have contributed something to the development of Western character and political institutions," he concedes. They are only destructive when they "blind us to the reality of human life." Thomas Jefferson and the American Founders based the Declaration statement upon the traditional rights of Englishmen, not upon abstract theory, so it is not universal. He even concedes, "The liberal ideal of universal fairness is an interesting and valuable artifact of the civilization that has grown up in Europe." So what is the point of the criticism against Locke, the Declaration, objectivity, rationalism and the "liberal tradition" generally? Should not the target be the extreme rationality that rejects tradition, culture and spirit altogether?

Hayek differentiated between two kinds of rationalism--the pure rationalism of the radicals and the rationalism that takes into account tradition and other non-rational means of learning. Descartes and Voltaire led his first list and Locke and the Founders the second. Why must Fleming excoriate all Enlightenment thinking? There is no question that the Voltaire stream of the Enlightenment was the enemy of the parochial, the local, the traditional and the religious. But why throw the baby out with the bathwater? As sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates empirically, most of the scientists who earned the positive reputation for the Enlightenment were religious, even highly religious as was its leading figure, Isaac Newton, who found the notion of Creator essential to his breakthrough. It was Fleming's bet noir Voltaire and his followers who created the myth that the success of modern science and rationalism was the result of the Enlightenment's elimination of the concrete, traditional and religious and the replacement of them with abstract theorizing. The problem is that Fleming and the paleos have bought too much into the myth Voltaire created for them.

What has made the West and the United States different has been that they have accepted reason and tradition, revelation and observation, the material and the spiritual, the concrete and the abstract, science and metaphysics, man and God, state and society, market and government and all of the multiplicity of the Creator's complex world. Fleming is reluctant to justify social life on any spiritual basis, preferring a natural explanation. Yet, he is reluctant to exclude spirit either. He simply fears modern man will not accept a spiritual foundation, accepting the Voltaire premise. For example, he says conservatives have no response to affirmative action because of their belief in equality, without recognizing the obvious response that the equality of the Declaration is the moral equality of all in the face of God, the Creator, that underlies the rule of law, which does not allow government to legitimately force equality of results.

It is very strange that Fleming generally references religion only indirectly, to say that consideration of it would change certain of his conclusions. For example, on the issue of rights, one could justify a universal set of such norms based on revelation, as Locke does with Christianity, to justify the rights of the Declaration. But Fleming avoids that solution. Likewise, to argue against universal rights, he is forced to argue that Jesus' Good Samaritan parable is not a call to universal love, not universalistic, only to be forced to qualify this later. Of course, Fleming is looking for a "natural" argument as he did in his classic work, "The Politics of Human Nature." The only apparent change in his thinking is to say Jesus came to accept man's weaknesses and to reject Nietzsche's claim that Jesus demanded perfection. He ignores the elephant in the living room that Christianity claims universal validity.

I am afraid Jesus does call man to perfection, to be good to all, even alien Samaritans. It is painful to follow Fleming's logic confronting the Samaritan story. As important as are family and tribe, Jesus' call to help all comes first. It is true, as Fleming says, that this obligation is limited by Augustine's practical recognition that it is impossible to help more than a few and that, in most cases, they will be near. But Jesus does say, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." He recognizes limits to human action but He says that what is impossible to man is possible with Him. The difference is His kingdom is not of this world and He does not force submission to perfection. It is not Nietzsche's charge of the impossibility of saintliness that is critical but that, as Fleming emphasizes in other places, kingdoms of this world use force to achieve their abstract and universal sense of perfection and they have created more evil than the ancients in seeking to accomplish this true impossibility.

Frank Meyer explained this new type of evil in the world as the negative reaction to the Incarnation of Jesus, the historical event and that ennobled every individual, an event that Fleming notices on p. 180 but from which he derives no social implications. But, as Meyer taught, there is no going back to the ancient world that Fleming offers as alternatives (interestingly, the only alternatives offered on the dust jacket, where the Christian alternative disappears completely except for its casuistry). The individualism and civilization released by the Incarnation, whether of the liberating or of the destructive variety, cannot be put back in the bottle other than with brute force.

Fleming does recognize two strain in Western history, represented by an earlier and later "liberal" tradition and that a strong Burkean religious and cultural tradition did allow the earlier version to "self-correct" itself for a period of time. Fleming even decries the loss of this rich Christian religious tradition but concludes that "matters of faith lie beyond reason and scholarship," trapped again by the Voltaire fact/value paradigm. So he is forced to look to non-Western traditions for common natural foundations. Rather than accept this rigid distinction between faith and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, St. Paul cut the cord by recognizing the cultural distinctions but finding the unity in Jesus, as did Thomas Aquinas, who Fleming also admires but does not follow on this matter. John Paul II carried this same insight into the modern world in one of his major works, titled "Faith and Reason," where he argues not exclusively for one or the other but for both faith and reason together to provide a full understanding. Fleming prefers Aristotle but, as wise as he was, it took Aquinas to reconcile him to revelation and the history of the West. Rather than avoid this historical synthesis, John Paul suggests in "Centennus Annus" that a modified and revived Burkean one might be the best approach for modern times.

Yes, the universality of Christianity and the individualism it unleashed into Western history and through it to the world is disorienting. Yes, as Fleming laments, "people in the modern world live a double life," tribal and international. But both are real, although the local is the more authentic. Yet, it is even more complex than a double life when one adds in the more primitive dualism of spiritual and physical human nature that Fleming does recognize cannot be ignored. In the post Incarnation world, this complex dualism and the individualism it implies are inherent in all of Western civilization in a way that cannot be extinguished without terrible consequences.

Since Fleming seems to accept, when he gets to the details (as he correctly teaches is the most important realm for resolving specific issues), the Declaration values as historically valid for America, what Ronald Reagan labeled fusionist conservatism, why does he insist upon division from modern conservatism and from Reagan himself? What is the barrier to agreement between that traditional conservatism and paleoconservatism? Sure, that fusionist conservatism clearly needs rejuvenation but what does paleoconservatism offer that is different? One will not find it in the philosophy or the teachings of this book. Once all of his qualifications are fully considered, this conventional conservative can find little with which to disagree, other than the apparent unwillingness to accept the dualism of both faith and reason, if there is indeed such an unwillingness in the book. The only real difference appears to be a deep pessimism concerning human life that separates paleoconservatism from modern Reagan conservatism, a pessimism I would argue was introduced by Voltaire.

Paleoconservatives need first to read Rodney Stark's research on the Enlightenment to appreciate how its positive accomplishments were a continuation of the medievalism they admire and then to recognize the uniqueness of the New Testament hope rather than equate its promise (or even its Jewish brother's) to an ancient culture's literature that had much to say about human nature but little to say about human hope. Then we can join as brothers and sisters in arms in a united conservatism to slay the Voltaire wolf.

By Donald Devine, Editor.