A Buckleyan Lenitive

Anyone pressed to the limits of equanimity by the manic utopianism of the Democratic presidential campaign will find at least some passing relief in the latest issue of the Intercollegiate Review, devoted largely to remembrances of William F. Buckley, Jr.

From Thomas F. Bertonneau’s essay, “The Obliging Order: William F. Buckley’s War on Totalitarianism and Blandness,” an appreciation of Buckley’s Up from Liberalism:

Buckley never doubted that liberalism tooks its quasi-religious life from the twin goals of earthly redemption and human divinization . . . . Despite [liberals’] professions of tolerance, Buckley wrote, “it is fair to generalize that American liberals are reluctant to coexist with anyone on their Right”; and he posed the necessary question whether “in the history of controversy, there has ever been such consistent intemperance, insularity, and irascibility as the custodians of liberal orthodoxy have shown toward conservatives who question some of the orthodoxy’s premises?” Buckley argued that liberalism’s readiness to anathematize opponents is inseparable from its intention to marshal instrumental forces, in a so-called “rational” struggle, to realize the utopia of the saints, an earthly New Jerusalem. An assumption about the demonic status of dissenters thus is at the heart of liberal folklore, a Gnostic sub-religiosity with its own repertory of creeds and dogmas.

One need only think of the latest version of this other-worldly redemption, the project of salvaging the planet from the sinful taint of humanity itself under the guise of forestalling global warming, to test the rightness of the interpretation. The teleological image of a pristine earth projected by the devotees of carbon-purity, as Buckley would doubtless have told us, conforms to a Rousseauvian fantasy, and that fantasy would remain incomplete without the gallery of industrialist trepassers who have profaned the ecological sanctum sanctorum. In the global warming cult, one witnesses the fierce intransigency of the True Believer, whose cause has become a crusade of the illuminated against the unwashed . . . .

“Etiquette,” Buckley reminded his readers, “ is the first value only of the society that has no values.” As a taboo governing what is mentionable, etiquette, in the form of political correctness, stifles the most essential attribute of a free society: the liberty of its people, as individuals, to speak their conscience based on the truth as they see it. The institution of free speech functions only in correlation with the courage that prompts a conscience to speak.”

T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. extracted this essential Buckleyism for his memoriam: “The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

What Buckley intended by this was not an equation of Christianity with unrestrained capitalism, or promotion of social, political, or religious autonomy. Rather it was a reference to the real-world struggle against utopians who of necessity must destroy real men, or at least remove their freedom and dignity, in the attempt to establish their abstract--and also of necessity, anti-Christian--ideal of humankind.

Comments

[Gabriel Sanchez]

This is all fine to accept if one ignores, of course, that Buckley's "thought" amounted to the (right wing)ideologue's Cliffs Notes for Eric Voegelin's New Science of Politics. Buckley (and his still ever-present epigones) could never full escape the restraints of ideology. Buckley's struggle was not akin to, say, Aquinas's in his Summa Contra Gentiles, nor even that found in as early a work of Christian apologetics as St. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. It was much more along the lines of a most common quarrel amongst five year-olds: "I like vanilla ice cream; butter pecan is stupid" and "People who eat vanilla ice cream are poo-heads; butter pecan rocks." Only Buckley's rhetoric was much more polished and he possessed no scruples about lifting theoretical concepts which he not only failed to master, but barely understood, to dress up his positions.

Ideologues don't see ideology. They just promote it.

[Ethan C.]

Mr. Sanchez, if I recall correctly, you've also heavily criticized Russell Kirk for being some sort of derivative ideological hack. I'm curious: are there any conservative writers that you like?

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>"I like vanilla ice cream; butter pecan is stupid" and "People who eat vanilla ice cream are poo-heads; butter pecan rocks."<<<

So you're saying it was on roughly the same level as a lot of the Christological polemics of the fifth and sixth centuries?

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Ethan,

Kirk and Buckley are cut from the same post-Burkean conservative ideological cloth. Interestingly, both tried to appropriate (and in some sense popularize) Voegelin's thought; an irony if one considers Voegelin's nausea for any ideological deformations of his or any other philosopher's thought. (See, e.g., Voegelin's acerbic remarks about American conservatism throughout his post-1950 collected corresponence.) One notable exception is Willmoore Kendall who, during the 60's, managed to drift away from the right-wing ideologues (eventually resigning from National Review) and yet never ceased being, you might say, "conservative." Of course, Kendall benefitted a great deal from a lengthy intellectual relationship with not only Voegelin (who tried--albeit unsuccessfully--to convince Yale that Kendall's promise as a scholar far exceeded his ideological posturing), but Leo Strauss. Through their mutual influence, Kendall saw the problems of Burke's proto-historicism (which, by the time it got to Kirk, had decayed into unqualified historicism) and, more importantly, the difference between modern ideology and classic philosophy. But Kendall remained "conservative" in a profound sense. People saw that Voegelin and Strauss were both conservatives, though again, that has to be qualified with the fact that neither of them would sacrifice the legitimacy of their respective enterprises by capitulating it to a set of political and social dogmas. Strauss benefitted from being a bit more aloof than Voegelin and, perhaps, a "harder read" for foot soliders in the kulturkampf looking for catchy slogans like, "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"

With that said, you could say I don't care for ideologues of any sort. So, it's hard for me to appreciate a conservative ideologue even if, at the end of the day, I might agree with him a great deal more than the liberal ideologue. I probably read and find myself influenced by a number of thinkers conservative ideologues like to read and, I believe, misappropriate. Voegelin and Strauss are two. Kendall is another (though I agree less with him than I do his teachers). Thinkers like Solzhenitsyn, Benardete, Lowith, Bloom, Schmemann, von Balthasar, de Lubac, etc., also get heralded by conservatives, though none of them were ideologues and all of them fall within the orbit of my interests and influences. (Again, with varying degrees of agreement.) So, it's not antipathy for "all things conservative" which draws my ire; it's a revulsion at sacrificing thought for secular dogmatism where my criticisms come from.

Stuart,

The great gulf between even the most intellectually vapid theological debates of the first millennium and the ideological squabbles of the present is that the former acknowledged that there was a common revelatory ground upon which to carry out their arguments and thus, a belief that they were susceptible to a final answer. Ideologues have no common ground because their "thought" is insular, self-contained, and does not allow its premises to be exposed to criticism. Their "debate" is simply a public display of self-justification and mindless indignation over the other's position. There's no substance there. (At the risk of sounding like a "Voegelian," I believe Voegelin's unpublished lecture, "The Drama of Humanity," and his recorded conversations at the Thomas More Institute illustrate the distinction between pre-modern intellectual engagement and contemporary rhetorical "contests.")

[Ethan C.]

>>At the risk of sounding like a "Voegelian,"<<

Just as long as you don't start reciting any Vogelian poetry. :)

As I think I might have mentioned on the old Russell Kirk thread, I disagree not so much with your condemnation of ideologues as with your labeling of Kirk, Buckley, and others as such. I don't really wish to take the time to recapitulate the arguments made there, but I wanted to let you know what the nature of my criticism is.

I would also note that (assuming you meant Seth Bernardete, Karl Lowith, Harold Bloom, Alexander Schmemann, and Henri de Lubac), on your list everyone besides Solzhenitsyn is an academic, which leads me to suspect a certain exclusivity in your appreciation.

[smh]

Who said anything about Buckley's "thought"? What I picked out here were several of Buckley's thoughts, particularly on utopianism and the relation between Christianity and atheism on one hand and collectivism and individualism on the other. This is "ideology"? Yet again the straw man is fashioned, clothed, seized, and triumphantly burned to ashes, while Mere Comments readers must stand by and breath in the smoke. You get one more comment before I cut this string, Mr. Sanchez. Make it good.

[Gabriel Sanchez]

SMH,

Are you implying that somehow a Buckley “thought” (or “thoughts”) can be separated from his thought? Surely, sir, you jest. But even assuming I went beyond the narrow confines of your subject, it doesn’t lift Buckley off the hook from being an ideologue. The fact he accepts a Christian anthropology doesn’t relieve him of the charge. Your attempt to collapse the argument to a few lines and, from there, stretch my larger assessment of his work into a “proof” that I am calling what you referenced an ideology is classic Hutchens; it’s also low arguing at its worst. Nothing is inherently immune to ideological deformations. Excuse me for not setting Buckley in isolation from everything else he wrote so I can accept him as something he isn’t. Also the observation of Buckley’s ham fisted “Voegelianism” still stands.

There’s no “straw man” here. The further you expand the circle of inquiry into Buckley, the stronger the ideologue case gets. On the basis of your own “counterclaim,” it seems that the more limited you make the image of Buckley out to be, the more you immunize him from criticism. So, where’s the “straw man” here? Give me the robust Buckley any day and I’ll show you a man no less consumed by ideology than your everyday feminist or Marxist (if there are really any of those left). As for your original observation that “[w]hat Buckley intended…was not an equation of Christianity with unrestrained capitalism,” etc., I wonder if such a claim can hold up under the weight of everything Buckley wrote. My suspicion is that it cannot.

Ethan,

I am not bias towards academics; it’s just how the list worked out. I don’t have an antipathy towards academics, but the “problem” is that the better work of the twentieth century came from them. With a few exceptions (Solzhenitsyn is one, and so is Camus; Alexander Dru may be another), most men aren’t afforded the resources to do compelling work outside of the academy. I doubt that it was anything about the academy per se which allowed these men to break the ideological barriers of their time. What the academic life afforded them was the time to complete their various projects—something we shouldn’t underestimate in importance. Please don’t take my “lumping” Solzhenitsyn with them as a sign of pure equivocation. His life and work is something altogether different and deserving a far greater degree of admiration than even the best books penned by Strauss or Benardete. Also, I meant Allan Bloom.

Whether you accept Burke’s proto-historicism or not seems to me to be the crucial first question to ask when dealing with any conservative thinker. Admittedly, Burke and the tradition of nineteenth-century reaction (de Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortes, etc.) turned to proto-historicism as a conservative counterweight to what they saw as the unhinging effects of using “nature” (in the Rousseauian sense) as the standard for society; that’s something quite different than the radical historicism of Heidegger and his lot. But both are guilty of becoming ideological deformations, not the least because in the case of the conservative’s proto-historicism, transcendence is cut off at the point, “What tradition?” is asked.

I’ll close by saying I don’t believe “all ideologues are created equal.” What Kirk and Buckley leaned upon is of a substantially higher order than, say, what Sartre or even Barak Obama leans upon. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the inadequacy of both Kirk and Buckley for dealing with the pathologies of the times. That “tradition for tradition’s sake” stuff has dangerous limits. Also, calling modernity “Gnostic” because it sounds particularly damning has polemical advantages which must yield at the point that name-calling neither uncovers the roots of the problems nor points towards a real solution.

[smh]

Can Buckley's thoughts be separated from his thought? You ridicule me, as is your wont, for thinking that they can. But I tell you that no one can be saved--or educated--unless he is able to do so, to extract thoughts from thought in accordance with the canons of truth, goodness, and beauty. If the thoughts are sin and error, can a man be separated from them? And is it not an act of grace and wisdom to do so? And what do you expect from God in your own case? Do you not live in the hope that he will separate thoughts from thought and thought from thoughts? You are very careless here.

You hate ideology. Very well: I know of no one at Touchstone who would fail to join you on the point, for our business here is to attempt writing as Christians for whom all ideology, including every kind of conservatism, is subject to the teachings of the faith, and thus for whom affinities for any systematic conceptualization detectible in our work are the product of a critical process that begins with assumption of a clear division between the fides quem and every secular thought-system. We have always been careful of this, and it would be clear upon a fair reading of even our most “political” productions.

Following our custom in this regard, my appreciation of William F. Buckley, Jr. in this posting had to do, and I think rather clearly, with several aspects of his thought I believe to be distinctively Christian. While I think he was brighter, knew more, and was more Christian than you allow, the point remains that if you had understood what was afoot you would have also understood that meaningful criticism of Buckley’s remarks, or of the commentary, would have gone to the issue of whether what was said was wrong, and if so, why. (Saying he is an idealogue in seven different ways and calling this "argument" would not do.) In doing so you would have to lay bare your own counter-philosophy, making it subject to criticism from a number of very intelligent Christians, on the bases of both its intelligence and its Christianity.

Instead we get, from your cloudy Olympus, screeds on “ideology” in which names and terms are thrown all over the place, giving the appearance of learning, but none of it to the point--more evidence that although you have been for many years free with your criticism of Touchstone, and me in particular, you have not been paying attention. You wish to reduce us to ideologues--which would be supremely difficult to do for anyone who was inclined to fight fair--and so dispose of us. Thus your tiresome, predictable, and usually vicious misconstructions of what is actually said, and cockadoodling over the corpses of the ghosts you have slain, proving little more than your aptitude for using verbiage as your Rocinante. If you’re ever to make headway on these pages, you’ll have to do much, much better than that. You’ll have to engage rather than issue catcalls from the stands. Once you’re down on the field you may be surprised at how big some of these guys are.