Ah, the Good Old Days

Hilzoy has a wonderful post on this article by Rod Dreher. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I'm not terribly impressed with Dreher's analytic skills, and this time is no exception. There are some huge holes in his reasoning here.

What could that mean for conservatives today? That we should consider what I’ve come to call the “Benedict Option”—that is, pioneering forms of dropping out of a barbaric mainstream culture that has grown hostile to our fundamental values. The case for traditional conservatives to make a strategic retreat to defensible perimeters, so to speak, has become even more appealing since 1999, when Paul Weyrich issued his famous fin de siècle call for conservatives to pull back radically from “a [cultural] collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.”

If you buy Dreher's assumptions -- and there is really no reason you should, and I don't -- this perhaps makes a modicum of sense. The first red flag, of course, is the appeal to "fundamental values." I hear a lot about these things, and no one ever seems willing to tell me exactly what they're talking about. Backtracking a bit:

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously ended his landmark 1982 book After Virtue with a gloomy meditation about the collapse of a common moral sense in the West. He suggested that we were too far gone into nihilism and relativism to save and that those devoted to the traditional virtues should consider hiving off, as Benedict and his followers did in Rome’s final days, to build communities that can withstand the incoming tide of chaos and despond.

"Common moral sense." I wonder when we've ever had such a thing. Of course, Dreher is quoting a Catholic philospher, so I guess we are supposed to figure that the world hasn't changed at all since the Reformation except for now, when it's all coming unglued. And of course, the assertion that we're all sunk in the cesspit of "nihilism and relativism" should be an automatic response by now, except that we're not. Not even most of us. Let me put it this way: I'm not Catholic, nor even Christian, and yet I don't think I'm bereft of morality. In fact, I think I'm a lot more deliberately and consciously moral than an institution that has regularly condoned completely appalling behavior throughout its history.

Dreher goes on to recount a dream involving the poet Constantine Cavafy, whom he professes not to know much about at all, which is probably what leads to one of those blinding ironies that so beset conservative pundits: Cavafy, as anyone who knows anything about the poet's life knows full well, was gay. And quite unapologetically so, at least in his verse.

The nut of this article, for me, and the part that throws into relief the major flaw in these sorts of screeds, is here:

Conservatives have worked so hard over the past few decades to fight for civilized standards against a short checklist of modern barbarisms—abortion, gay marriage, political correctness, and so forth. What we failed to consider was that we had become barbarians ourselves.

With the possible exception of abortion, I fail to see how anything else he lists counts as "barbarism." It seems to be another case of being Humpty Dumpty: "It means what I say it means --until I change my mind."

Trouble is, MacIntyre really is right, and so was Weyrich. From a traditionalist perspective, we truly are living through an astonishing, and astonishingly rapid, cultural collapse, living as free riders on the residual vestiges of Christianity.

There is a tendency on the right (that is to say, among "traditionalists") to view any time of cultural ferment as the final collapse of Western civilization. That is, as far as I can see, a matter of choice: you can take it as ruin, or as a chance at transformation. Traditionalists such as Dreher seem to have, somewhere in the back of their minds, the idea that what they imagine the world to have been like in the past is some sort of Eden, and anything that's happening now is by definition a disaster. Of course, the history they imagine never existed.

Hilzoy's commentary comes from a different direction than this one, but I think we're arguing the same point. In my view, Dreher's "fundamental values" are those of exclusion, privilege, hostility toward the Other, a readiness to condemn, and unquestioning obedience to authority.* Those are qualities you would have been as likely to find among the followers of Atilla the Hun as among the defenders of the Empire. And frankly, for my part, he can keep them. I don't consider myself a barbarian, although I'm starting to consider that he might be.

* By way of comparison, I was raised with what I like to consider real traditional values -- and I think one can consider them true values, not merely a fixation on centuries-old tribal taboos -- that have served me in good stead. They include respect for others, acceptance of their differences, delight in their virtues, independence and self-reliance, generosity in helping others, and grace in accepting their generosity. That's just a start. Frankly, if I and those like me are barbarians, the world is in good hands.