What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Anniversary Post--Conservatism Without Craziness

When we authors at W4 started thinking about the tenth anniversary of the blog, various suggestions were made as to who might write what. The idea was mooted that perhaps my contribution to our anniversary series might be a post on what is worse about the world now than when the blog started--an assignment in keeping with my gloomy bent and reputation.

Of course there are many possible answers. The homosexual and transsexual agendas have advanced with a speed I never would have predicted ten years ago. Things have gotten to such a pass that a man, now living in Hawaii, has sued the state of Idaho (in federal court) for refusing to let him change his designation on his birth certificate to female, because he identifies himself as a woman. Would that one could laugh this off as a frivolous suit with no possibility of success, but one certainly can’t be sure of that anymore.

But what seems to me perhaps the saddest change in the last ten years is the further fragmentation of conservatism in that time period.

Social conservatives, or those who said that they were socially conservative, already constituted a small group ten years ago. It was therefore extremely important that they stand shoulder to shoulder against the various insanities of the age, and this blog was founded in part as an attempt to do that. My prediction then was that this drawing-together would become easier and more natural as the insanity got more insane, the persecution more intense, and the perception more obvious that we must all hang together, gentlemen, or we shall all hang separately.

I was wrong.

The causes of this greater fragmentation in the ensuing ten years are many and varied. To some extent the Internet itself is to blame, for it is at one and the same time a powerful tool for forming coalitions and a jackhammer for breaking up coalitions. The same speed and ease of communication that allows you to find those whom you believe to be like-minded individuals also allows you to have never-ending arguments with those same people, arguments in which one side or both become extremely angry and decide to break off the association.

But there are far more causes than that. Already when this blog was founded there were “roots of bitterness” within conservatism. (Hebrews 12:15) God help me, I’m sure I shared that bitterness to some extent. When I think of one or two posts I wrote at the old Right Reason blog, I think that I did. We were frustrated by years of being losers. We were frustrated by the “establishment” in Republicanism and what seemed its increasing disdain for the social conservatives whose votes it took for granted. And those of us who were complementarians were frustrated by the failure of our fellow social conservatives to hold the line on issues like women in the military and the preferrability of stay-at-home mothers.

Gall is a poisonous drink. If one keeps on cultivating bitterness, bad things come of it. It is therefore not a social accident that many right-of-center conservatives, faced with, as they saw it, a choice between becoming angrily reactionary and becoming pansy progressive compromisers, chose the former.

Those who rejected that as a false dichotomy turned out to be much fewer than those who were among the right-of-center conservatives to start with. Fewer, even, than those who were among the intellectually aware, good-to-begin-with, right-of-center conservatives. And that’s a sad fact, both interpersonally and because we needed every soldier of the mind to resist the increasingly powerful and aggressive left-wing rulers of the age, the spiritual wickedness in high places.

Strangely enough, the pro-life movement fell between the cracks rather dramatically in the triumph of the false dichotomy. Too many of those who chose the angry reactionary option got too busy hating the “SJWs” to notice that their pundits are ruthless against the vulnerable lives of the unborn. Others reflexively spend energy in bitter anger at pro-lifers who think that we shouldn’t pursue (as a legal goal) prosecution of women for procuring abortion. Is that better than joining hands in fighting the Death Doctors?

What conservatism faces, in Trumpism, in the alt-right, in the manosphere, in neo-reaction, and also in the various progressive alternatives to them currently on offer, is a crisis of masculinity. That isn’t to say that women have not contributed to that crisis (they have) nor that they can do nothing to help in that crisis (they can). But there is a fundamental sense in which the anger, bitterness, and bizarrely eccentric ideology on display in the ersatz forms of “conservatism” that have siphoned off some of our best and brightest (and many foot soldiers) is a counterfeit of masculinity. It is not too dramatic to say that sociologically speaking, though not in logical space, the ground is disappearing under the feet of those who are firmly complementarian without being creepy or crazy patriarchalists or misogynists, firmly against liberal speech-nannyism without excusing vile abuse and threats, and willing to consider a few oddball political strategies (like civil disobedience) without advocating seditious violence. All of these ideological temptations are especially likely to influence red-blooded men, especially those who are frustrated, and perhaps especially those who are young. Many is the time that I have received endless, boring excuses for the utterly evil behavior and the degradation of conservatism on the grounds that they are “fighting our battles for us” or even that they give us “male role models.” Please, one wants to say, it shouldn’t be all that hard to find better models of masculinity--indeed, even among those deeply hated by that movement.

On the other side, though, those who recognize these concerns are likely to veer the other way--to beat the breast about the “terrible racism” that has supposedly infected Christianity for decades, to make pernicious and lame excuses for racial riots, to insist that everyone (at least every female or child) who claims ever to have been a victim of “abuse” or "sexual harassment" must be believed without the slightest hesitation and without any due process to the accused, to lecture men endlessly (even if truly) about their duties to love their wives while implying (if only by a strange silence) that wives have no need to mortify their sin nature in marriage at all, to adopt egalitarianism outright or at least to water down “complementarianism” to the point that women in combat and MMA fighting are no problem, and eventually to come to doubt the natural law basis for heterosexuality altogether.

If you reject the chest-thumping faux masculinity putting itself forward now as “conservatism” in some circles, you are likely to have more and more friends who are, to a greater or lesser extent, moderate ideological progressives, adopting ideas that would have surprised you ten years ago. But understandably and not altogether incorrectly, you think, "Hey, at least they aren’t making excuses for a President who boasts about grabbing women’s genitalia. At least they aren’t advocating wife beating as 'discipline.' At least they aren’t creeps."

This can leave a man in a strangely lonely social position. Ten years ago it seemed that sensible but staunch social conservatives were many in number and that nobody but a few kooks on the sidelines identified themselves as conservatives while believing really kooky things. That perception may have been to some extent erroneous even then. If so, the succeeding ten years have revealed the error--the extent to which people who seemed sensible then already had bats circling the belfry, and the extent to which people one would have then assumed to be staunchly socially conservative were unsure of themselves or willing to compromise. Moreover, people change their minds in ten years, and a generation of young people who were, say, fourteen years of age ten years ago are twenty-four now. Some of them are wondering why in the world we Christian conservatives reject gay “marriage” anyway and why we think marriage itself is so important. And others are following Milo or Vox Day, because it provides vicarious pleasure to watch someone anger the “SJWs.” This leaves sensible conservatives, at least those who pay attention to politics and to politically related social issues, somewhat isolated. One gets tired of thinking of one’s pastor and many of one’s closest friends as either muddled semi-progressives or Crazy Uncles. And I may be wrong, but it seems to me that men who are sensible conservatives and politically interested are going to feel this especially keenly.

Where do we go from here? Let’s face it, “Conservatism without craziness” isn’t exactly a slogan to set the pulses madly racing. One used to be able to take the “without craziness” part for granted; it’s harder now. If one tries to make a movement out of such a thing, it’s inevitably going to splinter into a thousand further fragments as a result of infighting to define precisely what constitutes real conservatism on various issues and what constitutes craziness.

Yet what we--the country, conservatism, and Christianity--desperately need now is, precisely, conservatism without craziness. We need, especially, men who exemplify it. We need them as husbands and fathers, to lead their wives, to provide for their families, to raise their daughters to be women and their sons to be men. We need them as politicians, to fight corruption, compromise, and leftism in all its hydra heads with clarity and intelligence but without dirty tactics and without hatred. We need them as pundits, to speak out strongly for marriage, for male and female as God created them to be, for human life, and against the forces of both left and right that seek to attack these. (Matt Walsh comes to mind as one example in the pundit-o-sphere.)

I’m proud to be associated with my W4 co-contributors because they are such men. May their tribe increase, and may we be able to see, ten years further on, how we contributed to its increase.

Comments (12)

I've been reading this blog for ten years. I'm glad to see it still going.

I agree that the splintering of conservatives is a problem, but I think this is largely because there never was a consistent conservative movement. It's largely been a conglomeration of independent groups, such as Christians, the Secular Right, libertarians, and neoconservatives. I've often argued with so called conservatives that the "just powers of government" come from God, not the "consent of the governed" and the response is "you're no conservative. Go live in Iran". Rather than get in a flame war of what a true conservative is, I'll often just say I'm a Traditionalist or Traditional Catholic Conservative or something of that sort. This is the strategy of the Alt Right. Stop bickering with Republicans and neocons about what a true conservative is and present yourself as an alternative. Something new and different. Anyways, that's my two cents. Here's to another ten years.

I think this is largely because there never was a consistent conservative movement. It's largely been a conglomeration of independent groups, such as Christians, the Secular Right, libertarians, and neoconservatives.

I don't fully agree, because I think *Christians* have splintered more and have gotten more confused--both confused veering left and confused veering...crazy. (I hesitate to call it "right.")

This is the strategy of the Alt Right. Stop bickering with Republicans and neocons about what a true conservative is and present yourself as an alternative.


In that case, a poisonous "alternative" and one I would rather die than belong to.

But I'm happy for myself to try to *exemplify* what conservatism should be, what Christianity should be, and what good ideas should be rather than bickering. Unless saying that the alt-right is poisonous and trying to dissuade people from getting sucked into it is deemed bickering. Then I'll just go on "bickering" (on that definition). Because evil has to be fought, wherever it arises.

I think *Christians* have splintered more and have gotten more confused--both confused veering left and confused veering...crazy.

I think this is true. For instance, the Methodist Church just elected the first openly gay bishop.

In that case, a poisonous "alternative" and one I would rather die than belong to.

There are poisonous individuals and poisonous subgroups within any group or movement. Nevertheless, I do not describe what I think the Alt Right should be because I'm not interested in flame wars with Alt Right provocateurs. However, if Men of the West is Alt Right, then I would argue that is an improvement to mainstream conservatism.

Because evil has to be fought, wherever it arises.

So we should have simultaneously fought the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany? Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

So we should have simultaneously fought the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany? Sometimes you have to pick your battles.

I can sit here in my chair and fight both ways, loudly, and I will. Yeah, it's arguable that we should *not* have allied (as opposed to being co-belligerents) with the Soviet Union. But guess what? I'm not here to argue that. You know why? Because I don't think it's necessary to develop a Complete Theory of Every Alliance in Every Political and War Context in order to make statements about fighting evil in the political realm in the here and now. Such analogies are not, like it or not, knockdown arguments. They just aren't. Arguably, trying to force people to do alternative history and foreign policy is a red herring from the particular evils and the particular duties that actually face us right now in the real world of political alliances.

I agree that the splintering of conservatives is a problem, but I think this is largely because there never was a consistent conservative movement. It's largely been a conglomeration of independent groups, such as Christians, the Secular Right, libertarians, and neoconservatives. I've often argued with so called conservatives that the "just powers of government" come from God, not the "consent of the governed" and the response is "you're no conservative. Go live in Iran".

I think that's almost right, Urban, but I would describe it with a twist. I think that most people who were conservative, right up to at least the 1970s, were seat-of-the-pants conservatives. They held their conservative core without examining it. Being conservative, to them, just meant "being normal old-fashioned American", with its satisfaction with baseball and apple pie. That is: hard work, clean fun, pay your way in life, and be decent to those around you. They didn't necessarily consider themselves under the term "conservative" so much as "normal", but the things they honored were the things conservatives honor: God, tradition, law and order, etc.

They had never had to ask, much answer, what they thought about trans rights; about how to handle in excess of 10M illegal aliens; about why Joe and Jane should get married if they were going to live together and have kids; about whether spanking was an appropriate way to discipline kids, etc. All these things were OBVIOUS, and therefore there was no splintering over them.

In the aftermath of the degradation of Christianity as the guiding explanatory (both intellectual and cultural) compass, all these people have been forced to explain each and every cultural artifact that they want to be so, ad nauseum, and not surprisingly the explanations are not all that consistent. It not quite so much that there never was any consistency in the conservative grass roots, as that most of its people had never had to say why they held to what they held, and were unable to do so when "because that's what we have always held" was laughed out of court as sheer bigotry and stupidity. People are splintering more and more because more and more of the cultural underpinnings are being explicitly attacked by our full-bore enemies. As Lydia points out, only 10 years ago, it was unnecessary to explain why men should not use women's bathrooms. Just 15 years ago, _all_ of the right was confident that people were either male or female and that was that. Only 20 years ago, DOMA was resoundingly passed by both sides of the aisle, but nearly unanimously by the right.

We need, especially, men who exemplify it. We need them as husbands and fathers, to lead their wives, to provide for their families, to raise their daughters to be women and their sons to be men.

I am tempted to say that young men are going to be beasts, unless pushed hard to be otherwise. The kinds of forces that push or pull them to be otherwise, are Christianity, solid law, and ... good women. By and large, if men - yes, even the young men in this generation - could not get sex from women outside of monogamous marriage, they would tow the line and enter monogamous marriage. By and large women have allowed themselves to buy the lie that they can't expect men to chaste and faithful, and so they accept a huge downgrade: temporary monogamy at most, without any promises of permanent benefits. At this point so many women accept this that the few women who won't are lost in the statistical noise.

Certainly a man or woman who wants a permanent faithful marriage and expects to GET that is going to have a hard time finding prospects. The more so because, in addition to the ordinary temptations against this, they will have all the broken-culture pressures to defeat their marriage.

It not quite so much that there never was any consistency in the conservative grass roots, as that most of its people had never had to say why they held to what they held...

That's a good point. What is today considered "radical right-wing fanaticism" was common sense 15 or 20 years ago. Back then I can't imagine any parent having to justify their decision to buy their daughter a My Little Pony. Today, you get called a bigot for doing so. After all, it's gender discrimination.

There's a novel that was published, sort of by Dorothy Sayers, after her death. She had outlined it but not written most of it, so someone else, a friend of hers, was commissioned to finish it after Sayers died.

In the novel the king of England dies (this is late thirties) and the one who would later get entangled with Mrs. Simpson becomes king. Lord Peter has a conversation with someone or other about the funeral procession for the old king and about what a convenient place it would be for a terrorist to blow up a bomb, with all the successors to the throne in one place. Lord Peter says something to the effect that the English can't think about those things, that part of the essence of being English is not *analyzing* things. He says something to the effect that the English can live according to good common sense as long as they aren't asked to philosophize about it, and that the minute they look at their feet (like a tightrope walker) they fall.

That has, in fact, proven to be quite prescient concerning the English, and concerning Americans as well. I don't know if that bit of dialogue was written by Sayers herself or by her posthumous co-author, but it pretty much epitomizes what Tony has just said about American conservatives.

And it's actually rather healthy for people just to live according to innocent common sense and not have to analyze it. People shouldn't have to explain why transgenderism is insane and homosexuality is perverted.

The Prince of this World has very cannily led our Western intellectuals to bring the insane to the forefront and to make it a subject of analysis and debate. One could say that the minute we say, "Explain to me why a man can't turn into a woman" or "Explain to me why it shouldn't be allowed legally to tear a child to pieces" or "Why can't two men marry each other?" an important battle has been lost. Innocence has been lost. Perhaps, in some ways, it's all downhill from there.

We can only pull back a few brands from the burning, then.

One feels here an all-prevailing mania for novelty. This hankering for mere novelty was visible to non-Americans. For instance Evelyn Waugh's Loved Ones which is set in California.

The conservatives allowed themselves to be beguiled by the fancy of creative destruction not realizing that this gale of entrepreneurship and destruction masked as creation will not stop in economic sphere only and will overspill in social sphere as well.

Even now, most conservatives are singing hymns of praise to capitalism, unwilling to accept that capitalism per se is the enemy of all conservatism.

I think Roger Scruton has written somewhere that the purpose of a conservative intellectual is to defend the prejudices of the people, which I think echoes what Tony and Lydia have said. Most people will tend to reason in accordance with their society's prevailing habits of mind and moral principles, and most people are unable to explain from first principles why those habits and principles are either right or wrong.

That's a comfort in normal time; an intellectually engaged conservative 100 years ago could rest easy knowing that "the people" as a whole were not going to adopt extreme leftism or feminism spontaneously because a few cranks told them to. But it's not a comfort now.

There is, though, comfort in knowing that the facts of life are conservative. Governments can try to impose artificial structures on people that force them into inhuman states of life, and the effects can be ghastly, but they cannot be permanent, and it is hard to see how humanity's collective memory can ever be wiped entirely.

The conservatives allowed themselves to be beguiled by the fancy of creative destruction not realizing that this gale of entrepreneurship and destruction masked as creation

Mactoul, I think the "conservative" sub-species you are primarily referring to here are, especially, neo-conservatives and economic conservatives, who simply in calling themselves '***-conservative' have hoodwinked a lot of conservatives into thinking that "this is cool for conservatives to think." This does create problems, in that the UNconservative ideas of these end up standing in for conservative ideas. Nevertheless, there is indeed one aspect of so-called 'creative destruction' that is difficult to argue against. It takes 3 comments:

As I outlined in my own post, conservatism is perfectly compatible with the sort of change that is implied by growth and development. Growth is natural to an entity, not imposed from the outside. And yet all growth in life, say even that of a baby to an adult, implies the destruction of all the food the baby had to consume in order to grow.

The second point is that most change comes in incremental, small bits and pieces. A family's Christmas traditions start out simple when the family is new, but year by year little additions and adjustments are made, until 25 years later the whole is quite complex. We normally think of this as growth, not as destruction of the simple and replacement with the complex traditions.

The problem comes with the third point: we humans are not given the gift of prophecy to foretell when this little change, taken together with that little adjustment, and yet another small tweak, each in their way inoffensive and perfectly reasonable, lead inexorably to a big change in a culture. The number of small intervening changes that led from almost everyone getting a large dose of their daily entertainment in the evening from 3 broadcast channels to getting it at any time of day from a gross of online channels is in the hundreds, if not thousands. It is (gradually) spelling the death knell of broadcast TV, which is a major cultural change.

Given that no human can clearly and certainly foresee the specifics of the major shifts that result from the aggregate of the hundreds of the perfectly reasonable and inoffensive little changes, nobody can claim the moral authority to suppress the little changes as being contrary to good order, contrary to a culture, "destruction" simply rather than growth and development.

It would take the social hatred of development of the Amish to stand in the way of the little changes and say, society-wide, "No, you must not!" And, oddly, I don't think that most traditionalists count themselves with the Amish. Nor do the Amish reject the socially revolutionary changes of fire and the wheel and writing and crop rotation, rather inconsistently. They do not object to eating better due to crop rotation, even though this leads inexorably to living longer and larger family size, which lead to...

The change in music from the early renaissance to that of Tallis, to Byrd, Purcell, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Hayden, to Mozart is certainly a history of development rather than destruction simply. To have put a brick wall in front of any one of these men, and say no to the incremental changes he made, on the basis of a future result hundreds of years and modifications later, would have been wrong. Well, it would have been just as wrong to have said no to vinyl recordings to recording tapes to video tapes, and the abacus to the adding machines of the early 1900's, to the computing machines of the 1940's (and 10,000 other minute developments) because in combination they would ultimately lead to the internet.

The social alterations that come about unforeseeably due to a long series of incremental adjustments may be happy or unhappy, but cannot be morally categorized as "right" or "wrong" changes individually due to the eventual (unforeseeable) outcome. Each individual increment has to be judged from the standpoint of what is known and foreseeable in the concrete, at the time. Man is not the arbiter of all life, that's the role of Providence.

When an economist describes the generation of a new good as containing within it also destruction of something else, he is merely remarking on the laws of nature, like gravity, like respiration changing C+02 to CO2. There can be no moral judgment in the observation. If we make a god out of innovation, and change for the sake of change, or change for the sake of the destruction itself, that of course is a deformed view of human good. To base economic prescription simply on the law of nature that developing a new good implies destruction of something else is certainly problematic, in that it tells a man to not even make a moral judgment about whether he ought to aim at certain changes.

Of possible interest... the new issue of Modern Age arrived in the mail yesterday, and the theme is conservatism in the age of Trump. It features essays by Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen, Samuel Goldman, and new editor Peter A. Lawler, and is examining some of the same issues brought up in these posts.

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