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By Paul M. Weyrich
April 24, 2006
What may be the most important message
of this series is that the conservative movement needs a different
agenda for the future than that developed during the Cold
War. From that standpoint I am encouraged by a book that offers
a new agenda, CRUNCHY CONS, by Rod Dreher, who formerly wrote
for NATIONAL REVIEW.
Let me say up front that I cannot
imagine a worse name for traditionalist or cultural conservatives
than "Crunchy Cons." I hope that title was inflicted
upon Mr. Dreher by some publicist.
What his book describes is not something
new but something old and to some extent forgotten: the traditionalist
conservatism of Russell Kirk. I agree with Rob Dreher that
Kirk's understanding of conservatism is highly important to
the renewal of the American conservative movement.
The book jacket lists a "Crunchy Con
Manifesto" that is similar to some of what I and others
have said in these columns. Its points include:
o Modern conservatism has become too focused
on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff.
o Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
o Culture is more important than politics and economics.
o Small, Local, Old and Particular are almost always better
than Big, Global, New and Abstract.
o Beauty is more important than efficiency.
o The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our
senses to authentic truth, beauty and wisdom.
o We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution
most essential to conserve is the family."
The last point is especially important
to me. Free Congress Foundation was the first conservative
think tank to make government policy toward families its focus,
in the 1970s.
One of the important questions CRUNCHY
CONS raises is just how important efficiency and even economics
should be to conservatism. I agree with Dreher when he writes,
"we can't build anything good unless we live by the belief
that man does not exist to serve the economy, but the economy
exists to serve man." The conservative life is not just
about getting more stuff cheaper. Yes, we want a decent standard
of living, but Dreher is correct in saying
A society built on consumerism must break
down eventually for the same reason socialism did: because
even though it is infinitely better than socialism at meeting
our physical needs and gratifying our physical desires, consumerism
also treats human beings as merely materialists, as ciphers
on a spreadsheet. It cannot, over time, serve the deepest
needs of the human person for stability, spirituality, and
authentic community. We should not be surprised that it has
led to social disintegration.
I can imagine Russell Kirk's saying "Hear!
Hear!" to this. Kirk also would agree with Dreher's rejection
of relativism, not only in morals but also in aesthetics.
Dreher writes,
In his 1994 book THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
. . . architect (Jonathan) Hale argued that the rampant charmlessness
of our built environment is a function of America's loss of
historical memory: "Everywhere in the buildings of the
past is relationship among parts: contrast, tension, balance.
Compare the buildings of today and we see no such patterns.
We see fragmentation, mismatched systems, uncertainty. This
disintegration tends to produce not ugliness so much as dullness
. . .
In other words, there is a canon based
on tradition, and it should be respected. The next conservatism
too, I think, should talk about resurrecting old canons.
One emphasis in CRUNCHY CONS likely to
be controversial among other conservatives is Dreher's emphasis
upon environmentalism. I reject environmentalism as an ideology,
which it largely has become. But Dreher is correct in saying
that traditionalist conservatives also have been conservationists.
He quotes powerfully from Pope John Paul II's Encyclical Centesimus
Annus:
In his desire to have and to enjoy rather
than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the
earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way.
At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment
lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread
in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and
in a certain sense create the world through his own work,
forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original
gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary
use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will,
as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given
purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray.
Instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God
in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God
and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature,
which is more tyrannized than governed by him.
Dreher is himself a Roman Catholic, but
regardless of religious affiliation, I think most conservatives
should agree that this is an area we need to think more about.
That may be the greatest service CRUNCHY
CONS can perform for the next conservatism: getting us all
to think anew about some of the challenges ahead, from the
conservative principles Russell Kirk laid out better than
anyone else. In his book's conclusion, Rod Dreher repeats
its most important point:
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.
Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and
CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
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