Neo-Cons Are Just the Newest Con

I received a submission for Praesidium early this summer from a previous contributor who attached certain odd claims to the essay’s history. It was under consideration elsewhere, he wrote… yet I could use it if I wished. He had frequently “loaned” it to colleagues so that they might employ it in their classes… yet the footnoting was incomplete and improper (which, admittedly, could explain why it was forever “under consideration” elsewhere). The piece wasn’t at all lacking in merit, though its subject has been well worked over during the past decade: the ascent of the sixties generation to power in the academy, and the consequent veering of the curriculum—especially in the Humanities—toward a loathing of everything Western and canonical. My journal enjoys a 501c3 status, so I seek to preserve its pages from any appearance of narrow political partisanship (the reason behind my removing this column from the site of The Center for Literate Values, as well). I was a bit uneasy about some of this submission’s generalizations, therefore. Yet what most troubled me was its conclusion. Because of the academy’s bias, “newly minted Ph.D.s” (a condescending phrase used consistently by the author and consistently mis-punctuated) should be tutored upon graduation in a kind of summer school run by such worthies as… the essay’s author. The goal: to introduce them properly to those canonical Western works which they had been raised to detest at a distance.

Now, if the author were right about the academy’s bias (as he most surely is), why would he, without taking leave of his senses, suppose that its ruling elite would collaborate in this re-programming of “newly minted Ph.D.s”? You’d have to read the essay for yourself—but I promise you that it concealed no hint of Swiftean irony. And a re-programming is precisely what the author had in mind, and what he described. If the intellectualist Left is to be deplored for superciliously feeding “correct beliefs” to the benighted—and the author’s essay had cited the intractably arrogant Richard Rorty in this regard to fine effect—then why would the Right not be equally deplorable for using the same tactic? The thinker dedicated to Western ideals is supposed to hold, like Socrates, that the truth will out: in this case, that hungry young minds will inevitably read great books of their own volition, DESPITE and not BECAUSE OF the hemlock waved in their face. Though this formulation is naïve if stretched to an optimism about our ailing culture’s recovery within familiar boundaries, I and most of my collaborators at The Center are convinced that the great books will again float to the top after the United States has fragmented into three or four countries, after China’s Christians have successfully martyred themselves to bring down an inhuman tyranny, etc., etc. Goodness will not die, any more than it will be revived by chanting a catechism under the shadow of the master’s stick.

In short, I have found something faintly but irrepressibly presumptuous about this contributor throughout the brief history of my dealings with him. The friction between us finally produced sparks this past week. As I prepared to take the journal’s summer edition to the printer, I received a file in my e-mail which, I was assured, was a completely rewritten version of the “great books” essay. I laboriously worked through the same old passages, inserting hyphens, unraveling clumsy gestures at foreign languages, and trying to make the footnotes respectable (I at last took the blame for them upon myself in an editorial aside where I apologized for having “rushed” the author) without finding anything new besides a single long citation. Yet I preserved my humor. The author seemed willing, in a friendly overture, to exchange some e-mailed thoughts about how his neo-conservatism differed from my “paleo” variety, and I obliged him with thoughts similar to those I have shared in this column. His response… hmm. Difficult to gather the strands. Something about how big cities are exciting and people in the boondocks are all rubes. The Unibomber, I was invited to observe, was a withdrawn survivalist (and, of course, we know that urban centers never produce mass-murderers!). If we do not carry our technology and progress into the future, we shall be outstripped by the Axis of Evil in nanobots and rockets—and then the world will be ever so much worse than we would have made it!

And so on. I responded that I was busy freezing my apricot harvest and plotting my next mass-murder, and signed off.

I write of this annoying encounter here in my blog because I want my readers to be keenly aware that “conservatism” need not be a bad word—that, to be precise, there are false conservatives of the “neo” variety among us who possess all the bad qualities of liberals and none of the endearing ones. The liberal believes that we should not develop a machine or technique further simply because the next step is clear and feasible—that we should weigh, rather, the human cost of that step. So does the true conservative. The liberal recognizes that people are more satisfied living in relative harmony with nature, their routine measured in footsteps and the reach of an arm, than living atop a high-tech house of cards precariously holding natural forces at bay. So does the true conservative. The liberal believes that the world’s various tribes have an inalienable right to preserve their time-honored customs free of constant assault from satellite-purveyed images of pornography and whimsical mayhem… or so the liberal would say, if he or she had a true conservative to help out with the wording (for liberals become hopelessly perplexed by the paradox of “cultural freedom”, which is nothing less than the freedom to restrict things like sexual expression).

On all of these fronts—and on numerous others—the real adversary of the liberal who has not yet run amuck in a chaotic hurly-burly of geometrically multiplying freedoms and of the true, old-time (= paleo) conservative is that slithy tove, the neo-conservative, a creature whose very name is a pulsing contradiction. The neo-con, like my erstwhile correspondent, relishes mocking and railing. He calls it “argument”, and he congratulates himself upon his proficiency at it. Everyone who divines a conspiracy behind some matter of public policy, for instance, is the precise equal of the crackpot who thinks that the CIA manufactured the mayhem of 9/11. Yet when he sees such moral equivalency on the Left, the neo-con leaps into the breach of logic’s battered wall like a superhero. My correspondent’s essay remarked, quite rightly, that one cannot have a serious discussion with a liberal who equates Joe McCarthy with Joseph Stalin. Are the prospects of serious exchange any better with someone who tries to sweep laterally from Wendell Berry to the Unibomber?

Global warming may be the biggest boondoggle of our time. I hope to write more on the subject soon: I most certainly am convinced that the Left has exploited fear of climate change to secure more political power. Yet the true conservative does NOT believe that human beings are better off spending hours of every day zooming about expensively and without roots to countless venues of work and play, much to the detriment of neighborhoods, urban architecture, and profound personal ties. The proper argument against car culture is not that it’s poisoning our air—it may or may not be—but that it poisons our soul; and to affirm that we must nevertheless keep driving down this road because a) we can’t turn back and b) other nations will amass car-collars if we do not is a pitiable mush of logical contradiction and moral nihilism. If technology enslaves us to certain courses of action, then it cannot be bettering us as beings of freedom, BY DEFINITION; and if we have backed ourselves into a corner wherein exploitation of our fellow beings is the only means of saving our children from starvation, then how could we not be better off growing the food we need on our own land?

My cultured metropolitan northeastern correspondent, of course, knows that the olives in his cocktails are not yet all artificially assembled in China: he knows that peons somewhere are sweating under the sun so that he and his gilded entourage can hatch witticisms about deconstruction around the penthouse pool over caviar. The extent of his concern about the peons’ humanity is that all peons around the world should be allowed to compete with each other for a dime a day. There you have him, my liberal friends: the quintessence of what you loathe. But please know that you do not loathe him more than I do.