Deracinated Conservatives

Conservatism has many meanings, the most arrant being the definition derived from the word itself, that certain things, ideas, and institutions are worth conserving in the vicissitudes of change that flow through life. The difficulty conservatives often face, regardless of their stripes, is that more often than not they are trying to keep scattered items of the past without believing in anything specific that bears down on contemporary issues. In short, conservatives are often too practical about what they want to keep and not innately idealistic enough about a vision for society as it exists now.

There are rare exceptions to this lamentable conservatism. American conservatism was successful in the late 20th century on the heels of an idealistic base built by William Buckley, Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers etc. They slowly built an alliance over the course of a generation that capture the presidency and the Congress for the following generation, an opportunity which the custodians of those institutions occasionally made good use of, but not always.

Another type of conservative exists, too. This type is perhaps the rarest and also the most curious kind of a conservative, the kind that wishes to preserve things which they themselves do not believe or make use of, yet they heartfeltly appreciate these ideas and institutions much more than even their own devotees do. An earlier example of this may have been George Santayana, a Spaniard raised on the values of old world Catholicism who, in the age of Darwin and progressive eugencists, embraced Greek materialism with a modern twist. To the end he lived in a monastery and called himself an "aethetic Catholic", defending the concept of natural aristocracy and choice against determinism and a coldly evolving society, ideas which reflected his own life choices more than his beliefs.

A more modern example would be Jordan Peterson, whose surging popularity in the last year descends from his twin talents for calm responses to angry questions and his non-dogmatic, personal way of addressing actual problems people face in life. Peterson routinely expresses positive views about masculinity in the age of #MeToo, religion in a post-religious time, and stable households with a mother and father when the "nuclear family" is more or less the exception. For all his contributions and good points, Peterson is one of these deracinated conservatives, a proponent of "Western Civilization", what was once called Christendom, but still falls into the occasional trap of expounding traditional values because they are valuable, not because they are right. Like Santayana and the Adams brothers decades ago, Peterson's secularism allows him to see the Church, the Christian mindset, the Christian family, suffering, and the Genesis origin story as things of importance and things to be preferred to this day's alternative, but he himself does not hold them.

In the age of Bergoglio I see in my own parish, on this blog, and across the internet various people falling into this sort of exceptional conservatism, trying so very hard to retain things they can while their own relation to those things is denuded. Nature abhors a vacuum, and what is often left in the gap of the person is a lingering bitterness that tends towards a vacillating belief. This is not the age to be a conservative, much less this sort of deracinated conservative that clings to things which no longer "work" for them.

Supposedly there was a synod of some sort in Rome recently about young people. I have no idea what they discussed and I absolutely do not care. At all. Far from burying our heads in the sand, Catholics today must do whatever keeps their heads clear and close to the Church, the continuing presence of Christ on earth. That doesn't mean saying prayers; it means prayer, which is something much harder. For this individual, staying close to the Church means calmly and prudently saying the Office, making time to read the New Testament or a Church Father daily, and keeping an equilibrated approach to the turbulence of life. It also means steering clear of political views of the Church or the temptation of ideology, which thwarted any great love of the Liturgy until I came upon the Eastern Churches (and I am a better Roman for it).

This is the challenge for Catholics today, as my co-writer alluded to last month, to find a way to come out of our distractions intact. We must build upon the corner-stones of the faith rather than grasp with white knuckles at what we hope we will be permitted to keep.