Category Archives: Conservatism - Page 2

The Heresy of Novak

Posted by on July 7, 2009 32 comments

The brand new encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI is out and there are a smattering of responses about the blogosphere. Whatever we may want to say about the merits or liabilities of Benedict’s claims in the encyclical, no one could do worse than Michael Novak in his pathetic response over on the First Things blog:

What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies—and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.

What are the most practical ways of defeating him? The Catholic tradition—even the wise Pope Benedict—still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms.

So, according to Novak what we need is to stop trifling with all this stress on “caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions” and starting looking for some new “methods for defeating human sin.” Not only is his whole thing about the “Father of lies” owning the “real world” straight up Manicheaism, Novak clearly just doesn’t think Jesus is worth bothering about in any significant sense whatsoever. Fuck charity, justice, and virtue, I need an effective method, dammit! In short, for Novak, Jesus simply doesn’t save.

What other method could there be for dealing with sin other than love, justice, and virtue we ask? I can only assume it must be some sort of coercive power. What else is there?

I mean seriously, this prick is saying that there’s far too much stress being given…to justice. WTF??

Novak has very openly declared his own apostasy. His god is Adam Smith and his religion is neocon capitalism. For goodness’ sake, he even acknowledges in his quote that it is outside of “the Catholic tradition”! Thanks for proclaiming your heterodoxy, Novak, old boy. At least now we don’t have to argue with you about it anymore.

Localism and Cosmopolites

Posted by on May 12, 2009 1 comment

Daniel Larison has a great post today on the contradictions of contemporary conservatism in response to this quote from Patrick Deneen:

This, in a microcosm, is a central paradox of our political system: our cosmopolite meritocrats theoretically admire localism but abhore [sic] the idea of living within the confines that such life would entail; our Red-State locals tend to despise cosmopolites, but support (and vote for) an economic system that encourages borderlessness, placelessness, and a profoundly abstract economy that has the effect of eviscerating those very localities. This arrangement is one of the central features undermining the localist cause today, and it’s difficult to see how it will be reversed.

Larison responds incisively:

Could it be that this paradox is unavoidable? Is the paradox the product of human craving and the inevitable disappointment and dissatisfaction that follow from desire? If so, the answer could lie in the self-denial of humbling oneself exceedingly in imitation of the Lord’s kenosis, which would entail forsaking status and honor to take, as it were, the form of a slave. That probably sounds bizarre, but it points to what Caleb Stegall has been saying about the centrality of love in all of this and, I might add, the right ordering of loves, which would tell us not to seek greener pastures but rather cultivate the ground where we are. A culture in which kenosis, self-emptying, was the highest ideal rather than self-fulfillment would be one in which mobility and flight might be possible but would very rarely be considered desirable.

Bingo.

Does Capitalism Work?

Posted by on May 12, 2009 3 comments

Not according to John Médaille at FPR, who is in the midst of an essay on the economics of distributism which looks to be quite interesting:

. . .  there is a certain amount of resignation among distributists, the feeling that they are facing a system that “works,” and that our major task is to add a moral dimension to an already fully functioning system. For example, Daniel M. Bell writes, “The empirical question put to capitalism cannot be ‘does it work?’ The obvious answer is “yes.” At first glance, Prof. Bell’s statement would appear to be true: we do see a working system around us, however imperfectly. However, the working system we see is not capitalism, but Keynesianism. The best one can say from the empirical evidence is that Keynesian Capitalism works. But to say this is to already destroy the argument of the capitalists, or at least of the pure capitalists. If capitalism is a system that requires massive government intervention to balance supply and demand, then it’s purely economic claims must be called into question.

Read more »

Conservatism and Sex

Posted by on April 24, 2009 50 comments

Yesterday I pondered John Milbank’s drift towards conservatism. What seems clear about it is that the main point of emphasis in Milbank’s conservatism is sex. The issues that he is coming out on that seem to betray a drift towards the right are all issues of marriage and sexuality. Interestingly enough, the same trend is pretty visible in the pilgrimage of Richard John Neuhaus. Beginning as a liberal Lutheran minister who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., he was primed to be the next leading voice of liberal protestant social thought. However, he ended up growing more and more conservative as the path of First Things makes clear. The reason? From what I can see it stems for him rejection of the social consequences of the sexual revolution in the 60s. You can see the same tendency in the development of Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten. Just check out Jenson’s chapter “Politics and Sex” in his Systematic Theology and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

This raises a rather odd question. Is the path towards conservatism really just about one’s view of sex? For many people sex seems to be the (only?) hinge on which one’s self-identification as a conservative turns.

The Conservatism of Obama

Posted by on April 7, 2009 7 comments

From George Packer in the New Yorker:

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether… [Obamaism]’s also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism—a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can’t create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn’t crumble. But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

Against Conservative Nostalgia

Posted by on April 3, 2009 1 comment

Smashing quote from Caleb Stegall:

I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like FPR is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing. If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it.

H/T: Rod Dreher

Conservatism and Globalization

Posted by on March 27, 2009 5 comments

Daniel Larison has some great comments about the relationship between the American neoconservative right and the issue of globalization/secularization. The American right constantly laments the secular erosion of the distinctively American. What Larison rightly points out is that it is incongruous for the right to embrace the economics of globalization and then decry its cultural outworking:

It seems to me that globalists would argue that national economies and regulatory schemes will tend to become more like one another as globalization continues, but so far as I can tell there are very few people on the right at the moment criticizing the policies that foster and encourage globalization, which is the process that will lead to the increasing convergence of our economic model and the European economic model insofar as one can generalize about a European model. To the extent that there is a distinctive American model, that distinctiveness will be eroded by globalization (just as the once far more socially democratic western Europe has become more like the U.S. in the last 30 years). Left-liberals in America and the modern center-left in Germany and Britain are simply embracing the full logic of that process both culturally and politically. Those who want to shore up and preserve distinctive national economic and political systems cannot simultaneously endorse the main force erasing differences between national systems.

Here is the basic contradiction at the heart of the American right’s embrace of technological progress and globalist trade policies: the cultural and political values and the economic model that conservatives claim they wish to preserve are necessarily going to be changed by globalization, and this process is going to be quickened by technological change. To a large extent, conservatives will have brought this fate upon themselves with their embrace of the economic (and, through hegemonism, the political) side of globalization. Like their predecessors forty years ago, the American right wants to have it both ways by enjoying the economic benefits of globalization, real or imagined, while insisting that no cultural price has to be paid and no political sacrifices need to be made. 

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