Posted on 04/16/2018 3:17:44 PM PDT by DeweyCA
Jonah Goldberg has a new book coming out next week and today National Review published a lengthy piece adapted from the book. There’s a tremendous amount to unpack in this piece so I won’t even try to do it justice in a single blog post, but there is an idea here that really struck me as insightful and worthwhile: Conservatism is a form of gratitude.
There’s a foundation to this idea. According to Goldberg, we’re living through a historical “miracle” brought about by the triumph of liberal-Democratic capitalism. On any longer time scale, Goldberg points out, our current lives are a recent invention and almost indescribably different from most of human experience. The important thing about the “miracle” is that there is no sense in which it had to happen, nor any guarantee that it must continue. In fact, Goldberg writes that there are forces at work which are already intent on bringing it to a swift end.
Why stress that the Miracle was both unnatural and accidental? Because Western civilization generally, and America particularly, is on a suicidal path. The threats are many, but beneath them all is one constant, eternal seducer: human nature. Modernity often assumes that we’ve conquered human nature as much as we’ve conquered the natural world. The truth is we’ve done neither. We simply restrain each from generation to generation. If you’ve ever owned a boat, car, or house, you know that nature needs only time and opportunity to reclaim everything. Rust doesn’t sleep. Termites respect a grandfather clock no more than an outhouse. Abandon a car in a field, and all nature requires to turn it back to the soil is time. Preventing decay and entropy from reclaiming everything built by human hands requires vigilant upkeep. As Horace said, “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back.”…
Nearly all of our laws and customs, from marriage and prohibition of murder to the concept of merit, restrain human nature. For instance, nepotism and favoritism are natural. People prefer family and friends in every society that has ever existed. Westerners often consider developing countries such as Afghanistan corrupt because their political systems proceed from tribal reciprocity. But Afghans and others argue that their ways are ancient and natural. And they’re right. Our system of merit, contracts, blind bidding, etc. is what’s unnatural.
The story of Western civilization, and really civilization itself, is the story of productively sublimating human nature.
Goldberg doesn’t use this metaphor but the idea he’s presenting is that the modern world is really dancing on the head of a pin and always in danger of going over one edge or the other simply because our current environment is so far from our natural state. The force most likely to send us over the edge is tribalism, our tendency to seek group identity. If we’re no longer getting that identity from home, from church, from the local community, most people will seek it in something else.
People learn virtue first and most importantly from family, and then from the myriad institutions family introduces them to: churches, schools, associations, etc. Every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians, Hannah Arendt observed: “We call them children.” Civil society, starting with the family, civilizes barbarians, providing meaning, belonging, and virtue…
Because the Miracle is unnatural, unless we’re properly civilized to understand and appreciate it, we look to restore what instinctively feels natural. As individualism feels more atomizing and alienating, the siren song of the group, the tribe, or the gang becomes increasingly seductive. We evolved to hate inequality because group survival required sharing resources. But envy is a deadly sin for a reason, and when a civilization surrenders to it, the Miracle dies.
And it’s with this understanding that the future of liberal-Democratic capitalism is not guaranteed that Goldberg comes to his point about the importance of gratitude in keeping it going.
It seems axiomatic to me that whatever words can create, they can destroy. And ingratitude is the destroyer’s form. We teach children that the moral of the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg is the danger of greed. But the real moral of the story is ingratitude. A farmer finds an animal, which promises to make him richer than he ever imagined. But rather than nurture and protect this miracle, he resents it for not doing more. In one version, the farmer demands two golden eggs per day. When the goose politely demurs, he kills it out of a sense of entitlement — the opposite of gratitude.
The Miracle is our goose. And rather than be grateful for it, our schools, our culture, and many of our politicians say we should resent it for not doing more. Conservatism is a form of gratitude, because we conserve only what we are grateful for. Our society is talking itself out of gratitude for the Miracle and teaching our children resentment. Our culture affirms our feelings as the most authentic sources of truth when they are merely the expressions of instincts, and considers the Miracle a code word for white privilege, greed, and oppression.
I like this image of conservativism as gratitude. This seems like a good way to frame the fundamental nature of the outlook animating various conservative views. The image of the conservative standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” is one we’re all familiar with, but this outlook suggests a reason for doing so: When you’re entire society is dancing on the head of a pin, it makes sense to urge a bit of caution and keep in mind that the way forward (as the left is fond of claiming they represent) is not always the way up. Sometimes it’s just a quicker way over the edge.
You can see a pretty good example of how all of these things are connected (individualism, democracy, capitalism) in the ongoing collapse of Venezuela. A populist leader transformed himself into a socialist and not even two decades later one of the richest nations in South America is full of people starving to death. As socialism took hold, capitalism was the first victim, but democracy soon followed. Now the nation is a dictatorship run by a gang of revolutionary thugs. The miracle is dead.
And you can see it happening on America’s college campuses where a minority of far left students have embraced silencing their opponents and demanding conformity to their group identity. They’re still a small minority at the moment but the same impulses, identity politics over individualism, is at work.
I haven’t read Goldberg’s book (it comes out next week) but this preview of the themes certainly has me interested in seeing more.
The general thesis sounds correct, but Jonah is such a rabid Never Trumper, I wonder how much that has polluted the book. Surely it works against his perspective insofar as he can’t see the Trump movement as a last best hope to win it back for another generation.
I agreed with Sexton’s and Goldberg’s overall analysis, but think that they did not discuss the underlying cause of the ingratitude. That cause is the Leftists’ inordinate sense of self and their out-sized sinful pride. That is what causes them to be ungrateful. Their self-centered ego makes them think that they are entitled to more than what they have been given, and so they are ungrateful. They do not believe in the fallenness of mankind, and especially not of themselves being fallen, sinful, corruptible individuals.
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Agreed. But I think it goes further, in their hearts of cloven-hoofed hearts they know they’ll never get what they feel entitled to. Who can ascend to that level of worthiness.
God, but they have no God, and they not only don’t believe but hate your God. They hate anything that diminishes their glory. So they become God.
If the snail-darter fish is becoming extinct, then God has failed in their warped minds. But they can save it. All they have to do is join a group on Facebook. And if children are hungry just make a banner of “Feed The Children”. Then just sit back, smirk and revel in righteousness.
If only God knew how easy it is.
Maybe Burnham wasn't either (people don't talk about him much lately).
If you say, we have to be strong to fight this external threat, you may get a positive response in some places and maybe change things, but if you say we have to resist all manner of internal weaknesses and self-indulgences that could eventually destroy our society, few people will listen.
If you have an economy based on consumption and self-indulgence, it's hard to tell people that they should restrain themselves when others don't.
ping for later reading
Some vessels are so flawed, they can’t possibly carry a message.
He also sided with the critics of Mark Levin’s global warming chapter in “Liberty and Tyranny.”
Lucianne is alive, well, and a far better source of headlines than He Who Went to the Dark Side.
Google Nov. 8th 2016 and get back to us. The rules have changed.
This could be repeated unto infinity, and it wouldn't be enough. This is absolutely, unequivocally true. Socialism is from Satan. It's his best way of fighting back against God.
The West isnt committing suicide, it is being murdered by the left. The left is obsessed with implementing Communism, an economic system that fails and results in mass murder every time it’s tried. The prosperity of the West is fueled by Capitalism and this system must fail in order to get people to demand a new system. In other words the left is doing everything they can to disrupt Western civ to convince people that the current system doesnt work. Once that is accomplished people will be willing to accept communism as a replacement.
FU JG.
who is He Who Went to the Dark Side?
LGF?
I like Jonah Goldberg and I like the premise of conservatism as gratitude. Sure wish he’d snap out of his anti-Trumpism tho.
Drudge.
“Free trade” and offshoring are destroying capitalism and wealth of the USA and creating debt.
I grew up in what was in essence a Dutch Reformed church which later joined the farcical "United Church of Christ"
I don't think protestantism has been undermined - I think it's a failure, and that its fate (in retrospect) was perfectly predictable from the days of Luther and Zwingli.
If the only structure of the Christian Church from the beginning was house churches and evangelical local churches, the whole thing would have been over in 200 years and no one living today would have ever heard of Jesus Christ.
Whether the Western Church, or what's left of it, can survive Francis remains to be seen.
Every human substitution for the Church is a failure.
You apparently do not believe in Divine providence.
I say we are headed back to tbe Catacombs.
A couple of small points
“So where are the Right-leaning students who will stick the Left Wing rioters up against a wall and belt them on the nose? Oh, of course they have been told that is bad behavior and they must not do it.”
Did your mother ever say (something like) “and if all your friends were going over a cliff would you?” It was mom’s favorite sayings, Just because antifa/blm and their allies are being stupid, does not mean we should also. That said, us “fighting back” is exactly what they want.
“The Right are the idiots because THEY DO NOT FIGHT BACK.”
There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, and the wrong way is to act like they do.
One of Jonah’s points is, by acting like the hard left we can win the battle, but lose the war.
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