Metternich vs. McEmpire

by Daniel McCarthy

Conservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist there is nothing left to conserve show that they don’t know the meaning of the word. Conservatism has always had to make the best of a bad situation—the human situation in general.

But conservatism earned its name in the context of a particular kind of bad situation, that of imperial Europe in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The great conservatives of the time were all stalwarts of empire—think of British conservatives from Edmund Burke to Lord Salisbury and beyond, or of Clemens von Metternich on the continent struggling to uphold the Hapsburg order.

These statesmen saw that Europe faced a choice not only between empire and anarchy—or rather nationalism, which seemed to be the same thing—but also between different varieties of imperium. Would empire abroad be liberal and commercial—and thereby also extractive and conformist—or would it be traditional and tolerant of local custom? In the heart of Europe, would the model of imperial sovereignty be Napoleon or, say, Francis I of Austria?

Empire made acute problems that conservatism was designed to answer. How could harmony be maintained not only between rich and poor, noble and common, merchant and farmer—divisions endemic to political society heretofore—but between Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic; Irish, Scots, and English; Hindu and Muslim; colonist and native? Neither faith nor blood nor citizenship, still less any national “proposition,” could unite the disparate peoples and sects of Europe’s empires. Unity was rather a fine balance to be sought, and peace required respect, in due measure, for every part of the whole.

Acknowledgement of authority supplied cohesion, and as Burke understood, this meant not only the periphery’s acknowledgement of authority at the imperial center but also the empire’s acknowledgement of authority in the provinces. When George III transgressed against the authority of America’s colonial constitutions, Burke sided with the colonists, for what the king could do to the Americans today he might attempt against the metropole tomorrow.

Empire made conservatism, and conservatism made empire durable and endurable. But the United States were born in rebellion against empire, and the most conservative Americans—the men branded Tories by the revolutionaries—opposed the breach with the mother country. The political labels tell the story. Americans from the time of the revolution called themselves republicans, Whigs, even democrats; their enemies were Tories or loyalists, words synonymous with “conservative” in old country.

Jefferson may have mused about an empire of liberty, but the Founding generation and their sons rejected the imperial ways of Europe: America would be an exception to the entangling alliances of the European state system. Unlike every great power of the Old World, America would not seek hegemony. Were she ever to become “dictatress of the world,” John Quincy Adams warned, “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Books That Make Us Human: Daniel McCarthy

My canon of the very best books that help us understand our humanity would contain no surprises. But Brad Birzer has said he wants to add to his reading list, so allow me to suggest some works that are instructive for reasons quite different from those of the recognized classics.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – It’s an untrue truism that good monster stories are really about humanity, but this one is, albeit in an unexpected way. Matheson’s novella has been filmed many times; the only cinematic treatment worth catching is the 1971 Charlton Heston version, “The Omega Man.” I would go so far as to argue that I Am Legend has inspired even more films than is commonly thought, since the mood and menace of “Night of the Living Dead” owe almost everything to this book. But what do zombies—or vampires, in the book—tell us about being human? The answer lies in the twist ending, which I won’t give away. Suffice to say the story viscerally confronts us with how purblind our self-understanding can be.

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh – His first and by no means his best novel, but it captures so much of the human experience:  how it feels to be young, to be at once ambitious and fearful for one’s career, to suffer reversal and suddenly achieve one’s dreams. Possibility, uncertainty, love. You could give this to a Martian and he would begin to understand what these human beings are like.

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold – An obvious one, and one that won’t add to Brad’s reading list, but it has yet to be mentioned and deserves to be. Being human does not mean being a zealot, a philistine, or a mass man of the “populace,” and being an aristocrat means little if you are a cultural barbarian.  Knowledge of “the best that has been thought and said” deepens our humanity and points the way toward reconciling otherwise intractable divisions of class, sect, and politics.

The Family and Civilization by Carle Zimmerman – Prose in places as wooden as an old Viking longboat doesn’t undercut what is still perhaps the best scholarly treatment of family life in the West. Its forms and guiding principles—in particular the contrasting policies of familism and legal individualism—have changed many times over the centuries, but the family has remained the bedrock of human existence. ISI Books produced a condensed edition of this long, and long out-of-print, 1947 classic in 2007. To turn to these pages after reading anything of today’s marriage battles and culture skirmishes is like walking into an IMAX theater after watching a tabletop TV set.

The Immortalization Commission by John Gray – This book presents two beautifully written case studies in an idea often (but incorrectly) attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” The “psychical researchers” of late Victorian England had lost their Christianity and sought a pseudoscientific faith—complete with afterlife and Messiah—instead. A little later, the Russia’s Bolsheviks intended to become god-makers and raise the mummified Lenin from the dead. The human desire for transcendence and meaning is on full display here. Gray doesn’t know what conclusions to draw, but the evidence is powerful in itself.

Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt – This book, too, looks at what happens to human nature when it’s severed from an institutional grounding in a transcendent order. Once the self-making and world-making ego is emancipated, it has a difficult time finding virtue in a mean between the excesses of formalism or classicism on the one hand and romanticism and feeling on the other. Babbitt comprehends the appeal, and danger, of both extremes.

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq – The author is provocateur and a pervert, and his later work—what I’ve read of it—doesn’t stand up. But The Elementary Particles is a brilliant exploration of modern man’s predicament: modernity fails to satisfy his nature even as it empowers that nature as never before with technology and wealth. Where can this end? With disillusionment—“depressive lucidity”—and the extinction of the human race.

Reflections on History by Jacob Burckhardt – The work is also known as Force and Freedom, with an introduction by James Hastings Nichols that’s a small masterpiece in its own right. Man is a historical being, and the work of movement through history, at its finest, is a civilization. But flawed creature that he is, man possess within himself the forces that will unwind all he has created. Burckhardt’s brilliance as a historian is one thing; but the character and sensibility of the man that comes through in his writing is an even more important contribution to a liberal and humanizing education.

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott – The cure for homo ideologicus. Not everything in life or politics is about achieving an end or maximizing utility; the sense that life is to be lived, rather than regimented toward some supreme effort, is found in many of Oakeshotts works, including two essays (one included here) titled “The Tower of Babel.”

With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy by Florence King – This is where you risk winding up if you think too much about what human beings mean. 

Daniel McCarthy is Editor of The American Conservative. 

Superfluity: The Impossibility of a Return to the Liberal Arts?

Fr. Albert Jay Nock

One of the greatest intellectual pleasures of my summer has been the discovery of the writings of Albert Jay Nock.

Well, really, the re-discovery.

I had twice read Nock's Our Enemy, the State, but I'd never found it compelling. In fact, if anything, at the times I read it, I found it rather repulsive. It wasn't that I disagreed with Nock's conclusions, it was that--for what it's worth--I disagreed with his way of getting to his answers.

Ten years on, I'd live to give Our Enemy, the State a third reading. I have a feeling I might appreciate it more, especially after the horrific expansion of our government during the Bush-Obama reign of pseudo-terror.

I'd also carefully read Nock's specific arguments against Woodrow Wilson, written at the time of Wilson's presidency. These writings, I'd found fascinating.

This summer, while reading Russell Kirk's letters and earliest publications, I came to realize how much of an influence Nock had on the young Kirk. Trying to figure out exactly what enticed Kirk about Nock, I, not illogically, picked up the works of Nock.

And, what a joy. Not only have I had the profound gift of getting to know a new soul and his body of writings, but I now also know why the brilliant and engaging Dan McCarthy calls himself the Tory Anarchist!

Well earned, Dan.

I've now had the chance to read several of Nock's works: The Theory of Education; A Journal of These Days; Journal of Forgotten Days; and Letters from Albert Jay Nock.

I am currently in the middle of Nock's last book, his autobiography, and I came across this fascinating passage.

So when all comes to all, I doubt that the study of translations has enough carrying–power to encourage much hope of a ‘return to the classics.’ I do not find this altogether lamentable, however, because I am by no means sure that a return to the classics, even if it were practicable, would be desirable. I am not sure that the post–revolutionary frame of mind is so awry, not sure that any more should be done with education, properly so-called, that is being done; or that the final end and aim of education,–the ability to see things as they are,—should any longer be taken into account. The question at issue, obviously, is whether the educable person can any longer be regarded as a social asset; or indeed, whether in time past his value as a social asset has not been overestimated. As I came to understand much later, the final answer must be referable to the previous question, What is man? On one theory of man's place in nature, the final answer would be yes, and on another, no. The immediate answer, however, I should say would be in the negative. In a society essentially neolithic, as ours unquestionably is at the moment,—whatever one may hold its evolutionary possibilities to be,—there can be no place found for an educable person but such as a trainable person could fill quite as well or even better; he becomes a superfluous man; and the more thoroughly his ability to see things as they are is cultivated, the more his superfluity is enhanced. As the process of general barbarization goes on, as its speed accelerates, as its calamitous consequences recur with ever–increasing frequency and violence, the educable person can only take shelter against his insensate fellow–beings, as Plato says, like a man crouching behind a wall against a whirlwind. [Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 95]