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Page 1: Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism

Notes Toward an EmpiricalDefinition of Conservatism

. . . Reluctantly and apologeticallygiven by Wm. F. Buckley Jr .

I am asked most frequently bymembers of the lecture audiencetwo questions, to neither of whichhave I ever given a satisfactory an-swer. The first is asked by those whoshare my feelings that the world i sin crisis and the nation imperilled :"What can I do? " — I don't know,and haven't the stomach to contrivean aphoristic answer . The secondquestion, asked alike by friendlyand hostile listeners, is "What isconservatism?" Sometimes thequestioner — guarding against thewindy evasiveness one comes to ex-pect from lecturers — will add ,"preferably in one sentence . " Onwhich occasions I have replied : " Icould not give you a definition ofChristianity in one sentence, bu tthat does not mean that Christianityis undefinable." Usually that dis-poses of the hopes of those whowish a neatly-packaged definitio nof conservatism which they canstow away in their mind, alongside(or replacing?) the definitions ofastrology, necrophilia, xenophobiaand philistinism . Those who areobstinate I punish by giving, witha straight face, Professor RichardWeaver's definition of conservatism ,as "a paradigm of essences towardswhich the phenomenology of theworld is in continuing approxima-tion" — as noble an effort as any Ihave ever read . The point is, ofcourse, that we are at that stagedangerously close to mere verba lgambiting . I have never failed, I a msaying, to dissatisfy an audiencethat asks the meaning of conserva-tism .

Yet I feel I know if not what con-servatism is, at least who a con-servative is . I confess that I know

who is a conservative less surelythan I know who is a Liberal . Blind-fold me, spin me about like a top ,and I will walk up to the singleLiberal in the room without zig o rzag, and find him even if he is hid-ing behind the flower pot . I amtempted to try to develop an equallysure nose for the conservative, bu tam deterred by the knowledge tha tconservatives, under the stress o four times, have had to invite allkinds of people into their ranks, tohelp with the job at hand, and thenatural courtesy of the conservativecauses him to treat such people notas janissaries, but as equals ; and so ,empirically, it becomes difficult tosee behind the khaki, to know surelywhether that is a conservative ove rthere doing what needs to be done,or a radical, or merely a noisemaker,or pyrotechnician, since our rag-ta garmy sometimes moves together i nsurprising uniformity, and there areexhilarating moments when every-one's eye is Right. I have, after all ,sometimes wondered whether I ammyself a true conservative. I feelI qualify spiritually, and philo-sophically ; but temperamentally Iam not of the breed, and so I needto ask myself, among so many othe rthings, how much it matters howone is temperamentally? There areother confusions . Whittaker Cham-bers, for instance, distinguishedsharply between a conservative anda "man of the Right." "You," hewrote me on resigning as an edito rof National Review, "are a conserva-tive, and I know no one with bette rtitle to the word . But I am not one ,never was. I call myself, on thos eoccasions when I cannot avoid an-swering the question, a man of the

Right . " I reflected on that letter ,needless to say, as would you if yo uwere the editor of a journal fromwhich Whittaker Chambers had jus twithdrawn, and remarked an inter-esting thing, that in the five-yea rhistory of the journal, Chamber swas the only man to resign from it ssenior board of editors explicitly be -cause he felt he could no longermove within its ideological com-pass; and yet he never wrote a piecefor us (or in the last dozen years o fhis life, that I know of, for anyoneelse), that was out of harmony withthe thrust of National Review's posi-tion .

Oh yes, people withdraw, andwrite and denounce you, and sweargreen grass will never grow overyour grave, on account of this o rthat offensive article or editorial o rbook review; but these losses ar emerely a part of the human attri-tion of outspoken journalism . Theyprove nothing, in our case, that ha sanything to do with ideologica lfecklessness . What I am saying i sthat notwithstanding the difficultyin formulating The ConservativePosition, and the high degree ofskepticism from our critics befor eNational Review was launched, Na-tional Review's position was, I be-lieve, instantly intelligible, from the

very first issue . He would probablysay that anyway (the skeptic wil lcharge) it being in his and the jour-nal's interest to say so . But I make

that statement on empiricalgrounds, as I propose to makeothers in this essay on the meanin g

of conservatism, which will reasona posteriori, from the facts to thetheory — and which will be base d

exclusively on my own experiences

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as editor of National Review . SinceI shall not allude to it again, let mesay so now unambiguously, that thi sessay is about the experiences o fNational Review and their bearing ,by the processes of exclusion, on aworkable definition of contempo-rary conservatism. I do not by anymeans suggest that National Re -view is the only functioning alem-bic of modern conservatism; merel ythat it is the only one whose experi-ences I can relate with any author-ity, and that its experiences may b einteresting enough to be worth tell-ing .

Roughly the same group of men,representing the same vested inter-ests in certain ideas and attitudes ,continue to be the major parti-cipants in National Review .The magazine found instantly, andexpanded, an audience w h i c hseemed intuitively to grant and tounderstand the happy eclecticismof the magazine 's guiding ideas ;while the critics, whose delighte dline at the beginning was one oranother variant on the theme, "Thiscountry needs a conservative maga-zine, and having read National Re -view, we still say what this countr yneeds is a conservative magazine, "finally, except for the bitter-enders ,gave up, and began to refer to Na-tional Review as, plain and simple ,a "conservative journal . " Others ,who as I say refuse to give up, willcontinue to refer to it only after aritualistic pejorative : "the McCar-thyite-National Review," "the ultra -rightist National Review," etc . Butit being so that in language th egoverning law is usage, it is by nowpredictable that those who fee lPeter Viereck or Clinton Rossiter o rWalter Lippmann are the tru earchitects of American conservatismare bound to enter the ranks ofeccentricity, like the right win ggentlemen who, because they con-tinue to insist on referring to them -selves as "liberals," have difficultycommunicating with the rest of th eworld, which for two generationsnow has understood liberalism t omean something else, beginning ,roughly, from the time Santayana

observed that the only thing th emodern liberal is concerned to liber -ate is man from his marriage con -tract .

ISince this is to be an empirical

probe, based, apologetically, on m ypersonal experience as editor of Na-tional Review, I shall speak aboutpeople and ideas with which Na-tional Review has had trouble mak -ing common cause . In 1957, Whit-taker Chambers reviewed AtlasShrugged, the novel by Miss Ay nRand wherein she explicates th ephilosophy of "Objectivism," whichis what she has chosen to call hercreed. Man of the right, or conserva-tive, or whatever you wish to cal lhim, Chambers did in fact rea dMiss Rand right out of the conserva -tive movement . He did so by point-ing out that her philosophy is i nfact another kind of materialism ,not the dialectical materialism o fMarx, but the materialism of tech-nocracy, of the relentless self-server,who lives for himself and for abso-lutely no one else, whose concernfor others is explainable merely a s

an intellectualized recognition ofthe relationship between helpingothers and helping oneself . Religionis the first enemy of the objectivist ,and after religion, the state — re-spectively, "the mysticism of themind" and "the mysticism of th emuscle . " "Randian Man," wroteChambers, " like Marxian Man, i smade the center of a godless world . "

Her exclusion from the conserva-tive community was, I am sure, i npart the result of her dessicated

philosophy's conclusive incompati-bility with the conservative's em-phasis on transcendence, intel-lectual and moral ; but also there isthe incongruity of tone, that hard ,schematic, implacable, unyieldin gdogmatism that is in itself intrinsi-cally objectionable, whether itcomes from the mouth of Ehren-burg, or Savonarola—or Ayn Rand .Chambers knew that specific ide-ologies come and go, but that rhe-torical totalism is always in the air ,searching for the lightning rod ofthe ideologue-on-the-make; and sohe said things about Miss Rand'stone of voice which, I would hazardthe guess, if they were true of any-one els e's voice, would tend to makeit eo ipso unacceptable for the con-servative. " . . . the book's [AtlasShrugged's] dictatorial tone . . .Chambers wrote, "is its most strik-ing feature . Out of a lifetime o freading, I can recall no other bookin which a tone of overriding arro-gance was so implacably sustained .Its shrillness is without reprieve . It sdogmatism is without appeal . . . re-sistance to the Message cannot betolerated because disagreement ca nnever be merely honest, prudent, o rjust humanly fallible . Dissent fromrevelation so final can only be will -fully wicked . There are ways o fdealing with such wickedness, and ,in fact, right reason itself enjoin sthem. From almost any page of At-las Shrugged, a voice can be heard,from painful necessity, command-ing : `To a gas chamber — go! ' Thesame inflexibly self-righteousstance results, too, in odd extrava-gances of inflection and gesture . . .At first we try to tell ourselves tha tthese are just lapses, that this min dhas, somehow, mislaid the discrimi-nating knack that most of us praywill warn us in time of the differ-ence between what is effective andfirm, and what is wildly grotesqueand excessive. Soon we suspec tsomething worse . We suspect thatthis mind finds, precisely in extrava-gance, some exalting merit ; feels asurging release of power and pas-sion precisely in smashing up th ehouse."'

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As if according to a script, Mis sRand's followers jumped Nationa lReview and Chambers in languagethat crossed the i's and dotted the isof Mr. Chambers' point . (It is notfair to hold the leader responsibl efor the excesses of the disciples, bu tthis reaction from Miss Rand 's fol-lowers — never repudiated by Mis sRand — suggested that her ow nintolerance is easily communicableto other Objectivists .) One corres-pondent, denouncing him, referredto "Mr. Chambers' `break' withCommunism "; a lady confessed tha ton reading his review she though tshe had "mistakenly picked up theDaily Worker " ; another accusedhim of "lies, smears, and cowardl ymisrepresentations"; still anothersaw in him the "mind-blanking, life-hating, unreasoning, less-than-hu-man being which Miss Rand provesundeniably is the cause of the tragicsituation the world now faces . . . ";and summing up, one objectivis twrote that "Chambers the ChristianCommunist is far more dangerou sthan Chambers the Russian spy . "

What the experience proved, i tseems to me, beyond the unaccept-ability of Miss Rand 's ideas andrhetoric, is that no conservative cos-mology whose every star and plane tis given in a master book of coordi-nates, is very likely to sweep Ameri-

I , .

can conservatives off their feet .They are enough conservative, an danti-ideological, to resist totallyclosed systems, those systems thatdo not provide for deep and con-tinuing mysteries . They may bepro-ideology, and un-conservativeenough to resist such asseverationsas that conservatism is merely "anattitude of mind . " But I predict onthe basis of a long association withAmerican conservatives that thereisn ' t anybody around scribbling into

his sacred book a series of all-fulfill -ing formulae which will serve th econservatives as an Apostles' creed .Miss Rand tried it, and because shetried it she compounded the failur eof her ideas. She will have to godown as an Objectivist ; my guess i sshe will go down as an entertainin gnovelist .

I IThe conservative 's distrust of th e

state, so richly earned by it, raisesinevitably the question, how far ca none go? This side, the answer is, o fanarchism—that should be obviou senough. But one man's anarchism i sanother man 's statism . National Re -view, while fully intending to sav ethe nation, probably will never de -fine to the majority's satisfactionwhat are the tolerable limits of thestate 's activity ; and we never ex-pected to do so . But we got into theproblem, as so often is the case, no tby going forward to meet it, bu tby backing up against it .

There exists a small breed of me nwhose passionate distrust for thestate has developed into a theologyof sorts, or at least into a demon-ology; to which they adhere a sdevotedly as any religious fanati cever attempted to adhere to the willof the Lord. I do not feel contemptfor the endeavor of either man . I tis intellectually stimulating to dis-cuss alternatives ' to municipalize dstreets, as it is to speculate onwhether God's wishes would bestbe served if we ordered fried o rscrambled eggs for breakfast on thi sparticular morning . But conserva-tives must concern themselves notonly with ideals, but with matter sof public policy, and I mean by thatsomething more than the common -place that one must maneuver with -in the limits of conceivable action .We can read, and take pleasure in ,the recluse's tortured deliberation son what will benefit his soul—Ber-nanos ' Diary of the Country Priestwas not only a masterpiece; it wasalso a best-seller . And we can readwith more than mere amusementDr. Murray Rothbard 's suggestionthat lighthouses be sold to privatetenants who will chase down the

beam in speed boats and collect adollar from the storm-tossed shipwhose path it illuminates . Chester -ton reminds us that many dogma sare liberating, because howevermuch damage they do when abused ,it cannot compare with the damagethat might have been done ha dwhole peoples not felt their inhibit-ing influence . If our society serious-ly wondered whether or not to de -nationalize the lighthouses, it woul dnot wonder at all whether to nation-alize the medical profession .

But Dr . Rothbard and his merryanarchists wish to live their fanati-cal anti-statism, and the result is acollision between the basic policie sthey urge, and those urged by con-servatives who recognize that th estate sometimes is, and is today a snever before, the necessary instru-ment of our proximate deliverance.The defensive war in which we ar eengaged cannot be prosecuted byvoluntary associations of soldier sand scientists and diplomats an dstrategists, and when this obtrusiv efact enters into the reckonings o four statehaters, the majority, sigh-ing, yield to reality ; while the smal lminority, obsessed by their antagon-ism to the state, would refuse t ogive it even the powers necessaryto safeguard the community . Dr.Rothbard and a few others hav espoken harshly of National Review 'scomplacency before the 20th cen-tury state in all matters that haveto do with anti-Communism, read-ing their litanies about the necessit yfor refusing at any cost to counte-nance the growth of the state . Thus ,for instance, Mr . Ronald Hamowyof the University of Chicago com-plained about National Review in1961, " . . . the Conservative move-ment has been straying [far] unde rNational Review guidance, " " lead-ing true believers [the words werenot capitalized in the text] in free-dom and individual liberty down adisastrous path . . . and that in sodoing they are causing the Rightincreasingly to betray its own tradi-tions and principles ."* *

And Mr . Henry Hazlitt, review-ing Dr . Rothbard ' s magnum

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opus,* ° ° Man, Economy, and Stat e(Van Nostrand), enthusiasticallyfor National Review, paused tocomment, sadly, on the author's"extreme apriorism," citing, for in -stance, Dr . Rothbard's opinion tha tlibel and slander ought not to beillegalized, and that even black -mail " `would not be illegal in th efree society . For blackmail is th ereceipt of money in exchange fo rthe service of not publicizing cer-tain information about the othe rperson. No violence or threat o fviolence to person or property isinvolved . ' . . . when Rothbard wan-ders out of the strictly economi crealm, in which his scholarship is sorich and his reasoning so rigorous ,he is misled by his epistemologica ldoctrine of `extreme apriorism ' intotrying to substitute his own instantjurisprudence for the common lawprinciples built up through genera-tions of human experience . "

"Extreme apriorism"—a genericbullseye . If National Review's expe-rience is central to the growth ofcontemporary conservatism, ex-treme apriorists will find it difficul tto work with conservatives excep tas occasional volunteers helping tostorm specific objectives . They willnot be a part of the standing army ,rejecting as they do the burden ofreality in the name of a virginalanti-statism. I repeat I do not de-plore their influence intellectually ;and tactically I worry not at all . Thesuccubi of Communism are quit enumerous enough, and eloquen tenough, to be counted upon to pu ttheir ghastly presences forward ineffective protest against the mar-riage of any but the most incurabl esolipsist to a set of abstractionis tdoctrines whose acceptance woul dmean the end of any human liberty .The virgins have wriggled them -selves outside the mainstream o fAmerican conservatism. Mr. Ha-rnowy, offering himself up grandlyas a symbol of the undefiled con-servative, has joined the Committe efor a Sane Nuclear Policy .

II IWe ran into the John Birch So-

ciety, or more precisely into Mr .

Robert Welch—we have alwaysdistinguished between the two . Mr .Welch ' s position is very well known .Scrubbed down, it is that one mayreliably infer subjective motivationfrom objective result : e.g., if theWest loses as much ground as dem-onstrably it has lost during the pas tfifteen years to the enemy, it canonly be because those who mad epolicy for the West were th eenemy 's agents . The ultima ratio o fthis position was the public dis-closure—any 300-page documentsent to hundreds of people can onlybe called an act of public disclosure—that Dwight Eisenhower is aCommunist. (To which the mos t

perfect retort—was it Russell Kir k ' s ?—was not so much analytical, asartistic : "Eisenhower isn 't a Com-munist—he is a golfer . " )

In criticizing Mr . Welch we didnot move into a hard philosophica lfront, as for instance we did in ourcriticisms of Miss Rand, or of th eneo-anarchists . Rather we movedinto an organizational axiom, th econservative equivalent of the left-ists ' "pas d'ennemi a gauche . " Theposition has not, however, beenrigorously explicated, or applied .Mr. Welch makes his own exclu-sions : for instance, Gerald L . K .Smith, who although it is a fact tha the favors a number of reforms indomestic and foreign policy whic hcoincide with those favored by Mr .Welch (and by National Review) ,is dismissed as a man with an ide efixe, namely, the role of the Per-fidious Jew in modern society . Manyright wingers (and many Liberals,

and all Communists) believe in adeus ex machina. Only introducethe single tax, and our problems willwither away, say the followers o fHenry George . . . Only expose theJew, and the international conspi-racy will be broken, say others . . .Only abolish the income tax, and al lwill be well . . . Forget everythingelse, but restore the gold standard. . . Abolish compulsory taxation ,and we shall all be free . . . They arecalled nostrum-peddlers by some ;certainly they are obsessed . Becaus ewhatever virtue there is in wha tthey call for, and some of their pro-posals strike me as highly desirable ,others as mischievous, no one o fthem can begin to do the whole job ,which continues to wait on the suc-cessful completion of the objective sof the Committee to Abolish Origi-nal Sin . Many such persons, becaus einadequate emphasis is not given totheir pandemic insight, the linch-pi nof social reconstruction, are dissatis -fied with National Review . Other sreact more vehemently—our failur eto highlight their solution has th eeffect of distracting from its uniqu erelevance, and so works positivelyagainst the day when the greatillumination will show us the onl yroad forward . Accordingly ,National Review is, in their eyes,worse than merely useless .

The defenders of Mr. Welch whoare also severe critics of Nationa lReview are not by any means all o fthem addicts of the conspiracyschool . They do belong, howeverinconsistently, to the school thatsays that we must all work togethe r—as a general proposition, soun dadvice . Lenin distinguished be-tween the sin of "sectarianism,"from which suffer all those who re -fuse to cooperate with anyone wh odoes not share their entire position ,right down to the dependentclauses; and the sin of "opportun-ism," the weakness of those who arecompletely indiscriminate a b o u tcompletely indiscriminate abouttheir political associates .

The majority of those who brokewith National Review as the resultof our criticisms of Mr . Welch be-

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lieve themselves to have done so inprotest against National Review'ssectarianism. In fact I believe theirresentment was primarily personal :they were distressed by an attackon a man who had ingratiated him-self with them, and toward who mtheir loyalty hardened in proportio nas he was (so often unfairly) at -tacked. When an attack rose fro mtheir own ranks, their bitterness ranover : and now it is widely whis-pered that National Review ha sbeen "infiltrated . "

The questions we faced at Na-tional Review were two. The first,to which the answer was alway splainly no, was whether Mr . Welch 'sviews on public affairs were sound .The editors knew from empirica lexperience that they were not .Enough of us had recently been t ocollege, or were in continuing touchwith academic circles, to know tha tthe approaches to the internal se-curity, and to foreign relations, thathave been practiced by successiv eadministrations after the secon dWorld War are endorsed by th eoverwhelming majority of the intel-lectuals of this country( and thattherefore any assumption that onlya Communist (or a fool, as Mr .Welch allowed) could oppose theHouse Committee on Un-America nActivities or favor aid to Poland an dYugoslavia, must deductively meanthat the nations ' academies arestaffed, primarily, by Communist s(or fools) . It is not merely commo nsense that rejects this assumption ,but a familiarity with the intricat eargumentation of almost the entir eintellectual class (who, of course ,are not fools, at least not in the

sense in which Mr . Welch uses theword) .

The second question then arose ,whether it was necessary explicitl yto reject Mr. Welch 's position as anunrealistic mode of thought ; andthat had to be answered by askin gwhether at the margin it contrib-uted or not to the enlightenment ofright wing thought. The answer wa snot as obvious as one might sup-pose. Ironically, the assumptionsthat reason will prevail and tha tlogic and truth are self-evident—the constituent assumptions of thosewho believe that that syllogism i scorrect which says, A . We were al lpowerful after the world war, B .Russia is now as powerful as we are ,therefore C. We willed the enemy ' sascendancy (the essence of Mr .Welch 's methodology) —argued infavor of leaving Mr . Welch alone .Thus might one reason, if one be-lieved that the truth will triumph :if Mr. Welch merely succeeds i ndrawing people 's attention, whic hotherwise would not be drawn, topublic events ; if he brings them toread about and think about publi caffairs—then those people, thoughintroduced to public concern byMr. Welch, will by the power ofreason reject, upon examination,Mr. Welch's specific counsels ; andgraduate as informed members ofthe anti-Communist community.

But reason is not king (and manyof those who have shrunk from Mr .Welch have done so less because o nreflection they repudiate his analy-sis, than because public scandal ofa kind has in fact attached to disci-pleship in a movement dominatedby a man with a very special set o f

views which realityrejects) . And so itseemed necessary tosay what one hopedwould be obvious :that the Welch viewis wrong, that it iswrong irrespective ofthe many personalvirtues of Mr. Welch ,and wrong irrespec -tive of how many peo -ple who were other -

wise politically lethargic, are now,thanks to Mr . Welch, politicallyanimated .

In consequence, National Revie wwas widely criticized for "throwin gmud" at Mr . Welch (a curious wayto refer to the act of throwing atMr. Welch his own statements!) ;and some battle lines (and som enecks) were broken . Whom did w eactually alienate? A body of people ?A body of thought? I tend to thinknot, for the reasons I have sug-gested . If we alienated those wh ogenuinely believe in pas d'ennemia droite, why do these same peoplea) applaud Mr. Welch 's exclusionof Gerald L . K. Smith ; and b) pro-ceed to exclude us? It is no answerto the latter inconsistency that thepenalty of turning against someoneon your side excuses the turnin gaway against the offender : and Mr .Welch, while failing to he consist-ent on point a) above, was consist-ent in respect of b) : aside from afew aggrieved references to Na-tional Review's naivete, and to theCommunists ' need of conservativ efront men to implement the smearof the John Birch Society, he ha snot, as yet, anyway, excluded usfrom the anti-Communist commu-nity .

For this reason I tend to putdown our encounter with Mr . Welchas having no philosophical signifi-cance in an empirical probe of thecontemporary locus of Americanconservatism—except to the exten tit can be said that National Revie wrejects as out of this world wha tgoes by the name of the conspiracyview of history. Most of the follow-ers of Mr. Welch who broke withNational Review on account of ou rcriticisms of him showed, by the in -consistency of their own position, tohave acted primarily out of personalpique—to which, of course, they areentitled. But perhaps this briefanalysis is relevant, if only becaus eit explains why National Review ' snoisiest collision did not serve anygreat purpose in the construction ofan empirical definition of conser-vatism .

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IVA few years ago Mr . Max East -

man, the author and poet, wrot esadly that he must withdraw fromthe masthead of National Review ."There are too many things in th emagazine—and they go too deep—that directly attack or casually side -swipe my most earnest passions an dconvictions. It was an error in thefirst place to think that, because o fpolitical agreements, I could col-laborate formally with a publicatio nwhose basic view of life and the uni-verse I regard as primitive an dsuperstitious . That cosmic, or chas-mic, difference between us has al -ways troubled me, as I've told you ,but lately its political implicationshave been drawn in ways that Ican't be tolerant of . Your own state-ment in the issue of October 1 1[1958] that Father Halton labore d`for the recognition of God's rightto His place in Heaven ' invited meinto a world where neither my min dnor my imagination could find rest .That much I could take, althoughwith a shudder, but when youadded that `the struggle for theworld is a struggle, essentially, bythose who mean to unseat Him , ' youvoiced a political opinion that Ithink is totally and dangerousl ywrong . . . "

Can you he a conservative andbelieve in God? Obviously . Can yo ube a conservative and not believe i nGod? This is an empirical essay, an dso the answer is as obviously, yes .Can you be a conservative anddespise God, and feel contempt fo rthose who believe in Him? I wouldsay no. True, Max Eastman is theonly man who has left the masthea dof National Review in protest agains tits pro-religious sympathies, but i tdoes not follow that this deed wa seccentric ; he, after all, was prob-ably the only man on National Re -view with that old-time hostility t oreligion associated with evangeli-cal atheism; with, e .g ., the name sof Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sin-clair, Henry Mencken, and Clarenc eDarrow, old friends of Eastman . I fone dismisses religion as intellectu-ally contemptible, it becomes diffi-

cult to identify oneself wholly witha movement in which religion playsa vital role ; and so the momentcame when Max Eastman felt h ehad to go, even while finding itdifficult to answer the concludingobservation I made to him : "I con-tinue to feel that you would be ata total loss what to criticize in th esociety the editors of National Re-view, would, had they the influence ,establish in America ."

Mr . Eastman ' s resignationbrought up an interesting point, towhich I also addressed myself i nmy reply to my old friend . "You re -quire [I wrote] that I take yourletter seriously, and having done soI must reproach myself, rather thanyou. For if it is true that you cannotcollaborate formally with me, thenit must be true that I ought not t ohave collaborated formally withyou; for I should hate for you tothink that the distance betweenatheism and Christianity is anygreater than the distance betwee nChristianity and atheism. And so ifyou are correct, that our coadjutor-ship was incongruous, I as editor ofNational Review should have beenthe first to spot it, and to act on it .All the more because my faith im-poses upon me more rigorous stand-ards of association than yours does . "

I know now, four years after thisexchange of letters, that my poin there, the reciprocal of the propo-sition that a God-hater cannotassociate fully with a Christian, i snot in fact true—for reasons thatare not easy to set down withoutrunning the risk of spiritual o rphilosophical condescension. Butthe risk must he taken, and I choos ethe Christian rather than the secularformulation because although th elatter can very handily be made, seee .g. Eric Voegelin 's "On Readines sto Rational Discussion,"° ° ° ° it re -mains debatable in a way that th eChristian formulation does not . Thereason why Christian conservative scan associate with atheists is be-cause we hold that above all faithis a gift, and that therefore there isno accounting for the bad fortune

that has beset those who do not be -lieve, or the good fortune that be -fell those who do . The pro-religiou sconservative can therefore welcomethe atheist as a full-fledged membe rof the conservative community evenwhile feeling that at the very botto mthe roots do not interlace, so thatthe sustenance that gives a specialbloom to Christian conservatis mfails to reach the purely secularis tconservatism. Voegelin will argu eon purely intellectual grounds, tak-ing as his lesson the Socratic propo -sition that virtue can be taught, bu tonly if virtue is defined as knowl-edge. Socrates defined knowledge ,Voegelin reminds us, as transcen-dental cognition, as, in fact, requir-ing the ability to see far enough int othe nature of things to recognizetranscendence, a view he elaboratedin Protagaros, Politei, and Nomoi .

The God-hater, as distinguishedfrom the agnostic (who says merelythat he doesn't know) , or simply thehabitual atheist (who knows ther eis no God, but doesn't much careabout those who disagree), regardsthose who believe in or tolerate re-ligion as afflicted with short-cir-cuited vision . Their faith is the re-sult of a combination of intellectua ldefectiveness and psychological im-maturity, leading to the use ofanalysis, and rhetoric, which MaxEastman "can't be tolerant of . "

The agnostic can shrug his shoul-ders about the whole thing, caringnot whether, in his time, the conflictbetween the pro-religious and anti-religious elements within conserva-tism will be resolved—there are s omany other things to do than thin kabout God . "Are you anything? " alady flightily addressed at her din-ner table a scholarly gentleman an dfirebrand conservative who has al -ways managed to nudge aside ques-tions, or deflect conversationa ltrends, that seemed to be movin ginto hard confrontations involvin greligion . . . He smiled . "Well, Iguess I 'm not nothing"—and theconversation went on pleasantly .Max Eastman is nothing : and hecan no more resist the opportunityto incant his non-belief, than the

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holy priest can resist the opportu-nity to proselyte : and so the tension .

Mr. Eastman, like many othe rprogrammatic conservatives, base shis defense of freedom primarily onpragmatic grounds . Mr. Erik vonKuehnelt-Leddihn once remarkedthat Friedrich Hayek ' s Constitutionof Liberty seemed to be saying tha tif freedom were not pragmaticall yproductive, there would be no rea-son for freedom. It appears to bethe consensus of religious-minde dconservatives that ordered freedo mis desirable quite apart from itsdemonstrable usefulness as the basi sfor economic and political associa-tion. The research of the past te nyears on Edmund Burke appears t ohave liberated him from the socia lpragmatists by whom he had beencoopted . Not to stray too far fromthe rules of this discussion, I citea poll a few years ago which showedthat the great majority of the read-ers of National Review think o fthemselves formally as religiouspeople, suggesting that conserva-tism, of the kind I write about, i splanted in a religious view of man .

Though as I say only a singleresignation has been addressed t oNational Review in protest againstthe magazine's friendliness to re-ligion, there is much latent discord ,particularly in the academic world ,centering on the question not s omuch of whether God exists ordoesn ' t (only a few continue to ex-plore the question consciously, le talone conscientiously, and most o fthe latter are thought of as infr adig) but on the extent to which itis proper to show towards religio nthe intellectual disdain the God -haters believe it deserves . Russel lKirk was not allowed inside the fac-ulty of a major university in which ,mirabile dictu, conservatives (spe-cifically: libertarians) had controlof the social science department—because of his "religiosity ." The Mt .Pelerin Society, an organization offree market economists and lay-men, has recently trembled over in-scrutable personal issues, but some -where there, in the interstices of the

strife, is a hardening of positions re-lating to religious differences, o rdifferences over religion, whichsometimes express themselves,loosely, in arguments between "tra-ditionalist" and "libertarian" con-servatism .

Though I say the antagonism i shere and there seen to be harden-ing, I have grounds for optimism ,based not merely on National Re -view's own amiable experience swith all but the most dedicate datheists, but on the conviction thatthe hideousness of a science-cen-tered age has resulted in a stimula-tion of religious scholarship, and ofall those other instincts, intellectua land spiritual, by which man is con-stantly confounding the most recen twave of neoterics who insist tha tman is merely a pandemoniac con -junction of ethereal gasses . Theatheists have not got around to an-swering Huxley 's self-critical con-fession, that neither he nor his fol-lowers had succeeded in showinghow you can deduce Hamlet fromthe molecular structure of a muttonchop .

I repeat what is 'obvious to thereader, that these are merely notes ,though not I hope altogether desul-tory, suggesting where are some o fthe confines of contemporary con-servatism, the walls it runs u pagainst, and bounces away from .The freeway remains large, largeenough to accomodate very differ-ent players, with highly differentprejudices and techniques : fromFrank Meyer, with his metaphysic sof freedom, to Russell Kirk with hi straditionalist preoccupations, fromBrent Bozell with his vision of thechurch-centered society to GaryWills and his insuperable wall o fseparation ; from Willmoore Kendal land Ernest van den Haag wit htheir emphasis on the consensual so-ciety to Milton Friedman and th eOpen Society—the differences arenow tonal, now substantive ; butthey do not appear to be chokin geach other off. The symbiosis mayyet be a general consensus on th eproper balance between freedom ,order, and tradition .

* Several years later, in the New Indi-vidualist Review, a graduate student inphilosophy, a disciple of Hayek, vo nMises, and Friedman, analyzed th ethought and rhetoric of Miss Rand, an dcame to similar conclusions . Miss Rand ,he wrote, is "hate blinded, " "suffocatingin her invective ." See Bruce Goldberg ,"Ayn Rand ' s `For the New Intellectual,' "NIR, Nov . 1961, p . 29 .

° ° New Individualist Review, Nov. 1961 ,p . 3 . On behalf of the magazine I an-swered (in part) : "The American con-servative needs to proceed within th eknowledge of history and anthropolog yand psychology ; we must live in our time .We must indeed continue to cherish ou rresentments against such institutionalize dimpositions upon our prerogatives as so-cial security. But we must not, if we areto pass for sane in this tormented world ,equate as problems of equal urgency, th erepeal of the social security law, and th econtainment of the Soviet threat . Theproblem of assigning priorities to the twoobjectives is not merely a problem of in-tellectual discrimination, but of moralbalance . "* ° * See "The Economics of Freedom" byHenry Hazlitt, which appeared in Na-tional Review September 25, 1962, pag e231 .

#°°° An essay in Freedom and Serfdom,An Anthology of Western Thought (Dor-drecht, Holland : D. Reidel Co ., 1961)


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