Hear, hear. What he said, that whole post.

I might also add that there is yet another sinister implication in this false criticism and in the overplayed “hypocrisy” card.

As the Leviathan expands over more and more territory it becomes increasingly difficult to survive at all — as an individual, as a family, or as a community — without somehow partaking of Leviathan’s material arrangement.

In other words, the idea is that you must either A.) Shut up and embrace the system as is, or B.) Crawl off into a corner somewhere so you can await extinction without your complaints annoying the rest of us.

If I am principled, why, I’ll boycott computer use altogether, hence getting myself quietly and unceremoniously cut loose by my employers. Then some drone of globalist NWO can take my place instructing the young, and my own family can grow up in impoverished squalor and never be in a position to challenge the regime.

Otherwise I’m a phony hypocrite.

Hooray — it’s a win-win proposition!

Fair enough, Jeremy. Your observation certainly includes me as well. I guess Ben’s point isn’t self-evidentally “dumb”; it could, for all I know (we’re good friends, but we’re not that good of friends), be true, or at least party true. I just thought it was silly, given that Damon has laid out his argument against attempts to ground political life on traiditons (particularly religious traditions) very extensively. Before we go for the reductive explanation, those of us engaged in intellectual argument should at least, I think, give some credit to the reasoned basis of our opponents’ ideas.

And for the Christian agrarian the question is even more irrelevant and worthless for the Christian believes in an inner spiritual life regardless of whether or not material circumstances compliment that inner life (this is most true for the martyr who goes to his death). But of course he is also concerned with bringing about material conditions that would be more likely to allow his Faith and that of others to flourish. But it does not follow that because he takes part in the material conditions that he holds are not most conducive to a healthy spiritual life that his criticism of those structures is invalid. It simply means that the Christian Agrarian is at the very least in favor of making himself and others aware of the material hardships of society because these material hardships often bring about occasions of sin. For example, a man should make his fellow men aware that the material conditions of being alone in a room supposedly “working” on a computer are conducive to the sinful viewing of pornography. This does not mean that if that same man while he is alone “working” uses his computer to post in defense of a critique of liberalism that he is somehow a hypocrite. If that same man looks at pornography, masturbates, and then posts in defense of a liberal critique then he is guilty of hypocrisy. However, that does not mean that his critique looses all legitimacy, only that he is a weak man in need of grace through Confession, and the other Sacraments.

If someone who advances such a critique has the time, energy, and ability to do so, he should also work against these conditions in whatever way possible understanding that a realistic assessment of success does not include the hope for radical change in the material conditions of the modern world, for the only meaningful radical change happens within the human soul and fundamentally concerns the next life of which this life is only a shadow; remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.

Someone coming to tradition does not say to himself “All modes of life are equally valid, which shall I live to best fulfill myself?” He asks rather “Is this TRUE?” He accepts that which which is true, regardless of whether he prefers it or not. Truth claims are the question liberals cannot stand, and which they try to preempt via taxonomic sleight of hand like Linker’s Liberal Bargain. “We will let you have whatever quaint religious opinions you like, provided you do not claim that they are true in any real sense.”

When stated in this way, it is obvious that it is a bargain no real religious believer, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or Pagan, can accept. Only by disguising the terms of the bargain can Linker make it seem like a reasonable compromise.

Does not stating that Rod Dreher has a “gay fixation”, and slyly hinting at an “obsession with sex” on the part of social conservatives also constitute … well, an “astonishingly reductive” attempt by your friend to suggest a “psycho-sexual explanation” for Dreher’s “worldview”?

Yes, how bizarre of Mr. Dreher; after all, why *would* anyone who accepts the Bible as the revealed Word of God be alarmed about “the normalization of homosexuality in American culture”?

(My, oh my — talk about some strange birds, those sociocons. Perhaps they labor under a pathology.)

I hesitate to generalize based on a single article. But the result of Linker’s “intellectual journey” seems to be an inability to imagine how anybody could possibly have a worldview different from his own.

Excellently written piece.

Out of consideration for Mr. Fox I will be considerably politer to Linker than I would be otherwise.

One point that I cannot overemphasize: Though Catholic myself, the most infuriating aspect for me was not the desire to see religion marginalized into the status of a harmless hobby having no connection to society or the way we live our lives (so what else is new?), but rather the assumption that “whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky” is irrelevant.

I’m offended not as a Christian but as an advocate of the liberal arts.

I can understand a mainstream-liberal insisting upon the compartmentalization of Christianity, given the zeitgeist.

But as somebody who teaches philosophy and literature I never cease to grind my teeth over the assumption of bourgeois-bohemian gourmets of the New World Order who “think that ideas are ping-pong balls,” as Chambers aptly put it, solely existing for the purpose of leisurely amusement.

Actually, no, it DOES matter whether you prefer Austen to Dostoevsky.

Or it should.

(Supposedly Brothers Karamazov is “Condi” Rice’s favorite book; I for one am oh so very happy she didn’t let the pleasure she dervied from Dostoevsky’s quaint, entertaining ideas interfere with her role as a minion of our Glorious Warleader, nor restrain her from indulging in fearmongering about smoking guns & mushroom cloud.)

And Linker’s choice of “entertainments” is not apt in any event.

In our society the more appropriate question is not whether it matters if someone prefers Austen to Dostoevsky, but rather whether it matters if someone prefers Desperate Housewives over either.

Well?

Does it?

I am very much in sympathy with Caleb’s recent post. However, I think I agree more with one of his commenters that we are all Gellnerians now. If that is the case – if we cannot help but “choose” tradition as one option among many, I think we are forced to face the question of how we reform modern consumerist society into a traditional direction.

Part of this is simply a question of level of detail. There may be many things we do from rote habit, unthinkingly in accord (and properly so) with tradition, and so we may not be full Gellnerians after all. We all can think of such things, I’m sure. Too often, conservative complaints about tradition are at root complaint about whether the traditions others live is full enough. I’m not sure we can do anything about that except live our own lives.

As a slightly different example, is a particular meal made on particular days “traditional”? I grew up with Friday fish fries, especially during Lent, but I could just as well have an egg salad sandwich. Which is traditional and how does one determine it? I see no reason why even regular trips to McDonalds – done with family for example – can’t spur good memories that can themselves become a tradition of family meals, even as fast food is left behind.

Similarly, I grew up in a traditional Sicilian family, which included, as sure as fall follows summer, Saturday night feasts with the relatives, followed by Sunday Mass and pasta. Now let’s leave aside that that “tradition” is almost completely different from how my grandmther, the materfamilias of Saturday, herself grew up. She was raised in an equally “traditional” household, but had nothing like the experiences she gave me.

Now with children of my own, I try to do something similar. Is that an overdetermined “choice for tradition,” and therefore self-defeating, or an affirmation? With Russell Kirk, I can’t help but think cheerfulness will break through. For me that means our individual choices – even as they craft tradition anew – are a worthy effort.

I am aware of Linker’s book, though I have not read it.

My “perspective” informs me that people do not rebel against the church and their benefactors because they have learned to reason better, but because they have sinned.

I was surprised by Damon Linker was when I read his piece on Fatherhood in First Things in November of 2002. [You can find it right here.] After this, nothing he has written or done has surprised me very much. Fundamentally, I think that Linker has fallen in love with a feminist. And that explains everything. In what is really a manly gesture, his recent career crusading against the theocon boogeymen is really a defense of his wife against those whom she perceives as aggressors. I think he is opposed to tradition, and its largest champion, the papacy, because it hurts the feelings of the one he loves. I can’t get too angry about that.

I suppose one might argue that this is meant to be a charitable comment, but, I mean, come on. Ben, are you not aware that Damon Linker has written a whole book on the theocon movement? That he has produced thousands of words as a blogger and public intellectual discussing the complex intersections of liberalism, religion, and democracy in the modern world? Your psycho-sexual explanation of Damon’s worldview is, at the very least, astonishingly reductive. (Not to mention that your insinuation about feminism is unwarranted and just kind of weird.)

As I am saying this as an old friend of Damon’s, my defense of him may well be discounted. Which is fine; I don’t intend this to be an apologia for his views, about which I have disagree with him and argued with him a great deal–and in great detail–over the years. (See here and here, for example.) But as a friend, and also as someone who thinks Damon’s point of view presents a liberal challenge that any community or locality or religiously-minded person (and I am, to a degree, all three) should wrestle with on its own terms–as Caleb did in his original post–I can’t let the suggestion that Damon’s intellectual journey is the result of his being a henpecked husband go by without comment. You’ve got an interesting point of view, Ben; try not to undermine it by saying something dumb.

To complicate this further, Dreher’s move from Catholicism to Orthodoxy does not obviously fit into this binary schematic. This is, I suggest, because both Orthodoxy and Catholicism are true choices, but use very different metaphors (or perhaps language) to explain their versions of the Christian revelation. But choosing either of them in a serious way is completely different than choosing Macs over PCs, or Prada over Gucci.

Perhaps there’s a real positive form of postmodernism at work in the paragraph above, and in Dreher, say. Recently, I’ve been trying to enunciate just what this positive postmodernism might be. It’s diametrically opposed to the glib BS that most academic theorists espouse, but it allows for a degree of intellectual “give” that would not have been possible seven hundred years ago or more. It is a recovery from the epistemological hubris of the enlightenment, while realizing that intervening modernity has made it impossible to “go back” to the time of Aquinas: along that route lies something like Catholic fundamentalism. All forms of fundamentalism are, I postulate, religion trying to act as if modernity had not happened.

“A real traditionalist does not know that he is one, his tradition simply is his life and his being: once he knows it as a tradition, one among others, or even as opposed to reason, he has been corrupted by his knowledge of something else.”

Alasdair MacIntyre attributes this view to Burke: as soon as his traditionalism becomes self-aware, it is a sign of failure.

“Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead…” he writes in After Virtue.

MacIntyre proposes another form of traditionalism, I think in his “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” (see here: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=985 and here: http://johnschwenkler.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/macintyre-against-burke/ )

Gellner depicts addition as corruption. This is utterly opposed to the synthetic habits of traditionalism as presented in, say, Thomas Aquinas, who aspired to reconcile seemingly antithetical positions.

Modernity, I understand, is more analytic than synthetic. It tries to comprehend reality more by breaking relations between persons or concepts rather than by clarifying existing relations or discovering/creating new ones.

So even a not haphazard application of analytical habits to a synthetic tradition is bound to create misunderstandings.

We are all aware that liberal society offers a certain kind of negative freedom, but that does not mean that every exercise of free will endorses juridical negative freedom. In choosing the Good through baptism into the Catholic Church in a society that permits that choice because of negative freedom in no way means that the exercise of free will — which exists in human nature regardless of the political regime — benefits from or supports — much less derives from — juridical freedom.

A faithful Catholic at any point in history must necessarily acknowledge an anthropology that places free will at its center; consequently, such a person, given access to political power, would respect freedom of conscience, knowing that it is integral to a person’s fulfilling his telos. But that same person would no less readily prohibit manifold forms of juridical freedom that the liberal state now protects.

Thus, we can see that the claims these critics make are specious. “Choosing tradition” is not one more consumer choice, because in that very choice one insists that many other choices are invalid, evil, and dangerous — and that these choices should be juridically limited or forbidden, should a true legal authority (one committed to promoting the good rather than clearing a space for greater negative freedoms) come into being. As such, what seems superficially to be just one more liberal choice in a liberal society is actually an attack upon that society and its principles.

To argue otherwise would lead to the preposterous claim that the exercise of the free will is in itself comensurable with liberal society. Though the clerics of the Catholic Church are probably too gone in the teeth to imagine the possibility, some of us faithful Catholics still believe its authority is not a juridical choice made legitimate and safe by liberal society. We believe our lives depend on it.