If you check the blurbs from my new book The Reactionary Mind you’ll notice two things. First, everyone says it’s a good book (obviously, or we wouldn’t have put them on the jacket). The second is that no one actually says they agree with my thesis.
Even before I finished writing the thing, I figured that was the best response we could hope for: “Good, but wrong.”
Last week, Jonah Goldberg—formerly of National Review, currently of The Dispatch—did me a great honor by reviewing my book. He was more frank than the blurbists, but had exactly the same response: Good, but wrong.
Mr. Goldberg writes,
I got the book, picked it up, and… I loved it. It’s written in brisk, inviting, oddly unpretentious prose. The author, Michael Warren Davis, is a knowledgeable, confident writer, who writes of cobwebby things with remarkable clarity and verve. It’s fun, informative, thoroughly quirky in a good way, and full of things—mostly of secondary or tangential relevance to his thesis—that I agree with to one extent or another.
And now that I’ve gotten the sure-to-be-unexpected, blurbable praise out of the way, I should get to my primary criticism: It’s b------t.
Well, there you have it.
I’m grateful to Mr. Goldberg, whether or not I should be. There are few writers I enjoy reading even when I disagree with them. Mr. Goldberg is one—and I rarely agree with him. Unlike most journalists, he’s not allergic to ideas. He seems to relish the discourse, not fear it. He’s the kind of person who really can enjoy a book while still thinking its thesis is bullshit. That’s to be admired.
(By the way, the word “bullshit” was coined by T. S. Eliot, so we can’t be too embarassed by it. It’s the most reactionary vulgarism.)
But enough sweet-talk. While I am grateful for the review, I’d like to point out that Mr. Goldberg’s response nicely demonstrates why I stopped calling myself a conservative and started calling myself a reactionary in the first place.
First, I’m afraid that—like most conservatives—Mr. Goldberg is unwilling to challenge progressives’ historicism.
Like our friends on the Left, I sense he’s reluctant to admit that the past was in any meaningful way superior to the present. To do so would be to offend the great god Progress, from whom all blessings flow.
For example, his take on the Middle Ages is way too harsh. In fact, most of his review focuses on my (slightly) romanticized version of life as a serf. He presents his reader with an exhaustive catagloue of the hardships faced by our friend the postclassical peasant.
Incidentally, my hymn to serfdom takes place in chapter one, which isn’t quite ten pages long. I don’t feel like it’s representative of the whole book. But I’m always happy to mount a defense of the old feudal spirit.
So, if Mr. Goldberg is interested in the history of that era, there are books by mainstream historians that correct the record on the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages generally, as well as specific events like the Inquisition and the Crusades. Most of what we’ve been taught about that period is frankly wrong. Any credible scholar would agree. Yet, shockingly, our schools aren’t rushing to revise their curricula.
But The Reactionary Mind was never billed as a history book. And, besides, there are more fundamental problems with Mr. Goldberg’s historiography.
For instance, I can’t for the life of me understand why everyone blames the Medievals for the so-called “Dark Ages.” The Dark Age came about because barbarian invaders tore apart the Roman Empire as the it reached the zenith of its decadence. Now, you can fault the barbarians. You can fault the Romans. But it hardly seems fair to fault the Medievals, whose only crime was surviving the collapse of Pax Romana and trying to rebuild Western civilization. That’s a very unambiguous example of victim-blaming.
No: the question isn’t how the Middle Ages compare to ancient Rome or modern America. Not quite. The question, rather, is how the Middle Ages compare given the hand they were dealt. So—assuming all the advantages of the modern world—would we be better or worse off if we all went a bit Medieval? Would the world as we know it be improved or impaired if we were all suddenly possessed a reactionary mind?
That’s the question we don’t dare to ask. In fact, any reactionary thoughts we might have are immediately drowned in a sea of whataboutisms. A Howard Zinn-shaped cricket will hop on your shoulder and whisper in your ear: “You think polities should be defined by a sense of the common good, inspired by a shared understanding of humanity as the imago Dei—not laws written by corporate lobbyists and enforced by armed bureaucrats? Then I guess you want to bring back highwaymen, too, huh?” No—thankfully, the highwayman is a thing of the past.
But the whataboutism runs even deeper. Later in the review, Mr. Goldberg writes:
In the aforementioned piece in the American Conservative, the reviewer sums up Davis’s treatment of serfdom thus: “The argument at the center of the book is that life was just better eight centuries ago; the medieval serf, for all his technological primitiveness, at least had the advantages of an integral social order and an integral worldview.” It’s a fair summary. But is that a trade you really find all that tempting? I mean, an integral social order—whatever you think that means—might be awesome. But if it comes at the price of antibiotics, plumbing, decent food, healthy children, and electric light—not to mention human liberty and the rule of law—I’m squarely on team “thanks, but no thanks.”
The examples he chooses are funny. As it stands, we actually have too many antibiotics. Our food is getting less “decent” as the years go on. Our children’s health is declining. Even when it comes to the purely material record of history—and even looking at the problem from a strictly “micro” level—we’re not on very solid ground.
But, to me, the macro problem is even more important. Did we cure polio only to keep ourselves fit so we could wipe out all life on earth in a nuclear holocaust? That’s hardly what I call progress. And the worst part is, if humanity did annihilate itself using weapons of mass destruction, reactionaries won’t even be able to say “I told you so.”
Second, and more importantly, Mr. Goldberg’s approch to these questions is too materialistic.
Now, I don’t know if he would call himself a materialist. I doubt it. But, as Mr. Goldberg must know, Westerners have been trained to quarantine all things spiritual within the private sphere. We’ve made a few extensions to Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” between religion and politics. Now it also runs between religion and science, religion and history, religion and economics… Soon enough, religion will be walled off in its little ghetto. (Assuming it hasn’t been already.) Meanwhile we’re supposed to assume a totally godless, soulless universe in our public discourse.
It’s a weird rule. Especially since only five percent of Americans identify as atheists. Yet the rule is followed even by many devout Christians. So I don’t meant to insult Mr. Goldberg when I say that his discounting of spiritual goods for the sake of material goods is wrong-headed, as most U.S. citizens would agree. Well, at least in theory.
For instance, he writes:
I have no objection whatsoever to Christians believing things would be better if more people got some religion in their lives. I even agree, albeit with all manner of caveats. But I stop nodding when I read statements like this, “We cannot remake the world as twelfth-century France, but what we can do is recognize that a happy society would look much more like twelfth-century France than twenty-first-century America.”
Again, I get his point. But it is predicated on so much B.S. that would take such effort to clear away that Hercules’ cleaning of the Augean stables is the only appropriate metaphor.
Does he really get my point, though? I’m not so sure. Really, it’s quite simple: Life may be easier in the modern world, but the Medievals had more of those things that make life worth living. They had a wealth of spiritual goods; we’re utterly destitute. As I write in the conclusion of The Reactionary Mind:
Yet a people who can’t confront mortality can’t really be happy. They can only spend their lives hiding from death. They use drugs and alcohol to dampen their thoughts. They play video games, where players always respawn after flying through the windshield at a hundred miles an hour or having their heads blown off by a sniper rifle. They gape at screens, with their constant, endless flow of distracting lights and sounds. They shop for trinkets on the internet, hiding themselves in great igloos of worthless baubles. They have casual sex with perfect strangers, giving each other a brief escape from their loneliness. And we invent all kinds of clever procedures that prolong our natural lifespan, keeping the body alive even as the brain dies. We survive longer, yet we never really live.
That, I think, has always been the appeal of the Middle Ages. Some scholars like to say that man invented religion to quell his fear of death. The intense religiosity of the Medieval serf was a way of escaping the endless cycle of famine and war and disease.
Really, I think it’s just the opposite. Man can’t really live if he spends his life running away from death. But when he keeps the veil that stands between life and death before his eyes, he can just make out the light shining behind it. Men used to believe that stars were only holes in the firmament, offering a glimpse of Heaven’s brightness in the night sky. And they were more right than wrong.
As I said, Mr. Goldberg’s point of view is basically materialist. (At least, it seems to be.) Mine is fundamentally religious. And, believe me, I’m no ascetic! Never mind forty days in the desert: I struggle to go forty minutes without a snack. But we can be grateful for the things we have—and cognizant of our own limitations—while still being hungering for things like glory, honor, and holiness. Those are things worth hankering after.
Here, as we said, is the difference between the conservative and the reactionary.
The conservative, like the progressives, follows the false god Progress. The difference is that progressives beg more and more favors from their deity. Conservatives, meanwhile, shout: “Don’t be greedy! We’ve already got things better than we deserve. Just say ‘thank you’ and keep your head down.”
In this way, conservatives are more devoted to Progress than progressives are. Think of that iconic quote by William F. Buckley:
A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
I’ve always hated that line. I hated it even when I was president of my prep school’s Young Republicans club. It says so much about the conservative mindset. It says that conservatives never go forwards or backwards. They never look to the past for wisdom or to the future for hope. They just—stop, frozen between greed and gratitude.
I think this what Irving Kristol meant when he said the champions of “bourgeois civilization” are afraid of things like heroes, poetry, and God. They’re all disruptive. They’re uncomfortable. War is uncomfortable. Passion is uncomfortable. Standing tall like a king or bowing low like a slave—they’re uncomfortable. Especially when you’re supposed to do them both at the same time, like a Christian.
But Mr. Goldberg isn’t giving himself enough credit. I’m certain there are many noble, intangible things—spiritual things—that he prefers to material goods. If he was forced to choose between living in a highly prosperous totalitarian state, or a liberal democracy with no indoor plumbing, I suspect he’d warm up to the outhouse pretty quickly. Freedom is worth a chamberpot.
Again, that’s to his credit. We all know there are things that matter more than comfort and safety. All that remains to be seen is how much of our comfort we’re willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of these spiritual goods. Because one thing is certain: man is made for mystery. Young men are supposed to see visions; old men are supposed to dream dreams. And nobody is supposed to stand athwart history yelling Stop.
Conservatism is lukewarm. Spew it out.
Having said that, I want to wish all of you a very happy Thanksgiving. I guess the holiday will be over by the time you read this, but I hope you enjoyed a peaceful day with your family and friends.
My readers are always in my prayers, but I’ll be remembering you in a special way on Thanksgiving. You make my work possible, and I’m deeply grateful to you all. God bless you.
Please put in a good word with Our Lord for the poor and lonely, who couldn’t share in our feasting and fellowship. It really is such a comfort to know that God’s friendship is always open to us, and we’re always invited to His table. Every Sunday is a little Good Friday, a little Easter. It’s also a little Thanksgiving.
Peace and the Good!