OK, this is a bit incestuous, but in this post Patrick Deneen elaborates on a quote from T. S. Eliot I recently sent him.

It is with this peroration that Eliot closes his The Idea of a Christian Society, a book that is truly remarkable for its richness and prescience. But the really interesting thing, as Patrick points out, is that Eliot would have been hooted down by a later generation of rightward-leaning folks for saying the same thing.

Interestingly, I think that is changing, and that many genuinely conservative-oriented young men and women today would find that Eliot's words comport with their own intuitions and experience. Am I wrong about that?

I liked this bit from Deneen especially:

<blockquote>Even as we can agree that Communism was a malevolent, pernicious, and false political dogma, can it be that one of its most enduring and lamentable legacies was this coalition in the West - in particular, the ascent of economic individualism over a healthy culture? If so, can we be so certain that we really did "win" the Cold War?</blockquote>

Indeed, a particularly pernicious half-truth (i.e., lie) of socialism is that societies are moved pricipally by economics: that man is an economic being and can for all practical purposes be accounted for by economic principles; that half-truth has not only outlived practical attempts at socialism, but positively thrived, all the more in its absence. It is today an entrenched and unexamined axiom of the modern left and "right". And yes Eliot would be laughed off the stage by mainstream conservatism today... but only insofar as mainstream conservatism fails in its impulse to conserve anything at all... save for the increasingly weighty spoils of centralized control.

I very much appreciate the idenfitication of Eliot with conservatism -- a much more adequate description than "radical," "reactionary," or (ridiculously, but common enough) "fascist." Those who knew him well (see, for instance, E.W.F. Tomlin's wonderful and very English "T.S. Eliot: A Friendship") believed that, while Eliot's life had led him to explore a variety of philosophical and theological perspectives before he arrived at Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy, his native impulses were fundamentally conservative. The shock "The Waste Land" produced as the apparent clarion of a new "radical" modernist art fooled many persons into thinking Eliot himself a radical. We now know that it, as with most of Eliot's poetry, was grounded in a sensibility informed by the ideas of (indirectly) Burke and Charles Maurras, and (directly) Coleridge and Babbitt.

Nonetheless, there were many conservatives of Eliot's day who did not recognize themselves in the poet. Indeed, it would seem Eliot had to engage in a scrupulous series of self-presentations and representations to get himself accepted as the conservative Christian humanist he actually was. C.S. Lewis, I believe, never could bring himself to see Eliot as an ally. Tomlin claims that only Russell Kirk's study of Eliot (forthcoming from ISI) accurately portrayed Eliot's political sympathies.

Now I come to my point, which responds directly to Deneen and Jeremy. In Eliot's day, as in ours, conservatism very frequently applies to crass materialist "capitalists" whose faith in free markets differs little from Marx's faith in the dialectical movements of historical materialism. For such persons, conservatism means not preserving the full riches of human culture and above all the social order that precipitates from orthodox Christianty. It means merely keeping socialist ambitions from interfering with unregulated markets. To the extent this sort of conservatism has an intellectual foundation, it is that of the very-materialist doubtful empiricism of contemporary econometrics. Eliot's concern with culture--not least with agriculture-- derives not from this strand of conservatism, but from the Catholic distributism of Chesterton and Belloc, and the cultural theories of Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain (among myriad others).

Those of us impressed by the passage from Eliot quoted, and allied with his comprehensive vision of cultural life as a precipitate of the life in and of faith, should not look back wistfully to a time when conservatives actually cared about the health of the natural world, etc. Rather, we should recognize that in Eliot's time and in ours, the term "conservative" partially masks deep incongruities between those who really wish to conserve the great things of creation, and those who wish merely to preserve a few convenient strands of classical liberalism that pertain to free markets.

Perhaps the time is ripe, as for a period it was in Eliot's day, before the Cold War began, for the voices of true conservatism to be heard more clearly and efficaciously.

To risk incestuousness alongside Jeremy, it occurs to me that the nutshell history of this problem has been well described in Mr. Beer's essay, "Wendell Berry and the Traditionalist Critique of Meritocracy" in "Wendell Berry: Life and Work." What Eliot once confronted, Berry confronts at present.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: James Matthew Wilson,

The "Idea of Christian Society" is a treasure that has kept me happily sane through my undergrad years! Thanks for the lovely post.

If you like this book, a few others you may like:

G.K Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"
C.S Lewis, "The Four Loves", "The Great Divorce"
Thomas More, "Utopia"

I would like to mildly take issue with Mr. Wilson in that as I read his remarks, he seems to disparage the (classical) liberal for his overemphasis of the economic aspect of conservative principles. Whether this emphasis, about which Mr. Wilson is quite correct, is overemphasis is a very good question. It can be argued that without economic liberty there is no chance whatever of conserving the culture, because in today's world the alternative to liberty is soulless socialism or totalitarianism.

My objection is that his critique seems to me to pigeonhole unfairly a quite broad spectrum of conservatives. While the economic principles are clearly most prominent in today's conservative "movement," beyond that not much can be said about our fellow conservatives as a body. No doubt there are many for whom religion and culture mean little. There are also many who value their economic liberty precisely because it provides them with the wherewithal to enjoy and conserve our cultural heritage.

Rather than find fault among conservatives, the fight we ought to pick is with the collectivist liberals whose all-out attack on anything prescriptive or ancient for the last 50 years has eviscerated the cultural organs that would preserve the permanent things. Schools from elementary through post-graduate not only do not preserve culture, they actively destroy it. Concomitant with their cultural damage, they also destroy political institutions that have taken centuries to evolve.