By Samuel Gregg
“Civilizations,” wrote the historian Arnold
Toynbee, “die from suicide, not from murder.” Preventing the West from
continuing to drift toward self-oblivion is surely a task—nay, a duty—of any
principled conservative worthy of the name. In fact, as Margaret Thatcher was
fond of saying, there is no alternative.
A central element in
any lasting conservative resurgence is the defense and promotion of what we
should unapologetically call Western civilization. By this, I mean that unique
culture which emerged from the encounter of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, the
brilliance of which—if I may be deeply politically-incorrect for a moment—is somewhat
harder to discern in other societies.
As anathema as this culture may be in the
contemporary faculty lounge, this is the tradition that conservatives should be
in the business of safeguarding and advocating: not just in opposition to those
who deploy violence in the name of a divine un-reason, but also against the
obsessive egalitarianism, rank sentimentalism and wild-eyed utopianism of those
who live inside the West’s gates but who have long inhabited a different mental
universe altogether…
As the French
theologian Jean Daniélou S.J. once observed, there is no true civilization that
is not also religious. In the case of Western civilization, that means Judaism
and Christianity. The question of religious truth is something with which we
must allow every person to wrestle in the depths of their conscience. But if
conservatism involves upholding the heritage of the West against those who
would tear it down (whether from without and within), then conservatives should
follow the lead of European intellectuals such as Rémi Brague and Joseph
Ratzinger and invest far more energy in elucidating Christianity’s pivotal role
in the West’s development—including the often complicated ways in which it
responded to, and continues to interact, with the movements associated with the
various Enlightenments.
Such an enterprise
goes beyond demonstrating Christianity’s contribution to institutional
frameworks such as constitutional government. Conservatives must be more
attentive to how Judaism and Christianity—or at least their orthodox
versions—helped foster key ideas that underlie the distinctiveness of Western
culture. These include:
·
their
liberation of man from the sense that the world was ultimately meaningless;
·
their
underscoring of human fallibility and consequent anti-utopianism;
·
their
affirmation that man is made to be creative rather than passive;
·
their
insistence that there are moral absolutes that may never be violated,
·
their
tremendous respect for human reason in all its fullness;
·
their
crucial distinction between religious and civil authority; and
·
their
conviction that human beings can make free choices.
This last point is
especially important precisely because of the difficulty of finding strong
affirmations of the reality of free choice outside orthodox Judaism, orthodox
Christianity, and certain schools of natural law thought. Beyond these spheres,
the world is basically made up of soft determinists (like John Stuart Mill) or
hard determinists (like Marx).
There is, however,
something more elemental of which modern conservatism stands in desperate need.
In the first episode of his acclaimed 1969 BBC series Civilisation,
the art historian, the late Kenneth Clark, sat in the foreground of an old
viaduct and spoke about the Romans’ “confidence.” By that, he didn’t mean
arrogance. What Clark had in mind was the Romans’ self-belief: their conviction
that the ideas and institutions which they had inherited, developed, and
extended throughout Europe and the Mediterranean amounted to a singular
cultural accomplishment worthy of emulation.
Obviously the Roman
world was far from perfect. As illustrated in the novel Satyricon, most likely
written by the Roman courtier Gaius Petronius Arbiter during Nero’s disastrous
reign, substantive decay had already set in among Rome’s elites by the first
century A.D. What, however, seems difficult to dispute is the need for
contemporary conservatives—however they prefix or suffix themselves—to develop
and display a Roman-like confidence in the West’s achievements. For, absent such
confidence, how will conservatives be able to re-infuse self-belief back into a
West presently awash in soft despotism, nihilism, emotivism, and rampant
self-loathing?
Samuel Gregg is
Research Director at the Acton Institute and author of, among other books, Becoming Europe and Tea Party Catholic.
