Back today from Charlottesville, where gathered on Saturday the new apostles of reactionary radicalism -- I will not use the word "rootsy" in this post. Luminaries included Daniel McCarthy (ex-AmCon), Jesse Walker (Reason), Bill Kaufmann, and Caleb Stegall (ex-New Pantagruel). Also on hand was Daniel Larison, D.L.P.C., on his best behavior, representatives of the Hedgehog Review, representatives of the Tocqueville Forum, and, well, more. I am experiencing Virginia Country Gentleman withdrawal, and academic overload besides.
But I do want to say something about Niccolo Machiavelli. N.M. cast a troubling dilemma which kept running through my mind as People Who Knew Who Wendell Berry Is presented appealing but complexly problematic portraits of America's "alternative tradition." Machiavelli contrasted the Romans and the Etruscans, the first of whom, in an effort to survive and thrive, expanded their territory lustily -- but too fast. The Etruscans on the other hand expanded not at all, content to carry on in bucolic temperance. They were as a result obliterated by the Romans, who ground their culture into the dirt and left we latter-day types with barely any memory of Etruscan civilization, which is now so lost to time that it could hardly have been worth living in the first place. Leaving aside the empirical accuracy of that claim now that many hundreds of years have elapsed, and also leaving aside Machiavelli's interesting moral philosophy of durability (though this may be the key to everything), the apparent dilemma for the political society resolves somewhat in Machiavelli's third contrasting characters: Swiss mountain goat herders.
The SMGHs, courtesy of the rugged landscape which shaped their culture and kept others disinterested in expanding up a jagged wall of frozen rocks, escaped the Goldilockean Hobson's choice of too-hot/too-cold civilizational vitality. Is the calling of anarchic agrarianism to become, in reality or in metaphor, Swiss mountain goat herders? And if so, how on Earth can that be done in metaphor?
Patrick Deneen suggested to me a different option: conquering the SMGHs, which seems to me to augur something resembling in our case a cross between Aspen and Research Triangle Park. I'm inclined to think that durability can't be kept in as high esteem as we've inherited from our western thinkers since Machiavelli, who went above and beyond Machiavelli's call to draw up a peaceful Italy with a hook from the depths of militarized madness. It's important to notice that Italy wasn't really "in chaos;" there were five main power players whose interrelationship was simply not peaceful. This doesn't mean that chaos repeatedly appeared in various towns, countrysides, areas, etc. And certainly uncertainty -- fortuna -- remained even for the great power-instrumentalist Machiavelli something we could ever only expect to get 50% out of our lives.
But Machiavelli made two claims. The first was that order was good because it created an internality in which there was peace. The second was that order was good because it created an internality which was durable. It lasted. The link between the two was that the pursuit of fame, glory, and lasting civic durability could lead citizens to both cherish peace at home and externalize war abroad. The trick was to prevent your externalized war from collapsing back in on you or wearing you thin and finally out.
I think what we have inherited from this kind of thought process is an unnecessary conflation of peace with durable order, and then both peace and durable order with political peace and durable political order. Surely these things are important, but surely they do not always go hand in hand. One story to tell, inspired by Jefferson's crackpotish notion of a revolutionary tree-watering every twenty years, is that political orders change as circumstances change because the cost of maintaining them is ultimately unappealing, and even if they are seemingly maintained they are changing internally in spite of themselves. Maintaining other orders besides the political is done at the expense of working in the realm of political order.
This has its costs. But it puts into perspective the reality that putative crises of order seem so often to be phrased in terms the solution of which is the creation of a more overarching new order. In a way, the quintessence of the conservative attitude -- or, if that sounds too meaningless, the logic of conservatism -- is order-plurality, the notion that small orders which developed in ways that are no longer kept accurately conscious can carry on simultaneously in different areas to the benefit of their respective constituents without the need of a unifying system. When you begin to perceive those plural orders as "a system" at all, you begin to socially construct that system, which does not need to exist at all, into being. Science as known in the west makes a formality of conceiving of ever-more-comprehensive systems, of fantasizing about systemization as the resolution of crises and then enworlding those fantasies.
The fantasy can grow from fear as well as audacity. When these two work together strange and terrible things can happen. As instrumentalizations of power continue to make geography less significant, the Swiss example seems less and less possible. After all, 9/11 was the putative proof that Our Oceans no longer keep us safe. One could just as well argue that much broader and deeper oceans of disinterest had kept us safe in the now-so-distant past. Which hints at what metaphorical goat-herderdom looks like, even if only in a fantasy of its own. Still, it so cuts against the grain of the modern age and what now appears to be human nature to claim that the most important thing we can do at such an important time is to be less important -- and that's exactly how we feel-think of being locally important. Who wants to play only in Peoria?
But tradition cuts two ways. Thinking of the established hot spots of high social status as the only places to be worth a damn forecloses the possibility of creating -- or re-creating -- new glories, especially the sort of humble glories that ground a culture. I don't think the terms of decision here require surrendering oneself to "the particulars," to the contingency and doubt version of tradition that neo-Oakeshottians like. But I do think it does involve recognizing that the particulars which play a role in your choice of where to live and what to do are little things unique to you that you cannot really abstract yourself around or out of. They do not dictate or determine, but they cannot disappear. Indeed, who would want them to?
There is room, I think, for both humility and pride in this regard. Trying to make a science project of your life is as exhausting and dissatisfying as trying to make an art project out of it, at least as a vocation. Perhaps the biggest contribution that the logic of therapeutics can make to undermine the wild scientific dialectic of broader scopes, new crises, and new orders would be to emotionally reaccustom our hectics to a peace of soul with the amateurization of order. Self-evident truths are, I think, things about the nature of being human that everyone can understand, and we have been silly enough to think all of these things are "rights" for far too long.
Sounds like a great weekend, and it obviously got you thinking. No wonder Larison's unusually quiet. Spending time with people who know who Wendell Berry is sounds nice.
We're thinking of starting a Swiss Mountain Goat Herder community. I'll send you a glossy tri-fold brochure.
Posted by: Christopher Bitner Hayes | March 26, 2007 at 12:05 PM
What's wrong with neo-Oakshottians?
Just finished Sullivan's The Conservative Soul and really liked it. Methinks the next few weeks are going to include a heavy dose of Brother Michael, and settling once and for all what I think of the man's work.
Or at least beginning a conversation about what I think of the man's work.
Posted by: Matt S. | March 27, 2007 at 04:37 AM