The Liberal Conservative (3)
Here is a shoe. It fits far too many conservatives, I’m afraid, although we don’t like to admit we’re wearing it. Of course it fits most Americans in general, but principled conservatism, and still less Christian faith attempting to work in the world, must find a way to get rid of it, and to begin the attempt to undo some of the damage it’s done.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn recounts a series of reflections prompted by one of the movies shown in the camp every few years. The movie was about sports, and, as terrible as the camp was, it produced and in fact almost compelled, in the right sort of person, reflection:
…from the screen they kept drumming into the audience the moral of the film: the result is what counts…
..And you kept thinking about it on your bunk. And Monday morning out in the line-up. And you could keep thinking about it as long as you wanted. And where else could you have concentrated on it like that? And slow clarity descended into your brain…
He recounts the gradual encroachment of the idea into the Russian mind, and then:
…from all kinds of socialists, and most of all from the most modern, infallible, and intolerant Teaching, which consists of this one thing only: They result is what counts! It is important to forge a fighting Party! And to seize power! And to hold on to power! And to remove all enemies! And to conquer in pig iron and steel! And to launch rockets!
And though for this industry and for these rockets it was necessary to sacrifice the way of life, and the integrity of the family, and the spiritual health of the people, and the very soul of our fields and forests and rivers—to hell with them! The result is what counts!
But that is a lie!
Substitute “pragmatists” for “socialists,” and remove the reference to the Party, and it’s hard to see how one could quarrel with this is as an indictment of the present state of things in the United States and the industrialized world in general.
I consider romantic nostalgia for the pre-industrial world something to be avoided. But that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been changes for the worse, and you don’t have to look back very far at all to see it. Even in my lifetime—which, though I am not young, does not encompass the pre-industrial era—there has been a palpable decline in “the integrity of the family, and the spiritual health of the people.” (The forests are doing well enough as museums and scenery, but as for the fields, they are practically empty, and the connection between them and the food on our tables is only mythological in the minds of most people.)
Most conservatives have always acknowledged the principle that, in the words of Pope JPII, “there are many human needs which find no place on the market.” But the principle remained an abstraction in the hurly-burly of political life, especially when the opposition was more or less socialist. The predation, the commercialization, the inanities, the saturation marketing of big business were perhaps something to be sighed over—but, after all, prosperity is fundamentally a good thing, and conservatives are rightly prejudiced in favor of liberty, even when we aren’t entirely pleased with its fruits.
The time is past when that response is adequate. With corporations increasingly able and willing to sell—not just to sell, but to market with the utmost cunning and aggression—anything to anybody, and to exert the considerable power of their wealth and propaganda on behalf of “progressive” causes which attack religion, the family and indeed the person at the root, it’s time for some sort of definite resistance. There should be the potential here for alliances with political liberals in limiting corporate power, although I’m not sure how much interest “social issue” liberals have in doing such a thing now that corporations are increasingly on their side.
Solzhenitsyn goes on to say:
No one is going to argue. It is pleasant to win. But not at the price of losing one’s human countenance.
Can we really look around at our society and say it is not in danger (at least) of losing its human countenance?
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