A Couple of Miscellaneous but Not Entirely Unrelated Items
Apropos the recent discussions of Wagner here, the reader who signs himself “rjp” kindly sent me a couple of back issues of Fidelity (December 1992 and May 1993) containing some interesting views of Wagner: a lengthy article by E. Michael Jones, who edited Fidelity, called “Richard Wagner’s Adultery, the Loss of Tonality, and the Beginning of Our Cultural Revolution,” (pretty clear where the author is going there), a letter to the editor from Madeleine Stebbins, who was (I think) one of the founders of Catholics United for the Faith, and a rejoinder by Jones. That was to be the subject of this week’s journal; however, I got too distracted reading some of the other stuff in those magazines, so Wagner must wait till next week. Herewith are a few gems, unrelated to Wagner but very much related to some other interests of mine.
I subscribed to Fidelity for several years in the 1980s and always found it a mixed bag. Jones was, I thought, clearly a sharp and perceptive fellow, often brilliant, and a pungent writer, but sometimes overly pugnacious and tending toward a somewhat conspiratorial view of things, by which I mean he seemed to have a tendency to attribute to conscious malice what was probably more conventional human blundering (a phenomenon not unusual on what I’ll call, and hope you understand my shorthand, the ecclesiastical right in the Catholic Church). I really can’t remember a specific reason why I let my subscription drop, aside from a general sense that the magazine was becoming fanatical and unbalanced. At some point in the 1990sFidelity folded, and was replaced by Culture Wars.
I have never seen a copy of Culture Wars, but it is, as they say, “controversial.” I have heard it charged with anti-Semitism by people whose opinion I respect, and looking around on its web site I have noticed evidence of some kind of hostility to Jews. I’m inclined to doubt that it is anti-Semitic in the classic sense; I would speculate that this is the above-mentioned slightly paranoid style at work again.
At any rate there is certainly no sign of anti-Semitism in the two copies of Fidelity that I’ve been reading. In fact one of the pieces from which I want to quote is a very favorable review of a book by Jewish conservative Don Feder. The book is called A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America; the review is titled “Real Conservatism”:
[This] book … makes an important distinction. Feder is a conservative because he is a Jew who believes in the Torah. Religious adherence to the moral law is the bedrock of the social order. Without the moral law there is no social order. The Republican Party can ignore this fact, but it will do so at its own peril….
Feder understands as a Jew what many of us have learned as Catholics: that the genius of the West is its moral genius, which was bequeathed to humanity through Moses on Mount Sinai and nourished by Christianity. Any conservatism which fails to face up to this one fundamental fact is simply a variant form of liberalism and doomed to be defeated by the real liberals anytime there is a contest….
The genius of this country, the main reason it could accommodate so many disparate peoples into one unified social fabric lay primarily in the ability of its institutions to incorporate the only source of unity in this world, namely the moral law, into the fabric of its culture…
Born in 1946, [Feder] grew up with the conviction that a political system compatible with his religious beliefs was something eminently doable. It worked then, he tells us; it can work again. The system he proposes is not only possible; it is the only possible system. The Republican Party would do well to sit up and listen. There is no social progress outside the moral law.
(Jones is quoting Pius XI in that last sentence.) This summarizes much of what I’ve been getting at in the “liberal conservative” series: not just a call for a personal reliance on the moral law, but the necessity of a cultural acknowledgement of the moral law in any effort to conserve American institutions.
Another essay, “Surviving the Sixties: How Cults Came About,” by Thomas W. Case, is an excellent addition to the attempt to make sense of the strange cultural revolution that overtook this country in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s actually the opening chapter of a book about cults, Mind-Forged Manacles: Cults and Spiritual Bondage, which appears to be out of print, although it can be had on Amazon and no doubt elsewhere.
I was never a leading agent in the formless mess of the 1960s…but I was right on the spot, creating it, loving or hating every minute of it. And if there was anything good in what we did—I’m thinking of serious (if unconventional) spiritual searches, poetry and poetic lyrics, the best rock music of the century, honest dreams for a harmonious and peaceful world, intense searches for perfect love—the larger contemporary society has thrown it away while it has embraced our drugs, our selfishness, and our sexual immorality. It has taken to its heart everything we did wrong and nothing we did right, perhaps because what we did right was mostly subtle and mostly a dream. It wasn’t marketable.
As T-Bone Burnett put it in a song called “The Sixties”: “Keep all the bad, destroy the good.” I would add that there really wasn’t all that much that was truly good, either (where is the really first-rate art other than rock music produced by the revolutionary culture?) and that there were some decidedly evil things on the loose, a point which Case gets to later:
Something went wrong in the early 1960s, and I don’t know why. If we search out the philosophical corruption stemming from Germany with Kant and his progeny or look to the long breakup of Christendom over four centuries or look at ugly twentieth century changes in art and architecture and high-brow music, we will find a wealth of causes, as we see all of it percolate down from the academies and the coffee houses to the ordinary citizen. But why did teenagers stop going steady in rural towns all over America in the 1960s? Why did they stop preparing for marriage? Was it Nietzsche or LSD or the devil himself who finally broke through the firm tribal customs of small town America? Or was it Vietnam?
All of the above, I suppose, and the point has been made many, many times that the virtues of pre-revolution America were pretty fragile. But Case is one of the few writers on this topic who seems to think, as I do, that the late ‘60s in particular—I’m talking about 1968-1969—were a very dark time. Joan Didion is another: read the first essay in her collection The White Album for a sense of what those last few years of the ‘60s felt like to a lot of us. That could be dismissed as a subjective view based on my own struggles, or Didion’s, or Case’s, but I would argue, of course, that the perception of darkness was objectively accurate (and no small contributor to my problems at the time). Most people who lived through that period seem to think of it as a brief taste of paradise. I couldn’t disagree more. A while back my wife and I started to watch the movie Woodstock, I suppose in a moment of nostalgia. I had to turn it off after twenty minutes or so; it was a bit like watching the early moments of a horror movie, as the characters enter the trap which the killer has set for them.
Things lightened up a bit after 1970; I suppose the moment of greatest struggle had passed.
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