Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2024 11:09 am
I've lost any clear sense of what a Conservative is and what conservatism advocates for. There are some -- like Pat Buchanan -- who do seem to reminisce for the 1950s. And it is certainly true that many who are critical of the present do refer, nostalgically, to former times as if those times were better. But let me tell you what my own process in relation to this question has been. In my own case my political and social orientation was very much on the Left and Progressive. Especially as it pertains to Latin America nearly all of my research and study was of a Left-critical sort. And possibly the largest influence on my historical analysis was Noam Chomsky.
It's not that you've said the 50s were good, it's that there is this amorphous past....................and the 60s came along and transvalued values.
The also I am talking about the mere fact that the 50s led to the 60s. The process went that way.
Quite a few years back now, for reasons that I could elaborate, I began to expose myself to critical ideas that came from a very different camp. Metaphysical Traditionalism (René Guénon, Julius Evola), but before that, if I have the order right, I read Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences as well as The Southern Tradition at Bay. And also -- and this has a direct bearing on what you brought up -- the book Slouching Toward Gomorrah by Robert Bork.
I found that he (Bork) made extremely relevant and powerful critical arguments about the influence of a general 60's ideology as it pertained to the attack on and the destruction of hierarchical categories. Without going into summations of their work these titles launched me into a wide study of Traditionalist perspectives.
And again, hierachies have been attacked before. The American Revolution, was an attack on traditional hierarchies and probably (hopefully?) Bork thought that was ok. In other words a categorical criticism is aimed at the 60s, but not at other points in history where it would be uncomfortable.
It's like there is this amorphous traditionalist past--------------------> the 60s.
I also devoted a good deal of time to researching Traditionalist Catholic perspectives -- pre-Vatican ll. I do not regret any part of all of this. But I am certain that when I speak of respect for people like Bork (utterly hated by the Left-Progressives) and Weaver (a Platonic Traditionalist), and certainly Guénon and Evola, as well as a respect for traditional values in Catholicism, my expressions evoke strong reaction on the part of some, perhaps most, who write on this forum. I believe I understand why. From my perspective -- this is the idea I work with -- we have all been inculcated in sets of values that have a strong tendency to define as *evil-bad* nearly all of the valued and traditional ideas (based in metaphysical predicates) that were formally a part of the very structure of our (cultural, civilizational) understanding. So, when I use the Nietzschean term *transvaluation of values* I am referring to that larger, and consequential shift. The transvaluation of sexual values is just one part of a far larger shift.
And the Catholic Church transvalued previous values and followed Jesus who radically changed Judaism.
And then also it was a tradition that we broke from in many ways, way before the 60s, even conservative Catholics were bizarre heathens in many ways to Medieval Catholics. Let alone a society that allowed freedom of speech, heresy, atheism and more. They used to kill people for many things most people take for granted.
the old ideas of men, women and sexuality, consumerism, trusting authority, conformism and more
I understand what you are getting at, and I would agree, but with a caveat. And the caveat has to do with metaphysical traditionalism of the sort that Weaver and Guénon deal in. So in each category that you mention here a discussion would open about what *values* operate at the core of those who articulate ideological positions about men & women, sexuality, consumer culture, authority, conformism -- all in the context of America and Americanism of those post-war years.
I certainly
grasp the Left-Progressive critical posture of those who lent power to a criticism of the 50s -- say the philosophers of the Frankfurt school like Eric Fromm and Horkheimer. I definitely came under their influence as I think we all did (to one degree or another). The origins of American Sixties Radicalism can even be traced back to the Catholic Personalism of
Dorothy Day and her mentor
Peter Maurin. Personally, I do not dismiss any of this nor some of the tenets of sound Catholic social doctrine (which certainly moved and inspired Maurin).
But again, Catholic Doctrine came in and rode over other traditional values. And during the heydey of the Catholic Church it was actively suppressing traditional patterns, beliefs, rituals, roles both inside and outside of Europe. Things that would be called pagan or indigenous practices and beliefs. These were traditional then.
For me personally, the monotheisms did a lot of damage and certainly were not traditional, but in fact innovated, sometimes radically, the way we were supposed to think of bodies, sex, reality, love, guilt, shame, social relations, epistemology, nature and so on. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in neutral ways and sometimes, I think in a negative direction from what went before.
An entire range of reasons. Weaver wrote about the destruction of metaphysical categories as ground or moorings.
But that ground they see as destroyed had already destroyed other grounds.
The assumption, as far as I can see in all these thinkers, is that the ground has unmoored, when in fact they were not THE ground, but a ground.
And he also wrote about 'nihilism' and decadence which he strongly noted in American culture in the Postwar. American culture in the 1950s, from traditional and genuinely conservative perspectives, cannot be considered a model.
Sure. But whatever he is calling conservative values, was likely radical at an earlier point.
This just doesn't seem to be a part of the schema.
Do people on the right or traditionalists or conservatives realize that they had a PC and it had power and that was problematic?
Again, it depends on who in that wide-ranging camp you refer to. As I said de Benoist and people like him take everything into consideration and dismiss nothing. I refer to him because he is not a backwards-looker but a forwards-looker. To be such changes everything.
He may well be a forward looker, but as long as he sees a break in 60s or in the 20th century from a ground in values, he's not really looking at history. He is choosing a kind of breakpoint from his specific values and saying that's when values got destroyed. Rather than, 'here again new values arose and other values were not valued, just as has happened many times.' he can then of course disagree with the changes he dislikes and give reasoning but as long as it is framed as tradition vs the recent new, then we are covering over the history of those values he likes.
Of course, and these polarities are locked in *moral combat'. But let me say that *we* have access to ideas that they could never access because, ideologically, they remain fixed in certain conventions.
You are making reference to ideological and cultural values that hinge on questions of *core value*. In my view these are metaphysical categories of concern and they have to be looked at carefully and with a penetrating insight.
Sure.
and then, there's my sense that these culture wars are being used to keep us focused on the relatively powerless those those with incredible power can get more.
Indubitably this seems to be so. But it does not have much bearing on how an individual orients themselves in regard to the categories we have broached here.
But it should. I don't mean in the sense that they should give up their values. But when I look at a thread like this - and when I see something from the left wanting to focus on getting everyone to learn how to not misgender, I see people on both sides doing exactly what those in power want. Thinking there are two teams. Thinking that these issues are the critical ones. Engaging their energies in anger against people with relatively little power (and having little themselves) sort of like people screaming and jumping up and down over a chess game while they are being surrounded by knights on horses ready to rape and pillage and enslave.
But do note that the activist Personalism of Maurin and Day, which I suppose seemed to come from Left-oriented concerns, actually has a root in traditionalist Catholic values.
Sure the liberation priests in Latin America often ended up extremely left wing. With justification from the New Testament and then well, seeing what the Right was doing there.
