Crunchy Con Job

Rod Dreher, a writer and editor at the Dallas Morning News and National Review Online contributor, invented the term "Crunchy Conservative" to describe a movement among conservatives to promote ecological and communitarian values over globalization and economic growth. His book on the subject, "Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party)" is being promoted by Dreher and his "tribe" of crunchies at a book-club blog on NRO. Here is the obligatory manifesto of the Crunchy Con movement:

A Crunchy Con Manifesto

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics. [Double yep! The health of a society is almost entirely the result of culture, if we define culture as "thought." Healthy thoughts equals healthy culture.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

The tenth item was not released on the blog, you have to buy the book to read it.

Without having read the book it is hard to get a good understanding of the particular things that Dreher would have done in service of these platitudes, though a read of the discussion thread on the blog gives some idea. Here are some of my thoughts on the manifesto.

Item 4, "culture is more important than politics or economics" is a rather slippery one to grasp. The problem I have with this statement is that these three aspects of society are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to separate them and deal with them as independent entitites. We have the luxury, by virtue of our historically unprecedented prosperity, to be able to make tradeoffs with our incomes to pursue more fulfilling cultural pursuits. But we shouldn't take that prosperity for granted, or disparage the hard work and ambition of our ancestors whse economic strivings provided this material bounty that we enjoy. If we were reduced to grinding poverty overnight through some global catastrophe, economics would most certainly become our most pressing concern. Likewise if our political situation deteriorated to the point that the very stability of our society were at stake, then politics would be our primary concern. It is only through the superior accomplishments of our political and economic system in the US that we have bot the stability and the prosperity to worry about cultural matters, at least that aspect of culture that has nothing to do with economics or politics.

In item 6 he states "Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract". I really don't see that we have to make a choice between these things. The local, like your shadow, will always be there, wherever you are. Wherever one chooses to live, one will always have to come to terms with his locality. There will always be products and services that can only be provided locally. Whether the technician who installs your phone line works for a locally owned small business or a global multinational conglomerate, the interaction you have with him will be as authentic as otherwise.

I sense here a nostalgia for a time long gone that will never return. Dreher and company seem only capable of finding fault with modern, mobile society, and imagine that the settled provincial life will cure all those ills without introducing any of their own. They apply no imagination to the task of seeing what is good about mobility.

There is a negative flip-side to this preference for localness and aversion to moving away from home. When local identity becomes overly deterministic in setting values, it does so at the expense of a connectness to the greater whole. Provincial loyalty breeds an aversion of the foreigner. Wars are usually not started by the cosmopolitans, but by the nativists.

For whatever sins that are pinned on globalization, we have to admit that it has brought many peoples of the world closer together. I work daily with people from India, Russia and China, among other places. I have to believe that these daily human contacts between the peoples of the world serve the greater good of us all.

Item 7 states "Beauty is more important than efficiency". Again, I think that there is a false dichotomy at work here. To the extent that we have the luxury to indulge in inefficiency for beauty's sake we have to thank three hundred years of relentless innovation and improvement in all areas of economic life. I am no enemy of beauty, but I believe that there is a danger in moralizing aesthetics. Beauty is a pleasure of life that is bestowed upon us in measured doses, but it is not the end all of life, and it is not something to be worshipped. Goodness and beauty are not one in the same. Some of histories worst cruelties were committed in the pursuit of beauty. The Nazi movement in Germany was inspired in a large part by aesthetics, both racial and cultural. Of course I am not comparing Crunchy Cons to the Nazis. But I've noted among some of the commenters on the blog a tendency to use this aesthethic sense of the good life as a club with which to bang on the unregenerate slobs that don't share the vision. This quote from Caleb Stegall makes my point:

I grew up despising hippie culture. I found, and still find, virtually all of the Boomer cultural affectations to be utterly false and preening; I find the nihilism of their intellectual and popular leaders to be entirely banal and unromantic; their radical egalitarianism was, I thought, an emasculation of all the good things in life. Rather than donning Birks and tie-dye t-shirts, I dreamed about sword-canes and black capes. My image of a conservative hero came from men like Theodore Roosevelt, Andre Malraux, T.E. Lawrence, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Men of action and adventure yet also of refined taste and intellect. Men who wore black, fought for the old world, were on intimate terms with both life and death, and who never went anywhere without their driver or their butler. The image is about as far as one can get from John Lennon.

I came to understand, later, that while the romantic age of Malraux and Saint-Exupery was gone (if it had ever truly existed), there was a certain quiet romanticism still to be had in living a life closely rooted to the ground, learning to love the limits of one’s existence; to suffer one’s place and one’s people in service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is the true basis for finding love, friendship, and a meaningful — or decent, as Bruce put it — life: master one’s passions, deny oneself, and love others.

It was this quiet romance that I found, on reflection, in the small-town folks and traditional religious community I grew up with and in which formed a spiritual order — both personal and social — nourished on a veneration of children, work, craft, a sense of honor in commitments, and a common responsibility. Then I found the same thing in the writing and lives of people like Russell Kirk and Wendell Berry.

It was not until later, when I moved into the wider world of business, high-stakes law, and Evangelicalism, that I discovered that all conservatives were not like this. That instead, there existed a kind of upwardly mobile coldblooded rationalizing self-serving conservative mind that struck me, still strikes me, as sterile and not quite human.

I find it hard to admire the moral compass of a man who can let his aesthetic values lead him to question the humanity of his fellows. This is what I meant by the dangers of moralizing aesthetics. Can he point to anything immoral that these one-time business acquaintances have engaged in, other than career ambitions? It is an extreme judgment of personal qualities that society as a whole finds admirable. If this is the face of crunchy conservatism, then it will be seen as no more than a scolding kind of snobbery and holier-than-thou elitism. While these self-appointed saviors of the American soul imagine themselves on a quest for deeper values, it appears that they are, in reality, fishing in some rather shallow water.