Contemporary conservatism stands in danger of being the conservatism of nothing. Too much conservative energy pours into negotiations over the pace and method of what are presented as social changes and the policies designed to address them. Many on the right appear content to represent the voice of prudence in a liberal world. When it falls victim to this mood, conservative thought fails to focus on the true nature of our cultural and political predicament. We must recognize that we face a great contest. At stake is the understanding of personal identity that supplies moorings for the conservative virtues and lies at the root of any distinctively Western tradition. That understanding is being crushed in the tentacular grasp of the techno-bureaucratic order, its idioms, and its methods. Such a predicament calls for the conservatism of conservatism, a recourse to first principles. No political disposition, no set of policies, will suffice. Our situation calls for a frankly reactionary posture. We must return to the metaphysical foundations of Western culture, even and especially if these are denied or distorted in the prevailing matrices of power.
At the heart of that return lies a renewed appreciation of the personal nature of our world and of ultimate reality. The drama of society mirrors the drama of the soul. Our world and its history, indeed all our stories, derive their meaning from personal initiatives. I want to suggest that our most pressing political dilemmas raise the question whether God, man, and world are ultimately personal or impersonal realities. The Western tradition rests at its core on the experience of personal identity. It rests also on the appreciation of ontological heterogeneity, of the plural and many-leveled character of ultimate reality. Most criticism of the tradition reflects an antipathy to distinct and irreducible personal existence. That antipathy comes from viewing multiple centers of agency and responsibility as an illusion and as an affront to the constitution of being. The tragic story of the left, obscured by its egalitarian formula, amounts to the generation of tyranny out of monism.
I propose to sketch the fundamentals of a principled reactionary stance through the development of several converging themes. An initial contrast between the personal and the impersonal suggests the twin themes of political thinking and political language. We face the rapid spread of theories and idioms that, to the extent we take them seriously, reduce human beings to the pliable material of irresponsible power. The question of personality in turn suggests our responsibility to transform the given elements of life. These transformations include that of time into duration, the lived, human time that one can remember and relate as a story, and that of space into location, the place for fellowship and loyalty. (Reactionaries tend to be storytellers and localists rather than theoreticians and cosmopolitans.) The discussion of reactionary principles will conclude by considering authority, the crux of the mystery of personal existence. One of the reactionary’s first obligations is to illuminate the significance of authority as a bulwark against social engineering and as a foundation of humane living.
Today’s political controversies revolve around the embattled ideals of personal loyalty and personal responsibility. Put another way, those controversies imply the alternative of personal dependence or impersonal dependence. Progressive political thought has attacked the former and abetted the latter, reflecting Rousseau’s insistence that dependence on things is less corrupting and degrading than dependence on persons. Human associations constituted by mutual personal loyalties—notably family, friendship, and locality—confront an intensifying theoretical as well as practical onslaught. Other spheres of human activity, such as school and workplace, likewise feature the rise of bureaucracy and regimentation at the expense of spontaneity and personal loyalty. From the rationalist’s perspective, the relationships of family members, friends, and neighbors arise by chance and carry unfathomable and unwanted dangers. Therefore, we are told, we need plans and programs, staffed by credentialed experts, to undo the damage wrought by us, the amateurs of life, hapless sleepwalkers whose first need is to be disabused of the illusion of free agency.
Depending on the rhetorical circumstance, our progressive savants remark the growth of the impersonal sphere either with the cool detachment of the impartial spectator or with the enthusiasm of a co-conspirator in the historical process. The reactionary’s scandalous vocation consists in the refusal to abet such historical forces or to accept their inevitability. The inner meaning of reaction is captured in Paul Elmer More’s elegant phrase: “to oppose to the welter of circumstance the force of discrimination and selection.” This determination must contend with a canard that should be exposed right away, namely the invocation of “social change.” It is in the name of this slogan that our pundits invoke the famed clock that cannot be turned back, the quintessential technocratic golem. The change in question is clearly not pure change, change as such. Change as such brings to mind the unpredictable, the novel, even the arbitrary. Change as such has no predetermined content or direction. “Social change” has been tamed and mastered by the theoreticians of progress; it is change that has been filled, mapped out, predicted and predestined, a change to end all change. Progressive politics figures as the instrument through which time submits to theory.
Since he knows that history has many other avenues besides the crude dichotomy of “backwards” and “forwards,” the reactionary poses indelicate questions about the content and direction of change. (Not “When will we get there ?” but “Where are we going?”) As the pathbreaking reactionary G. K. Chesterton put it, what’s wrong with the world is that not enough people in it ask what’s right. The unwillingness to pose that question explains the veiled, subversive character of the moral orientation behind relativistic and deterministic modes of thought.
The key challenge facing our thinking about politics is whether we ought to resist the spiraling augmentation of the impersonal at the expense of the personal. (To pose the question in terms of whether that development is capable of being arrested or reversed is to substitute an insoluble pseudo-problem for a fundamental question of spiritual orientation.) The nature of our predicament has been expressed with consummate clarity by Romano Guardini as the “divorce of power from person.” This condition leaves power increasingly autonomous and intangible, while persons come increasingly to see themselves as the paralyzed playthings of forces outside their control. Thus divorced, both power and person are, strictly speaking, irresponsible. The new world order has as its foundations two pillars, the impersonal constitution of power and the decomposition, one is tempted to say the deconstruction, of the person and of his experience of moral responsibility. The recognition that technocrats and intellectuals, despite their professed disdain for each other, actually operate hand in hand, supplies the key impetus to reactionary thinking.
Not for the first time, intellectuals have succumbed to the lyricism of power. Today, popular social science and the machinery of opinion formation have infused that murky passion deep into the public mind. Art, morality, love, and learning, all the forms of judgment and affection, have been recast as matters of power relations. In a way, there is nothing new here. Since the first parents raised the first infant, human beings have known that relations of power figure in the most tender of human experiences. What is destructive in the current teaching is the identification of power with ultimate reality. Today’s devotees of power eagerly embrace the Nietzschean view that the world of quality is a rhetorical gloss on the world of quantity; there is neither good nor bad, only more and less (power). In this view, all discrimination between can be nothing other than discrimination against. Lacking the poetic integrity of Nietzsche’s tyrannical vision, our power-worshipping contemporaries seek shelter behind a patina of egalitarian politics. That retreat does not at all detract from the lasting legacy of this intellectual movement, namely the metaphysics of tyranny. According to this view, ultimate reality consists of units of force acting on each other in relations of domination and subjection. On the existential plane, more and more people accept the claim that misery, despair, and lethargy can only be cured by “empowerment.” Empowerment commonly turns out to mean recruitment into the offices and doctrines of the techno-bureaucratic order. (One thinks of the sinister evolution of the once honorable word “workshop.”)
Against the metaphysics of tyranny, the reactionary upholds a religious view of ultimate reality. (In this context “religion” is meant in an etymological sense distinct from its application to specific institutions or to the specific content of Revelation. My discussion draws on the treatment of personal fidelity and “disposability” by Gabriel Marcel and that of “religation” by Xavier Zubiri.) According to this view, reality owes its coherence and its articulation to obligation; or binding, between persons. Human beings are bound both vertically, to the source of their existence, and horizontally, to each other. These relationships occur in specifically personal forms such as love or loyalty, or, for that matter, other personal forms such as hate or resentment. This holds with respect both to the Somebody to Whom we owe our existence and with respect to the others with whom we share the given world. Our understanding of other human beings mirrors the image we have of the source of our existence. Even those who see God and man as things, or as nothings, are themselves bound as persons to an ultimate reality and to other human beings. Either their views are merely speculative and they nevertheless live according to a religion of personal fidelity, or they learn to practice the religion of their philosophy and enact the story of personal extinction. To be a person means to be open to the different forms of personal relation, and to find oneself in a field of obligations and loyalties. We can attempt to alter the particulars, or modify the scope, but obligation itself is inescapable. The “idiot,” the closed soul, lives on the spiritual capital accumulated by others.
Our world receives its articulation from the light cast by personal engagements and loyalties. This is as true of the fields of, for instance, economic and scientific experience, as it is of the “personal” or “religious” spheres as understood in the stunted sense current in social criticism. Truth of any sort builds on the fundamental sense of “personal faithfulness.” When mutual obligations weaken and persons begin to live like closed, impermeable units, the world grows dim. As Guardini and others have noted, Franz Kafka stands as the premier storyteller of a world succumbing to impersonality and bureaucracy. Reaction, if you will, is the self-conscious awareness of the fundamental reality of personal obligation, or binding. This awareness accompanies a spiritual orientation that sees historical developments toward impersonality as the shadow, not the substance, of our lives. Disregarding the cynicism of those who regard history as the theater of necessity, the reactionary bases his outlook on the personal engagement of hope.
At the level of political thinking, the distinction between the impersonal and the personal recalls a major argument put forward by opponents of the French Revolution and of its legacy. That argument centered on a penetrating critique of what was seen as the “spirit of philosophy.” For the statesmen and thinkers of the party of order, the Enlightenment rationalism that claimed the mantle of philosophy stripped all customs and traditional institutions of their authority in order to substitute for them the illegitimate power of the revolutionary State. Joseph de Maistre lamented that “philosophy having corroded the cement binding man to man, there are no longer any moral ties.” The endangered alternative was understood as the spirit of religion. In a powerful formulation, Juan Donoso Cortés contrasted the internal control supplied by religion with the external control supplied by politics, warning that “when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises.” Nor ought we to forget Edmund Burke’s eloquent portrayals of the theoreticians who proposed to strangle Europe in the grip of abstract schemes that would replace the contingency of tradition with social arrangements flowing from logical necessity.
In our day, the “spirit of philosophy” and the reactionary resistance contend over what is discussed in fashionable quarters as the equation of the personal and the political. From such quarters issues the demand that the lives of individuals and families be analyzed in terms of power politics. Even more ominous is the almost inevitable corollary that those lives succumb to the same techniques that the State and allied power syndicates have perfected on a larger scale. (As but one example, note the techno-feminist reduction of human beings to “human resources” valued according to their economic function, a development foreseen by Chesterton.) The reactionary stands the fashionable equation of the personal and the political on its head. Instead of furthering the spread of politicization, reactionary political thinking encourages personalization, the reconstitution of power on the basis of personal responsibility. This emphasis replaces the bureaucratic formula of administrative consolidation and spiritual fragmentation with the combination of spiritual integration and administrative decentralization.
Cries of “irrationalism” and “anti-intellectualism” hardly explain traditional opposition to rationalist political experiments. Such charges sidestep the central question of whether political thinking is participant or abstract. Conservatives spurn rationalism because they sense that new meanings are best built up through organic growth within a tradition. At the living heart of tradition lies the experience of participation, of being a part of an order that endows words and deeds with meaning. The occasion for being reactionary in turn arises when one becomes conscious of that experience and that order, characteristically when they are endangered; reactionary hope emerges out of conservative despair. Reactionary thinking rests on the experience of self-consciousness and the aspiration to participation. Drawing on ways of thinking deeply embedded in the Western tradition, the reactionary strives to order the social and political world in the light of the personal and participant character of ultimate reality. (My understanding of participation draws especially on the treatment of that theme by Marcel and by Michael Polanyi, as well as on the work of Owen Barfield and John Lukacs. In his autobiography, Lukacs explains how he has come to think of himself as a reactionary; in one of his many masterful insights, he notes that “reactionaries are made, not born.” An insistence on the centrality of participation also lies at the root of Allen Tate’s essays setting out his “reactionary ideas” on literature and culture.)
“Participation” is meant here in an ontological sense that goes much deeper than the immediate, often political, sense in which the word is generally used. Participation characterizes all human existence, thinking, and utterance. To live, think, and talk as a human being means to be a part of the order of being and to be linked to the other parts of that order. Any purposive action, like any attempt at being understood, affirms that participation. Although we might seek to flee from it, whether frivolously or painstakingly, the experience of personal self-consciousness belies those philosophies and political theories that insist on the impersonal or “objective” character of our human predicaments and their “solutions.” Being as such is irreducibly personal and irreducibly diverse. Abstraction is a fugitive occupation; one always returns to the experience of being a person with obligations. No argument from mechanical causation or logical necessity can explain either the experience or the obligations. It can only explain them away.
The experience of participation reflects what Marcel calls the “ontological mystery,” which he in turn explains in terms of embodiment, or incarnate being, a theme that affirms the profoundest symbols of the Western philosophical and religious tradition. Our personal identity consists in a mysterious reciprocal relation between our selves and our bodies; we are irreducible to our bodies, yet inexplicable without them. It would be inaccurate to say either that we are our bodies or that we have them as possessions. We cannot step outside that relation, in order for instance to see if its exact workings function along either of the lines suggested above, without abstracting through our inquiries the very personal identity whose nature we are trying to observe. (Lukacs has illustrated how the realizations of modern science, of physics in particular, confirm this facet of participant thinking.) In this sense personal identity is a mystery that we live within, rather than a problem we can stand outside of in order to solve. The same abstract reason that yields such ample dividends in the solution of logical or technical problems, figures in personal life either as an irrelevance or as a fountain of distortions and simplifications. The usage of “mystery” as a synonym for meaninglessness or unintelligibility presumes that the only form of reason is the impersonal one that approaches its objects in the spirit of abstraction. Reactionary thinking aims instead to salvage and redeem the meaning won through personal, participant reason. It seeks out hard-won glimpses of inner realities rather than command of external, manipulable realities.
An awareness of participation has clear consequences for political thinking. Relativist and reductionist formulas traduce the conditions of personal existence and ultimately impugn the grounds for their own validity. The widespread propagation of such formulas compounds their inherent deficiencies. Reductionism, for example, has traversed the path from scientific detachment spoken in the third person (“Social forces cause . . .”), to disdainful invective spoken in the second person (“You’re only saying that because . . .”), to the proud assertion of irresponsibility spoken in the first person (“I, too, am a victim . . .”). Increasingly, official thought invites us to become the spectators and theorists of our own conduct. Yet in the conduct of life, as Burke explained in his critique of revolutionary rhetoric, it is disingenuous to argue from necessity. Necessity needs no help, indeed brooks no help. What is more important, any argument itself testifies to the presence of personal intelligence that transcends the mute workings of necessity. Participant political thinking affirms the centrality of persuasion and deliberation among rational, responsible beings; it is teleological, not causal, because our actions derive their deepest meaning from their ends; and it admits that political explanation carries a spiritual valence that helps to shape the world it describes, and therefore shares in responsibility for that world.
Consider the notorious oxymoron at the heart of deterministic thought. Whatever factors may figure as terms of explanation, any theory with a pretense of meaningfulness exempts itself from the scope of the reduction it imposes on the world at large. This is, if anything, most poignantly true of those theories, recurringly popular among the intelligentsia, that would deflect criticism by denying the reality of reason and of reasonable discourse. Abstraction from the field of rational meaning operates much like abstraction from the field of personal obligation. The operation can be performed, but only so long as those involved nourish themselves on the spiritual resources of a wider world constituted by precisely those two fields. (In a striking analogy, Miguel de Unamuno compared gnostic intellectuals who deny the reality of personal identity to intestinal parasites who might take it upon themselves to deny the reality of sight or hearing.)
Our political language suffers from a similar corruption effected by the spirit of abstraction. Consider the prevalence of the type of expression described by C. S. Lewis as the “methodological idiom.” Language of this sort plays on the transference of meaning between phenomena and the study or treatment of those phenomena. Liable to occur in any established trade, it is particularly overweening in the language of academics. (One could easily, for example, hear someone referred to as an “important figure in German history” only to realize that the speaker is referring, not to Bismarck or Adenauer, but to a professor at an American university.) Methodological idiom supplies the pathway through which a host of noxious neologisms have invaded our political discourse and, within the space of remarkably few years, begun to crowd out traditional moral and spiritual categories. Foremost among these invaders are expressions and formulas such as “social problems” and “social forces.” Through such expressions the mindset of mechanical explanation has come to color our understanding of ourselves as a community. In a development that comes as no surprise to a reactionary, the social engineers who set out to harness those forces and solve those problems come back repeatedly asking for more time and more money, more “programs.” The iatrogenic character of our “social problems” has become increasingly apparent to sensible observers. The interior, spiritual dimension of personal existence exacts its revenge upon attempts to manage human affairs as if people were closed units or carriers of impersonal forces. Undeterred, our managers have the temerity to identify the resultant anger and despair, not as the spiritual distresses they are, but as yet more “problems” requiring additional “programs.”
The connection between methodology and bureaucracy is far from accidental. Over half a century ago Zubiri diagnosed the bureaucratization of the intellect, the reduction of the republic of letters to an amalgam of self-referential disciplines with a gentleman’s agreement not to intrude on each other’s turf as each refined its terminology and amplified its techniques. The expansion of bureaucratic power requires a constant replenishing of the technical vocabulary presumed to explain our social and political life. The “findings” of social science likewise figure among the arcana of the techno-bureaucratic order. The impersonal “they” receives its paradigmatic use in the expression “they did a study,” which characteristically introduces the conclusion of some eager researchers that yet another facet of everyday life should be reorganized in order to benefit from professional expertise. Sophists are the rainmakers of tyranny.
Trend-setting theoreticians have pursued the bureaucratization of the intellect to its finale, suggesting that discourse may not be capable of referring to anything but itself. Leaving aside the oxymoron, note that this approach elevates academic opportunism to a theory of knowledge. When José Ortega y Gasset wrote that love is a text, he meant that it is a dramatic and creative engagement through which we enact our lives. When today’s scholar argues that love is a text, he is likely to mean that its significance lies in being a subject for journal articles. Consider the effects of propagating such methodolatry. The danger is not so much that language will cease to be a medium for the transmission of meaning; not even the new theoreticians seriously envision such a future. The danger lies more in the weakening of our capacity to hold the wielders of power accountable through intelligent public discourse. Someone who has lost faith in the ability of language to illuminate reality is ready prey for any tyrannical design.
The spread of methodological language calls for a redoubled insistence on the use of participant, ontological language. Reliance on such language is an important aspect of the reactionary’s scandalous vocation. Ontological language rests on the awareness that meaningful thought and speech imply our openness to, and our participation in, realities other and larger than ourselves. Having passed through the crucible of personal self-consciousness, such language, instead of implying a notional return to the participant language of those ensconced in an unproblematic tradition, represents a subsequent victory over the spirit of abstraction. (Barfield describes this victory as “final participation,” as distinguished from the “original participation” enjoyed before the rise of science and self-conscious theory.) In the case of moral and political language, such a recognition is especially pressing. In this sphere, we would do well to rely on an insight that goes back to Socrates’s critique of sophistry. The debunking of a term such as “justice” would make no sense unless that term described a real quality that can be traduced or denied within political life. The reduction of moral and political language to symbols referring only to the relations of power among their users confuses the corruption with the substance. However much we may subvert its purposes, language remains the medium of our link with reality and with each other.
Here reactionary thinking draws close to the spirit evoked by Thomas à Kempis when he warned against the temptation of being an “inquisitive philosopher who, considering the constellations of heaven, willfully forgets himself,” and told his readers that he would rather feel compunction in his heart for his sins than know the definition of compunction. True knowledge is personal knowledge, characterized by the inward appropriation of ideas. Opposing this insight stands the regnant emphasis on how our language reveals our “position” on things. This emphasis rewards the repetition of approved formulas (what Lukacs calls the “substitution of vocabulary for thought”). This emphasis finds its existential form in those ideologists convinced that their intellectual baggage enjoys diplomatic immunity. Consider the “humanitarians” who hold actual flesh-and-blood people in contempt, or the “egalitarians” who devote their own lives to craven status-mongering. Under the influence of this spiritual pathology, the avarice of ideas, virtue and distinction lie in the accumulation of fashionable opinions. When the reactionary challenges those opinions he does so not so much for the undeniable amusement it brings as for the sake of rehabilitating our public discourse, crippled as it is by slogans generated and disseminated through the bureaucracy of ideas.
The methodological cast of bureaucratic language reflects a rejection of metaphor in favor of the infinite regress of neologism. In the hands of skilled practitioners, neologism serves as a technology of ideas, the equivalent of techniques of advertising and planned obsolescence. In large part, the phenomena discussed under the label “political correctness” indicate attempts by bureaucrats and intellectuals to keep abreast of the stream of neologisms. For those susceptible to such techniques, proper moral and political terminology changes at a pace akin on the one hand to that of developments in mass consumption, and akin on the other hand to that of methodological innovation in an academic discipline. As in those other areas of endeavor, status rests on being “at the cutting edge.” One would not dare be seen sporting yesterday’s paradigms. Each new accession of an “issue” leads to the demand that we demonstrate our “commitment.” Not coincidentally, the desired commitment invariably involves swelling the bureaucratic class and its power over our lives.
The spirit of neologism is perhaps best illustrated when it fastens on a word in common use. Note the recent career of the word “diversity.” This term denotes a key conservative theme. As is pointed out by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in writings including his classic Leftism (1974), a devotion to diversity arguably distinguishes the right from the left. The elements of this devotion are many; consider, for example, respect for regional traditions, the insistence that human beings are not interchangeable, the tendency to think in terms of distinct persons rather than large classes of people, support for various institutions that shield individuals from the State, as well as the related belief in decentralization. We are now expected to restrict the term to one explicit, technical meaning, one that refers to a specific demographic distribution. Not surprisingly, the new usage is explained and enforced by a phalanx of experts. Note also that, in a characteristic tour de force, the term is now compatible not only with intellectual conformism but also with the pursuit of economic and political integration on a global scale.
The spirit of neologism also accounts for the notorious opacity of methodological language. Technical terms carry literal, stipulated meanings anchored in the presuppositions of the science or ideology that makes use of them. The opacity of technical terms lies not in their difficulty, but in the fact that one cannot, as it were, see through such terms to call on the kind of associations and implications that characterize the vernacular language. Steeped as they are in idiomatic tradition, populists and traditionalists are often perplexed by the strident insistence of “issue activists” that the population undergo “education” as the answer to “social problems,” even when it does not seem that formal instruction could add much to common sense about the matter in question. We must remember that such programs of education are designed not primarily as additions to our stock of knowledge but as initiations into the premises and terminology of social engineering. (As one listens to the way in which activists intone the word “education,” it becomes apparent that this once noble word has itself undergone a contraction even more egregious than the one that limits it to institutionalized, certified schooling.) Taken seriously enough, such new idioms entirely cut off their users from inherited wisdom and reflection.
Spurning neologism, participant language relies instead on metaphor. Metaphor requires initiation, not into a method, but into a culture and into a sense of idiomatic tradition. The ebb and flow of metaphors reflect the shaping force of what Barfield has discussed as “speaker’s meaning,” which builds on but alters the literal, stipulated meaning of words. Speaker’s meaning is the source of nuance, of poetry, and of wit. Tradition allows and encourages a degree of personal inflection unacceptable to the technocrats of ideas, who yearn for interchangeable people holding interchangeable opinions. For that reason, technocrats strive to replace traditional usages with a vocabulary presumed to express an unmediated apprehension of social reality. In this fashion, moral and political phenomena are redefined as technical problems in fields ranging from medicine to fiscal policy. Yet attempts to do without metaphor mask their own poetic diction. Anyone who believes that a term such as “codependency” has a hard, literal meaning missing from a phrase like “no man is an island” is truly lost in the mists of theory.
The acceptance of technical terms as merely literal reflections of reality forecloses any consideration of the metaphysical postulates and political designs that have gone into the making of such terms. Consider the increasingly prevalent treatment of the concept “equality” as a literalism referring to an aggregate, demographically proportioned distribution of political power and of economic roles and rewards. (Here, the mathematical reduction seems to be a danger built into the concept itself, as von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Marcel have argued and as Tocqueville warned so eloquently.) Again we confront a key term defined so as to foreclose consideration of the manner and quality of power and of economic roles. Taken seriously, technocratic politics conjures up the Kafkaesque experience of the world as a place of “outsides with no inside to them” (Barfield’s description of the mechanical worldview).
Yet, to cite one of Chesterton’s classic paradoxes, the inside is larger than the outside. Few propositions come closer to expressing the core of reactionary thinking. The spiritual dimension of life holds more significance, and ultimately more power, than those facets of life described from the outside in objective or mechanical language. Hence the reactionary holds what one could call a sacramental attitude toward the given elements of life, which he sees as occasions for testifying to the obligations of human agency. Foremost among those obligations are the redemption of time through tradition and the transformation of space into place, or location. Both constitute perennial human engagements designed to cast the world in the form of an ethical community rather than that of a field for the workings of necessity. Deracination, the attempt to live outside tradition and outside location, draws its inspiration from the desire to replace obligations with choices, yet it issues in submission to impersonal forces.
Tradition anchors our experience of time in memory, and projects it into the future through hope. Its inner logic is dramatic rather than dialectical, something explicated through narration rather than through demonstration or analysis. The principle of tradition seems backward and irrational only from the imagined perspective of impersonal, disembodied reason. The dramatic structure of history, its character as a tableau of stories, reflects our existence as embodied spirits. We are unavoidably immersed in the succession of events yet also capable of, and given to, abstracting our self-consciousness, our thoughts, and our hopes from that stream. Human beings experience neither the immersion nor the abstraction to the exclusion of the other, which is why they experience life as a drama; personal life is self-conscious but not self-sufficient. “Traditional” is scarcely an appropriate term for static societies that have a diminished sense of time and of personal existence. As an active engagement, a sense suggested by its etymology, tradition implies a participant understanding of personal identity. The field of obligation and the field of meaning extend into the past and into the future. The transmission of culture sustains our awareness of those relations.
The propaganda of “social change” builds instead on an impersonal conception of time as mere succession. Such a conception reflects the deterministic errors so aptly pointed out by Henri Bergson. Progressivist time is dead; it consists of discrete moments that cannot react upon each other and instead run a necessary course visible to observers. This view in effect reduces time to space, and then explains all movement (“change”) in terms of mechanical causation. In a world envisioned in this way, there is no room, for instance, for memory or hope, the human activities that allow past, present, and future to shape and enrich each other. Tocqueville pointed out the political implications of this mechanical conception of time through his discussion of democratic historianship, a discussion amplified and updated in Lukacs’s writings. Once the doctrine of necessity takes hold of the public mind, the Frenchman warned, free citizens would be enervated into submission. Historians of general causes teach men to obey. Aggregate movements are presented as impersonal processes, only to wind up as idols, as hollow abstractions presumed to govern our lives. In our day, we see a blatant manifestation of this spirit in administrative boosterism, whose slogans are forever masking the march of bureaucracy in florid asseverations of the need to adapt to exciting new historical trends.
Against the lure of historical necessity, the reactionary looks to duration, to lived, human time. From this perspective, “progress” is a spiritual phenomenon, in the sense that Bunyan wrote of progress. Human time takes the form of a journey, a pilgrimage. The journey is shot through with contingency; the pilgrim may get lost, be misguided or delayed or ambushed, may even go backwards (at times because, having strayed or having neglected something, he ought to). We participate in our destiny through the media of hope and despair. Life has a plot that continuously calls on us to assume responsibility for our actions and for the spiritual orientation that supplies the shaping power of what we want to believe. The refusal to acknowledge human beings as pilgrims explains the hierarchical cast of most contemporary egalitarian movements and ideologies. These generally embrace a historicized version of the rationalist distinction between the few and the vulgar. In this view, the many are weighted down by ostensibly temporary forms of false consciousness. For the time being, the division persists between the few who recognize the workings of necessity and the many who suffer delusions of free agency. At some point in the future, after sufficient education and reconstruction, the life of freedom and responsibility may commence. Meanwhile, we are put under the tutelage of a mandarinate licensed to tell us what’s what. Reactionaries tend to believe, on the other hand, that the moral journey is now, that we should not wait for relief from our burdens. In opposing the proffered postponement of personal responsibility, reactionary thinking affirms one of the most powerful “populist” sentiments. Moral agency is not so much the goal as the way; our obligations would cease to have meaning if we could perform them without hindrance or temptation.
Reactionaries tend to believe that the moral journey is now, that we should not wait for relief from our burdens.
Localism, cultural as well as political, complements the understanding of time as a moral journey fraught with significance and contingency. Rationalist political thought and the social engineering it inspires feed on a hostility to what progressives see as the accidental, arbitrary constituents of a human life. Foremost among those constituents are the identities and loyalties generated by local attachments. Far more is at stake here than the admittedly important debate over federalism. Reactionary localism points to a first principle, the same theme of embodiment that underlies the dramatic structure of human history. No embodied existence, not even that of the most abstracted theoretician, can dispense with the categories of here and there. Even under the most dire conditions of cultural decline and confusion, much of a person’s identity hinges on his location and on his ties to those he finds there. Local patriotism works to transform location from more of an external, spatial factor to something experienced as a source of meaning and significance. Viewed as human situations, locations are no more interchangeable than are persons or their biographies. The reactionary seeks to redeem the looming indifference of space through the building of homes and communities that mirror the articulated, obligation-laden character of ultimate reality.
From the techno-bureaucratic perspective, all the world’s places together comprise one undifferentiated mass of space, flecked with recalcitrant spots pretending to distinct identities. The inhabitants of this universal space figure less as human beings than as human resources, interchangeable units of labor ever more tightly girded in the mesh of national and international markets. Much of the sentiment derided as “protectionism” expresses a dissent from this reduction of human nature, a dissent not stilled by discussions of the shifts and compensations effected by the macroeconomic mechanism. The managers of the mechanism do a delicate dance with their egalitarian partners, as the demand for an equal distribution of offices and rewards rubs against the bottom line. Neither wing of the new world order pays much attention to those mossbacks who would call into question their enterprise as a whole by insisting on the integrity of local communities and on the priority of personal ties over functional roles.
Local loyalties run afoul of centralizing technocrats and leveling radicals for the same underlying reason. Both groups regard the various human associations that arise organically as impediments to the comprehensive reconstitution of our lives. As students of tyranny have long recognized, such associations, when intact, endow persons with qualities that make them resistant to the orchestration of their lives. Confirming Richard Weaver’s apprehension, even the enjoyment of friendship has come under attack as arbitrary. We are increasingly encouraged to rely for sustenance on “support groups” and “mentoring” conducted under professional auspices. Reactionaries insist that such arrangements be debated on their merits, not on the basis of the “social changes” presumed to necessitate them. As to policies and institutions, the reactionary posture incorporates suspicion, what the founding fathers would have called “republican jealousy.” Reactionaries are thoroughly skeptical of the bureaucratic claim that we have no alternative to centralization and regimentation. On the level of the spirit, the reactionary posture incorporates a scandalous hope. Perhaps we can turn back the clock; perhaps uprooting can be undone; perhaps families, neighborhoods, friendships—the persons and places that matter—can rise from the ashes of dislocation and mistrust.
As an alternative to the consolidation of impersonal power, the reactionary returns to the principle of authority. Authority humanizes power and makes it personally meaningful and personally accountable. Much as tradition redeems time and location redeems space, authority redeems power. Power without authority works as a mechanical force. As Guardini argued, we who live at the end of modernity face the decisive challenge of curbing autonomous power and recasting it in the light of personal responsibility. Authority and responsibility intertwine inextricably; authority resides in persons or bodies of persons who can answer for their actions. Power wielded in and by the techno-bureaucratic order functions precisely through its lack of authority. Its impersonality at once protects it from its subjects and justifies it in the eyes of its adherents. Tocqueville foresaw the proliferation of this kind of power and, keenly aware of how its faceless and efficient character distinguished it from classical models of tyranny, termed it “democratic despotism”; in the twentieth century, James Burnham and later observers have charted the course of “managerial” power and its method of handling persons as one might handle trained animals or other resources.
Reactionaries tackle the crisis of authority on three levels: the personal, the literary, and the political. In each case, bureaucratic institutions, private as well as public, do their best to shape a world in which authority gives way to impersonal forces. At the same time, each case feeds on theories and idioms emerging from the bureaucracy of ideas. A review of the three levels of the crisis will shed some light on the reactionary enterprise of reinvigorating authority.
Every man is the author of his own actions. In that sense, each of us exercises what we could call personal authority. Personal responsibility hinges on personal authority; the former makes no sense without the latter. The current attack on the principle of authority is not directed at the overlords generally identified with “authoritarianism.” The attack begins closer to home, as more and more persons, inspired by the propaganda of determinism and sustained by the engines of therapy and pharmacology, disavow authorship of their own actions. Our culture displays an increasingly clear split between those who would extend the scope of personal responsibility and those who would diminish it. The reactionary stands firm with those who would uphold the principle of personal responsibility. Reactionary thinking does not deny the reality of impersonal forces that may work on our bodies and on our minds. Instead, what is at stake is the existence of a nucleus of personal identity and responsibility that is irreducible to those forces. Nor does the reactionary deny the crippling power of anger and despair, spiritual themes prominent in the stories of our lives. The line is drawn elsewhere, at the elevation of personal irresponsibility into a principle that one seeks to justify. Reactionary criticism is obliged to expose, and even lampoon, the spiritual oxymoron of reductionism voiced in the first person. Only those who acknowledge authority over their actions can work to curb irresponsible power.
Note the controversy over literary authorship. At the most advanced fringes of academia the notion has got about that authors, strictly speaking, do not exist; they have been deconstructed along with their texts. Once again, we see bureaucrats profiteering in the void left by the eclipse of authority. The death of personal authority builds the business of treatment industries; the death of the author builds the business of the critic, now presented with unlimited opportunities for speculation. Books become matter for dissection, and for the virtuosity of artful manipulation; what suffers is their potential for transforming and enhancing the vision of the reader. The bureaucracy of ideas, here as elsewhere, repeats and inculcates formulas that corrode the sense of personal identity and prepare the way for a more general consolidation of bureaucratic, managerial power. Deconstruction of personal identity effects the mining and sapping required in order to supply ready material for projects of social engineering.
The reactionary approach to political authority builds on the traditional conservative view of political power, a view simultaneously realistic and hopeful. Consider Burke’s observation: “A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.” Burke was well aware that the history of governments is a sad tale full of fraud and force. He also saw, as have most conservatives, that power is an enduring reality in political society and an enduring temptation to those who wield it. From this perspective, the government of men defies reduction to the administration of things. The challenge posed by power is whether it can be experienced as authority and not as force, whether, in other words, it can be redeemed through personal obligation.
“Progressive” thought has succumbed to different variants of a monistic view of power (reflecting what More discussed as the “Demon of the Absolute”). The revolutionary left rested in the belief that in the future relations of power would be completely transcended. The story of Marxist regimes has made this position increasingly untenable, though the power of such nostrums to persist should never be underestimated. The main current of today’s progressive thought proposes a cynicism as thoroughgoing in its way as the discredited utopianism. We are now asked to adjust ourselves to a world whose ultimate reality is inescapably constituted by relations of power, a world in which the joys and burdens of personal existence are reduced to manifestations of those relations. We are used to identifying this view with those who invoke the demonology of oppression, but it also informs the theory that sees the end of history in a global technocratic regime. (Perhaps we could speak of “Left Nietzscheans” and “Right Nietzscheans.”) Against both variants of the metaphysics of power, the reactionary puts forward the principle of authority derived from the metaphysics of personal obligation. We cannot escape relations of power, but they can and must be transfigured by mutual loyalties and personal accountability. Authority marks the transmutation of necessity into obligation. To the extent that the reactionary can be distinguished from the traditional conservative, the difference may lie in the reactionary belief that the “unbought grace of life” did not die with the Old Regime, but instead represents a perennial human possibility. The counterrevolution cherishes personal loyalty and insists on personal responsibility, though these spiritual values may conflict with every known institutional imperative; and it works to replace unilateral, bureaucratic power with power of a personal scale and constitution, disregarding the cynicism of those pawned to the techno-bureaucratic order.
The distinction between power and authority reflects the mystery of personal identity. The prevalence of impersonal power indicates that fundamental human realities have been “problematized” so that they appear to us as phenomena whose impersonal workings we can trace. The theoreticians and managers of impersonal forces will reply that they are simply dealing with observable realities that just happen to be so, regardless of our wishes. Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. (“Not to laugh, not to weep, neither to denounce, but to understand.” Spinoza’s motto captures the dominant mood of technocratic politics.) Yet the reactionary knows that all human phenomena reflect the mysterious quality at the heart of personal identity. The inside is larger than the outside. The reactionary also knows that those, small or great, who claim to be merely the pristine vessels of impersonal forces in fact harbor the souls of tyrants. We must recognize power exercised outside the field of mutual personal obligations as the usurpation that it is.
Being reactionary entails care for the spiritual realities that integrate and illuminate our common world. The integrity of language, the mutual obligation of personal ties, the cultivation of place, the insistence on personal responsibility for power: all testify to the fundamental reality of personal identity. The reactionary vocation lies in the reclamation of these projects, even and especially if the constitution of the social and political world threatens to make them obsolete. Though the faith in recovery may seem a scandalous and quixotic dream, the reactionary knows the work is worth the effort.
Rein Staal is a professor of political philosophy at William Jewell College.
