T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

“Where in the World Are We Going?”

April 2, 2006
The Sheraton Society Hill
Philadelphia

Instead of looking forward as enjoined, I will be looking backward.  I want to talk about the apparently contradictory presuppositions of the modern Conservative movement.  This meeting has intentionally highlighted our differences.  The best sessions of the Philadelphia Society always do precisely that. 

The Philadelphia Society was the brainchild of that remarkable man, Don Lipsett--who was also a longtime Midwestern director of ISI. In some ways, the Philadelphia Society was conceived as a home for ISI students who had the misfortune to have become grown ups. Don Lipsett and the other founders of the Society--Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Gerhart Niemeyer, Fr. Stanley Parry, and M. Stanton Evans among them--set down before the first meeting a mission statement that has stood the test of time: 

“The purposes of this Society shall be: To sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundations of a free and ordered society and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions. We shall seek understanding, not conformity.” 

As we have seen this weekend, we have certainly been successful at avoiding conformity. I mean that seriously. The Philadelphia Society has flourished best when--as any conservative institution must--it has kept faith with its founding vision, and with its tradition. And the same is true, I believe, of our movement, the conservative movement. 

Reflect for a moment on a fact that is too often overlooked: which is that our movement is known as “the conservative movement.” It might not have been so. ISI itself was originally the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and the New Individualist Review at the University of Chicago was an early intellectual fruit of the awakening conservative movement. But we will not be known to history as “the individualist movement.” Similarly, “traditionalism” was a strong current throughout the past fifty years of conservative thought and activism: yet we are not the traditionalist movement. Nor indeed are we the “classical liberal” or “libertarian” movement, though those elements have from the first been pillars of what it means to be an American conservative.  No, as a movement, we are not Strausian or Vogelinian, Paleo or Neo, European Reactionary or American Exceptionalist. 

We are the conservative movement: our identity as a whole is broader, more capacious--and in a certain sense truer--than any of our hyphenated sub-identities. I think that means something; it captures a truth about what conservatism really is.  It is historical fact that as a political movement conservatism has been non-ideological.  The man who gave modern American conservatism its name would go farther.  Russell Kirk, described conservatism as the “negation of ideology”--or, as he told me once while we were walking the hills of Scotland together, as the disposition of “openness to reality.”

Because conservatism is the politics of reality, it treats with general truths about human persons, human society, and the common good--truths known from experience. The procrustean bed of ideological reductionism and the exacting purity of litmus tests is the very opposite of the conservative disposition. In being open to the whole rambling totality of experienced reality, conservatism is open, as well, to new experience. There is thus a kind of “aggregation” intrinsic to genuine conservatism--or, dare we say it, a kind of “fusionism.” Each tendency within the conservative movement, taken on its own, may be in peril of falling into ideology--mistaking partial truths for the whole truth. But taken together, conservatism captures more of the whole truth about politics and the common good.

There is also a quite practical advantage to conservatism’s habitual appeal to broad, general truths. By proceeding in such a non-ideological way, conservatism, politically, naturally attracts to itself a wide array of men and women of good will who can recognize within conservatism something genuinely relevant to their own various teleological concerns. It is a paradox, but it is true: we are true believers in a conservatism that has room for far more than only the true believers. In this time of often quite intense debate among conservatives, it is well to remember this.           

In The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, George Nash identified three main tendencies within the movement: libertarians, anti-communists, and traditionalists. Consider for a moment how acute the disagreements among these elements of the movement were:

From the point of view of the Libertarians:

• Traditionalists were nothing but coercive collectivists, intent on legislating morality;
• while Anti-Communists were calling America to a worldwide crusade which could only lead to the aggrandizement of state power: for was not war “the health of the state”?

From the point of view of the Anti-Communists

• the Libertarian devotion to individualism in point of fact hastened the appearance of the Mass Man--for the vast majority of men were simply not equipped to flourish when freed from traditional authorities and social bonds: the disoriented Mass Man, in turn, became easy prey for the totalitarian temptation;
• Traditionalists on the other hand were so parochial and inward-looking that they were insufficiently alarmed at the threat of Communism; they were too given to an isolationism that would cede the globe to Communist oppression.

From the point of view of the Traditionalists

• the Cold War that the Anti-Communists proffered was sure to  “mobilize” society, and a mobilized society is quite the opposite of a traditional society;
• and the Libertarians seemed little more than libertine immoralists--and ideologues to boot.

Whenever we despair of the conservative movement on account of its intramural factiousness, it behooves us to recall just how intense were the earlier disputes through which our movement was forged. Was the conservative movement then nothing but a “shotgun marriage” in the face of the Communist threat? Was “fusionism” just a word to paper over irreconcilable differences? No. For consider also the subtle and intricate connections and areas of agreement among the same three groups:

For Libertarians,

·         their central thinker was Albert Jay Nock: and he insisted that true liberty is something demanding, hard, in fact it is only really possible for those who have undergone an intense cultivation in high culture and Great Books: in other words, they shared something very important with the Traditionalists.

·         Moreover, the Libertarians could certainly affirm that the Anti-Communists were exactly right that Communism represented an extreme violation of the liberty of the individual and so must be resisted.

For the Anti-Communists,

·        the Libertarians were certainly correct in their fear that “it can happen here”: domestic communism was indeed a genuine threat, not a chimera, and we might well be on the “road to serfdom.”

·        What’s more, the Traditionalists were right in their critique of Mass Society, for the emergence of the Mass Man was indeed the enabling condition for totalitarianism; the Traditionalists were also right when they contended that a flourishing civil society, richly settled in tradition, was the best possible domestic defense against the totalitarian temptation. 

For the Traditionalists,

·         the Libertarians were right that freedom was, if not The, than at least A key element of the Western tradition; the free society is a Western achievement to be celebrated--and defended.

·         And the Anti-Communists were right in their distinction between ideological totalitarianism and traditional authority; they were also right (at least, Whittaker Chambers was) that Communism’s deepest error lay in its atheism.      

This, then, is our history as conservatives--and as members of the Philadelphia Society. In our commitment to a common conversation among the strands of conservatism, we have opened ourselves to be challenged by the insights of each other. In doing so, I think we have all grown in understanding in ways that we could not have foretold. And think what we have accomplished together: we have faced down the bloodiest tyranny the world has ever known; we have transformed a nation suffering from Jimmy Carter’s malaise and stagnation into one of the most dynamic economies on earth; we have so routed the Left at the level of ideas that it can no longer speak in the language of socialism but must mask its aims with euphemisms; and we have encouraged and profited from a Great Awakening that has burnished America’s reputation as the most religious society in the advanced industrial world.

There is no reason why the new disagreements we encounter today must lead to a conservative “crack-up.”  Surely our work is not done. We must secure our country from the threat of Islamist terrorism; we must repulse the vulgarian assault on high culture; we must arrest and reverse the decline of morals; and--alas--we conservatives must relearn our own lessons about the imperative need for limited government. My answer to the question, then, of “Where in the World Are We Going?” is merely this: we must make that journey together--as we always have.