Friends, Radicals, Ideologues: Open Your Ears, and Your Minds

My article “Rad Trads and Rad Fems: Best Friends” seems to have been mistaken for a fusionist manifesto. While I appreciate the ongoing dialogue between my colleague Mr. John Goerke and myself, I think he may have missed my original point. This misunderstanding may be lack of explication on my part. I think, however, that it goes deeper; it cuts to the heart of an issue found in many movements, conservative, progressive, and otherwise. Namely, that of tribalism.

In my original article, I wrote:

“Are these women conservatives? Are they even correct on these issues? Not necessarily. But that isn’t what matters. What matters is breaking outside of our comfort zones to experience the other side; another side with a strange amount in common with contemporary conservatism. And, if not, there’s certainly much jargon to be learned.”

I think this paragraph makes my intention quite clear. In no way did I marry bell hooks to T.S. Eliot, and neither did I smash patriarchy with the hammer of tradition. I did, however, attempt to draw out strange similarities between incredibly disparate groups. Such agreements imply the ability to take from, study, and (perhaps ultimately) refute one another. It doesn’t matter whether these radical feminists are right because that was never the question. The question was whether or not we conservatives can learn something from people with whom we share unexpected similarities. In a word, I was calling for openness to new ideas, which too often are dismissed by us all with the graciousness and intellectual rigor of Facebook meme-posting.

I’ve written against such mental rigidity before and I guess it’s part of the human condition. Let me be clear then: I am not accusing any particular person of such behavior. In a sense, we’re all guilty of it. As I’ve put it previously:

“While Richard Weaver, F.A. Hayek, and G.K. Chesterton are all valuable thinkers who should form part of the backbone of conservative thought, there is no reason conservatives cannot turn to people like Derrida, Foucault, and Nietzsche. Just because one does not agree with a specific thinker does not make him useless. Things have changed since the past and while the past is valuable, the lessons of the present must be confronted and understood. We no longer live in 1500. And that’s coming from someone who sometimes wishes he did.”

Max Weber’s writings on Capitalism and Protestantism played a role in my transformation from libertarian to Red Tory. Nietzsche, in part, led me to conversion. Mary Daly’s unbridled misandry pushed me to a deeper and fuller understanding of how to resist and qualify contemporary notions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Am I supposed to wait until Daly and Derrida are covered by the dust and cobwebs of time, having become nothing but names safely locked away in books? Is reading them a sin against conservatism? Au contraire. They are, perhaps, the hope of a resurgent conservatism as it debates a foreign world.

And so, I apologize to Mr. Goerke for not being clearer. My original article was intended to publicize names that may be unfamiliar to my (at this point perhaps very few) readers as well as to argue for the need for more openness within our movement. To paraphrase one of my idols (and from the margins!), George Grant: we face the problem of a post-Christian, consumeristic world precisely because the old systems have failed to connect with people, their lives, and their passions in some meaningful way.

Does that mean the old systems are failures? Not in the least. I wouldn’t be a conservative if I thought that. I do, however, believe in the powers of renewal, re-articulation, and re-assessment. We’d do well to start there.