CONSERVATIVE

“the body in its entirety would become … an instrument
of pleasure”. The sexual liberation Marcuse hailed
was not a fecund liberation. As in Brave New World,
children do not enter into the equation. The issue is
pleasure, not progeny. Marcuse speaks glowingly of “a
resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality” that
“protests against the repressive order of procreative
sexuality”. A look at the alarmingly low birth rates of
most affluent nations today suggests that the protest
has been effective.
When Tocqueville warned about the peculiar
form of despotism that threatened democracy, he noted
that instead of tyrannizing men, as past despotisms had
done, it tended to infantilize them, keeping “them fixed
irrevocably in childhood”. What Tocqueville warned
about, Marcuse celebrated, extolling the benefits
of returning to a state of what he called “primary
narcissism”. What Marcuse encouraged, in other
words, is solipsism, not as a philosophical principle but
as a moral indulgence, a way of life. I note in passing
that Marcuse was a college professor: How proud he
would be of those contemporary universities which
have, partly under his influence, become factories for
the maintenance of infantilizing narcissism.
A couple of concluding observations: In Notes
towards a Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot observed that
“culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately
aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less
harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake”.
“For its own sake”. That is one simple idea that is
everywhere imperilled today. When we plant a garden,
it is bootless to strive directly for camellias. They are
the natural product of our care, nurture, and time. We
can manage that when it comes to agriculture. When
we turn our hands to cultura animi, we seem to be
considerably less successful.
Let me end by noting that the opposite of
“conservative” is not “liberal” but ephemeral. Russell
Kirk once observed that he was conservative because
he was liberal, that is, committed to freedom. Kirk’s
formulation may sound paradoxical, but it touches on a
great truth. To be conservative: that means wanting to
conserve what is worth preserving from the ravages of
time and ideology, evil and stupidity, so that freedom
may thrive. In some plump eras the task is so easy we
can almost forget how necessary it is. At other times, the
enemies of civilization transform the task of preserving
of culture into a battle for survival. That, I believe—
and I say regretfully—is where we are today.
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion
and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. He is an art
critic for National Review and writes a regular column for PJ
Media. This article was originally delivered as a lecture at the
annual meeting of the Philadelphia Society on March 28, 2015.
It appears here with permission.
A Gothic view of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, England, on a blustery day.
TILLIEBEAN/CC BY-SA 3.0
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Summer 2015