The New Inquiry Symposium: Conservative Thought

Find outlined below key areas of inquiry on conservative thought. These

suggestions were inspired by our salon, but your response need not be grounded
in the readings we cite (see our invitation to contribute). You may answer one or
many questions directly, combine topic areas into a single answer, or go beyond
the prompt to explore whatever interests you most about conservatism.

Your response may be as long or as short as it needs to be, though we find pieces
between 1,000 and 3,500 words to be most effective.

We will accept pieces previously published elsewhere, provided we are legally

permitted to reprint them.

All submissions must be e-mailed to thenewinquiry@gmail.com by July 25.

Topic Areas & Questions

Reactionism: Is conservatism always and only a reaction to change,
resulting in a politics of shortsighted showdowns with foes of the moment,
or does it contain a positive and sustainable program?

Economics: Does free-market capitalism, which encourages change and

mobility, undermine conservative values?

Elitism: Burkean conservatism would have us defer authority and cultural

guardianship to an aristocracy, but it is unclear whether the defining
element of an American aristocracy would be money, fame, or prestige.
How are we to make sense of the anti-elitist and anti-establishment
sentiments that pervade conservative discourse today?

Religion: Conservatism founds its logic of a higher order on religious

conviction. God provides the benchmarks of extrinsic, absolute value. What
are the implications of this foundation in the Wests prevailingly secular
age?

Art & Culture: Is it the job of universities to protect high culture, even
though the distinctions between high and low cannot be rationally
defended? If the practice of preserving and fostering the creation of art is
essential to cultural guardianship, does it follow that it is incumbent upon
conservatives to engage in the study and support of the arts?

Sex & Gender: In embracing equality as a cardinal modern value, have we

failed to account for the continued utility of gender roles (whether or not
they are socially or biologically determined)?

The Future of Conservatism: If there is a future for the Right, what is it?!
The New Inquiry Symposium: Conservative Thought, is a single-issue
publication collecting diverse responses to questions about the social,
cultural, and political roots and manifestations of the conservative mind. In
the spirit of The New Inquiry, this symposium aims to advance a complex
understanding of conservatism by fostering public discussion outside the
university and beyond the political affiliations (implicit or explicit) of most
print journals.

The symposium will be published digitally as a PDF download on

thenewinquiry.com on October 1, 2010, and distributed to both
conservative and liberal institutions, publications, and individuals. We
intend to publish in print later this year.

We humbly invite you to consider contributing to this special initiative.

Thank you,
Rachel Rosenfelt, Sarah Leonard, Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Borkowski and Helena
Fitzgerald
Editors, The New Inquiry
tni@thenewinquiry.com
www.thenewinquiry.com

About The New Inquiry

Thinkers and writers of our generation face an unprecedented set of
cultural realities. The growing supply of career academics has flooded the
university job market, and 21st century technologies have thrown traditional
media into crisis. Although the future of higher education and print remains
obscure, these cultural sea changes have yielded one definite side effect:
an abundance of young writers and thinkers resolved to pursue a public
intellectual life for its own sakea pursuit ordered and enabled by Internet
technology.

The New Inquiry is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural
and public life by putting all available resourcesboth digital and
materialtoward the promotion and exploration of ideas.

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Introduction
Since 2008, The New Inquiry has hosted a number of public, topic-based
salons in New York City. Anchored in selected readings, our salons have
gained a reputation for cultivating vibrant, open discussions on a range of
cultural and intellectual themes. On March 6, 2010, The New Inquiry held a
public salon on Conservative Thought. The work of Mark Lilla, particularly
his recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Taking the Right
Seriously" made us question our assumptions about conservatism. Lilla
notes,

The unfortunate fact is that American academics have until recently

shown little curiosity about conservative ideas, even though those
ideas have utterly transformed American (and British) politics over
the past 30 years.

This lack of curiosity is not limited to the universityit is endemic in most

urban centers (such as our own New York City), where even the most open-
minded groups consider the notion of conservative thought a
contradiction in terms. The foreclosure of critical thinking fuels the familiar
logic Edmund Wilson describes: Knowing thisknowing, that is, that we
are rightwe may allow ourselves to exaggerate and simplify."

Thought is a high-stakes game when the consummation of political

commitment is action. To concede even the smallest intellectual ground to
the opposition (whoever they may be) can undermine the certitude activism
requires.

We evoke the words of Scott McLemee, who shows why the willingness to
take this risk defines the social utility of critical thought:

And so the strange fate of the intellectual is to be subjected to an

almost obligatory form of self-questioningthe very sources and
media of their power (words, symbols, ideas) turning back on them,
reflexively. Perhaps bankers and politicians, too, have moments of
doubt. Let us hope so. Still, money and power are not obliged to be
introspective or to challenge the conditions of their existence.
Critical intellect is.

It is in the spirit of critical intellect that The New Inquiry has chosen
conservatism as the topic for this special publication. The New Inquiry
Symposium: Conservative Thought is an attempt to bring together
minds from across disciplines, political affiliations, and cultural
sensibilities to engage with the theme of conservatism as a case study in
the life of an idea.

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Defining Conservative Thought
Because the term conservatism has meant many different things to
different people across time and space, we will try to clarify our sense of its
meaning.

For the purposes of this publication, we define conservatism less as a

political philosophy than an attitude toward history and culture. This
attitude is paradoxical, at once pessimistic and (broadly speaking)
Romantic. The conservative attitude rejects enlightened rationalism as
wishful fiction and egalitarianism as flattening navet, both bureaucratic
impositions that misconceive and repress human nature.

Conservative thought can be inherited as cultural tradition or animated by

a reaction to perceived problems in society. This reactive tendency means
that the political usage of the word conservatism is in perpetual motion, its
manifestations variable.

With this in mind, we have chosen not to anchor the symposium in a

specific historical context. Discovering the many faces of conservatism has
been one of the most exciting aspects of our inquiry. We welcome
participants to address whatever variant of political or cultural
conservatism interests them most.

The Conservative Thought Salon

At our salon March 6th salon, we discussed readings from a diverse group
of thinkers (not all of whom identify as conservative) to enable a wide-
ranging dialogue. These selections were:

! Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

! Hannah Arendt, "Total Domination" from The Origins of Totalitarianism
! Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
! C. Wright Mills, "The Conservative Mood"
! Allan Bloom, "The Failure of the University"
! Camille Paglia, Chapter 1 from Sexual Personae
! George Scialabba, "Dying of the Truth" from What Are Intellectuals
Good For?

For your interest, we have used quotations from each text to draw a
discursive thread through our selections. We offer these interpretations not
as guidelines, but as examples of the diversity of possible approaches to
conservative thought, broadly conceived.

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind

Russell Kirk anchors the discussion with six canons of conservative
thought, summarized here as:

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 1. Respect for the irrational and unknown in a cultural attitude largely
beholden to scientific and rational thought, as well as a strong moral
sensibility.
2. Human beings are products of a natural order that is hierarchical.
The fervent insistence of liberal ideologies that 'all men are created
equal' is a dishonest and ultimately ineffective way to approach the
problems of society that continually arise from the diversity and
mystery of humanity.
3. The inevitability of societys orders and classes. The utopian ideal of
total equality and obsolete social hierarchy is not possible. We are
animals, and every animal in nature, including man, devises
hierarchical divisions of labor and purpose to maintain harmony.
4. Belief in the importance of private property. Equality of economic
conditions cannot be achieved in a society that is hierarchical. The
problems that have arisen from industrialization are not ameliorated
by the abolition of private property.
5. Respect for tradition. Rational thought, logic, and specificity of
design in social progress professed by the liberal tradition do not
account for the anarchic and lustful nature of man, who remains
hungry for power at all costs unless he is checked by long standing
institutions.
6. Conservation of the social and political foundations of Western
society. Revision and evolution of custom are not anathema to the
conservative mind, but they are to be approached with caution.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil!

[T]he LEVELLERS, these wrongly named "free spirits"--as
glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and
its "modern ideas" all of them men without solitude, without personal
solitudethey are not free, and are ludicrously superficial,
especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost
ALL human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has
hitherto existeda notion which happily inverts the truth entirely!
What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal,
green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety,
comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two most
frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called "Equality of
Rights" and "Sympathy with All Sufferers"--and suffering itself is
looked upon by them as something which must be DONE AWAY
WITH. We opposite ones, howeverwe believe that severity,
violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy,
stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,--that everything
wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man,
serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its
opposite

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Hannah Arendt, "Total Domination"
The curious logicality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in
the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific,
varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian
contempt for reality and factualityNothing matters but
consistency.
What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the
transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing
transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature
itself.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous
idealsSexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We
are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another
will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first
Sexuality is a murky realm of contradiction and ambivalence.
It cannot always be understood by social models, which feminism,
as an heir of nineteenth-century utiliarianism, insists on imposing on
it. Mystification will always remain the disorderly companion of love
and art. Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and
imagination around sex. It cannot be fixed by codes of social or
moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For
natures fascism is greater than that of any society.
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George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For?, "Dying of the
Truth"
Classical and Christian morality was based on the concept of
telos, which means variously goal, purpose, perfection, or
essential nature.Then it was discovered (perhaps the founding
discovery of the modern era) that science could only be done by
dispensing with the idea of essential natures. In the riot of
liberation, teleological reasoning was banished from theas yet only
putativehuman sciences. And that, according to MacIntyre, was
our cardinal mistake.... There is no God, in other words, and no
telos.
Is everything permitted, then? ask Kolakowski and
MacIntyre, anxiously. Yes indeed, replies Rorty. We must grow up
or go under. Our cultures childhood is at an end.
Art and nothing but art, wrote Nietzsche. We have art in
order not to die of the truth. How not to die of the truth is what
both Kolakowski and MacIntyre are asking
!
Allan Bloom, "The Failure of the University"
In the last years we have witnessed the failure of the
university. It has become incorporated into the system of ideas and
goals of the society around itPhilosophy and liberal studies, in

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 general, require the most careful attention to what are frequently
called the great books
Hardly any thought of the past has any continuing public
significance in our country, so that if the universities were to act as
the preservers of the tradition, they would have to resist the tide,
insist on studies which go against the grain, appear to be troglodytic
and irrelevant.

C. Wright Mills, "The Conservative Mood"

The intellectual core of the groping for conservatism is a giving
up of the central goal of the secular impulse in the West: the control
through reason of man's fate[Yet] tradition is something you cannot
create. You can only uphold it when it exists. And now there is no
spell of unbroken tradition upon which modern society is or can be
steadily based. Accordingly, the conservative cannot confuse
greatness with mere duration, cannot decide the competition of
values by a mere endurance contest.
American conservatives have not set forth any conservative
ideology. They are conservative in mood and conservative in practice
but they have no conservative ideology. political decisions are
occurring, as it were, without benefit of political ideas; mind and
reality are two separate realms; America a conservative country
without any conservative ideologyappears before the world a naked
and arbitrary power.

We hope youll consider contributing to this initiative. Please see

accompanying submission guidelines to The New Inquiry Symposium:
Conservative Thought.

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