Reply to Gottfried

Paul Gottfried has a couple of complaints about the piece on traditionalism I posted here recently. He says I’m not going to be able to raise the armies of social-moral rearmament I’ll need to reconstitute a traditionalist order, and also finds fault with a couple of negative comments I made (in the piece and elsewhere) about elitism.

On the first point, his chief complaint seems to be that what I say isn’t socially anchored and so lacks relevance to our situation today. In effect, he seems to be saying, I’m a utopian fantasist. The complaint misses the point of the essay. It’s not a campaign manifesto, but is intended as an analysis of what’s needed for a reasonably stable and coherent society adequate to normal human functioning and purposes. My claim is that formal institutions based on efficiency and rationality aren’t enough and can’t even be given a clearly leading role. Overriding loyalty to particular traditions that are somewhat opaque to instrumental reason and relate to goods understood as transcending human preferences is in fact a social necessity. Indeed, it’s necessary enough that a society that denies such things in a sufficiently radical way won’t last.

If that claim is correct then how many people accept it today is about as important as how many people in 1920 accepted Mises’ claim that socialist economies can’t work. Gottfried’s response, of course, is that “American society is succeeding as a material, military, and cultural enterprise while ignoring and even contributing to the crisis Jim considers to be all-pervasive.” So the issue between us from a pragmatic perspective is whether that success will last or not. I don’t think it will, for reasons touched on repeatedly here at VFR. The managerial liberal state is parasitic on a preceding traditional order that it roots out more and more aggressively. Professor Gottfried may believe, for example, that the EU will survive the combination of multiculturalist ideology, the abolition of all supports for normal family relationships, and the importation of masses of third-world workers to support masses of ethnically and religiously unrelated pensioners. I have my doubts.

As to “elitism,” I think he misunderstands me. Elites are universal, necessary and good. I do object to what I called “radical elitism,” that is, to elites that do not understand themselves as part of the same moral order as their people. Liberal elites, for example, demand equality and non-domination as the supreme moral imperatives for everyone else, but necessarily exempt themselves (otherwise they could not function as an elite). And certain conservatives — some Straussians and quite possibly others — view traditional religious and moral views as fictions justified only by the social benefit of having other people accept them. The latter view is quite different from the view, with which I agree, that people generally must accept some things on faith and in a popular form that a few members of an elite might accept in a more philosophical way.
Posted by Jim Kalb at February 15, 2003 10:45 AM | Send