Morality and the neocons

When it comes to questions of morality, the neoconservatives, at least in their earlier incarnation (that is, before their dramatic move leftward in recent years), were not exactly conservative, and not exactly liberal, but something else. This occurred to me during an e-mail exchange with Spencer Warren, who has written important articles about the destruction of standards in the popular culture and the neoconservatives’ acceptance of same.

He said:

Did I ever write you how my article explaining the philosophical/religious basis of the old Hollywood Production Code (drafted in 1930 mainly by a Jesuit, Fr. Daniel Lord) was rejected by Crisis, National Review, First Things, Commentary, New Criterion and the Weekly Standard? A shorter version was published in The Wanderer, but not posted on their website.

The Code was a self-censorship set of rules enforced by a special office set up by the Hollywood studios from 1934 until 1966, when it was replaced by the ratings system. The studios adopted it after pressure and a threatened boycott by the Catholic Legion of Decency in protest against increasingly suggestive and salacious movies.

I noted in my article how if humans are fallen beings, their base instincts need to be controlled to protect society. This was the rationale of the Code and censorship generally. The code of course was self-censorship. I also argued that on balance it made films better.

I replied:

You’ve led me to a new thought.

The neoconservatives are liberals in a specific sense that had not previously occurred to me.

A conservative or traditionalist believes that man is imperfect and flawed, that some higher principle must contain his expansive urges and help direct him toward the true good.

Liberals believe that man is naturally good. If social institutions with their inequalities and oppressions are put aside, man’s natural goodness will manifest itself.

Neocons are in between on this issue. They recognize that man has a bad and destructive side, BUT they think that this can be contained NATURALLY, without effort. They never want to believe that some higher truth is necessary to bring about order in this world.

Thus the neocons’, and particularly Commentary’s, main argument for the success of conservatism was that “the American people” supported Reagan. “The American people” were this natural font of wisdom and virtue. Nothing was necessary to make them wise and virtuous, they just were that way, and their support for Reagan was all that was needed to validate him. The problem is that, as a result of their reliance on the “American people” to validate whatever they, the neocons, believe in, if the “American people” voted against the neocons’ candidate, the neocons would tend to lose confidence in their former beliefs and go over to the other side.

Similarly, Commentary’s constant appeal to an assumed bourgeois way of being as their ethical framework. They never articulated this framework or explained its source. They just sort of implicitly appealed to it as this constant presence in their writings to show the nuttiness of the left and of modern America. It was just sort of understood that sane, bourgeois people like Midge and Norman didn’t do crazy things like what those leftists and counterculture types were doing.

So they didn’t have to appeal to a principle. They just appealed to some implicit authority contained in an attitude and way of being.

And that’s why they don’t seem particularly interested in the Hollywood Production Code. As you point out, the Code was based on religious and moral principles (coming from the Catholic Church no less) being asserted over and above the culture and over and above man’s uninstructed self. In short, it was a species of traditional morality. The neocons don’t believe in traditional morality. They believe in some kind of bourgeois morality that just happens by itself.

But a bourgeois morality that happens by itself and is not based on higher truth is a house built on sand. When David Brooks showed that bourgeois values of family and work could operate in complete harmony with leftist politics, a bohemian lifestyle, and regular visits to sado-masochism clubs, and when Francis Fukuyama complacently announced that there was no undoing the sexual revolution, which was just fine with him, and when Dinesh D’Souza expressed his approval of a guy in Starbucks with his face full of metal studs, the older neocons had no deeper resources to fall back on to resist this turn to the cultural left. Even though Irving Kristol had said in 1993 that the culture war was an even bigger war than the Cold War and would go on for lifetimes, the neocons rapidly gave up on the culture war in the late ’90s and early ’00s. After 9/11, John Podhoretz, son of Norman, was gloating over the fact that the war on terror had made the culture war irrelevant. Now that we had foreign monsters to slay, the monsters within ourselves could be ignored, or, better, celebrated. And so we end up with South Park Conservatives.

Jim Kalb commented:

“The neocons don’t believe in traditional morality. They believe in some kind of bourgeois morality that just happens by itself.”

It always seemed to me they believed in a morality that’s generated by the capitalist system, or by American freedom and opportunity. They look back at their own family history, which involved arriving here and landing in a situation with lots of opportunities but demanding particular habits and attitudes. So they emphasized those habits and attitudes—family cohesion, education, hard work, ambition, persistence, etc.—and did wonderfully well. What worked for them could work for everyone. Or at least that seems to be the idea.

My reply:

I think you’re saying the same thing as I am. The neocons’ view is that if people put themselves in a certain situation, with education, hard work, marriage and family, then all the necessary virtues arise more or less automatically out of that. No higher principle, whether God or Plato’s Agathon or Babbitt’s “check” or C.S. Lewis’s Tao, is necessary.

But, of course, this arrangement can only be sustained within a society in which all kinds of restraints and standards are still operative. The neocons assumed the existence of such a society, just as they assumed that all that was needed to validate conservatism was Reagan’s electoral victories. So when the American society lost its public ethos, a development that was consummated in the ’90s, the neocon ideology collapsed. When the American people elected and defended Clinton, the neocons didn’t know what to do, except to go with the flow and sign on to the cultural revolution. As Irving Kristol admitted in his important article, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” 9/11 saved the neoconservatives from irrelevance by giving them a foreign crusade to fight.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 11, 2005 02:32 PM | Send