Opening up the trad/neocon debate at NRO

(Note: In the initial posting of the below item, I gave an incorrect impression when I suggested that up to this point Kathryn Jean Lopez had confined the Phi Beta Cons blog to academic issues and had not posted entries by PBC contributors dealing with larger questions of culture and national identity. In fact, PBC has had quite a few such entries, including ones challenging the neoconservative universalist view of America, some of which I have discussed at VFR.)

Candace de Russy, writing at Phi Beta Cons blog at National Review Online, praises my traditionalist critique of Francis Fukuyama’s faux effort to go beyond a purely liberal, individual-rights notion of national identity. Talk about a shot across the bow at our mainstream conservative friends at National Review!

The only even semi or quasi traditionalist voice among the regular writers at NRO over the years has been John Derbyshire. But with his more recent embrace of atheist Darwinian reductionism and his openly expressed contempt for religious people, not to mention his public soft-porn musings (when you stop believing in God, you don’t believe in nothing, you believe in hot tubs), there’s been no traditionalist voice at NRO at all. Against the general direction of NRO, the trads in the Phi Beta Cons blog, namely de Russy and Carol Iannone, are helping open up a vitally needed debate on liberalism, neoconservatism, and traditionalism as they relate to the question of culture. Notwithstanding the name “Phi Beta Cons,” NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez has frequently allowed PBC contributors to post articles that go beyond academic issues.

In fact, it is impossible to have a truly meaningful discussion about higher education without reference to the larger culture. The liberal arts do not exist in a vacuum, they consist in the transmission of a tradition, our tradition, extending over millennia from the ancient Greeks and Hebrews through Christian Europe and the Renaissance and the Reformation to the United States of America. The tradition is not just a set of neutral procedures for discovering knowledge; it is a continuum of which we are participants and members. This was the reason I ended my membership in the National Association of Scholars in 1995. As I wrote to NAS president Steve Balch at the time, defending academic standards, while a worthy and necessary task, did not represent a broad and compelling enough mission, since those standards do not have meaning apart from the civilization of which they are a part. In short, for NAS to make a difference, what it needed to defend from the onslaughts of political correctness and multiculturalism was not just the modern—and, by itself, rather pallid—ideal of neutral scholarly disinterestedness, but our historic civilization.

So let’s hope that Phi Beta Cons continues to be a forum for the debate about our nation and culture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 23, 2007 09:14 PM | Send