Traditionalism: the antidote to conservative brain decay

Jonathan L. writes:

I have a thought on why traditionalism is so necessary.

Like many people I happen to be an expert on some very narrow topics related to my job, and am the person coworkers come to with their questions. Usually these questions are very basic and require trivial effort on my part to answer, yet my coworkers come away very grateful for my help. At first this is gratifying and a real ego boost. At some point, however, it becomes grating as you keep answering the same simple questions over and over again. Given enough time, simple annoyance turns to despair, as you realize that despite all your worldly success (your boss and coworkers couldn’t be more pleased with the job you’re doing!), your brain is turning to mush because it is so understimulated.

I think this represents the fundamental condition of most conservative intellectuals. Happy to keep pointing out the same contradictions and hypocrisies of the left ad nauseam (even while collecting ever larger emoluments for doing so), they fail to notice how their minds are starting to decay. Speaking for myself, thinking long and hard about how a traditionalist program could be revived in today’s America has been more than enough to keep the forces of right-liberal brain atrophy at bay. Your help in this has been much appreciated.

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LA replies:

Thanks very much for this. This is elegantly expressed. You capture exactly the conservative brain death, the utter lack of any intellectual effort on the part of these people to go beyond the obvious, their unending repetition of the same uninteresting rejoinders to the left, and (which is both a cause and a result of the above) their failure to mark out a ground that is distinct from the left.

But your analogy between your job and the condition of conservative intellectuals is only true up to a point. Unlike you, the conservatives feel no annoyance or despair at the constant intellectual repetition, they find the material and spiritual emoluments a sufficient reward, and they are utterly complacent about themselves.

Hannon writes:

You both say that mainstream conservatives are stuck, or brain dead, when it comes to realizing the fuller philosophy of traditionalism. Maybe the mainstreamers are like sports fans: the vast majority know enough to enjoy the game but they don’t take it to the deeper levels of the die-hards who can recite voluminous stats of all the teams going decades back. Classic bell curve stuff which, if true, means that to grow in numbers traditionalism requires a conversion of liberal thinkers into non-liberal thinkers and not a conversion of non-thinkers into thinkers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 25, 2008 03:37 PM | Send