Alernative "conservatisms" (work in progress)

(a work in progress...)

[The following short essay appeared in this comment from 2012, but it gives a bit of perspective on the history of my engagement with what I used to call reflexive anti-conservatism but I now refer to as alternate "conservatisms". Usually an alternative conservatism consists of an unsensible ideology which sees mainstream conservative ideas as more dangerous than liberal ideas while presenting it's own ideas as "Authentic Conservatism". I hope to add to it from time to time.]

And here's a brief review of my engagement in this discussion which is going on 6 years at this point.

I had originally heard someone from my parish self-describe as a "crunchy" back circa 2005. This person bought into conspiracy theories in general and they railed against "mainstream conservatives" and people who didn't realize how horrible Bush was. I hadn't heard of crunchy conservatism before then, but when the book Crunchy Conservatives came out and the nuts came out of the woodwork to defend it, I felt strongly about how dangerous it was to sow distrust toward people people who mostly agreed with you on issues, and I subsequently wanted to show how inchoate the underpinnings were to something making claims to be more intellectually consistent and pure. Also how it was a "gateway drug" to self-righteousness, elitism and seriously misplaced priorities in the moral and political spheres.

In ‘06 you could say that I officially became a "contra-crunchy" and an erstwhile contributor to this parody blog. At that time I was forcibly reminded of a Catholic convert I knew way back around '95 who struggled a lot with his faith. He was very conservative and cynical about the US Bishops like many of us are. After he had just come back from a trip to France he told me how great it was over there and how "you don't even have to be a Catholic to have a great life in Paris" or something like that. Then he talked a bunch of grass-is-greener malarkey about food, wine and architecture and the superiority of their culture. It was all very honeymoon-like and immature, like a rich guy who leaves his wife for a young gold-digging hottie and has no clue why everyone is laughing and shaking their heads. I thought if you want to knock down strawmen, go ahead, but don't insult us by pretending they are line-backers.

I didn't understand one bit of this Europhile mentality in the 90s and I still don't. I suppose that I always figured that while Ananias and Sapphira might have become Catholics for the material aspects—as if pagans and Jews can't make good wine—I wasn't pissing off 200 or so people including my parents just to achieve some kind of worldly wisdom and prestige.

Then along came Rod Dreher, the architect of crunchiness, and he proved what I had suspected by formally and loudly leaving the Catholic Church. (Well, loudly after trying to sneak out and failing.) His reasoning seemed to be that the true Christian religion was all about viewing the world itself "sacramentally" and as long as you did that, you had the Secret Knowledge, not like Joe Sixpack who had been raised Catholic and whose relatives built the churches that the Drehers of the world sit around and critique.

One of the ways in which you practice this sacramentality when applied to your sexual relationship is to use NFP rather than artificial contraception. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this last point.) He took a lot of flack for talking about that in his book.

But if Dreher has indeed ditched this belief as it seems, we see that once again whim has triumphed over being true to the nature of things. Hillaire Belloc stated that the Catholic perspective on the Protestant Reformation was that it stemmed more from a "progressive denial" of the teachings of the church than some kind of rediscovery of a simpler form of Christianity. It seems to me also that the Catholic view of Crunchy Conservatism could be seen to have an analogous progression of denial. First you deny that the Catholic Church is the one true, but concede they have a lot of truth because you agree on key issues. Later you start dropping those issues, or you figure out ways to circumvent them. You discover that this is really easy now because you encounter very little resistance in the considerably smaller world you've chosen to inhabit.

(to be continued...)