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Babbitt Rising
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10164 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1986 |
4,686 Words |
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W. Wesley McDonald
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IRVING BABBITT IN OUR TIME
Edited by George A. panichas and Claes G. Ryn
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
Cloth, 256 pp.
WILL, IMAGINATION AND REASON
Irving Babbitt and the Problem Of Reality
Claes G. Ryn
Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986
Cloth, 222 pp.
Is conservatism destined to be the dominant force in American politics for the foreseeable future? At the height of their power and influence, a few leading conservative intellectuals paradoxically are openly expressing doubts about the direction of conservative political thought, characterizing it as "adrift" and "in trouble." If the economy where suddenly to turn for the worse, some fear liberal ideas will once more become fashionable. Others feel that the very success of conservatism will be its own eventual undoing. In the pursuit of power and influence, fundamental principles will be compromised and the conservative identity lost.
Are such self-doubts premature? It the present ascendancy of political conservatism merely an ephemeral political phenomenon, a momentary blip on the political screen brought about wholly by the unique charms of an unusually popular president, only to vanish the moment he exists from the political center stage?
As we approach the last half of the last term of the Reagan administration, conservatives and certainly Reagan office holders are mulling over these issues as they strive to anticipate what the future holds for them. Perhaps the unease felt within the conservative intellectual ranks reflects a realization that a cultural revolution must precede a revolution in political vales. If indeed Americans are to be permanently inoculated against the shibboleths of the liberal Left, then merely increasing the doses of money poured into the coffers of public policy institutes, libertarian "freedom schools, or the campaigns of right-wing political candidates will not suffice. Unless conservatives are able to displace liberal collectivist values with should ethico-aesthetical doctrines, then their political achievements may well be erected on sand, doomed to vanish with the shifting winds of politics.
Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), social critic and sage, would have understood well the futility of seeking a purely political solution to problems that are at base moral. He knew that true reform cannot be the mere product of the outer manipulation of the environment in the absence of the concurrent inner reform of the soul. Nowadays, many conservative intellectuals are turning to Babbitt whose work, although now more than fifty years old, seems to speak more than ever to contemporary problems and challenges. Troubled by the apparent moral relativism of the libertarians and equally relativistic doctrines of the Fafnir ("Let me rest, I lie in possession.") standpat conservatives, and seeking to distinguish themselves from the so-called neo-conservatives, who are singularly obsessed with the excesses of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, some conservative intellectuals are seeking to build a body of modern conservative thought upon a moral epistemology that until now has received
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