Rod Dreher Redux

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I've been forced to defend my attack on Crunchy Cons in various emails this afternoon, so allow me to elaborate. I have no objection to Birkenstocks (apart from: they're hideous) or organic foods, and I agree that dominion over the animals doesn't entitle us to treat them like factories. What gets under my skin about the crunchy-con movement is that it only thinks it's Christian and conservative. The truth is that its sensibilities are drawn from Rousseau.

Rousseau is the embodiment of the so-called "second wave" of the Enlightenment --which rebelled against the first wave of the Enlightenment (committed to capitalism, limited government and boundless confidence in modern science) because it was "heartless." As a Christian, I'm all for not being heartless! But the second wave of the Enlightenment is far more radical than the first, because it seeks to "humanize" by romanticizing --giving priority to emotion, myth and "nature" (including the romanticization of rural life, farmers, "crunchy" foods) instead of reason, science and civilization.

Rousseau recognized (properly but inadequately) that Christian (and other) myths provide more satisfaction to human aspirations and sentiments than the cold metaphysical skepticism of the first wave of Enlightenment. However, the Crunchycon-Rousseau solution is worse than the disease. It replaces "cold-hearted reason" (or "pure Capitalism" as Dreher would have it) not with "Truth" -- but with historicism (hence the appeal to a laundry-list of erstwhile Conservative but actually historicist thinkers). But when nature, emotion and romanticism are preferred to reason and science, we soon find that there is no limit to what the emotions want . . . and that, as the French discovered, is the path to Terror. There is no preserving democracy --consent of the people within the limits of natural right. There is only "The General Will," the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism.

No thanks! There's a reason Camus didn't include the American Revolution in his study The Rebel; America rests on classical and Christian grounds, not those of the Enlightenment. When I want to know how to resist the evils of consumerism and continually renew society, I'll look to the American Founders and B-16, with his profound understanding of politics --its possibilities and its limits-- and his continual warnings against the dangers of historicism.