The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism (ed. Paul Gottfried)

Gottfried, Paul. ed. The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism. Northern Illinois University Press, 2020.

We place before the house the definition of our term: a neoconservative is a former liberal who is anti-Soviet and pro-Israeli. When I use the phrase “neoconservative” or “neocon,” I do not mean it in a pejorative sense. At least not in this review. Indeed, some neoconservatives, particularly the West Coast Straussians, are decent human beings. They are wrong, to be surer, but they have honor. Not so those on the East Coast.


One other introductory remark: what is the relationship between the philosopher Leo Strauss and Neoconservatism? Leo Strauss, by all accounts an impressive and powerful thinker, marginalized religious belief for the sake of philosophy–but he did so in what appears to be a somewhat conservative bent. He believed in natural rights. His disciples took his natural rights philosophy and reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence around it. No longer was the Declaration an American document listing specific abuses by a specific king. It was now a manifesto for all of humanity. In other words, America is no longer a place or even a people, but an idea.


The Big Con


Beginning in the 1980s, neoconservatives repositioned themselves, infiltrating (infecting?) think-tanks and DC groups. Conservatism no longer meant a commitment to community, tradition, and the values undergirding them. It now means what former Trotskyites say it means. And while the contributors to the volume did not make this explicit, the purges the neocons engaged in were almost identical to (minus the firing squads) the Stalinists engaged against the Trotskyites, further compounding the irony.


The Mel Bradford Affair


Mel Bradford, a world-class scholar, was chosen by Reagan (or Reagan’s aides) to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Aside from the fact that such an institution should not exist, Bradford would have been an ideal choice. Neocons were in panic-mode, for if Bradford got the job, he would send most of the money to Texas and Oklahoma and not to the east coast universities where the neocons worked. That was unforgivable.


In response, the necons dug up some old remarks of Bradford on Lincoln. On one level, Bradford’s remarks had little to do with slavery, as Bradford, like everyone else today, opposed it. Bradford merely pointed out that Lincoln’s rhetoric made empire possible.


Evaluation


Neocons promote specific global aims at the expense of the American people. The clearest manifesto of Neo-Conservatism was David Frum’s vitriolic attack on godly Americans in “Unpatriotic Conservatives” (2003). Anyone who had questions concerning the Iraq invasion simply hated America or was probably a secret Muslim (which was particularly awkward for the Jewish paleoconservative Paul Gottfried). That is ultimately why the Neoconservatives hated Trump. Although he is vulgar and brash, Trump’s ultimate sin was questioning neocon foreign policy.


One could argue that Trump is not a conservative. But on issues regarding homosexuality and abortion, the main issues on which Trump faltered, it is hard to see how he is any less conservative than Norman Podhoretz or David Brooks. Trump did not “move” conservatism away from its true moorings The Neocons already did that in the 1980s.


Not every essay in this volume is equally good, though some are near-perfect. Gottfried ends with an autobiographical reflection on various neocon purges in the last few decades.

Notes on Oswald Spengler, part 1, volume 1

 Spengler gives us Big Ideas.  They are broad, sweeping, and breath-taking.  He’s probably wrong in particulars, and I cringe over his use of Goethe at times, but his overall project is awe-inspiring.

Crucial to his argument is the distinction between Culture and Civilization.  Culture is the organic life of a people.  Civilization is the outer husk.  Moreover, Spengler avoids isolating one moment of Western history and culture and calling that moment “universal man” to which we apply to the rest of humanity.  He isn’t saying all cultures and values are relative.  Rather, it doesn’t make any sense to evaluate aboriginal man by the standard of Bach.

Spengler explores “world-as-history” and sees history under the category of “becoming.”  When we read history, we implicitly think in static terms and universals.  There is a place for that, but since history is necessarily unfolding, it makes more sense to see it under the category of “becoming.” To do this, Spengler looks for “morphological relationships” that bind the forms of culture together.

Civilization is not bad, per se.  It is the historical destiny of a culture.  It manifests what happens to a culture when life is drained from it.  In that sense, it is a very important heuristic device. In its final manifestation, a Civilization has a “world-city” as its focal point (32). A world-city is focused on money, rather than on the organic bonds of tradition.  It doesn’t have a “folk,” but only a faceless mass of people. Its power is the money-spirit.  

The key term for all of this is “megapolitan.”

Spengler mentions it in passing, but there is a connection between Civilization and Empire.  “Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated” (36). You have to expand to acquire new markets.

Culture has gymnastics (in the old sense) and tournaments; civilization has professional sports

Cecil Rhodes is the archetype for the New Civilization Man (37).

Chapter 2: The Meaning of Numbers

Before discussing numbers, Spengler advances the claim that the soul is to the possible what the world is to the actual (54).  The soul is something we intuit, not rationally analyze.  Life in the world, then, is “the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished” (54).

Number

“Number is the symbol of causal necessity” (56). Spengler needs this claim to make his distinction between mechanized views of nature and history, which is “the aggregate of that which has no relation to mathematics” (57).

There is a better way to state his claim.  One’s views on number and mathematics are the outward expressions, some of them anyway, of the style of the culture. Spengler sees this in Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples. The latter is Euclidian.  The former anticipates concepts of infinity.

Classical mathematics was perceptible to the senses (63). Number is measure.  As he notes on the classical statue, “here every essential and important element of Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively rendered by surfaces, dimensions and the sensuous relations of the parts.”  Extension, then, is a function of space and it makes things “appear.”

Here is the problem: if number is correlative with Being and measurement, then what does one do with irrational numbers?  These magnitudes “can never be presented in a straight line” (65).

Cultures that are open to non-Euclidian geometry do not have this problem. Here a word of caution is in order: Spengler is not saying the builders of Gothic cathedrals knew non-Euclidian geometry.  Rather, they were no longer bound by older intuitions. For them, “numbers are images of perfectly desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain abstract validity within themselves” (67).

Descartes’ geometry replaced lengths with positions, although not doing away with lengths entirely.   What it allowed him was a purely spatial, and not material, understanding of position (74).

Number is no longer understood as magnitude, but as relation and function. One can now speak of an infinitesimal calculus, negative numbers, and imaginary numbers–all of which were impossible on the older Classical model.  “Numbers are capable of plastic embodiment” and are “cut” along a unidimensional continuum” (77).

Apollonian soul: tied down with limits of physical space (83).

Western, Gothic Man: “an unrestrained, strong, willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space” (81).

Function and Limit

The limit, on the new understanding, is an operation and relation, not a state of being (86). Spengler goes so far to say that the limit of an aggregate represents “an aggregate of lower potentiality” (89 n1).