Jonathan Munn, Lay Reader in the UK diocese of the Anglican Catholic Church has written a fine article – The Skeleton of Conservatism, Fleshly Liberality and Procrustean Polemics. I detect that he has been reading my writings and other things, and reflecting on the label conservative.
As a translator, I sell words (I give them away free here), but words and combinations of words grammatically organised in a language are expressions of concepts. Translation from one language into another is not word-for-word, but a fluid expression of the concepts expressed in the source language in the target language. To be a good translator, you have to have an intimate understanding of the language and translate into your own – in my case, French into English.
I was schooled in the 1960’s in reading and writing, in the north of England with a schoolmaster who admitted – “I know I’m an old square schoolmaster, but…“. He smoked his pipe, using an old World War II shell cartridge as an ashtray, explained everything rationally and would stand for no nonsense. He used corporal punishment – six on the bottom with a leather slipper, nothing excessive. One thing Mr Hales hated was the abuse of words, like nice instead of pleasant. Nice means accurate or precise. “I hit the target nicely on the bull’s eye”, for example. Sophisticated is another. Modern usage applies this word to a complex and cutting-edge machine or piece of equipment. It actually means worldly wise or engaging in sophistry, the bad logic of the Sophists in ancient Greece. The word contains the Greek word Σοφíα meaning wisdom. An i-Pad is not wise, but a complex and modern electronic gadget. Another thing he could not tolerate was the emotional use of words, which distorts their etymological and conventional meanings. There are many examples like inclusive and gay, from the top of my head. They have political overtones and are emotionally-loaded.
Many bottoms nowadays could do with six of the best with that old leather-soled slipper! Alas, it was probably thrown away when the old crusty Cambridge graduate died in the 1990’s at a ripe old age.
The emotional use of words is done to a fine art, and its main application in the modern world is advertising. Business is based on the supply of goods and services to a paying customer’s needs. It is difficult to make the right turnover by depending on customers expressing their needs, so you have to stimulate the need. In days gone by, advertising consisted simply of informing the world that the product or service existed, and that customers had the choice of buying one competing brand or another. Then came the idea of creating the need. The businessman is no longer in the perspective of service, but the customer exists for his profit. The need is created by psychological means.
Propaganda is an old science, involving techniques (another site) developed to some extent by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and refined by American advertising experts before and after the war. There are seven known techniques: name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking and band wagon. I invite you to consult these two websites to discover the meanings of these terms. Another tool of the propagandist is a set of alternative word-tools like dictionaries and thesauri – see Connotative.
Thus I am careful in my use of words like conservative and liberal. For me, a conservative is one who conserves the good things from the past, his tradition, patrimony, heritage, etc. to pass them on to future generations. A liberal is one who loves his own freedom and that of other people. Conservatism has suffered a change of meaning through its use in centre-right wing politics, such as the Toryism of Margaret Thatcher or the Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and its use in present-day American and British politics. A different form of conservatism conserves capital and the wealth of a minority of selfish and greedy people, and the gap between rich and poor grows. Left unchecked, it would develop into a contemporary form of medieval feudalism.
Liberalism expressed itself in the early nineteenth century as a reaction both against the ancien régime and the revolution. Fundamentally, in the writings of Félicté de Lamennais (1782 – 1854), the aspiration of the time was to free the Church from the encroachments of an anti-religious state (France and some other European countries) through disestablishment or separation of Church and State. The slogan at the time was a free Church in a free State. That seems most reasonable to us these days, but it was madness in the words of Pope Gregory XVI! Without the State, the Church can no longer maintain its spiritual monopoly through constraint exercised by the civil authorities, and separation enables the State to enact immoral and anti-religious laws. There are the issues in a nutshell.
Liberalism developed in the theological world, and old dogmas were called into question with the development of the sciences. Modernism was an attempt at “saving” the tradition and the faith by conciliating them with modernity and science. The process never stopped and the end result, if unchecked, is secularism, atheism and the abolition of the transcendent. Catholic apologists have confused liberalism with modernism, when a distinction was to be made. Modernists like Tyrrell and Von Hügel actually tried to fight against excessive rationalism, like the early liberals like Chateaubriand and Lamennais, to bring back the mystical and transcendent dimension of religion!
Many us like stability and the continuation of what is good: art that produced recognisable two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, harmony in music based on the eight modes of ancient music or the three modes of modern music (major and melodic / harmonic minor), decency, dignity and reserve in social convention, the sense of duty and virtue, the art of being a gentleman or a lady, so many things from about a hundred years ago and more. My grandparents passed these things to my parents, who passed them to me. But, these values seem to be disappearing. What do we do, beat it into them – or show that there is intrinsic beauty in order and harmony?
We are aware that if these things go, they will be replaced by people who promote their own freedom but despise that of others. Law gives way to the arbitrary and what Pope Benedict XVI calls the tyranny of relativism. Don’t forget that he was made to serve in the Hitler Youth until he found an opportunity to get out without winding up in a concentration camp! That was the “New Germany” whose thousand years were over in a relatively merciful twelve years. So compared to the relativists and those who don’t care about other people, left-wing or right-wing – it’s all the same – we do well to look to the old Judeo-Christian values that built our society since the middle ages and the Renaissance.
Jonathan is a mathematician. I am not. I can accurately calculate numbers when they have some practical application: design a building, a boat, a machine, whatever. Figures are also used for navigation, perceiving space and time, using a known dimension and an angle to calculate an unknown dimension. We also use figures to manage money, something I find intensely boring but necessary. Fine with me. But, ask me to do abstract things like simultaneous equations and differential calculus – you might as well ask me about the back side of the moon! I deal with words, he with numbers, but he also writes well.
A certain amount of conservatism is necessary like the framework of a building or the skeletons of our own bodies. Society needs law, and a religion needs dogmas. That is another badly misused emotional word, often used to describe moral interdictions. Dogma simply means doctrine or teaching. Languages are also precisely governed by rules of spelling and grammar. Music is written according to rules of harmony and counterpoint, keys, time signatures, avoiding parallel fifths and octaves, keeping a firm hand on chromaticism and key modulation. Christianity has creeds, the Bible, the teachings of the Fathers and Ecumenical Councils. The bishops of the Church still have teaching authority, especially when they are together and come to a consensus. That is the Magisterium. Our worship is performed according to a set liturgical rite, so that the Eucharist and Office at least bear some similarities from church to church, diocese to diocese. Let that go, and someone going into a church wonders if everyone has been smoking LSD or crack cocaine!
I am all for those rules being conserved and kept. What is important is to keep a sense of flexibility. We can’t bring up children like in the nineteenth century. Knowledge of child psychology has progressed, and good parenting and schooling involves motivating them in good things rather than only punishing them for bad things. The British Navy had to come to the conclusion that flogging made a bad man even worse and broke a good man’s heart, and so they abolished it along with keelhauling – and replaced punishment by appointing only the finest men to command a ship, so that each officer and seaman would do his duty out of a sense of respect and motivation. A good officer never tells a man to do something he would not himself. There are also rules of humanity, of decency and respect of the person. This is also part of tradition.
Jonathan has largely escaped the trolls and fanatics I had to contend with on my old English Catholic blog. On this blog, I get about a third of the numbers who came to look for the latest sensational news about Archbishop Hepworth and the TAC. I am glad to be without the crows perching atop the gallows waiting for a tasty scrap of hanged man’s eye or tongue, or the ghouls who watched decapitations in Paris as late as the 1930’s. They have moved onto other pastures. The internet could do so much more, but the worst of man is always the same. He discovers steel and wastes no time in making swords, uranium and the first idea is a doomsday bomb before generating electricity!
Let us keep rules and principles, but be flexible and human in their application. If we don’t, we will continue to fragment and shoot ourselves in the foot. It also happens to Roman Catholics, even when they are in communion with the Pope. That is no guarantee of peace and stability. Anglicanism used to be characterised by the genius of staying together in spite of differences of opinion and teaching. Nowadays, that tolerance seems to have gone, replaced by much of what Queen Elizabeth I fought against in the Reformation times. The hatred and polemics discredit. Like flogging, they make a bad man worse and break a good man’s heart!
It all essentially boils down to tolerance and inclusiveness. Now, take a moment to strip those words of their emotional / political meaning, and look at their conceptual meaning. Tolerance is accommodating a person or an idea that we don’t like, but we put up with him or it for the sake of a common good such as peace. Tolerance is a minimum. Inclusiveness is granting to others the same freedom as we ourselves want. We want them to respect us, so we have to respect them. Then comes the idea of Christian love (caritas – I’ll say it in Latin and not English). The English word charity makes us think of popping a coin into a tin for the local homeless people’s soup kitchen!
Can tolerance be acquired? Perhaps to an extent, as long as it isn’t the euphemism of yet another intolerant ideology. There are teaching techniques in schools aimed at reducing hate crimes, discrimination, bigotry and racism – which are largely due to ignorance. We do need to learn to relate to people from different backgrounds and cultures. I am myself living in a country other than the one of my birth. I mentioned propaganda earlier and its use of bandwagons and stereotypes. We need to learn to think for ourselves and do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
We have a long way to go…
The Blue Flower 
“Translation from one language into another is not word-for-word”
bene, potest esse, sed non sit. Which is to say: yes, but some people will insist, for bizarre reasons of their own, on the validity of “formal equivalence”.
“The emotional use of words is done to a fine art, and its main application in the modern world is advertising.”
“The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.”
– from ‘Promise’ as an Institution”, in The Doom of Youth, by (P.) Wyndham Lewis, published 1932.
“Left unchecked, it would develop into a contemporary form of medieval feudalism.”
Too late! We are already all liegemen of Bob Diamond and co.
It is interesting to note that the great modern economy is based on one of the evils most expressedly and vehemently condemned by the great medieval theologians, councils, and Popes, in a line of thought developed, I believe, straight out of Chrysostom and Basil: the charging of interest on loans. There is a post about this on my own blog, in which I quote extensively from both Aquinas and Benedict XIV’s bull “Vix pervenit”. (I realise this is not the subject of this post or even this blog, but I find “conservative” Christianity now so dominated by American or American-style economic liberals that I feel the point must be made as often as possible that the Church is implacably opposed to this.)
“A certain amount of conservatism is necessary like the framework of a building or the skeletons of our own bodies.”
Would you agree that this amount can be summed up in the dictum “where change is not necessary, change is unnecessary”?
” Society needs law, and a religion needs dogmas.”
It amazes me, but some seem to genuinely not understand these two points. I would strengthen the latter, however: a religion IS dogmas. Without them, and next in importance, the public ritual which derives from them, there is nothing.
“Languages are also precisely governed by rules of spelling and grammar.”
If I might make a slightly nice (!) point, this analogy is, I feel, the odd-one-out, since the rules of language change and evolve over time, whereas those of us on the “conservative” end of Christianity usually state that God’s law is as unchanging as God himself.
“Let us keep rules and principles, but be flexible and human in their application.”
“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity”? Sometimes, one gets the impression that the exact opposite of this dictum is the general practice among Christians…
What about a comprehensive critique of the Counter-Reformation and its continuation? When we look at the SSPX and all the so-called Traditionalist movement, it is clear that what they defend, expound, teach and seek to preserve and transmit as Tradition is nothing but the Counter-Reformation’s account of the same.
Where ought we to stand between outright modernism in its true etymological sense, anhistorical Counter-Reformation, “emporte-pièce” scholasticism and an idealised conception of the Middle Ages?
Carl Schmitt, in his admirable book, The Nomos of the Earth, has this to say about the post-mediaeval reconstructions and interpretations of the mediaeval notion of Respublica Christiana, Christian Commonwealth or Chrétienté: “Here, all transferences from the sphere of the modern state historically are incorrect; but so, too, are all conscious or unconscious applications of the unifying and centralizing ideas tied to the concept of unity that has prevailed since the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. etc”.
Schmitt criticises the concept of the two perfect societies which he opposes to that of respublica christiana. From this angle it is possible to understand the contradiction in the Roman Church’s opposition to separation of church and state in the 19th and 20th centuries.
After the French Revolution, with the end of feudalism and absolutism, the advent of the industrial nation-state, the relations between church and state underwent further profound changes, for the nature, more than the type, of the state had changed completely. The new state wanted to assume several of the social duties hitherto devolved to the Church. The new state came with its own logic, its own auctoritas alongwith, naturally, its own potestas. The Church did not realise this. It wanted at the same time to hold to the doctrine of the Two Perfect Societies while claiming once more the mediaeval auctoritas. This is part of the contradiction for, while the civil administration of the Respublica Christiana, was dependent on the Church for its internal law and cohesion- was, therefore, heteronomous, the new civil power of the nation state was or claimed to be fully autonomous. The new nation state looked to natural law for its fundamental principles and not to Revelation or the “Cléricalité” that pretends to control the same. So the reactions of the Popes of the 19th and 20th, while logically understandable, were historically inadequate for it betrayed a tragic ignorance of their enemy.
“do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”
This goes a long, long way toward covering a multitude of sins.
The secular state tends towards totalitarianism (nihil alienum, &c!). The Church is also in principle totalitarian, we hope benignly. The two cannot tolerate each other.
Totalitarianism in principle rather than practice? Perhaps you just got words muddled…
I go by the two dictionary definitions:
I would see the crushing of the person in favour of the collective (typically the State) as characteristic. Nazism and Fascism were just as totalitarian as Soviet Communism. Perhaps the Church institution at times has totalitarian tendencies in practice, but I hope no Church would ever be totalitarian by principle or conviction. It is true that Churches are monarchical and not democratic. The Pope, Patriarch or local Bishop governs by virtue of his mission from Christ through his consecration, but in principle, the person matters and the Church as a collective does not have the right to crush the person. It happens, but when it does, it is wrong.
I meant that the Catholic Church is essentially (even if not avowedly in principle) totalitarian – not necessarily in a bad way – because there is nothing beyond its scope. The foundation teaching of other totalitarianisms are not necessarily evil, but some, e.g. communists, have never stuck to it. The Church, similarly, has not always stuck to its own teachings, or has sometimes misapplied them. “Put not your trust in princes, or in any child of man”, whatever authority the institution may claim.
In truth it may be that I indulged somewhat in polemic in the former blog. I would say, only once in a while, and I hope most of my posts were constructive. I hesitate to post here this evening being aware that this blog is mostly the preserve of the ordained or the genuinely intellectual, among whom I am not numbered.
I most certainly identify with the sentiments expressed by Fr C about the true meaning of the word ‘Conservative’ Indeed when this involves approval of the ever growing gap between rich and poor I particularly agree with his writings. The problem in the area of faith is that the Christian Conservative Right in the USA are now so readily identified on the side of the wealthy and the privileged both politically and in terms of Christian Faith. I disagree with many of their public utterances.
Perhaps European Christians involved in democratic politics, and I am one of them, should be more forthcoming in expressing what the concept of ‘Conservatism’ means. The party I belong to is on the democratic and libertarian right and certainly on the side of the poor and the marginalised.
In terms of ‘Conservative’ Christian Faith I would say that whatever else we do we should uphold the centrality of Faith and Tradition, the Orthodox Faith of two millenia. I looked up on line a bishop recommended on here who was elsewhere congratulated for his Inter Faith work. Now I do not for one second deny the possibility of the salvation of members of other historic faiths. In fact the RC Catechism explains this far better than I am able. I do not though agree with them in the matter of presenting the Risen Christ to the Jewish people.I believe that we should.
I am all in favour of constructive dialogue with other faiths but I will not countenance abandoning the Incarnation and the Atonement and the doctrines of Orthodox faith. My own view is that none of us need to dot every ‘I’ or cross every ‘T’ in what constitutes Orthodoxy. I do not see how inter faith services serve any useful purpose although I can see benefits from meetings which reduce inter faith tensions and lead to everyone respecting human rights.
I was recently high upon a mountain in Iceland and my Guide Ingrid and I sat down for a rest in the fierce wind. We fell into discussion as you do. The sun was shining, the sky totally blue and we had shelter. Relaxed discussion and thinking about things was truly easy. I resolved to abstain from blog posts completely.
This entry constitutes a one off relapse.
Neil
“this blog is mostly the preserve of the ordained or the genuinely intellectual“.
No, it is not a preserve, and I welcome all who are interested. Like Oscar Wilde, I welcome intellectuals and people who want to acquire knowledge but have not had the advantage of education. He couldn’t stand stupid people – those who think they know everything but know nothing.
You are not in that category. I treasure your input and find it precious. You are welcome to write however regularly or irregularly as you wish – but know you are esteemed.
“The party I belong to is on the democratic and libertarian right and certainly on the side of the poor and the marginalised.”
Ah, yes. Perhaps this party might be called, in Canadian and British circles, “Red Toryism”. Recently, a leader of a Norwegian democratic center-right party was interviewed. He stated, quite correctly, that his views on economic policy would be considered “socialism” in the United States.
Unfortunately, no such party, or even tendency, exists here in the United States. Here, “conservativism” is rooted first and foremost in an idolization of Ayn Rand, the worship of mammon, and remains, first, last and always, the cult of social darwinism.
Neil stated the following: “The problem in the area of faith is that the Christian Conservative Right in the USA are now so readily identified on the side of the wealthy and the privileged both politically and in terms of Christian Faith.”
I am not so certain that this is really true. I do know that left-wing, mostly anti-religious, propaganda keeps saying this over and over again, and much like Hitler’s Big Lie, eventually people will believe what is repeated again and again, regardless if it is true or not.
The real issue, that makes the alignment of Christians with the more right-wing conservative forces in the United States, is the issue of abortion, more so than support of the wealthy (Actually the wealthiest counties in the United States all voted for Obama). The Democrat Party has made support for abortion their one and only real litmus test, this leaves Christians very little alternative but to support the pro-life alternative, which tends to be the Republican Party.