ADVERTISEMENT

Relearning How to Think

Review: Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists'

AP
April 29, 2017

'What do we do to stop the decline?'
'I have no idea what we do.'

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

These are odd times for the American Right. Republicans have unparalleled domination of federal and state governments, but are led by the least coherently conservative president since Ford. Americans are materially better off than nearly everyone who has ever lived, yet our life expectancy is falling for the first time in generations. The United States is unrivaled as a global power, but the nation has turned inwards. In a nation where there are more children with mobile phones than intact families, it is difficult to deny the presence of some sort of decadence.

It is a time for American conservatives to do what they have always done: return to the past to see what it has to tell us. Gertrude Himmelfarb shows us how that process should be approached. Himmelfarb, a revered historian of Victorian intellectual history, also has the distinction of being one of the last active members of the first generation of neoconservatives. Her new collection, Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, From the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists, draws on the best of her sixty years of writing to show the reader American conservatism's methodological essence and how to apply its genius to the problems at hand.

Unlike its European versions, conservatism in America is not the embrace of a particular idealized political order and the effort to bend the body politic to that idealization. Rather, it is a method: the examination of historical antecedents to determine the best course for present realities. Unlike the American progressive, who relies on yet-unproven social theories and prognostications, the conservative demands the positive evidence of what has actually happened to inform his policy.

Past and Present begins with a 1951 essay published in Commentary, "Leo Strauss: Ancients and Moderns." The superficial oddity of this opening underlines its programmatic purpose. Himmelfarb is above all a student of nineteenth-century Britain, while Strauss's concerns are more temporally wide-ranging. Yet they share a methodological commitment to seeking truth in real historical events rather than in the prescriptions of scientism. Despite their different specializations, both scholars are akin.

The rest of the collection settles into Himmelfarb's realms of expertise. The essays primarily examine the English moderns from Burke to Churchill, with particular attention paid to the Victorians. Himmelfarb's favorite muses are clear: Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Bagehot make frequent appearances. These three are central to her intellectual program: All understand culture and politics as a conversation with the past. Her treatment of Arnold is particularly subtle and incisive. Part of Himmelfarb's genius is finding happy syntheses of tense dichotomies, and in the case of Arnold she shows how his dogmatic "Hebraism" and freethinking "Hellenism" are both necessary for a healthy society. If the Victorians had too much of the former, as Arnold felt, we have too much of the latter. Himmelfarb is always concerned with the golden mean.

Her treatment of the relationship between political and social or civic spheres shows a similar effort toward reasoned harmony. Two pieces especially stand out: "Democratic Remedies for Democratic Disorders" (1998) and "For Love of Country: Civil Society and the State" (1997). The former foresees the balkanization of the American polity, anticipating by almost two decades a recent George Weigel piece that suggests the right thing for America might be another Great Awakening. "For Love of Country" argues for a symbiotic alliance of civil society and politics.

If these essays painted a grim picture of America at the time of their publication, their shades have only continued to darken. Himmelfarb cites a 1998 poll in which three-quarters of respondents said America's problems arose from "moral decay;" here, two decades later, even as we find ourselves in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history and the sexual revolution reaches its humanity-annihilating endgame, how many people would even dare to use the words "moral decay" publicly? More worrying is Himmelfarb's far-sighted correction of those who would divorce their civil life from their political life: "Nor can we afford the luxury of being apolitical, of depriving ourselves of the proper resources of government. Indeed, civil society itself requires them, if only to preserve its independence, strengthen its constituent parts, and thus help remoralize itself."

These essays present urgent and important arguments. What was once called the Religious Right is currently devouring itself from within. One faction seems willing to abandon its traditional skepticism of Caesar now that "our" man is in the White House. A rival faction led by Rod Dreher considers embracing "the Benedict Option," which amounts to a retreat from broader American society to small communities of like-minded individuals. This latter effort is the most threatening heresy facing American conservatism today; as R. R. Reno writes, "I fear [Dreher's] book encourages some of our debilitating self-deceptions."

Times are bad, but they always are. Like the guardians of the White Horse Vale, religious conservatives must deal with our time's weeds as they come to us. Abandoning the American project is a reckless response to problems that are, ultimately, merely human problems. Underneath the impulse is a radicalism that speaks the language of conservatism, a sullen refusal to engage in the conversation with the past; it poses as great a threat to conservatism and the national soul as any fanatical scientism. Himmelfarb warns: "Civil society should not be the enemy of the state but its ally—an ally not of the welfare state, to be sure, but of a state worthy of our 'public affections.'"

These are odd times, but their problems are not insoluble. They are not even that new—human nature does not change. We may not know how to stop the decline, but we can find out. Past and Present serves as an example of how to approach the problems through reasoned engagement with the past, that is to say, as conservatives. Himmelfarb is a treasure, not only for the conclusions she draws, but for the way she draws them.

Published under: Book reviews