Nostalgia and Conservatism

I like St. Thomas Aquinas as much as the next guy and as a medievalist, I promise I have a healthy respect for tradition and the past. But conservatives too often make the mistake of refusing to confront modern and postmodern thinkers. When you’re arguing with an atheist and you bring up Augustine, you may as well have admitted defeat.

And that isn’t because St. Augustine is useless or unintelligent. He’s one of the smartest men to ever inhabit the earth! But that’s the equivalent of a liberal person throwing out loaded rhetorical terms like “privilege,” “patriarchy,” and “Judith Butler.” A conservative just stops listening when he hears these words.

While Richard Weaver, F.A. Hayek, and G.K. Chesterton are all valuable thinkers who should form part of the backbone of conservative thought, there is no reason conservatives cannot turn to people like Derrida, Foucault, and Nietzsche. Just because one does not agree with a specific thinker does not make him useless. Things have changed since the past and while the past is valuable, the lessons of the present must be confronted and understood. We no longer live in 1500. And that’s coming from someone who sometimes wishes he did.

Again, this does not mean we shouldn’t read traditional thinkers. There’s great wisdom in ancient philosophers, wisdom that is too often neglected by moderns who have no time for “old white men.” But conservatives tend to forget that we can combine the past and the present. We forget that one needn’t be a “conservative thinker” to be valuable. I’ve honestly learned more from Nietzsche than from almost any other philosopher and he’s surely no conservative.
At the end of the day, it boils down to what was once said at a dinner shared by George Grant and Leo Strauss. Grant asked Strauss when he’d most like to live, assuming he’d say Ancient Greece or something like it. Strauss instead said that he’d prefer to live today because today gives us all the wisdom of the ancients with all of the new problems made apparent by the moderns (and now post-moderns). That’s the attitude conservatives need to take. We have to engage the culture and confront contemporary thinkers. It’s hard, but necessary. I see too little of that and it’s a pity.