The Conservative Turn

Thoughts on The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

-for reference - check out http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-illiberal-imagination

The book reviews that I’ve read on Michael Kimmage’s book, The Conservative Turn, have mostly focused on Kimmage’s premise itself: that Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, despite their different backgrounds, had similarities in their political journeys, and that both of them were fundamental (though neither one consciously) in the development of neoconservatism. That’s not really what I thought was most interesting about the book, and it wasn’t my initial reason for picking it up in the first place. I just wanted to learn more about Lionel Trilling.  Kimmage wrote about Trilling in very admiring terms, and I enjoyed that.

Trilling was an ex-Communist, and Kimmage describes in detail how both Trilling and Chambers each had their “Kronstadt” moment, when they saw that Stalinism, the Soviet Union, and Communism itself were all inextricably tied together by horrific violence, and suddenly and definitely turned away from the movement. Both Trilling and Chambers then, of course, subsequently wrote a great deal attacking the American left over its affinity or neutrality toward Communism.

            What is always striking to me is how sympathy for Communism is still treated as something benign, amusing, or even “interesting” by my classmates and professors. It is disquieting how prescient and relevant Trilling’s declarations against progressive leftism (whether that’s specifically how he identified it or not) are today. The quotes that Kimmage provides seemed directly relevant to my experience so far with the progressive leftism that is too often identifiable with liberal Jewish leadership – that is, Reform and Conservative clergy who use a very elastic definition of tikkun olam to encompass any current agenda of the Democratic party. In response to more than a few sermons or emails from the RAC that I’ve gotten over the past few years, exhorting us to raise the minimum wage or vote for universal health care coverage or “do the Jewish thing” and promote gay rights, I wish I’d been able to quote Trilling:

 •”…liberals serve no good end at all when they cease to look for truth and, in the name of ‘action…’ substitute wish-thinking and rationalization for the functions of the critical intellect.” (1937) (82)

 •“Trilling concentrated on the psychological roots of the Popular Front, eschewing any simple equation of progressivism with a longing for social justice: ‘the ‘social consciousness’ of the Thirties which flowered in Hemingway and Steinbeck, in Odets and Irwin Shaw, which millions found so right, proper and noble, did indeed have a kind of passion, and perhaps it had the virtue of being better than nothing. But how abstract and without fiber of resistance it was, how much too apt it was for the drawing-room, how essentially it was a pity which wonderfully served the needs of the pitier.’”

  Or in response to the endless classes I’ve had to taken on “learning styles” and educational theory:

• “if the Victorians too much disregarded Rousseau and Wordsworth and thought of children as adults manques, we today are perhaps too often tempted to think of adults as children manques.”

  Trilling seemed to identify with a liberalism that invited open, serious critique, in which the questions were posed without assuming the answers beforehand. He valued tradition, morals, manners (which he linked with morality), and evaluation of art and writing according to aesthetics and morality. Already he was worried that the liberalism of his time was embodying not the open-minded serious critique but rather an orthodox adherence to predetermined assumptions. This was making liberalism, once the dynamic and engaging intellectual front, into something stagnant and prone to blindness of various types.  I feel like I’ve seen this in liberal Jewish leaders who not only confuse their Jewish liberalism with political and cultural leftism, but also simply assume that all the principles of the Democratic Party/contemporary leftism are correct and obvious, without further consideration. This is not a helpful method of thinking – and it could lead to a real decline in many ways: in affiliation, relevancy, moral and intellectual engagement, etc.

 In a sentence reminiscent of the patter song from Patience – ‘If you want a receipt” - Trilling himself described his liberalism: ”you take the best ideas of [Jeremy]Bentham – I mean Bentham as he really is, not Bentham as most people represent him – and John Stuart Mill, and [John] Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and involve them with the temperament of the English romantic poets, and connect them with Montaigne…and much of Rousseau, and much of Stendhal, you will get some notion of the intellectual constellation to which I refer.” (186) I certainly haven’t read all of those guys. Nevertheless, Trilling and his work have been inspiring to me as a model of an “old-school liberalism.”

I favor Trilling’s approach instead when discussing contemporary issues of liberal Judaism (though maybe I’d leave out the T.S. Eliot): “Trilling ushered in conservative ideas into his essays and books with the aim of expanding the liberal imagination and widening the parameters of American intellectual culture…he wrote appreciatively about the (reactionary) politics of T.S. Eliot, about the moral vision of the Victorians, about the merit of hierarchy, and of stable ethical values.”

What if, instead of simply assuming that all Reform Jews somehow instinctively know that the moral thing is to be pro-choice and pro-gay (in every respect), we had serious discussions in which the pros and cons of each position were critically evaluated? What if opinions about being pro-life and against gay religious marriage were actually considered or allowed discussion in an open atmosphere?

  Trilling consistently resisted being identified with either the conservative movement as it was being formulated under Buckley et al or the official Republican party. I found it disappointing that Kimmage didn’t go into much detail of why this was so, other than Trilling was just so committed to his ideal of liberalism – though it seems Trilling allowed his definition of liberalism to fit many ideas labeled as “conservative” today. Perhaps it was also that Trilling saw that the solid identification with one party or another, or with one defined set or another, defied his true commitment, which was to liberalism.

I am personally intrigued by Trilling’s desire to remain flexible in his political and social affiliations. Orthodox Jews may have an easier time of identifying with contemporary cultural/political conservatism and being accepted by fellow Orthodox Jews for affiliation with the Republican Party. But I am committed to becoming a rabbi, and to the liberal Judaism that has developed uniquely in America. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Orthodox Judaism has all the easy answers or is problem-free, either. I think that there are plenty of opportunities in that lifestyle to fall into just the kind of unthinking adherence that defies Trilling’s liberalism. I certainly disagree with the mantra of “progressivism” that all change is progress, and good. But I also disagree that simply because something is new and different that it must not be good. I don’t think that the practices of liberal Judaism necessitate its being linked with the political left; at the same time, I think that orthodox Judaism might do well to acknowledge that it has changed much (and for the better, in this American environment) since an older style of Judaism that resisted secular studies, Zionism, or careers for women.

            So, perhaps like Trilling, I can maintain the freedom to maintain my flexibility, resisting blind acceptance of the doctrines spouted by either party or camp. This freedom can be invigorating and, maybe someday, even an ‘intellectual catalyst:’

 • “To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians, who had tasted Arnold’s despair without succumbing to it. For both Trilling and Chambers, despair was a powerful intellectual catalyst and not simply a mood to be indulged.” (18)

 

I think Rabbi Levi Olan, a longtime spiritual leader of the synagogue where I grew up in Dallas (although he was a good bit before my time) was an old-school, Trilling-style liberal. Here’s what he wrote in 1969:

 “In biblical times the Prophets were certain liberals. They called for a change in the social order; they denounced the rich and championed the poor. But they were also conservatives who bid the people to ‘remember when they came out of Egypt.’….It is not an either/or situation, either conservative or liberal. Both are essential in any healthy existence, whether personal or social…The clash between the liberal position and that of the conservative resounds noisily and at times without charity. It would appear at the outset that these positions can never be reconciled. In all probability they cannot. What is important is that religion needs the best of both if it is to be alive and vital for man. The conservative becomes the guardian of the great truths which the tradition has preserved – the accumulated experience of the race and a resource for wisdom and hope…The fact is that even the conservative changes, for not even he brings sacrificies as the Bible commands. The liberal gives the old a chance to live by clearing out the accretions which stop up the well of living water. His danger is that he may in the end totally forsake the well of his father and wander aimlessly after new water which he cannot discover…The liberal has not found an answer to the authority for his faith. The conservative is doing no better. He formally acknowledges the revelation of God but he does not really live by the word…Wisdom in this hour would dictate the recognition that there are virtues and weaknesses in both positions. What is needed most is a concerted and united effort against the secularism which threatens our very existence today.”

Rabbi Olan is also connected to Trilling (in my view) in that he consistently quoted from great literature – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Coleridge – in his sermons. Trilling was obviously committed to the idea that classics of literature help us see and appreciate the complex variety of life. Olan apparently agreed. I haven’t seen a single sermon of his in which he quotes Bob Dylan.

 And this is an interesting postscript that didn’t fit anywhere else:

•“Chambers does not write [in a 1957 National Review essay] about Islam as a political factor, except as it might alienate Arabs from the Soviet Union, which was ruling over millions of Muslims, suppressing their religious freedoms just as it suppressed those of Christians and Jews. Chambers wonders whether ‘those wretched Arabs heard, too, that in Soviet Siberia several million of their co-religionists exist in a misery not much different from their own?” p. 287