Mission and Vision in 1955 and Today

James Tonkowich
December 04, 2008

The following originally appeared in a recent IRD Weekly e-newsletter.  If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “IRD Weekly.”

While searching for a quotation on the Internet, I came across William F. Buckley’s November 19, 1955, mission statement for his brand-new magazine,National Review. With the exception of a few names in the news then, but all but forgotten today, Buckley’s statement is remarkably contemporary.

Buckley identified his age as one where “literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation”—something for which, fifty-three years later, literate America still has an insatiable appetite. Same-sex “marriage,” open borders, and euthanasia are three of far too many examples of such radical social experimentation.

Buckley wrote regarding what was then the growing problem of relativism:

“I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,” said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.”   We have come around to Mr. Holmes’ view, so much so that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything.

While Buckley went on to note that in 1955, “The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident,” relativism in the American soul circa 2008—including the American Christian soul circa 2008—glows like the lights on the Las Vegas Strip. It is so evident you can see it from space.

“Who are you to judge?” we’re asked. “That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me,” our neighbor tells us and the culture leaning over our shoulder is quick to inform us that we have no answer. The grand Reformation idea of “the individual conscience before God” has become license to do pretty much anything we please and to demand affirmation for doing it. This is true in the privacy of our own homes, in our churches and church assemblies, and in the halls of Congress.

Then Buckley focused on ideas: “[B]ack of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations.”

Those ideas must come from some source.   Buckley noted in 1955 what we observe today:

The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience.

Elsewhere in the document Buckley writes, “[T]he United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.” These “fixed postulates,” “the organic moral order”—things like “inalienable rights”—are derived from Scripture and Natural Law, two sources in which elites in the culture and in many churches no longer have confidence or, for that matter, interest.

Instead, today as in 1955, we are assaulted by the prevailing group-think, rooted in ideology rather than in any sort of discernable external authority. Buckley observed:

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts [as well as the churches], are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than “newness”) and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

Buckley names the familiar dangers of large, centralized government; two political parties that in Washington, DC, seem too much alike; rejection of the market economy; and remote, unaccountable international bodies eroding national sovereignty.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal,Columbia University professor Mark Lilla points out that in 1955 while Buckley was founding National Review, “sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on ‘The New American Right’ that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force.” Buckley and others, in a sense, rose to the challenge and proved Bell wrong.

As a result, “For the past 40 years,” Lilla writes, “American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant.” Lilla, a political liberal, goes on to lament that from his point of view those days are over, that conservative intellectualism has given way to “populist chic” to the detriment of conservatism and the republic.

Lilla, I believe, overstates his case. The cadre of conservative intellectuals continues to grow. Nonetheless, Lilla’s words are a reminder of the need to self-consciously pursue Buckley’s 1955 mission—at National Review, the IRD, and a thousand other places—of building and communicating an intellectually vibrant and coherent conservatism to meet the challenges of 2009.