Hungarian Septic Services, Ideology and Human Dignity, by Bradley J. Birzer.

No one I know personally who knew Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) has ever said a kind word about his personality. If anything, he gained notoriety, even among those who respected him, through an infamy of intolerance, often under the unimaginative guise and excuse of “not suffering fools gladly.” This, in part, helps explain the lack of almost any notice of his death by the conservative world in 2010. He passed into the next world without—really—even a brief sigh or a fond fare well from this one. Few even offered a bitter fare well. Almost all seemed to have simply forgotten the man.

A recent google search reveals almost as many hits for a Thomas Molnar Septic Tank Service in South Bend as it does for the deceased Hungarian scholar. Yet, at one point, he served as a mainstay for both Commonweal and National Review.

Whatever his deficiencies in personality, no one could claim Molnar did not possess a rather expansive genius. Even a cursory examination of his publications—in terms of books as well as articles—overwhelms the would-be researcher. As with many of the greats of his generation, he wrote widely on a variety of topics and in a variety of fields on his heroes such as George Bernanos, educational theories, intellectualism, and the confluence of media and ideology.

His prolific output revivals that of Russell Kirk, a man who inspired, intrigued, and perplexed the Eastern European. Though the two walked across North Africa together in the summer of 1963, Molnar’s published travel memoir mentions Kirk only as an eccentric travel companion who attracted the attention of innumerable Arab and Berber children because of his outlandish appearance.

The Michiganian offered his own praise of Molnar far more openly, considering the Hungarian’s early book on the history of intellectuals, The Decline of the Intellectual, to be one of the most important works of the century.

A Christian Humanism of Sorts

Much of what Molnar wrote and argued during his adult life would fit nicely into the realm of possibilities for those admired at The Imaginative Conservative. Yet, he was always more of a European conservative than an American one. He might very well have been the model—if somewhat imagined on the Austrian’s part—conservative for Hayek’s 1957 famous Mont Pelerin Address, “Why I am Not a Conservative.”

From an American perspective, Molnar might fit better into the category of reactionary than conservative. Admittedly, such labels are as arbitrary as they are problematic. But, Molnar was a man who admired Charles Maurras and many of the Spaniards allied with Franco, but who also actively despised the National Socialists and found himself imprisoned in Dachau at the end of the Second World War. Molnar’s counterrevolutionary streak was as anti-ideological as it was curmudgeonly and, as John Zmirak has so effectively argued, always contrarian. In the end, Molnar believed the communists and the fascists of all stripes to share more in common than not, especially in their embrace of modernity and Gnosticism.

Whatever brief intellectual flirtations Molnar had with the extreme right of his youth, by the 1960s, Molnar had returned to his childhood faith and embraced an orthodox—if somewhat rigid—Roman Catholicism. Certainly, one could place Molnar into the category of Christian humanist, a title, role, and idea to which he gave much thought and spiritual assent. When assessing Molnar’s role in the twentieth century, we will miss his profundity as a thinker if we do not take this Christian humanism into account.

Utopia and the Ideologues

Of his many works, Molnar’s 1967 book, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, published in the final days of the greatness of Sheed and Ward remains, perhaps, his most intriguing and relevant to today’s problems. In it, Molnar analyzed what he considered the never-ending temptation in this world, the belief that man can achieve perfection by his own will and ability and without God. Of course, Molnar offers nothing profound or original in this. Great writers and thinkers throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition had recognized the origins of perfectionism in the devil’s temptation in the Garden.

Unlike many others, though, especially those who describe the first temptation in the bible in passing, Molnar presents a very complex argument against it, noting that even the very thought of perfection is evil. Yet, because of the fall, man easily slides into such dangerous thinking.

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


Bertrand de Jouvenel: Forgotten Conservative, by Bruce Frohnen

In the disaster for humanity that was the 20th Century, dominated by the murderous dreams of collectivist ideologies and the unrestrained lust for power and the knife, those who loved liberty, be they conservative, libertarian, or “classical liberal,” recognized their common cause: opposition to ever-expanding state power. T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, and Russell Kirk sought to redeem the time through recovery of our understanding of the spiritual bases of culture, and the cultural bases of ordered liberty. They were joined, in the economic sphere, by the likes of Wilhelm Roepke, but also by more secularist, market-centric thinkers like F.A. Hayek, who warned of the false appeal and disastrous consequences of following the Road to Serfdom. Yet, this sometimes uneasy partnership of defenders of cultural renewal and economic liberty included figures who sought to bridge the gap between cultural and economic thought. Such a one was Bertrand de Jouvenel, a conservative political thinker of great importance, whose writings from the middle to the second half of the 20th century deserve a wider audience than they receive.

In important works of political thought, including Sovereignty, On Power, and The Pure Theory of Politics, and also in works and essays dealing with economics and questions of how best to approach problems of public policy, Jouvenel made clear the tendency of the modern state to swallow the rest of society, and the individual with it. Ironically, Jouvenel observed, what made the state so dangerous in modern times was precisely what to most people gave to it its legitimacy: democracy.  To many, this recognition of the dark side of democracy rendered Jouvenel’s thought suspect, at best. But his point was not that rule by consent is intrinsically wrong or unjust. Rather, it was that we should recognize the proper limits even of the people to act according to their will, and that such recognition is all the more important in democratic times. From recognition of the importance of the consent of the governed, modern democracy moved to the assumption that governments are legitimate to the extent that they serve the unmediated will of the majority led. Relatively early on, this overemphasis on the normative status of The People (too often little more than an abstraction) led to the common assumption that whatever a democratically elected government did was, by definition, right and just. One need only consider the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror and its claim to act for the people to see the wisdom of Jouvenel’s warning.

In a collection of lectures published as The Ethics of Redistribution, Jouvenel showed how false belief in the power of the majority to achieve a just, fair, and (especially) equal society could succeed only in feeding the Minotaur—that monstrous combination of man and beast that the modern state had become. Thinking, wrongly, that the rich had kept for themselves sufficient wealth to satisfy the needs of all, the people for generations have voted for governmental policies aimed at “redistributing” that wealth so as to meet the needs of the poor. Unfortunately, Jouvenel points out, even if one were able to confiscate all the rich had in their possession, the sum would not come close to meeting the needs of even the poorest. Thus, Jouvenel argued, the wealth “transfer” had not been, and could not be, from the rich to the poor, but rather from most of society to the state. Various programs aimed, in theory, at enriching the lives of the poor would be funded from a general tax, taking money from most people so that the government might spend it on those it deemed worthy or in need. From attempting to provide subsistence to the hungry and the cold, the state quickly moved on to funding various ideological projects, including wasteful forms of subsidized insurance and educational programs and artistic endeavors of highly questionable value, as it built an expensive administrative apparatus to determine how much to give to whom. In this manner the state became increasingly powerful and independent of any check or oversight, even as it maintained the guise and the rhetoric of a mere servant of the people.

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


A Scottish Remembrance of Russell Kirk, by Alvino-Mario Fantini

The Conservative Mind‘s author taught generations to re-enchant the world.

As an undergraduate, my first encounters with Professor Jeff Hart and The Dartmouth Review eventually led to my discovery of the works of Russell Kirk. Like William F. Buckley Jr., Kirk wrote about the need to raise, as historian George Nash put it, a “full-scale challenge to modernity”—in the arts, literature, religion, and politics. While both Buckley and Kirk enchanted me with their obvious love of language and mastery of words, it was Kirk who also managed to stir my spirit with an affection, kindness, and warmth that I did not find elsewhere. Here was a gentle, conservative aesthete.

But I’m not the only one who was affected in such a way by Kirk. And last year, to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, The Conservative Mind, there were several tributes. Last summer, The University Bookman, which Kirk founded in 1960, published an on-line symposium discussing the book. In July, the Liberty Fund also published a tribute, along with three excellent rejoinders. In September, two more events took place: Lee Edwards at the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel with Matthew Spalding, Yuval Levin, and Peter Wehner to discuss the book’s impact; and a few days later, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The Imaginative Conservative, and the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal co-sponsored a one-day seminar at Houston Baptist University.

Scottish Celebrations

One of the more interesting commemorations took place October 18-20 in Scotland, where a distinguished group of students and academics joined members of the Kirk family and their close friends at the University of St. Andrews to discuss The Conservative Mind—and to remember, in Willmoore Kendall’s words, the “benevolent sage of Mecosta”.

Some people aren’t aware that Kirk was a doctoral student at the University of St. Andrews; in fact, he remains the only American to have received a Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from that esteemed university. His dissertation, titled “The Conservative’s Rout”—later re-named The Conservative Mind in discussions with publisher Henry Regnery—is still on file at the university, and the anniversary celebrations in Scotland began, appropriately enough, with a viewing of the original dissertation on Friday afternoon.

Attending the weekend’s events were a dozen or so promising young Americans, all current or former Wilbur Fellows who, after working for Russell and Annette Kirk, went on to study at St. Andrews. It was impressive to hear the deep affection with which each of them spoke about the Kirks—and about the time they spent at his ancestral home at Piety Hill.

Various Europeans also joined the celebrations—for, despite his focus on an ‘Anglo-American’ political tradition, many of Kirk’s published works are known across Continental Europe. Some have even been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian, and his ideas have influenced a range of European scholars. In Germany, Kirk’s contributions as a ‘conservative man of letters’ were recognized as so important, that he merited a lengthy entry (and photograph) in the Lexikon des Konservatismus (Dictionary of Conservatism), a 1996 work edited by the German noble, Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. Today even young members of Sweden’sKonservativt Forum are wont to quote Kirk approvingly.

The always charming and energetic Annette Kirk was also present in Scotland, along with two of her daughters and their families. On Friday evening, she hosted a private reception and dinner at the cliff-side Russell Hotel, where guests were treated to a talk by André Gushurst-Moore, currently Director of Pastoral Care at Downside School, an institution attached to the Benedictine Downside Abbey in Somerset, England.

Gushurst-Moore elaborated on some of the principal themes in Kirk’s works, speaking of Kirk’s defense of humane learning, the moral imagination, and “the permanent things.” Not coincidentally, these are precisely the themes closest to Gushurst-Moore’s own work. In his recent The Common Mind: Politics, Society and Christian Humanism from Thomas More to Russell Kirk (published in 2013 by Angelico Press), he profiles 12 great ‘Christian Humanists’ through the centuries, including Thomas More, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, Orestes Brownson, and Russell Kirk, among others.

His was an eloquent and respectful tribute, which many found quite moving. It was a testament of sorts to the impact that Kirk’s writings—and his gentle character—had on people. And nearly two decades after his death, Kirk continues to touch people with the evocative power of his words (the late Frederick Wilhelmsen said “Kirk was essentially a poet who wrote in prose”). What a reminder of those T.S. Eliot lines from Four Quartets which Kirk was so fond of quoting: “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


Bertrand de Jouvenel: Forgotten Conservative, by Bruce Frohnen

In the disaster for humanity that was the 20th Century, dominated by the murderous dreams of collectivist ideologies and the unrestrained lust for power and the knife, those who loved liberty, be they conservative, libertarian, or “classical liberal,” recognized their common cause: opposition to ever-expanding state power. T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, and Russell Kirk sought to redeem the time through recovery of our understanding of the spiritual bases of culture, and the cultural bases of ordered liberty. They were joined, in the economic sphere, by the likes of Wilhelm Roepke, but also by more secularist, market-centric thinkers like F.A. Hayek, who warned of the false appeal and disastrous consequences of following the Road to Serfdom. Yet, this sometimes uneasy partnership of defenders of cultural renewal and economic liberty included figures who sought to bridge the gap between cultural and economic thought. Such a one was Bertrand de Jouvenel, a conservative political thinker of great importance, whose writings from the middle to the second half of the 20th century deserve a wider audience than they receive.

In important works of political thought, including Sovereignty, On Power, and The Pure Theory of Politics, and also in works and essays dealing with economics and questions of how best to approach problems of public policy, Jouvenel made clear the tendency of the modern state to swallow the rest of society, and the individual with it. Ironically, Jouvenel observed, what made the state so dangerous in modern times was precisely what to most people gave to it its legitimacy: democracy.  To many, this recognition of the dark side of democracy rendered Jouvenel’s thought suspect, at best. But his point was not that rule by consent is intrinsically wrong or unjust. Rather, it was that we should recognize the proper limits even of the people to act according to their will, and that such recognition is all the more important in democratic times. From recognition of the importance of the consent of the governed, modern democracy moved to the assumption that governments are legitimate to the extent that they serve the unmediated will of the majority led. Relatively early on, this overemphasis on the normative status of The People (too often little more than an abstraction) led to the common assumption that whatever a democratically elected government did was, by definition, right and just. One need only consider the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror and its claim to act for the people to see the wisdom of Jouvenel’s warning.

In a collection of lectures published as The Ethics of Redistribution, Jouvenel showed how false belief in the power of the majority to achieve a just, fair, and (especially) equal society could succeed only in feeding the Minotaur—that monstrous combination of man and beast that the modern state had become. Thinking, wrongly, that the rich had kept for themselves sufficient wealth to satisfy the needs of all, the people for generations have voted for governmental policies aimed at “redistributing” that wealth so as to meet the needs of the poor. Unfortunately, Jouvenel points out, even if one were able to confiscate all the rich had in their possession, the sum would not come close to meeting the needs of even the poorest. Thus, Jouvenel argued, the wealth “transfer” had not been, and could not be, from the rich to the poor, but rather from most of society to the state. Various programs aimed, in theory, at enriching the lives of the poor would be funded from a general tax, taking money from most people so that the government might spend it on those it deemed worthy or in need. From attempting to provide subsistence to the hungry and the cold, the state quickly moved on to funding various ideological projects, including wasteful forms of subsidized insurance and educational programs and artistic endeavors of highly questionable value, as it built an expensive administrative apparatus to determine how much to give to whom. In this manner the state became increasingly powerful and independent of any check or oversight, even as it maintained the guise and the rhetoric of a mere servant of the people.

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


Why Vampires and Zombies are So Popular with Secular Humanists, by Timothy Gordon

The cultural phenomenon is undeniable: vampire and zombie phantasmagoria is in its heyday, especially among Gen-Xers and younger. The dis-ensouled human form, both the high (the vampire) and the low (the zombie), has swept the nation in movies, TV shows, books, graphic novels, and even spoofs. The vampire has become the golden boy for the New Humanism, the zombie its greatest scapegoat. From a religious point of view, these modern tales of alienation happen to tell far more about the soul of the culture which situates them than the lack of soul within the individual zombie or vampire.

First, a brief caveat: I disclaim no inherent immorality appurtenant to the consumption of this sub-genre. I’ve viewed some of these films myself, of course. Zomb and vamp flicks are not themselves immoral or perfidious. Rather, they reflect the abiding lack of morals and good faith–the nutritive supplements of the psyche–of the generation which authors and cherishes them. These creatures reflect the soullessness, in a word, of the culture that has embraced them.

In a secular age, a dis-ensouled human form like a zombie or a vampire becomes a natural item of fascination for the class of young, urban metrosexuals which has been immersed from the cradle in the day’s agnosticism (more pervasively than the older generations, who experience cultural apostasy as something of a sea change, even as they affirm it). Both the vampire and the zombie lack souls and, as such, seek constantly to fabricate existential meaning for their lives, ex nihilo. But the zombie does so in a flatly insufficient manner, seeking the taste of brains alone.

The irreligious youth recognizes the facially unfulfilling nature of the zombie’s quest and presupposes instead the veracity of the vampiric creed, out of hand: the “person” is seen no longer as composite body and soul, but rather as body alone; soulless, the individual is no longer directed toward anything; existence becomes painful loneliness, as love has become eros and no longer caritas. Genuine human communion is thus impossible; one creates one’s own private meaning. And meaning is most lucratively created when done at the expense of others, save for an arbitrarily chosen beloved, who is set aside as sacrosanct. The vampire’s otherwise Hobbesian modus operandi is suspended–without an articulable reason–for his beloved.

Unfortunately, I have just described the weekend mood of the average nightclub attendee, across this land.

Recall what Whitehead wrote about scrutinizing an epoch for its truest self: “look not to its suppositions, but to its presuppositions.” In short, stories of the vampire and of the zombie really represent the new, secular, anti-Aristotelian De Anima, both poles of the ontology of desultory soullessness. They constitute the secularist’s credo on the soul: the quandary arises on account of mankind’s lack thereof.

To a post-theistic generation and its cosmos, the vampire represents all that remains a secular desideratum, being “beyond good and evil,” physically virile yet delicate, outwardly attractive, atheistically immortal, intelligent without acknowledgement of the intelligible barriers to total behavioral license (except for an occasional moral whim). Androgynous and yet still anthropomorphically alluring, the “modern vampire” is the re-vamped (pun definitely intended) Nietzschean übermensch, a “brute, blonde, if pale, beast.” He can basically do as he pleases, act decently or not.

And yet, for all his attributes, still he skulks and ever wrings his hands. This is the secularist’s version of humility. The vampire has postmodern angst. He’s “emo.” In short, he is everything the secular humanists hold dear and have striven after for two centuries.

Okay, but then why the zombie? What has that rube got going for him? He has no existential inner conflict like the vampire. He’s not smart. He’s not handsome. He doesn’t attempt to nurture even the selfish, erotic love of the vampire.

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


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