The Reactionary Mind

Why Conservative Isn't Enough

Michael Warren Davis

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684511464
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

America Needs Reactionaries! Never have the American people been lonelier, unhappier, or more in need of a swift reactionary kick in the pants. There is a better way to live—a way tested by history, a way that fulfills the deepest needs of the human spirit, and a way that promotes the pursuit of true happiness. That way is the reactionary way. In this irrepressibly provocative book, Michael Warren Davis shows you how to unleash your inner reactionary and enjoy life as God intended it. In The Reactionary Mind, you'll learn:

• Why medieval serfs were probably happier than you are
• Why we should look back fondly on the Inquisition
• Why all "news" is fake news
• How "conservatives" become "adagio progressives"

You also get bonus lists of Reactionary Drinks, Reactionary Books—even Reactionary Dogs. If you want to be happy, you need to be a reactionary, and this book is your guide. It belongs on the bookshelf of everyone in America. (And, incidentally, a reactionary would build his own darn bookshelf, not buy one from IKEA!)

PART I That Was Then

CHAPTER ONE The Reactionary’s Dreams of Heaven

Life in the Middle Ages was not a nightmare,

but a dream—an amorous dream of heaven.

—Ramiro de Maeztu

Imagine a land where the average citizen lives on about twelve acres of land, and the poorest of the poor get by with just one. None of them have ever seen the road darkened by a skyscraper or heard the air split by the sound of a passing airplane. Nearly 100 percent of the population lives and works in the great outdoors. Their skin is a healthy bronze; their hands are strong and calloused; their muscles are hard, taut, and eminently practical, earned through long days of wholesome labor.

There are no pesticides or growth hormones in this country. All the meat and vegetables they eat are totally organic. Their furniture is what we would call antique, fashioned by master craftsmen in the local style and passed down from father to son over generations. To heat their homes, they burn wood in the fireplace. Of course, they chop the wood themselves.

Here, nothing is disposable—and nothing need be. When a man’s trouser catches a nail, his wife can darn the tear in a matter of minutes. In fact, she herself made the trousers from wool her husband sheared from his own sheep. If a chair breaks, her husband fells a tree and carves a new one. Tinkering at these pleasant little chores under the shade of an oak tree might even be a definition of happiness.

For the most part, these folks walk everywhere they need to go. It keeps them fit and limber. Besides, they’re never far from town: everything they need is, at most, a few miles from the front door. Not one of them has ever seen a throughway or a byway, and no tractor trailer has ever disturbed the quiet of this little domain. The only sounds a man hears are the whistle of the scythe as his son mows the barley, the low of the heifer as she brushes away flies with her tail, and the voice of his wife calling him in for lunch.

Of course, the routine changes slightly as the year goes on. Life here is tied to the seasons.

In spring, the men stay up all night drinking craft beer, roasting pigs and lambs for the Easter feast. This they’ll eat with apples and plums and wild strawberries. The boys will crown the girls with garlands of wildflowers and woo them with memorized poetry. Broods of children will chase rabbits through the briar. Someone will play the guitar and the people will dance.

Come autumn, the men will hunt deer and geese. The harvest feast will be marked with hearty vegetable stews, tart cider or warm brandy, and all sorts of homemade cheeses. The men will build a great bonfire; the people will sing and dance; and when the celebration ends, families will walk home to their cottages. There’s perfect silence over the valley. An owl hoots somewhere deep in the forest; a badger chitters in the brush.

Here, there are no streetlamps or strip malls. Once the sun sets, all is dark. Every living thing looks up and sees the same pale moon looming amid a crowd of stars. The road ahead is lit by these heavenly bodies. How could it be otherwise?

Welcome to a day in the life of a serf.

That’s a slightly romanticized view…but only slightly. Our view of the Middle Ages has been clouded by centuries of bad history piled on top of one another. So, before we go any further, we must clear up three common misconceptions about our friend the serf.

1. The serf was oppressed.

The defining characteristic of serfdom, it would seem, is a total lack of freedom. But what do we mean by freedom? Usually, we mean exactly what the Marquis de Sade would mean: the ability to exercise one’s agency to fulfill one’s desire. The modern would probably say freedom is the ability to “live your best life.”

Freedom, then, is about choices. The more our choices align with our desire, the freer we think ourselves to be. For instance, the citizen of a communist country gets his bread by standing in a bread line. Everyone receives the same crusty loaf with the same bland wrapper. They have no choice; they are not free. The citizen of a capitalist country, meanwhile, goes to the grocery store. Does he want Wonder Bread, Pepperidge Farm, Nature’s Own, Sara Lee, Arnold, or store brand? Does he prefer white? Wheat? Rye? Pumpernickel? Cinnamon raisin? Sprouted grain? Gluten free? He has choices; he is free.

Theoretically, this should mean that the man who shops at the largest store is the freest. That’s what we mean when we say that a store has the “best selection” in town: that it has the most options to choose from.

But if freedom is defined as the ability to choose from as many options as possible, then freedom is automatically defined by income. In theory, I can walk to Market Basket and choose from hundreds of different breads, the cheapest of which costs $1.99. Yet, if I have only two dollars in my pocket, I have only one choice, which is really no choice at all. If I have only one dollar in my pocket, then I have less “freedom” than our comrade in the breadline, who at least gets some bread.

This isn’t an apologetic for communism, of course. But maybe we can see how our definition of freedom is a bit muddled.

What’s more, chains like Trader Joe’s and ALDI are quickly building a supermarket empire by taking away choice. They realized that Americans like choice in theory but hate it in practice. We’re highly susceptible to option paralysis. While we’d be perfectly content eating any of the hundreds of breads in the baked goods aisle, having to pick just one causes us mental anguish. We’re actually glad when someone makes such decisions for us.

This is the case with so much of modern America. We have more choices than we have desires. In fact, there’s a whole segment of the economy devoted to creating desire for products that already exist but that nobody ever wanted. It’s called advertising. In a sane economy, supply responds to demand. In America’s capitalist economy, we create the supply and then manufacture the demand. Nobody wanted a Chia Pet or an iPhone until someone offered to sell it to him for a reasonable price. Anyway, what’s a “reasonable price” for something you don’t want and don’t need?

So we can’t say that the serf was oppressed merely because he lacked choices. In fact, I would argue that he was freer, because he was free from meaningless choices. If he wanted bread, he baked it.

And this goes well beyond economics. We feel not only entitled to our infinite choices but obligated to make them with the utmost care. There are eight billion people on earth, and we have to find the perfect one to marry. There are more than twenty-six thousand colleges on the planet, and we have to attend the one that’s just the right fit for us. Then we have to move to our ideal city and land our dream job, which will allow us to buy our dream car and go on our dream vacation to an island paradise in the Caribbean. If we don’t, we’ll die unhappy and unfulfilled.

This is nonsense, of course, but many Americans think this way, even if unconsciously, and it’s making us miserable. We are always free to choose, but never free from choice. We lack the greatest freedom of all: freedom from desire, otherwise known as gratitude.

Chesterton once said that “thanks is the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” This has always been the position taken by the Catholic Church. Christian serfs were warned against greed and urged to thank God for what little they had. Most of our contemporaries would probably call that a form of propaganda meant to defend the lairds from their envious peasants. Well, the American middle class enjoys prosperity beyond anything the fattest, richest laird in all the Middle Ages could have dreamt of. We have infinitely more to be grateful for, and yet we’re infinitely less grateful for it.

Gratitude for the blessings of his life is what made the serf’s lot such a happy one. He lived his whole life in the village where he was born. He began apprenticing for the family business as soon as he was old enough to hold a shovel or carry a hammer. He married some girl he’d known and befriended since childhood. He was baptized, confirmed, married, and buried in the same church he attended every Sunday. In other words, he was blissfully free of all the basically meaningless choices that we moderns spend the first fifty years of our lives agonizing over. By the time he was eighteen, he could get on with living.

2. The serf was ignorant.

When we picture a serf in our mind’s eye, we see an illiterate, superstitious bigot, his boots caked with manure and his face full of warts. He couldn’t read; he couldn’t vote. If he wanted music, he had to sing it himself. If he wanted art, he had to content himself with the statues in his parish church. He was uncultured and uncouth—trapped in a religious-political system in which he had no say, and which he couldn’t understand even if he did.

How unlike us moderns! We spend our days reading Plato and listening to Beethoven. For long hours we wander through museums, or else simply plant ourselves beneath an oak tree and contemplate the unity of all Creation. On Fridays, we gather with our friends for our weekly symposia; we drink wine and discuss Confucius and Augustine and al-Ghazali. And we’re all very proud of those wise, benevolent elected officials we send to Washington.

It’s amusing to consider how many wars were fought to empty a little scripture out of the peasant’s head and fill it with a bunch of sitcoms and pornography. It’s doubly amusing to read the accounts of men who thought the future might develop otherwise. The philosophes believed the Revolution would bring about a grand Republic of Letters, governed by a mass of learned and virtuous citizens guided by pure reason. Friedrich Engels believed that, in a communist society, the proletariat would become like his bourgeois friends: they would drink champagne, eat caviar, and foxhunt.

It never occurred to these men that most people might not want to be lettered. They might not have much interest in the fancy things afforded by Herr Engels’s trust fund.

To be fair, this isn’t a uniquely modern error. It has its origins at the very beginning of philosophy. In the first line of his Metaphysics, Aristotle declares, “All men by nature desire to know.” It’s a nice sentiment, but a false one. Let me prove it to you.

In your pocket, there’s a little black box. Using that little black box, you can read every known work of Seneca, Euclid, Xenophon, Aquinas, Pascal, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Donne, Johnson, and Dickens. But you probably won’t. You’ll use it to look at pictures of strange-looking cats and watch videos of men hitting each other in the groin. And that’s not your fault! Human beings, on the main, simply aren’t very curious.

This is the confounding thing about the Enlightenment. It’s true that all men are, to some degree, rational. But it’s also true that all men are, to some degree, creative. We are all, to some degree, funny. Why on earth should we single out reason as the basis of our society? The idea of a “Republic of Letters” is only slightly less ridiculous than that of a Republic of Paintings or a Republic of Comedies.

I say “slightly less” because every human being possesses a rational soul. We are defined by reason in a way we aren’t defined by creativity or humor. But assuming that men will make good use of their rational souls was a pretty big gamble and, so far, it hasn’t paid off.

That’s the trouble with our political, economic, and cultural institutions. They were devised by men who, like Aristotle, believed that every man could be a philosopher and assumed that every man wanted to be one. The feudal order was built on the opposite assumption. The medievals assumed that most men didn’t want to be philosophers: they were content to be men.

3. The serf was miserable.

I suppose, if we went back in time, we could poll a few thousand serfs and find out what percent of them were miserable. Then we could compare that data to modern statistics. That would settle the question definitively.

How are we doing in twenty-first-century America? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 10 percent of Americans have medical records that list them as clinically depressed. In 2017, a Harris poll reported that 72 percent of Americans feel persistently lonely. In 2019, YouGov found that one in five millennials claim to have no friends at all.

It’s hard to believe that our peasant friends would have worse numbers.

Many conservatives would balk at the idea of judging our social order based on happiness, but every question about humanity must concern itself with happiness; it’s the whole reason for our existence.

This is one of the fundamental truths of the Christian religion. The Baltimore Catechism, in its sweet and simple way, puts it thus:

Q. Why did God make you?

A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

Now, that last clause is certainly important. Trying to make everyone as happy on earth as in heaven is to immanentize the eschaton, as conservative highbrows like to say. It’s the very essence of utopian thinking, and the reactionary is even more allergic to utopianism than the conservative.

Yet the fact remains that humans are meant for happiness, in a deep and metaphysical sense. Men are made to be happy. The founding fathers understood this and had the wisdom to enshrine “the pursuit of happiness” on our republic’s birth certificate.

Back when he was a conservative, the columnist George F. Will wrote a book called The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions. Yet Mr. Will missed the point, perhaps because he’s an atheist. The pursuit of happiness is the Toriest notion of all.

Virtue is certainly a necessary aspect of human happiness. A man can’t really be happy as he wallows in sin. Whatever debased pleasure he might feel, it’s not worthy of the name happiness.

The pursuit of happiness was at the center of the medieval worldview. They understood (as every Christian does) that we cannot be happy without God—that God is our happiness. “Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in thee,” as Saint Augustine said. There’s no better word for the condition of modern man: restless. He is oppressed by his own false freedom, tortured by his inflamed appetites, and humiliated by his own ignorance. The things that might make him truly happy—gratitude and simplicity, peace and quiet—are kept forever out of his reach.

Whatever else we want to say about the Middle Ages, that certainly wasn’t true of the happy serf, whose gratitude and simplicity were a matter of faith and routine. Such happiness was not only independent of wealth, but it could be found in poverty; gratitude was something that could be felt even after the collapse of a civilization. Saint Augustine witnessed firsthand the fall of the Roman Empire, the event that inaugurated the so-called Dark Ages, otherwise known as the early Middle Ages. This was a turning point in the history of Christianity. As Charles Van Doren (himself no reactionary) wrote, “Where wealth had been the measure of a Roman, now poverty became the measure of a Christian.”

It was poverty, yes. Specifically, it was Lady Poverty: the maiden in the desert who won the heart of that great chevalier, Saint Francis of Assisi. In his blessed poverty, the medieval man found a reflection of Christ himself, the poor carpenter’s Son and the source of all true happiness. As Van Doren observed, “The Christian of the Dark Ages also felt that the greatest of human pleasures was to praise the Creator.…Simple meals, a simple life, time to contemplate eternity, and a voice free to praise God—what more could man want?”

We cannot remake the world as twelfth-century France, but what we can do is recognize that a happy society would look much more like twelfth-century France than twenty-first-century America. If one believes with Louis de Bonald that Christianity is “but the application to society of every moral truth,” then one would want our society to be in some meaningful way Christian. In the Middle Ages we have the singular example of a purely Christian society. It was isolated from the o...