New Modes and Orders?
In his fine essay “Modernity and Its Discontents,” Lee Oser offers several “theses” regarding the age in which we find ourselves. The whole piece is full of profound insights about our present condition, but perhaps its greatest virtue is that it is no hidebound reactionary condemnation of modernity itself. Oser understands that true conservatives, inheritors of an intellectual legacy that was passed from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk and beyond, ought to understand themselves not as prisoners stuck in the modern world but as citizens of it. We have a duty to redeem the time.
Of all the conservative sages Oser cites, it is perhaps the American poet T. S. Eliot who can best serve as a new Virgil, guiding us through this troubled era in pursuit of a higher vision. In Eliot’s poetry, he writes, “Modernity is more than a distraction for the Christian believer: through prayer and discipline, it becomes a way to discover the sacred.” His body of work, The Four Quartets most especially, demonstrates to a serious reader how order might be brought out of disorder—it is shot through with a kind of mysticism that has transformed many lives.
Admittedly, modern thinkers have not always been so concerned with the inner order Eliot so desperately sought. “The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact, or consists in the fact, that modern Western man no longer knows what he wants,” Leo Strauss—a sometimes-colleague of Eliot’s at the University of Chicago—wrote in one famous essay, and “that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.” Given the moral urgency of this crisis, it is perhaps little wonder that so many on the left and right alike turn to the hard politics of force and coercion to impose order from the outside. But the vast concentrations of power inherent to modernity have always failed to achieve that end. Conservatives seeking “the peace of the city” must reject the insane cruelty of the death camps and the stupid banality of relativistic liberalism alike. Just as we cannot force men to live free, we cannot force them to seek the good.
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