Paul Elmer More: America's Reactionary

Modern Age, Fall, 2003 by Brian Domitrovic

More did not live to see the "perfections" of totalitarian utopianism. One wonders if he would have kept to his view of evil had he lived to observe all the predations of the twentieth century. Indeed, More's identification of "slackness" as the root of moral turpitude, whatever its Greek overtones, does suggest the frame of mind of the American burgher at about 1900. More, however, did not linger on this question, choosing in his last years, while not becoming quite a confessing Christian, to cast his thoughts towards things eternal. In one of his final pieces, which he left unfinished at his death, More quoted this beautiful passage from Newman:

  ... at length [this world] floats before our eyes merely as some idle
  veil, which notwithstanding its many tints, cannot hide the view of
  what is beyond it;--and we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there
  are but two things in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God
  who made it. (16)

IV

"Paul Elmer More is forgotten today," wrote Byron C. Lambert in Modern Age in 1969. (17) This judgment remains essentially correct; More is not now enjoying any kind of vogue aside from that engendered by the appreciative essay in The Conservative Mind itself. It is not, however, correct that More's principles and commitments are bygone. The latter half of the twentieth century probably witnessed the greatest rediscovery of Plato since the Renaissance. And while More might not have had that much in common with Leo Strauss and his followers, there have been other salient strains of Platonism that are of a sense and spirit congenial to More's own. Paul Oskar Kristeller, forced out of central Europe in the 1930s, presided over a remarkable flourishing of Plato scholarship in the United States for four decades. In reading the Kristeller of the 1970s, one is transported to the More of the 1910s:

  [W]ithin the humanities, the intellectual historian has to defend
  himself against the claims, often excessive and intolerant, of the
  social historian, the literary critic, and the analytic philosopher.
  There is a widespread quest for broad syntheses and a contempt for
  details and nuances, while specialization is constantly deplored but
  practised, as it has been ever since the twelfth century at least.

  ....The world of scholarship, once called the republic of letters, is
  or should be autonomous.... If it yields to political or social
  pressures, it does so at its own risk, and must consider the price it
  pays and whether that price is worth paying. For it is our task as
  scholars to preserve and keep alive what is valuable in our cultural
  tradition....

And again:

  Many people now seem to feel that submitting to the truth, factual or
  rational, and to valid standards of conduct and taste, is a
  restriction of their freedom, and that the best defense of this
  freedom is to deny that there is any valid truth or standard. Such
  views were expressed more subtly by the sceptical philosophers of
  antiquity and of later times. I do not share them, and rather believe
  with many respectable philosophers that the submission to truth and to
  valid norms is what constitutes our true moral freedom.

  I must confess in the end something that may be inferred from my
  previous statements. I am at heart a Platonist, on the issue of
  rhetoric, as on many, though not all, others. (18)