The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive?

National Review, Oct 21, 1991 by Matthew Scully

ORDER! More a pamphlet than a book, Claes Ryn's The New Jacobinism: Can Democracy Survive? (National Humanities Institute, 102 pp., $8.95) appears at first to be your standard conservative grieving over the death of the old ways--one man's futile cry against the fates. The times are marked by "a flight from individual responsibility." Among intellectuals, we find a "superficiality" and "frivolity," a "moral flabbiness" all around. Politicians lack conviction. "Standards of personal behavior and comportment are falling." Our dear old Western Civilization, in short, is winding down, and only a "reawakened awareness of personal character and responsibility" can save it.

The essay takes an unexpected turn, though, for among the "Jacobins" causing all this trouble we find not just the usual liberal riffraff. "It is indicative of the influence of the Jacobin spirit in the Western world," writes Mr. Ryn, "that a fondness for abstract general schemes and utopian visions should today have attraction even for people said to be 'conservative' or on 'the right.'" Endlessly browbeaten and caricatured by the liberalism of the day, conservatism's "old beliefs undergo a subtle change."

Mr. Ryn has in mind conservatives who enlist in federally sponsored "causes" of the moment, New World Orders, crusades for democracy, and suchlike. These conservatives, he says, share in the delusion of moral reform as a collective undertaking. When Democratic speechwriters summon us to the "New" this or the "New" that, no one is disappointed; that's what Democratic speechwriters do, and few of them are likely to pause anytime in this life and ponder Ecclesiastes. But conservatism, Mr. Ryn remind us, is supposed to stand for the idea of self-reform, for the "moral realism" of tending one's own garden before venturing off to set the world right. It is not in politics, he writes, but "in daily life, primarily in one's intimate associations, that opportunities for love of neighbor are actually present."

How asks Mr. Ryn, can we set about "ordering" the world when America itself is in such a bad way? If conservatism's distrust of vast state enteprises applies to foreign policy, then "a country's primary duty is to conduct its own affairs and repair its own flaws." Morally, we're becoming a nation of Mitch Snyders restlessly hurling ourselves into causes, each "vital," but far removed from the mundane duties awaiting us at home.

Further, Mr. Ryn adds, we must not embrace even capitalism as a moral absolute. For "civilization depends on not letting purely economic considerations dominate society."

About society's restlessness, Mr. Ryn is certainly onto something--though Eric Hoffer put it all even more succinctly when he observed that a man is never busier than when he's avoiding the one thing he ought to do. But here and there his sweeping "Jacobin" thesis leads MR. Ryn to dismissive overstatement. Are Allan Bloom and Ben Wattenberg really "Jacobins in spirit" on account of their conviction that America must in times of crisis assume the role of (Mr. Wattenberg's phrase) "global organizer"?

Not really, and indeed much of Mr. Ryn's own thesis had already been advanced pretty compellingly in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. It's all very well to alert us to America's falling "standards of personal behavior and comportment," or to the "fading self-discipline" and "promiscuity" that typifies the younger folks who so depress Mr. Ryn. But it was Mr. Bloom who ventured beyond the Decline-of-Western-Civilization platitudes to examine, at length and not without sympathy, the jaded souls who slip into these "lifestyles" and their sad delusions of moral idealism, so that a modern libertine reading that book could not cast it aside without sensing that he or she had been found out. "A society's greatest madnesses often seem normal to itself," reflected Mr. Bloom. Not, it seems safe to say, the sentiment of a Jacobin.

Still, Mr. Ryn--the author also of Democracy and the Ethical Life--has his mind correctly focused, and respect is due any man who so fiercely resists liberalism's pull to "normalcy."