Why I too am not a neoconservative

National Review, June 20, 1986 by Stephen J. Tonsor

Too many conservatives whose own belief is weak or non-existent, who will privately admit that religion is "for the troops,' continue to try to teach the catechism to those troops, forgetting that the latter have by now been thoroughly exposed to the Enlightenment and its lessons.

There you have it: The dividing line between conservatives is the line separating Burke from Nietzsche. Let me say parenthetically that I could never understand the reasoning processes of Jews who are Nietzscheans. Walter Kaufmann was quite unable to discern that while Nietzsche was not a biological racist he was a philosophical anti-Semite. If Nietzsche's anti-Semitism was less vulgar than that of Julius Streicher or of Nietzsche's friend Richard Wagner, it was no less deadly.

One is struck again by the true and forceful portrait Thomas Mann gives us of the Nietzschean modernist in the person of Adrian Leverkuhn in Dr. Faustus. Adrian's music is modernist music not only as a style but in terms of the metaphysical conception out of which it is constructed. It is also demonic. It can only come into existence through the ruin of a soul, the destruction of a mind--and as the work of the composer reaches fruition, Germany is destroyed philosophically and sinks into ruin beneath the rain of Allied bombs. Mann, who made the character of Adrian Leverkuhn out of a composite of Nietzsche and Arnold Schonberg, intended in this, the greatest novel of the twentieth century, to tell us something about the cultural reality of our age. The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is a religious and pious Conservative--one, I take it, who had missed the Enlightenment.

I sometimes imagine myself and my fellow Conservatives to be of the type of Serenus Zeitblom. They have a loving regard for their age and their fellow men, and they realize that they must often forgo intervention and permit the tragic drama to play itself out. Because Leverkuhn could not accept an order which, modernist that he was, he felt to be meaningless, he imposed a new order, rational and cleanly articulated as the music of Bach but lacking Bach's attachment to the divine and reconciliation to the human. Leverkuhn's achievement was a great technical triumph but only a triumph of technique. It is fitting funeral music for a culture that died of pride.

Rational technique in the pursuit of irrational ends; that suggests the modernist condition. That is why neoconservatives are so inventive and often correct in dealing with the realm of technique. But when push comes to shove, ends are of ultimate importance and will finally determine the appropriate technique. What the neoconservatives have done is to divorce techniques from ends in an effort to maintain their cultural modernism while rejecting its social and political implications. This, I say, is quite impossible, and in the long run dangerous. It is easy to see that the utopian social and political programs of the last hundred years have failed. It is not the cat of atheism that has been let out of the bag but the failure of the Enlightenment in all its forms. Neoconservatives are, as Irving Kristol remarked, "liberals who have been mugged by reality,' but while they have been detached from their social and political myths they have not located themselves in a body of principle that makes life worth living, or that one would die defending.