Forgotten Works: The Integration of Theory and Practice

The Integration of Theory and Practice is the sort of essay that liberals like to scream shows how the Christian Dominionists are taking over the political sector of the United States. If only. The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement is instead a perfect example of a program conservatives do not follow, and a perfect critique of mainstream movement conservative.

It was written by a student of Paul Weyrich. Weyrich was involved in founding some extremely important (mainstream) conservative organizations in both the US and Canada, and is generally considered a very Practical Person not given to Idealistic Dreaming. This makes the advice he gives all the more interesting, because it sounds like advice a philosophy professor or Wendell Berry would be apt to give. Allow me to summarize some major points.



1. Traditionalists need to abandon the focus on politics and work on culture and virtue. The reason we continue to fail politically is because the public imagination, mind, and habits are liberal. Until the latter is fixed the former is a dead end.

2. To work on culture and virtue, we must create alternate institutions to promote them. "Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. . . . All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions." This seems to me obvious again: if traditionalists hold that man is a social animal and that virtue often requires cultural support, making that cultural support should be our concern.

3. Ideas do not spread in virtue of being true; this is obvious given the state of the world, but is very important. We preach to the audience far too much, or publish in specialized journals, or use philosophical argument; we have to capture the imagination, though, before we capture the mind. Thus we must value art, movies, etc. (To those who doubt this--perhaps you should think think very hard about your own past and motivations.)

4. We don't need new ideas--more philosophizing is apt to be pointless anyhow. What we need is the implementation of the ideas that we have.

You can read the essay for yourself here. It isn't long, and it won't hurt you.

One of the most important points of the essay is, to my mind, the second. Everyone who wants to live a certain sort of life, different from that of the surrounding society, clumps together: Jews, sodomites, Muslims, etc. That's just how human nature works: if we want to live differently from the world, then we have to live at least a bit apart from the world. Those who think otherwise are, to my mind, likely to overestimate both their self-awareness and their-self control--to think themselves angels that control themselves utterly, rather than men that pick up hundreds of habits from others.

Frederick Wilhelmsen, one of my favorite authors, grew up in a Catholic ghetto in the first half of the twentieth century, before we were integrated into society. He liked it. Say what you like about the pre-conciliar Church--the Church was still in better shape then, and Catholics were definitely more Catholic. To mix in the general population, when you are less than 1% of it, is the surest way to suicide; we should instead clump and conquer.