What exactly do they have in common with Russell Kirk, James Burnham and the conservative intellectuals who wrote for publications such as National Review and Modern Age in the 1950s and 1960s? It is not obvious to me. In the past, being a conservative did not mean walking in lock-step with the Republican Party. The fact that Patrick Buchanan, a key figure during the formative years of the conservative movement, does not see eye-to-eye with many of the most prominent media conservatives of our time speaks volumes on this question.
In many ways this blurring of the old conservative identity was inevitable. Conservatism is not a value-laden term. Its meaning changes, depending on the time and place when it is applied, on what status quo is being conserved and on what establishment is being defended. To state the obvious, a conservative in the old Soviet Union was committed to a starkly different set of principles from those defended by a conservative during the Reagan years in the United States. There was no reason to assume that the key themes of the conservative movement of the Goldwater years would remain central elements in the political give-and-take of our era. Time marches on.
That said, there is one prominent conservative theme of the past that we overlook at our peril: the impact of Original Sin on human affairs. I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone on the talk shows bring up Original Sin in a discussion of current events, even though back in the 1960s and 1970s it was at the heart of the conservative critique of the growth of federal programs, the arms race, progressive education, and liberal theories about crime and criminals. Back then, even secular conservatives, who viewed the biblical accounts of the fall of man as a metaphor, would make the case that man’s fallen nature must be kept in mind when making public policy, because humanity’s inclination towards evil was real, whether caused by Adam and Eve eating the apple or in some innate psychological shortcoming of mankind. It was why they pushed for us to keep ourselves strong militarily, rather than trust in the good will of our adversaries in the world arena, why the courts and our prisons should be tough on criminals, why we should not coddle school children, why we should resist the temptation to spend a fortune on “utopian” social programs doomed to come up short.
Why is Original Sin not mentioned by conservatives these days? It could be that success at the ballot box is to blame. Republicans now control both the Congress and the White House. Maybe that is why conservatives are no longer as fearful as they once were of federal programs and the growth in size of the federal government. They run things now. The term “big government conservatives” sprang into existence during the Reagan years. It is easier to trust the “feds” when they are your people.
Or maybe it is the growing secularization of society that explains the change. Perhaps politicians and journalists on the right have concluded that using the term Original Sin is counter-productive; that it will turn away members of society who may respond well to the case for smaller government and a get-tough approach to crime, but only if it is not directly linked to a biblical understanding of human nature. That could be. Maybe there are conservative politicians and television commentators sophisticated enough to have made this tactical shift. Rush Limbaugh comes to mind. He understands what is meant by Original Sin. In his early years on the air, he displayed an impressively solid grasp on the themes being explored at the time in conservative scholarly journals such as Modern Age and Intercollegiate Review. Then again, maybe what we are witnessing is the impact of what might be called the “Oprahfication” of society, the rise of the offend-no-one-feel-good-about-ourselves approach to public discourse. Humanity’s fallen nature and inherent inclination to evil are not concepts that fit well in settings that end with a hug.
Whatever the reason, we are shortsighted if we forget that mankind has a great capacity for evil, and not just isolated individuals such as Charles Manson and serial killers. Recent events have made that clear. I have in mind scenes that appeared on our television screens in early April. One set of images was of the crowds kicking and mutilating the burnt bodies of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists in Fallujah, Iraq. The young men in those mobs were as gleeful as a crowd tearing down the goalposts at a homecoming game. They took pride in the horror of their actions.
The other images were part of a PBS telecast about the genocide in Rwanda in the late 1990s. I had read of the mass murders of the Tutsi tribe by members of the rival Hutu tribe. So I knew the numbers. I had heard Bill Clinton apologize for standing by while the killings took place. But I was not prepared for what I saw on my television screen: graphic scenes filmed from a distance, of men, women and children kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs as thugs with machetes whacked away at them as if they were cane stalks on harvest day, of hundreds of decaying bodies strewn across the churchyard of a Catholic church, of bodies scattered along the roadside like the debris on an arena floor after a rock concert, of sad-eyed children in hospitals with their arms and legs hacked off.
One of the Hutus who participated in the slaughter spoke of what was going through his mind as he wielded his machete. He said, “It was as if the devil had taken over my mind.” He added that, after he killed for the first time, he felt an urge to go on, to kill more, then more. I can think of no better definition of blood lust, of the unleashing of the dark side of human nature, of mankind’s inclination to evil, of Original Sin.
Fears of being politically incorrect should not hold us back from taking this dimension of human nature into account when we make judgments about the world. For most of the history of the Christian West, it was the norm for those in charge of governments, schools, prisons and families to focus on mankind’s fallen nature. Their insights should not be cast aside; they are part of what Russell Kirk used to call the “inherited wisdom of the past”; of what G.K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead.” That line from the goofy commercial of a few years ago had it right, once we apply the appropriate spin to it: “You can’t fool Mother Nature.”
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
