‘Athwart History’: Brilliant Essays by the St. Paul of American Conservatism
A review of ‘Athwart History’, by William F. Buckley, Jr. (edited by Linda Bridges and Roger Kimball); Encounter Books, 2010.
‘A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.’ Thus spake William F. Buckley, Jr., described by Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation as a man who ‘could have been the playboy of the Western world, but … chose instead to be the Saint Paul of the conservative movement.’ Buckley is immortalised by his thirty-three years as host of Firing Line, his creation and editorship of National Review, and his king-making of Ronald Reagan. In Athwart History, we encounter his greatest essays over half a century, culled from the millions of words he published throughout his career.
These essays cover political, cultural, religious and philosophical subjects, including just about every major event in American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Many first appeared in National Review, which Buckley founded at just twenty-eight having shot to fame with the publication of his polemic, God and Man at Yale, in which he attacks his alma mater for shoving collectivist, Keynesian and secularist ideas down the throats of its students. In Athwart History we find Buckley’s takes on Kremlinology, rock music and peanut butter; on the response to Hurricane Katrina; on Maggie Thatcher and the end of the Latin Mass. We have the impression of reading a man who had an opinion on absolutely everything. But there are currents that runs through everything he writes, and roughly speaking reflect his ‘fusionism’—his ideological mélange of traditionalism, right-libertarianism and hawkishness on foreign policy matters—as well as the moral underpinnings of such views.
In Athwart History we find Buckley’s takes on Kremlinology, rock music and peanut butter.
One does not go into opinion-journalism let alone political opinion-journalism if one is not convinced of the idea that, to quote the title of a famous book by Richard Weaver, ideas have consequences. Buckley clearly believes that, particularly in respect of conservatism, some intellectual muscle is necessary if the right people are to get into office, and the right policies passed. He is a serious intellectual, and one who takes other intellectuals and their ideas seriously. Anyone who has watched Firing Line (make haste to YouTube if not) will know that his approach to ideas was quite antithetical to that which is so pervasive today. He wanted to talk to those with whom he disagreed; he wanted to give those people a fair crack of the whip, as it were. That is not to say that he would go easy on those people or their ideas, but rather that, in respect of intellectual life, he was a thoroughgoing pluralist.
His approach was rare. But then, intellectual conservatives (or conservative intellectuals) are rare. Psychologists tell us that our personalities can be broken down into five distinct areas which are easy to recall because their first letters spell out O.C.E.A.N.. They are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. To be open is to be curious, interested in ideas or experiences; conscientiousness pertains to hard work and organisation; extraversion (and intraversion, which is simply low extraversion on the scale) you will know the meaning of; agreeableness refers, essentially, to how hard it is for us to say ‘no’; and neuroticism describes our proneness to unpleasant feelings. Generally speaking, conservative types are conscientious but not open, and the opposite is true for progressive types. It is exceedingly rare that some is both very open and very conscientious, in part because these two cognitive styles to do not sit all that easily with each other. This is to a certain degree why men like Buckley are rare.
Also rare is Buckley’s prose. It is a very Marmite thing: you will either love it or hate it. He uses a rather ‘peculiar syntax’ (as Gore Vidal would put it during one of their debates). His sentences can run on. Here is a sample:
Mrs. Roosevelt’s principal bequest, her most enduring banquet, was the capacity to oversimplify problem as to give encouragement to those who wish to pitch the nation and the world into humanitarian crusades which, because they fail to take reality into account, end up plunging people into misery (as Wilson’s idealistic imperialism plunged Europe into misery for years and spawned Hitler) and messing up the world in general (under whose statecraft did Stalin prosper?)
Also rare is Buckley’s prose. It is a very Marmite thing.
But I like Buckley’s writing. It is fun, it is different, and he does not make the cardinal error of conflating complexity and quality. (‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’, Leonardo is meant to have said.) In other words, he writes well, in the sense that he chooses his words carefully and succeeds in getting across his meaning. He is also very funny:
‘I remember a critic … remarking that an extrapolation from the demure bumps and grinds of Frank Sinatra, on the orgiastic b’s and g’s of Elvis Presley, suggesting that future entertainers would have to wrestle with live octopuses in order to entertain a mass American audience. The Beatles don’t in fact do this, I observed at the end of that brain-rattling evening, but how one wishes they did, and how this listener wishes the octopus would win.’
It is quite the skill to be a likeable and funny curmudgeon.
In the end, Athwart History, like Christopher Hitchens’s Arguably, Gore Vidal’s State of the Union, Orwell’s Seeing Things As They Are, and Scruton’s Against the Tide, is a worthy contribution to the history of political ideas, as well as a rich study of conservative thought as it is applied in context, to real-world matters. Conservative thought, refracted through the lens of history, often comes off looking bad (the survivorship bias describes the error of focusing only on that which passed a selection process: we tend not to focus on what didn’t happen, or didn’t happen at a certain time, and what benefits that might have had). But in the case of Buckley, we perceive a man who had his principles, and held them more or less consistently, which is surely admirable, whatever we think of them. Moreover, we encounter someone who cheerfully accepts the things he cannot change, and who never drifts into bitterness, even at the tail-end of his intellectual (and actual) life.
