Do Not Go Gentle Into That Bad Night

Ross writes:

there are times when quietism is the better part of valor, and times when revolutions are necessary things. And given my own declinist instincts, I can easily imagine myself ending my writing career sharing the “only a revolution (or the Benedict option) can save us now” point of view that some of my favorite dissident conservatives partake of. But I’m not ready to take that path just yet.

Let me go on record with a big yo tambien — not because of some romantic notion of politics as The Thing That Will Save Us, but because Ross is dead-on in his criticism of the unhealthy psychological oscillation between “the barricades” and “the monastery” that conservatives are often wont to indulge. It’s not so much that politics will save us as that we’ll all be doomed without practicing politics as citizens; and in the contemporary milieu in which I and all good bloggers are a part, that means, for good or for ill, occupying a weird nether-region between private/apolitical and public/political life.

Faeces et urinam nascimur. It’s uncomfortable to dwell on the way political commentary can fail as both a private and public endeavor, neither half dozen of one nor six of the other, besmirched by association in both directions. Nonetheless, I think this moment needs it (needs, um, us): precisely because of the feverishness driving those around us to the solace of total commitment in either the apolitical or political immersion tank. Modern (small-l) liberalism, which in spite of it all I largely defend, is not built for either kind of obsession. Winding up in either tank is one thing, but fleeing hither or yon out of a sense that otherwise everything is lost strikes me as quite another.

Someone, someones among us need to keep shared faith in our ability to maintain separate but related sociocultural and political spheres. It’s a tension as irresolvable as it is indispensable to a society that’s not only free but good. We can’t and shouldn’t merge these spheres. Nor should we seek to jettison one or the other out of exhaustion masquerading as contempt.