Not a day goes by that I do not witness someone on the street having a bizarrely demonstrative phone conversation. This often happens around 5:30 PM, that witching hour when the normal people are walking home from work and I am walking to church. Relieved from the confinement of the office, they flee to the confessional of the smartphone, dialing an acquaintance or family member and unleashing their every burden. The only problem is that they are usually shouting or speaking with the ebullience of one who has just scaled Mt. Everest. And they are usually complaining, loudly, about someone else from the office, or a nascent romantic interest, as well as gesticulating and cutting across the sidewalk with the aggression of a baby falcon. Indeed, it is often a young person putting on such a performance, and the display seems intended for those in their surroundings rather than the unfortunate interlocutor. Perhaps, in this way, the speaker gets to “perform” some version of himself that he would wish to be, and if no one else confirms it, at least an observer is subjected to it through no will of her own.
There is so much shouting in our world, and so little listening. One of the most instructive things about the time I spent with monks and nuns earlier this summer was the quality of listening I was introduced to. Never in my life have I been aware of such listening. Never in my life have I been so deeply listened to. There was a sense, when speaking with a particular monk, that we somehow existed outside of time, that he would consider each thing I said in some deep part of his brain before even allowing the impetus to respond to germinate. There was no pressure of the “marketplace” in this setting, no worldly imperatives. For he was someone accustomed to listening to the whisperings of God. A dialogue became like a dual meditation. And each thing I shared was absorbed, allowed to land, and met with some kind of deep acceptance.
This is how I want to listen to our political culture. I see that I have been at times too reactive. I have rushed to fill a wound with synthetic solution, rather than submerging it in water and looking at it in the light. It is time for what author Thomas Moore calls “a homeopathic move, going with what is presented rather than against it.” In a chapter called “The Body’s Poetics of Illness,” Moore talks about an interest in the “poetic suggestiveness of a disease.” He writes about “the symptom as a symbol.” What is a symbol? It is “the act of throwing together two incongruous things and living in the tension that exists between them, watching the images that emerge from that tension.”
Images are emerging from our political body that are the result of the tension between the way things were, which on some level was deeply unsatisfying to many, and the progressive solutions which appeared but did not solve the problem. In my antipathy to the progressive solutions, I have often denied that there was a problem at all. So deep was my disgust at what was being presented that I could do nothing but offer a rebuke. But the new images, beautiful and serene, are the products of a negotiation between the unsatisfactoriness of the progressive response and the slow reckoning and acceptance that things have not been as they should be.
Compare this cycle to the onset of an allergy. It is ragweed season in Washington. A typical response might be the rush toward drugstore medication which does nothing but make the sufferer drowsy. In light of this failure, one might consent to try a set of daily homeopathic capsules, which at first seem limited but slowly begin to alleviate the disturbance.
This is a way of listening to, rather than shouting at, the body. “Listen” is the first word of Saint Benedict’s venerated Rule for monastic life. Written in the 6th century, it includes a chapter on restraint of speech. This passage mentions “esteem for silence.” It is similar in spirit to advice one finds on how to accompany, or console, the grieving. In “Counseling Skills for Companioning the Mourner,” Alan Wolfelt writes that listening alone is healing. The key to being with a person going through deep loss, he suggests, is knowing “when to allow silence to reign.”
Consider the therapeutic system of the Bach Flower Essences. A little-known form of natural medicine considered by some to be laughably esoteric, the essences work by restoring negative emotional pathologies to their sacred origins. They do not eradicate inherent qualities. So for instance if I take Water Violet for isolation, the plant will bring me to my true self as a person who loves solitude and can bear independence, rather than forcing me into unwanted social contact.
So it is with remedies I see emerging in distinct areas of American life. If progressive answers were the synthetic solution to problems that undeniably existed, a new thing is coming into being that I can only call holistic conservatism. The ideas of this contingent are a correction to the correction represented by the upheavals of 2015-2020. In the economic realm, the brief exhilaration of the Bernie Sanders campaign, which viewed with dignity the struggles of workers, gave way to the Trump presidency. But in its wake solutions are being developed on the right-of-center which take the best ideas from the former administration and leave behind its trademark incivility. Such ideas are represented by organizations like American Compass. In the erotic arena, the shrill paranoia of #MeToo has slowly been replaced by a deeper consideration of romantic ethics, seen in books like Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex. Often viewed as part of a wavelength dubbed “sex negativity,” it makes more sense to think of this book and others along similar lines as representing a new chastity.
What, then, of art? Is there something beyond the one-two punch of the progressive insistence that art must address social justice, followed by the libertine backlash stripping aesthetics of any more noble impulse? What is the holistic conservative approach to the visual or stylistic? Libertarian and reactionary are often thought of as opposites, but libertarians are the reactionaries in our culture. Our society is moving toward something deeper than freedom.
In 2011, critic and academic Maggie Nelson published a book called “The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning.” In it, she talks about how the role of the artist in the 20th century was often associated with transgression, agitation, and a sense of the “bellicose avant-garde.” She describes creative people of this era as having a tendency to use “shock-and-awe strategies.” An art of “pure cruelty” was employed in order to perturb the well-heeled and placidly stable, and its tactics can be seen in the Dadaists of the 1910s as well as the punks of the 1970s. I, too, have partaken of these pleasures, and few can deny the thrill of jabbing some upright person in the ribs by way of a provocative statement here and there. But like all pleasures, it is ephemeral. I sense that I am not the only one feeling this way. There is something tiresome about the continued need to upset, to rankle, to court ostracism. If these are the only satisfactions afforded an artist, they are poor indeed.
Perhaps the impulse of 2010s progressives to enjoin art and creativity to some deeper purpose, something that could be curative and restorative rather than simply shocking or nihilistic, was not without merit. I can scarcely believe I am saying this, but maybe they were onto something. It’s just that their solution was synthetic and limited, based as it was on an art that dealt in material problems and Earth-based answers. Throughout the centuries, one of the main roles of the artist has been to glorify God. Fra Angelico, already an established painter before joining a Dominican order in the early 15th century, spent his life thereafter completing commissions for monasteries and other religious institutions. There is a wealth of Buddhist art which depicts pilgrimages to important sacred sites across Asia, and artists were often employed to create items such as sculptures and scrolls that could assist in such a journey.
We are in an age of inversion. The last will be first and the first will be last. It may be that in the 21st century, things that have come to be associated with being an artist (living in cities, defying religion) will become their opposite (living in the countryside, honoring the divine). The holistic conservatives are the true progressives, the ones truly finding a way forward.