The Creation of a Conservative

This lovely article, again from culture11.com, traces this fellow's evolution into a conservative while at Yale.

Needless to say, he cites lots of intellectuals and philosophers but it is actually a pretty easy read and pleasantly illuminating.

I particularly liked this bit - yes I know it is long but it is worth it....

No matter how I try, I can’t identify the precise moment I first called myself a conservative. I know that in my rejection of rationalism, I considered duty and community as alternate sources of meaning; I know that I was powerfully moved by Burke’s paean to the “decent drapery of life,” his condemnations of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” and the “new conquering empire of light and reason.” If I’m strict with myself, though, it also had something to do with the people I spent time with. The most interesting, intense, and intellectual people I have ever encountered – then or since – are the men and women of the Party of the Right. Their style of Socratic dialogue, their conviction that ideas had consequences, their valorization of truth, all appealed to me: even when I had nothing, I looked to them for hints. When I finally started over, my first tentative steps away from ideology took me rightward.

My first real certainty, after Eliot, was that alienation had been implicit in my old world-picture. If we cannot understand ourselves as meaningful participants in something, we regard ourselves as fundamentally other; if all we can truly establish is our own existence as “things that think,” we have nothing to do with our fellows. Language and logic are not enough to bridge those gaps: it requires something more. In opposition to that liberal, rights-based worldview, I looked to love and to tradition.

I understood my own struggle with rationalism and meaning as a symptom of a far greater cultural crisis. It was Man’s isolation in the face of an increasingly alienating world, and his commitment to Enlightenment rationality as the only means of explaining that world, that created the problems of modernity. Those were the things I had hated in myself, and I saw them starkly illustrated in the modern world.

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism terrified me not for its historical lessons, but because there but for the grace of God went I. She describes the “uprootedness and superfluousness” that followed ”the break-down of political institutions and social traditions,” and subsequent creation of pseudo-rationalist ideologies to provide some measure of meaning. Totalitarianism “teach[es] and glorif[ies] the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started.” If a man is drowning in his own nihilism, he’ll cling to some – any – ideology as though his life depends on it. (His ego does.) Wherever it takes him, he won’t dare to let go: to reject the conclusion would be to reject the idea that brought him to it, and that would leave him floating in the abyss again.

I had been drowning. In my longing for certainty, I might have latched on to some murderous ideology. It was only by luck, or by that awful daring of a moment’s surrender, that I’d sacrificed the logical consistency of ideology for compassion. I wanted everyone to have that: I wanted human connection to be easier, closer, more meaningful, so that rationalism wouldn’t seem such an appealing option in the future. I wanted to encourage compassion and community, though I didn’t know how.