BOOK REVIEW Memo to China: Careful what you wish for Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher
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Reviewed by Spengler
What will China be like in 30 years, and what desires will beckon to the hearts
of the Chinese? Rod Dreher's chatty account of "crunchy conservatives", or
neo-traditionalist dropouts from American mass culture, deserves editions in
Mandarin and Cantonese. But a generation from now, some hundreds of millions of
Chinese will have lived with prosperity long enough to ask whether life holds
more in store than shopping. Dreher's book will leave them wondering whether
the United States of America is a
role model, a horrible example, or a bit of both.
Americans are the world's great migrants, soon to be surpassed, as half a
billion people shift from China's countryside to its coast over the next
century.
American spirituality, I long have argued, underlies America's political and
economic success. But Dreher, an editor of the Dallas Morning News, goes
further, insisting that spirituality cannot survive without a radical break
with consumerism.
"Crunchy" in the title is an abbreviated form of the qualifier
"crunchy-granola", referring to the hippie fad for natural foods. The
"crunchy cons" reject the America of shopping mall and suburban subdivision,
and seek spiritual solace in Old World religious liturgies, organic farming,
handicrafts, slow-cooked food and other expressions of deeper tradition. They
teach their children at home rather than send them to school, join strict
religious sects, grow their own vegetables, and they have lived with the
prosperity that Asians now desire and found it empty. The Republican Party's
preoccupation with growth reflects a "tragic flaw of Western economics", namely
that "it is based on exploiting and encouraging greed and envy". Dreher writes:
Our
liberty and prosperity have made us feeble, because the things we've forgotten
to conserve in the rush to riches were the very virtues necessary to build a
stable society. Does anybody really believe we can grow our way out of our
problems? Is another tax cut, gimmicky educational scheme, or entitlement
reform ... going to save marriages, restore children to their parents, heal the
land, renew the commonweal? Come on.
Dreher earlier was
employed at the National Review, whose founder William F Buckley quipped that
conservatives "stood athwart history shouting, 'Stop!'" The crunchy cons stand
athwart the conservative movement shouting, "Get a life!" The great migration
of American Christians toward conservative (mainly evangelical) denominations,
I have argued in the past (The
devil's sourdough and the decline of nations, February 22) is the
decisive political development of 21st-century America, paradoxically so,
because its motives are personal rather than political to begin with.
The American on the margin lives in an "exurb" beyond the traditional suburbs
in the great concrete desert that spawns suburban subdivisions, and drives his
family to a shopping-mall megachurch to hear Christian rock music and a
blow-dried minister preaching the Gospel. Leave the exurb, tear up the
concrete, change the electric guitars for Kentucky bluegrass and hear
traditional liturgy in a wood-frame church, and you have the crunchy-con ideal.
It seems a bit pre-Raphaelite, and it is easy to dismiss as Romantic the crunch
cons' search for tradition and linkage to nature. But the fact remains that
synthetic living and commercial culture make people miserable. Food is not a
trivial matter. Epidemic obesity is the characteristic that most impresses
first-time visitors to the American heartland. They absorb revolting fare
through television and the Internet. They have not given up hope, like the
Europeans or Japanese. But Dreher thinks that a fast-food diet and worship in a
box-like space at a shopping mall does not satisfy the spirit of Americans.
From his writing about food, he stands at the top of my list of American
writers with whom I should like to dine.
Contemplating these issues in a McMansion in an exurb pockmarked with fast-food
dens of indigestion, just what should one do? Everyone cannot go back to the
countryside and raise organic chickens, for there isn't enough countryside to
go around, and not enough people to buy the chickens. For the billion or so
people of China's interior, farming is much too organic, to the point that the
concrete boxes and polluted air of industrial cities seem paradisiacal by
comparison. Those who mourn the disappearance of rural life often forget that
rural poverty almost always is worse than urban poverty.
What Dreher envisages, though, is not so much a back-to-nature movement but
rather a shift back to tradition. Paradoxically, that is where he is most
American. How should an American approach tradition? Judging from his book, in
the United States one simply goes shopping for a tradition. Methodists become
Episcopalians, and then Catholics, atheists become Eastern Orthodox, Unitarians
become Zen Buddhists and then join the ultra-Orthodox Chabad sect of Hassidic
Jews. Among all the crunchies in this account, only one remains loyal to the
church of his fathers. That is Caleb Stegall, a Kansas Calvinist and founder of
the "New Pantagruel" webzine. "The modern answer to everything is to just move
down the street," he said. "I refuse to do that."
Americans change religious denomination all the time, to be sure, not because
they seek tradition but because they seek inspiration. That has its risks. As
Stegall says:
Evangelicals have a great deal of energy and zeal, and
that's a good thing. It's borne great fruit in some ways. But it's tempered
hardly at all by depth and rootedness ... It's a cultural issue. There's not
much preparation in our lives today for deferred gratification, and the
validity and the value of working harder for something. Getting to the depth of
the church's history and teachings is hard work. We want to feel better, and
feel better now.
One gets the feeling that many of Dreher's
crunchy cons choose only those hoary traditions that make them feel good right
now. If that were the basis of tradition, not one would last a century. Each
generation cannot rediscover the world on its own. The fact is that Scripture
simply is too difficult to read without philological interpretation, historical
background, and theological commentary. Look too deeply into any of the great
theological traditions and you will encounter insoluble problems that find
expression in opposing schools. The Catholics have Augustine vs Aquinas, the
Protestants have Calvin vs Arminius, the Jews (following A J Heschel) have
Akiva vs Ishmael. One steeps one's self in tradition not to eliminate the
contradictions, but to learn to live with them. Unless one lives in a faith
tradition, its contradictions lie in ambush for the unprepared mind.
The strangest feature of Dreher's account is the implication that his crunchy
cons have more in common with one another than they do with other people raised
in the same faith. Only in America! What they have in common is an aching
desire for tradition and rootedness, and a common alienation from mass
commercial culture. With the exception of Stegall, whose "New Pantagruel" site
takes its theology neat, what unites them is a characteristically American
willingness to move down the street.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Christianity requires tradition less than
it does conversion. To become a Christian, the Gentile forsakes the gentium of
his origin to join a new people in flesh and blood, through the ancient rite of
rebirth by passage through water, that is, baptism. Because the new people of
God into which the Christian is reborn is not quite of this world, conversion
must be perpetually renewed. That is something no tradition can do.
No US congregation will live through Johann Sebastian Bach's "Passion According
to St Matthew" as an inner experience the way German evangelicals once did. But
who is to say that black Baptists singing Gospel are further from God? I agree
with Dreher that the Chartres Cathedral is more conducive to spirituality than
a shopping-mall megachurch, but there is a reason why Chartres is full of
tourists and the megachurches are full of worshippers. What if this is as good
as it gets?
Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher. Crown Forum: New York, February 2006. ISBN:
978-1-4000-5064-2. Price US$24, 259 pages.
"crunchy cons" reject the America of shopping mall and suburban subdivision,
and seek spiritual solace in Old World religious liturgies, organic farming,
handicrafts, slow-cooked food and other expressions of deeper tradition. They
teach their children at home rather than send them to school, join strict
religious sects, grow their own vegetables, and they have lived with the
prosperity that Asians now desire and found it empty. The Republican Party's
preoccupation with growth reflects a "tragic flaw of Western economics", namely
that "it is based on exploiting and encouraging greed and envy". Dreher writes: 
