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The Race To Unimportance Hugo on Genius

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Conservatives and the Creative Impulse: Part I

by Christopher Chantrill
February 12, 2005 at 1:17 am

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WHAT A DIFFERENCE a year makes! A year ago Americans were digesting the rude, crude Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” of Janet Jackson. This year, twenty-something guys are sniggering over the Go Daddy Girl’s troublesome bra-strap. A year ago America got hit in the solar plexus with mindless “challenge” art. This year we got a satirical $2.5 commercial from GoDaddy.com that sashayed provocatively up to the line but not over it. (Warning: parental discretion advised here)

It is vital for conservatives to understand the difference between the bared breast and the broken bra-strap. By understanding the difference and acting on it we can win the culture war.

Raunchy TV goes back to the Sixties, “do your own thing,” and the so-called creative revolution in advertising. It made a cult out of transgression, “challenging” the conformist society of the Fifties and the Organization Man. But the cult of creativity goes back at least to Freud at the turn of the twentieth century. That’s why you’ll still hear artists and writers witnessing to the world how the scales fell off their eyes when they read Freud.

Freud’s psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe. But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant’s conscious ego, Fichte’s impulsive ego, Hegel’s stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression. The key link in this chain is Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world? Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory. But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales. It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory. And that act comes from impulse: “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” he wrote. It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis.

For the middle-class conservative, this all seems crazy. Without the restraint of rules, the impulsive ego becomes an unguided missile. The names of Hitler, Mao, and Castro come to mind. Rules and traditions are not repression, but society’s wise defense-in-depth against unrestrained egos and their destructiveness. And so conservatives brush Freud aside.

But rejecting German psychology means keeping on stage the psychology of Locke and Hume, an ageing act, any German will tell you, that lost its top billing when Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber over 200 years ago. Locke and Hume laid the foundations of our miraculous constitution and gave a philosophical foundation to the Protestant culture of self-government that was the glory of colonial New England. But Kant cut the ground out from under them with a startling idea that resolved an argument that went back to Plato and Aristotle: Was the real world the ultimate reality, or was it the world of ideas? Kant said, simply, that we couldn’t tell. All we can know are appearances; we can never know “things-in-themselves.”

The Germans should have run the British empiricists off the stage there and then, but they didn’t. Instead they had a wardrobe malfunction. The slipup was made by Fichte and extends through Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre and all their postmodern adepts in a thousand universities, arts communities, and movies—and by cultural osmosis down to third-rate talents like Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. As we have seen, they conceived of the genius as an impulsive ego beyond the rules. “No more rules… Genius conjures up rather than learns,” said Victor Hugo. It is the great achievement of the postmodernists to have added a corollary to this theorem. Rules are a mask for power.

It is precisely on this that conservatives take their stand athwart history, yelling “Stop!” And they are right. Rules are not a mask for power, but a defense-in-depth against power.

Conservatives need something more than a stop sign. They need a model of consciousness that can dish Fichte, Freud, and the cult of the transgressive genius by offering something better. It would extol instead the creative ego, the hero that transcends and includes the rules that have served us so well instead of trashing them.

Can conservatives create such a theory? Or perhaps has someone already developed one? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of “Conservative and the Creative Impulse.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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