Bill Buckleys Conservative Family - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S a pity that great conservatives have to die for us to find out how remarkable they were. We learn, now that he is dead at age 82, that William F. Buckley, Jr. was the best friend in the world.

He was a man of astonishing work habits, productively busy every waking hour. Yet he was a man who would sit down with you and be genuinely interested in what you had to say. He sent notes to people all the time, was extraordinarily generous, and throughout his life constantly encouraged conservative writing talent.

The best story last week belonged to New York Times columnist David Brooks.

When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

Buckley, he wrote, “spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs.” And so on.

So when William F. Buckley came to give a speech at Brooks’s college he announced: “David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.” It turned out to be David Brooks’s big break.

People think of Bill Buckley as the acerbic host of Firing Line, the writer who wielded a pen like a rapier. But if we are to believe his eulogists, the most important talent of this conservative warrior was the feminine virtue of looking after the family. He kept in contact with people. He gave them presents. He encouraged the young. And when he sat down for a conversation he really listened—as only women do.

We live today in a great age of liberalism, when women are encouraged to behave like men, pursue brilliant careers, sleep around, live public lives, and liberate themselves from the dead weight of children and domesticity.

Meanwhile America’s Mr. Conservative lived a life whose great edifice is a far-flung conservative family that he birthed and reared by cultivating the feminine virtues.

It is in families, of course, that social mores are established and refined. Tocqueville holds in Democracy in America that religion “reigns supreme in the souls of the women, and it is women who shape mores.”

There have never been free societies without mores, and... it is woman who shapes these mores.

Mores are the private virtues of the face-to-face society, such as obtain under the direction of women in families, churches, and associations. These mores often constitute, as Lee Harris writes in The Suicide of Reason, a “shaming code,” an instinctive code that children take with their mother’s milk and internalize so completely that when they violate its precepts in adulthood they unconsciously blush with shame.

There is no better example of a shaming code in operation that the pivotal moment in Pride and Prejudice when Miss Elizabeth Bennet refuses, with prejudice, the offer of marriage made by the very rich and proud Mr. Darcy. Months later, when Darcy had reformed his manners and won Lizzie’s heart he could talk to her about how she had shaped his mores.

The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners... has been many months inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: “had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.”

Our liberal friends, of course, have based their political and cultural movement upon the destruction of these bourgeois mores. They talked about organized religions as systems of social control that denied them their freedom, and determined to liberate themselves from the control of religion and mores and to live lives of self-discovery. The feminist revolution was a movement to apply these notions to women’s lives. Here is how British Conservative Danny Kruger describes the liberal way:

Liberalism is the philosophy of the individual. Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy — the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says ’I shall…’

The upshot has been a blizzard of laws to control behavior that once was controlled with a much lighter hand by mores. Most pernicious has been the criminalization of anti-social behavior in government schools and universities.

The life of William F. Buckley was a witness against this folly. You may say that he lived his life in the truth of Danny Kruger’s definition of 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…’

As the great generation of conservatives passes onwards to its eternal rest we are constantly reminded that its great men were not just great but good, not just great political and intellectual leaders but good husbands and friends.

We may ask why this should have been so. But that is the great mystery of the universe: Why?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Home

American Manifesto

Chapters

Chappies

roadtothemiddleclass

presented by Christopher Chantrill

Follow @chrischantrill • Contact