Kraynak Conservative Critics of Modernity

7/28/2019 Kraynak Conservative Critics of Modernity

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Conservative Critics of Modernityby Robert P. Kraynak

THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEWFall 2001 31

Conservative Critics of Modernity:Can They Turn Back the Clock?

Robert P. Kraynak

Robert P. Kraynakreceived his Ph.D. from HarvardUniversity and is currently Professor of Political Sci-

ence at Colgate University. He is the author ofHistoryand Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes(1990) and Christian Faith and Modern Democracy

(2001). This essay was originally given as a talk at anISI Honors Fellow summer conference.

It is not easy to be a conservative in themodern world. In fact, it takes a high degreeof moral courage, for conservatives are al-most always on the defensive, fighting forcauses that seem hopeless or lost becausethey go against the most powerful currentsof the modern age.

In praising the courage of conservatives,I am referring primarily to cultural ratherthan to economic or political conservatives.

The proponents of free-market capitalismand limited government that are today calledconservatives (in the economic and politi-cal sense) actually enjoy a certain momen-tum in their favor so they need not think ofthemselves as defenders of lost causes. Butcultural conservatives are different. Theyare die-hard adherents of religious, philo-sophical, and artistic traditions that are outof place in the modern world. They are likedinosaurs who inexplicably missed the massextinction sixty-five million years ago. As

creatures from another era, cultural con-servatives were not made for modern civi-lization and do not fit into the universe ofrespectable opinion. This gives them thedistinction of being the last genuine radi-cals, and usually makes them the most in-teresting figures in todays intellectual

circles. To these wonderful pre-historic crea-tures, I would like to offer some words ofencouragement by sketching a broad pic-ture of modern culture that indicates whyHistory is not as overpowering as it some-times seems to be and why, in the long run,traditional patterns of culture are favoredby the natural order of things and even bydivine providence.

Let me begin with a simple definition:Cultural conservatives are those daringthinkers who are willing to question thebasic assumption of historical progressthe assumption that the modern world as ithas developed over the last four hundredyears in the West (and now around theglobe) is superior in decisive respects to allthe civilizations of the past. This questionhas been raised by many great cultural con-servatives and answered in a variety of pro-vocative ways.


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32 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEWFall 2001

One striking example is the Russian writerand former dissident, AlexanderSolzhenitsyn; he is a cultural conservativewho shocked his audience during theHarvard Commencement Address of 1978by asking if Western civilization took awrong turn at the time of the Renaissancewhen it replaced God-centered societieswith Man-centered societies, producing aworld of secular humanism that now ap-pears to be spiritually exhausted. Anothergreat thinker who could be classified as acultural conservative is Leo Strauss whosescholarly writings are dedicated to revivingclassical Greek philosophy as a genuine al-

ternative to modern philosophya pro-posal that implies no real progress in phi-losophy has occurred since its peak 2,400years ago.

Other cultural conservatives look to theMiddle Ages as the high point of Westerncivilization: For example, Henry Adams,who preferred Gothic cathedrals dedicatedto the Virgin Mary to the dynamo of theindustrial revolution. Or traditional Catho-lics, who think that Latin Scholasticism isthe peak of Christendom. Or Eastern Or-

thodox believers, who believe that monas-ticism and the centuries-old liturgy are theauthentic sources of Christian spirituality.Orthodox Jews are also cultural conserva-tives because they believe that traditional

Judaism, faithful to the divinely revealedMosaic Law, is superior to Reform Juda-ism. And one should not forget AmericasSouthern Agrarians, including RichardWeaver, who held fast to the convictionthat the Old South, despite the evil of sla-very, represented a higher civilization than

the more progressive industrial and com-mercial society of the North.

Reflecting on these examples, one mayinfer that cultural conservatives are drivenby a profound dissatisfaction with the mod-ern world and look to the pre-modern worldfor sources of inspiration, especially for

models of lost greatness. The root of theirdissatisfaction is the belief that modernitydoes not constitute unmixed progressover the past because the advances in free-dom, material prosperity, and technologythat we presently enjoy are offset by a de-cline in the highest aspirations of the hu-man soulin the aspirations for heroicvirtue, spiritual perfection, philosophicaltruth, and artistic beauty. Seen in this light,modernity is not superior to past civiliza-tions because it has ushered in an un-heroicage. It has sacrificed the highest achieve-ments of culture for a more equitable andsecure but more prosaic existence that, in

the last analysis, is not justified because ithas lowered the overall aim of life and de-based the human spirit.

The obvious objection to this kind of think-ing is that cultural conservatives are, at best,hopeless romantics with an incurable nos-talgia for the past or, at worst, dangerousreactionaries who want to turn back theclock and repeal the modern age. Bothsentiments are usually met with derision orwith the advice that cultural conservatives

should learn to accept defeat graciouslybecause historical progress (articulated invarious forms by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill,Dewey, and most recently by FrancisFukuyama) is not only desirable; it is alsoinevitable and irreversible. In response,those who share the intuitions of culturalconservatives that something is wrong withmodernitybut who feel trapped by theo-ries of the inescapable nature of progressneed to see that modern civilization isnot as mighty as it claims. Let me offer a few

proposals for freeing our minds from thegrip of modernist thinking.

The first step is to devise a philosophicalequivalent of long-range planning. The fu-ture, after all, is not simply the next decadeor even the next generation. We need tothink about civilization after the next cen-


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tury or after the next millenium or (I addsomewhat facetiously) after the next iceage. To gain an idea of what civilizationmight look like in the distant future, wemust wait for all the forces of modernity toplay themselves out and then see what kindof reaction will occur. Who knows, for ex-ample, what Western Europe will look likein a hundred years? Will it still be Europeanand social democratic? One strange andalarming statistic that foreshadows majorchanges is the population implosion orbirth dearththe declining birth rate ofadvanced industrial societies resulting fromthe sexual revolution and modern technol-

ogy. Nations like Italy now have negativereplacement rates that are so low that theremay be no more Italians in 150 years. Willthere be a reaction that repeals moderntrends? Or will European races simply dieout and be replaced by African and Arabraces shaped by Islamic culture? All that onecan say at this point is that the moderntrends will likely continue for some time(perhaps a generation or two), followingthe present pattern which combines per-missive freedom, materialism, half-baked

nihilism, and strange New Age cults on thefringes. This situation will remain untilmodern Western civilization subverts itsexisting foundations and collapses or istransformed by reactions that resemblemore traditional structures of authority.

In addition to proposing the long view, Iwould urge people to stop thinking in termsof historical progress in a rational and lin-ear direction and to think instead in termsof cycles of civilization in which narrowtrends play themselves out over finite peri-

ods while the full range of human possibili-ties remains permanently viable. The un-derlying assumption is that civilization hasups and downs; but beneath it is an order ofNaturea set of laws, patterns, and formsthat give human nature and the naturaluniverse an enduring structure. Though

not truly eternal like God, the natural pat-terns will endure as long as created beingendures. The implication is that humannature may be temporarily distorted (some-times for centuries) by the rise and fall ofhistorical civilizations; but certain naturalpatterns that God has imprinted on createdbeings will persist and re-assert themselves.What looks inevitable todaydemocracy,industrial and technological society, evenmodern sciencecan be seen more realis-tically as a transient phase in the rise and fallof civilization. The present order of thingsis therefore not an inevitable culminationof history but a diluted version of some-

thing better that is livable until older pat-terns, including older patterns of greatness,are able to re-emerge. How and when thiswill occur is impossible to predict. But let usnot confuse the last few centuries with anecessary or best order, and let us remainopen to the permanent possibilities of thehuman soul.

To illustrate the way cultural conserva-tives might challenge the present order andrecover enduring patterns of human na-

ture, I would like to speculate about fouridols of the modern agedemocracy,womens liberation, modern art, andmodern science. Contrary to conventionalwisdom, I doubt that these phenomena areas inevitable or as desirable as most peoplehave been led to believe by the dogma ofhistorical progress.

Consider the status of democracy. Is itreally the best form of government or theone toward which all nations are converg-ing? Every serious conservative must wrestle

with these questions because the deepestprejudice of our age is the belief that de-mocracy based on human rights (liberaldemocracy) is the best, indeed theonly le-gitimate form of government. Thomas

Jefferson said the idea was self-evident toall enlightened minds and therewith shut


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down discussion of the issue. He made itseem un-patriotic to question this view,although patriots like Alexander Hamiltondid entertain the possibility that monarchywas better. One should also remember thatmost of the great political thinkers of theclassical and Christian tradition were at oddswith present thinking. Despite the differ-ences among Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augus-tine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther,

John Calvin, and the early American Puri-tans, all agreed that democracy is not thebest form of government and that monar-chy, aristocracy, or some kind of mixedconstitution is the best regime in most cases.

It would be a major step in liberating ourminds if we could recover their reasoningand take it seriously once again.

Their argument, in a nutshell, is thatdemocracy is not the best regime because ittends to level distinctions between high andlow in society and in the souls of citizens;and this leveling tendency undermines thequest for virtue or human excellence. In-stead of judging life by the peaks of human-itythe philosophers, saints, and heroesdemocracy glorifies the tastes and opinions

of the average man, producing a popularculture or mass society that weakens thehighest impulses of the soul. In extremeforms of mass democracy, the people as wellas the educated elites become ashamed ofthe moral superiority implied in true virtueand tear it down by treating it with indiffer-ence or contempt. This leads to demo-cratic tyranny, something we have wit-nessed in violent forms under socialism orcommunism and in softer forms in the de-based mass culture of America and the so-

cial democracies of Europe.Because democracy tends to level dis-

tinctions between high and low, the classi-cal and early Christian thinkers favored morehierarchical regimes than democracy. Fol-lowing Platos maxim that the regime inthe city shapes the regime in the soul, they

favored monarchy or aristocracy in orderto perfect the minds and characters of citi-zens; or they defended mixed regimes thatcombined wisdom and virtue in rulers withthe demands of the people for consent. Ofthe various models proposed, the one thatmakes the most sense to me is Saint Tho-mas Aquinass idea of mixed or constitu-tional monarchya regime that combineselements of kingship, aristocracy, and de-mocracy in a balanced order. This wasthe order of the English Constitution forcenturies, a balance of King, Lords, andCommons. It was also the order of theSpartan regime, which combined kingship

(actually two kings) with an aristocraticbody of venerable elders (thegerousia) andthe elected representatives of the people(theephors). The mixed constitution wasalso the political order endorsed by thegreat conservative, Edmund Burke, and byPlato in hisLawsand Cicero in hisRepublic.It is the basis of the Catholic Church, whichI would describe as an elective constitu-tional monarchy in which the supremePontiff is elected by the College of Cardi-nals and governs in communion with the

bishops, the ordained priesthood, and thepeople. It is the regime underlying mostcorporate hierarchies in business, the mili-tary, and tribal life where one boss or chiefgoverns by consensus in partnership withqualified elites and the broad mass of people.

Is it possible today to believe that thosefavoring constitutionally mixed monarchiesare right and that advocates of pure repub-licanism or democracy are wrong about thebest form of government? I believe that it ispossible to hold this view, even if it cannot

be implemented in the present age. Thedecisive issue that favors the traditionalview is the connection between a hierarchi-cal political regime and the need to main-tain a high or heroic culture over a popularor mass culture. Without high culture, thehuman soul is degraded to the point where


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it becomes indistinguishable from animalor plant life and human existence rarelyrises above comfortable self-preservation.For anyone concerned with human nobil-ity, it is crucial to establish a regime thatpromotes high culture over popular cul-turethat promotes Mozart over theBeatles, as it were, or Michelangelo overHollywood, or opera over rap music, or theclassical liberal arts over professional train-ing. Since all high culture is aristocraticculturetaking aristocratic in its broadsense to mean rule by the best souls ratherthan mere hereditary privilege but not ex-cluding hereditary privilege in some ar-

easit follows that hierarchical regimeswould be better at promoting high culturethan purely democratic or republican re-gimes.

While we can appreciate the freedom,prosperity, and dynamism of modern lib-eral democracies, we cannot forgive thecultural wasteland they have producedthrough the leveling of high culture by themasses and its even more devastating de-construction by the educated elites in thedemocratic age. What is unnatural about

the present arrangement is precisely thecontempt shown by elites for true and meri-torious elitismfor the natural inequali-ties of mind and spirit which cannot beeliminated from human nature and whichelites in healthier ages channeled into nobleand spiritual cultures that actually spoke toall classes of society. Under present condi-tions, the mission of cultural conservativesshould be the defense of high culture overpopular culture and the reassertion of tra-ditional hierarchies wherever possible while

waiting for modernity to spend its last ener-gies on nihilistic self-destruction.

Asecond way to resist mass democracy isto re-examine womens liberation or femi-nism. Such a re-assessment should begin byrecognizing the familiar trade-offs of so-

called progress. The gains in freedom andequality by modern women are offset bydeclines in the higher, intangible realmsin romantic love (including decline in thegrace of women as they are coarsened byefforts to imitate men), in the seriousness ofmarriage as a permanent commitment, inthe responsibilities of motherhood and childrearing, in respect for authority as a result offeminizing authority, and in manly honoras men conform to the new code of an-drogyny. Driving the whole feminist move-ment is a notion of personal autonomy thatequates moral worth with nothing higherthan having a salaried career or a middle

class profession. How durable and satisfy-ing is this new social experiment?It may sound shocking to hear, but it is

possible that the new experiment will notlast more than two generations because itgoes against the practices of all pre-existingcultures and against Nature herself. Thepresent trend assumes that men and womenare interchangeablethat no distinct rolesshould be assigned by custom or by law tothe two sexes and that both men and womenfind their fulfillment in bourgeois careerism.

Yet all previous cultures have establisheddifferent roles for males and females, usu-ally assigning political, military, and reli-gious authority to men while giving socialand moral power to women in varying de-grees. This pattern is often overlooked byacademic proponents of multiculturalism,who seem to forget that non-Western soci-eties have always distinguished the roles ofmen and women and nearly all have beenpatriarchal. How long can modern societydefy the wisdom of the ages? It cannot do so

indefinitely if the universal experience ofpeoples and cultures is rooted in Natureand plenty of evidence suggests that it is.

One bit of evidence is that modern West-ern societies preserve natural differenceswithout admitting it. While officially re-quiring men and women to be treated not


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merely equally but identicallyas in thetraining of women for hard-hat construc-tion jobs, military combat, weight-lifting,and professional boxingthe double stan-dard quite reasonably persists beneath thesurface. Men are from Mars, women arefrom Venus, proclaims a best-selling bookon male-female relations.Moreover, new studies insociobiology and geneticresearch support theclaims of natural differ-ences between the sexes.Feminists themselves re-fer to feminizing author-

ity and the work place, bywhich they mean makingthem less hierarchical andcompetitive. The newschool of differencefeminism recasts old ste-reotypes by describingfemale reasoning as intui-tive and personalized compared to malereasoning, which is abstract and imper-sonal. In addition, everyone knows thatmales are much more aggressive and vio-

lent than femalesas evidenced by violentcrime statistics, male addiction to violentvideo games, the macho swagger of com-puter hackers, and the rowdy behavior ofboys. From all of this evidence, one mayreasonably infer that traditional cultureswere more natural in thinking that men arebetter suited for military and political lifeand women for domestic, aesthetic, andmoral life and that efforts to transformroles distorts both spheres by unduly ho-mogenizing them.

The reason why the facts of life are soreadily denied today is that several power-ful forces are at workideology, technol-ogy, and prosperityand these forces havecreated a temporary artificial world in whichsexual differences seem obsolete. On onelevel, ideology causes people to deceive

themselves in order to uphold the myththat gender is a social construction and thesexes are the same. This is akin to socialismsbig lie that private property and religionare merely social constructsan anti-natu-ral ideology that kept tyrannical systemsoperating for seventy years, until human

nature reasserted itself. Onanother level, technologyand material prosperityconspire to make naturaldifferences seem unimpor-tant because all tasks havebecome easier and life isless heroic, creating the il-

lusion of interchangeablesex roles. In addition, thehigher authority of tradi-tional religions, all of whichare patriarchal, seems ir-relevant in a modern secu-lar culture dominated bymaterialism and technol-

ogy. As long as there are no great wars andemergencies, as long as no harsh demandsare placed on people in advanced industrialsocieties, as long as sex is detached from

procreation and parenting is detached fromserious moral authority, then all peoplewill seem like interchangeable parts in aconsumer-worker society. But this is anartificial state of things that cannot lastindefinitely.

Where will dissatisfaction and reactionsbegin to appear? Certainly, great events likewars and social breakdowns will cause somere-evaluations. But even without such cri-ses, in middle-class society one can alreadysee reactions caused by the eternal femi-

nine in women rebelling against pressuresto be little more than imperfect imitationsof men. I refer to mundane troubles likeeating disorders in women who have beentaught by a unisex society to hate everyounce of extra flesh on their female bodies.I think also about educated and profes-

Nineteenth-century Philadelphia...

CourtesyofPhilad

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sional women who admit that careers arenot as satisfying as they first appear and thatdeeper meaning can be found in traditionalreligion than in bourgeois careerismarecognition that there is higher dignity indevoting oneself to family, church, and lo-cal community than in slavingaway as, say, a lawyer for ma-terial success and power.

Admittedly, the novelty ofcareers among first generationfeminists is still a significantforce, and the second genera-tion naively takes for grantedan artificial unisex world with-

out seeing the special condi-tions on which it rests. Butthere are also undergroundtrends in the opposite direc-tion that have been ignored bythe popular media. One re-cent book, for example,records the stories of youngcareer women who have re-

jected the sexual revolution and returnedto the divine wisdom about men and womenfound in the Orthodox Jewish tradition.

Such women are the vanguard of a resis-tance movement that will eventuallychange modern norms, just as human na-ture eventually defeated socialist ideologyin countries where it seemed firmly estab-lished for two generations.

A third trend that needs to be challengedis modernism in the fine arts and archi-tecture. Here we face the most bizarre con-tradiction of all between an imposed mod-ernist ideology and the true feelings of

people. While the general public recognizesthat modern art has reached a dead end, theart establishment of museums and schoolsof fine arts still uphold modernism. Mostpeople see clearly that the rejection of beautyand the contempt for visible reality by mod-ern artists is absurd; and most are offended

by art that has been reduced to gimmickryor shock value or the nihilism of abstractchaos. Beneath the quiet surface, nearlyeveryone thinks about modern art like thelittle boy inThe Emperors New Clothes:

There is nothing there! Unfortunately, theinner voices of people are stillstifled by fears of soundingphilistine.

As with other modern ide-ologies, however, modernismin art will eventually give wayto the natural demands of thebody and the soulin thiscase, to the demand for depic-

tions of visible realities andbeautiful forms which earlierart celebrated. We will thensee a titanic clash between theearlier classical and medievalstyles and the modern style.By the classical style, I meanart which imitates Nature oridealizes Nature following

canons of perfect proportion and symme-try. By the medieval style, I mean the Gothicstyle and iconography, in which art is in-

tended to glorify God by depicting visiblerealities as images of invisible beauties.

These earlier styles should be revived inorder to defeat the modernist style, whichequates art with subjective self-expressionand substitutes the energy of the artisticprocess for the beauty of Nature and theglories of Creation. Modern architecture,too, fits this pattern by rejecting higherbeauty for the cold and lifeless utility ofabstract functionalism. Here, the seeds of areaction are already evident within the ar-

chitectural establishment. To Mies van derRohes lapidary dictum of modernistdogma that Less is more, Philadelphiaarchitect Robert Venturi famously re-sponded, Less is a bore.

To see what returning to earlier styles ofart and architecture might look like, I would

...Twentieth-century Philadelphia.

Progress in architecture?


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point to two examples. The first is the cru-sade of Prince Charles in England to teardown ugly modern buildings in certain sec-tors of London and to restore the morehumane styles of beauty from earlier peri-ods. A more serious case is the struggle thattook place recently at the University of NotreDame School of Architecture. There, thedean of the school, Thomas Gordon Smith,fought a successful battle against the reign-ing modernism and hired a new team offaculty to teach the next generation of ar-chitects the classical and medieval styles ofchurch architectureRomanesque, Byz-antine, Gothic, and Renaissance. His point

is not to slavishly imitate everything donein the past but to develop variations on theolder styles based on the recognition that achurch should offer a glimpse ofotherworldly beauties and give physical em-bodiment to the transcendent truths of theChristian faith. The underlying assump-tion is that certain styles are eternally vi-ablethey never go out of stylebecausethey constitute the perfection of the thing inquestion; and it is only the false belief inhistorical progress and the restless desire

for novelty that cause modern people tolook upon older perfections as boring oroutmoded.

Finally, I would like to encourage culturalconservatives to question the premises ofmodern science. This is the most difficultchallenge because modern science is true insome sense; and a return to many claims ofpre-modern science would be false and dis-honest. Obviously, much of modern cos-mology is true. The earth is not at rest at the

center of the universe, and the universe isnot simply a finite sphere. The general pic-ture of an expanding and evolving naturaluniverse put forward in Big Bang cosmol-ogy and Darwinian evolution has moreevidence to support it than a static Aristo-telian model. Yet the modern scientific

model is far from being conclusively proven.One must take seriously the objectionsraised, for example, to Darwinian theoryby those who argue that the chances of lifeemerging from non-life are nearly zero andthat the fossil record for transitional formsbetween stable species is almost non-exis-tent. Such criticisms, cogently stated byPhillip E. Johnson in Darwin on Trial, arenecessary for every serious conservative toponder.

But the main ground for challenging themodern scientific view of the universe is notthe insufficiency of evidence; it is the incom-pleteness of modern sciences theoretical

claims. Modern natural science has noth-ing to say about the ultimate purpose of theuniverse beyond the orderly movement ofnatural bodies in accordance with math-ematical laws. The reason for omitting themost important question (that of purpose)is that modern science deliberately lowersthe goals of science in order to makeprogress in lesser realms of knowledgeatrade-off that follows the logic of the entiremodern project. In its version of modern-ism, science restricts itself to explaining

how Nature works rather than whyNature works as she does. It postponesindefinitely the question of Natures ulti-mate purposes or designs (the question ofnatural teleology). Stated in more preciseAristotelian language, modern science fo-cuses on material and efficient causes anddispenses with formal and final causes. Buthow long can modern science ignore for-mal and final causes? Once again, I believethat such issues cannot be ignored indefi-nitely because the highest kind of knowl-

edge is required to understand the naturalworld and to satisfy the human soul. Oneshould not be surprised, then, to see anunderground movement of thinkers whohave revived formal and final causes in theconcept of intelligent design.

According to the school of intelligent


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design, Nature is not a product of blindmechanical forces because her complexstructures cannot be reduced to numeroussmall parts that accidentally came togetherover time. As Michael Behe argues, many ofthe critical parts of animals, such as eyes orwings, exhibit irreducible complexity:they cannot function as anything but com-plete units and therefore could not haveevolved through incremental changes. Thewhole animal also functions as a completeunit that could not have gradually evolved,

just as twenty or even eighty per cent of anairplane is not capable of flying. The impli-cation is that formal causality of some kind,

not excluding special creation by intelligentdesign, is needed to explain organic func-tionalism. On a cosmic scale, Paul Daviessuggests that the entire natural universeexhibits design and direction. He acknowl-edges that Nature is evolving (as modernscience says), but it does so by producingself-organizing wholes of ever-greatercomplexitybeginning with simple struc-tures like stars and galaxies and movingtoward more complex forms such as livingcells and human minds. Since the chance

appearance of complex forms is extremelylow, Davies infers that living and intelligentbeings must result from Natures self-orga-nizing tendencies. Nature is therefore aliveand directed toward intelligent life and couldbe said to aim at conscious understandingas its natural end. While the school of intel-ligent design is still speculative, it challengesthe narrow thinking of much of modern

science because it is simply more plausiblethan the theory of a purposeless universedriven by blind mechanical causes.

If these arguments are correct, then weconservatives have reason to be encour-aged. They show that we can resist the deg-radations of modern culture and can hopeto reverse the tide of history with positiveresults. They show that we are freer than wehave been taught to believe: There is nohistorical determinism to trap us becausethe forces of Nature and of Natures Godare stronger than the forces of progress.Not only can we imagine alternatives to

modern civilization, we can also recoversome of the greatness of the past.And time is on our side. Modernity is not

a permanent stage but a transient period inhistorical civilization, temporarily sup-ported by the distortions of modernist ide-ologies and modern technology. Againstthose pressures, we can push back. And wecan take heart at the words of William F.Buckley, who once said that the job of theconservative intellectual is to stand athwarthistory and shout, Slow down! Stop! Re-

turn to ancient wisdom. To this coura-geous call, I would add the observation thatancient wisdom is worth recovering notmerely because it is ancient but because ittestifies to the permanent possibilities ofthe human soul as well as the natural orderof things. These possibilities will eventuallytriumph over modern illusions.

Kraynak Conservative Critics of Modernity

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