Mr. Buckley's words originally appeared in the first issue of National Review in 1955 and they are remarkable for their description of "literate America" and its bizarre wish to cast off from our carefully constructed haven of tradition.
Here are Mr. Buckley's insightful thoughts on this tragic phenomenon:
[I]f NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.Not too shabby of an analysis in any age butespeciallyy when one recalls that this was written before the trickle of conservative intellectual ideas in the public square became a torrent.
NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.
"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything.
The causes of this literate abdication of responsibility to the past will be endlessly debated. We think that smart people confused the ability of the mind to fashion technical marvels with the ability to fashion workable social, economic, and political structures free of the miseries of alcoholism, unemployment, and inequality. If obscurantism held back the advance of scientific knowledge, by punishing Galileo, for example, then the failure of man to achieve perfect institutions must similarly by the result of obscurantism. Bring reason to bear and tradition can be if not swept away then simply be but one chalk mark on the tabula rasa of "modernism."
We forget how intoxicating the advance of technology was and is. Mastery of technology has lifted many a man or woman to dizzying heights far from modest, even imprisoning conditions. It is not, therefore, unreasonable for people who understood the benefits of technology to have been intoxicated with its possibilities.
It has, however, been the tragedy of the post-1917 world not to have realized that reason alone will not solve the ills of man.
Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that present day America serves the needs of the automobile not human beings. That is a profound statement. Automobiles transport us to pleasant suburbs but those suburbs are manifestly not communities, only collections of contiguous strangers. Superb examples of automotive engineering transport us to spiritual vacuums.
This weighs heavily on modern man but it is not the fault of our tradition. Socialism, centralized government, and notions of "a living constitution" -- ideas totally incompatible with the vision of our Founding Fathers -- will eventually undermine what is left of the good that remains leaving a servile population unable to influence the course of the federal Leviathan State.
Which we suppose will leave Islam to fill the vacuum created by abdication of large portions of the intellectual elite that cannot bring themselves to protest the flood of illegal immigration, Saudi financing of America wahhabism, or the presence of unassimilable Muslims.
"Publisher's Statement. Standing athwart history, yelling Stop." NationalReviewOnline, 1/29/04 (emphasis added).
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