The Brussels Journal: The Rise of the Orthos

Most thinking conservatives believe that the modern West has gone off the deep end, and most of them also identify a particular historical event as the start, or at least the first major symptom, of this development. For many modern cultural conservatives, that event was the moral revolution of the 1960s; for some on the American right, it was the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, or the end of the Civil War; and for certain counterrevolutionaries, it was the French Revolution.

But for a loose affiliation of conservative bloggers and authors who have recently taken to calling themselves “orthos”, the sources of our modern malaise lie farther back in time, and are more deeply embedded in our presuppositions and prejudices. Their critique of the modern Left is far more philosophically substantive and, for better or worse, far more radical than most of its competitors. Their main target is not postmodern relativism, redistributive left-liberalism, Frankfurt School cultural radicalism, or Marxian socialism; for although they deplore these things, they also regard them as mere symptoms of a deeper problem.

I pause here to note that it is difficult to summarize the orthos' beliefs succinctly. This is partly because of their often high level of philosophical abstraction, and partly because the orthosphere (the orthos' term for the network of blogs and websites they administer and write for) is a loose coalition of people who do not necessarily agree about everything. Still, I think the founding idea of the orthosphere can be fairly oversimplified into this sentence: “The problem with the modern world is modernity itself”. For the orthos, the philosophical core of modernity is the rejection of the Aristotelian-Catholic idea that there are objective essences and purposes in the world. Many of the orthos trace this idea back to the nominalism of late-Medieval scholastics like William of Ockham, although they would also argue that it did not culminate until the 18th century and the Enlightenment. In philosophy, this modern nominalism gave rise to the idea that the world consists of nothing but meaningless, purposeless matter, and thence to modern atheism, materialism, relativism, and finally the complete nihilism which today is increasingly engulfing America and Europe. In ethics and politics, it produced a worship of autonomy – the idea that every individual can and should define its own purpose and destiny, unfettered by tradition, authority, or higher truth – which became the founding idea of every modern political ideology, from the classical liberalism of Locke to the redistributive leftism of the modern state. (The American philosopher Edward Feser, while having given no indication that he considers himself part of the orthosphere, provides an excellent overview and critique of this modern anti-essentialism in his book The Last Superstition.)

This is a radical idea, and it entails a radical conservatism. The orthos reject the Enlightenment project entirely, and espouse many ideas that are unfashionable even on the Right, including theocracy, censorship, and absolute monarchy. Their ideology centers around the defense of particular loyalties and moral communities, of traditional authority, traditional morality, the monarchy, the patriarchal family, the ethnos, and the Church. Many of them draw inspiration from the throne-and-altar conservatism of counterrevolutionaries like Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortés, and seek to rescue the Middle Ages from the historical scrapheap. Needless to say, orthodox Christianity is central to the their thinking (hence the name) – in fact, I have yet to come across an ortho who is not a traditionalist Catholic or a conservative Protestant.

Certainly there are [traditionalist] Catholics who think along these lines. I still don't buy the genealogy, though I grant that many, especially academics, think like liberals today. I thought liberalism as an ideology gained prominence only once the work started by the consolidators, political (first monarchs, then the constitutions that replaced them) and economic, did their work.