We live in a fallen world. For political conservatives, this fact is never far from view. In fact, imperfectability is a defining principle of conservatism. It has long been our task to critique modernity and its maladies, using the resources of a longer Western tradition to supply insight into the deeper pathologies that threaten civilization. Think of Russell Kirk, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Roger Scruton. Wise critics have often done the world a good service by retranslating the wisdom of the past.
Reflect a moment on some of those far-sighted thinkers. Now turn your attention to the cultural critics who have dominated right-wing bestseller lists for the past 10 or 12 years. In 2017, Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option galvanized the right with the notion that we were headed into a new dark age (or are we there already?). Patrick Deneen followed up by explaining “why liberalism failed,” and at that point we were off to the races. We’ve been treated by Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson to explanations of how the left “conquered everything,” a total institutional capture that demands a scorched-earth response. Writers of a more theological cast, such as Stephen Wolfe and Andrew Isker, have recommended “the Boniface Option” and called for a revitalized “Christian Nationalism.”
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare end-cap trade books to the work of serious scholars. Some of the above-mentioned writers do have real academic credentials, however, and are viewed by their fans as serious intellectuals. More importantly, there has really been a change. Though it’s hard to remember now, there was a time when Arthur Brooks and Jonah Goldberg topped right-wing lists with their apologias for limited government and celebrations of entrepreneurship. Even comparatively gloomy works, like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, were miles apart from the apocalyptic diagnoses of Dreher and Deneen. Imagine Murray coming out with a book like Regime Change or Live Not by Lies.
This change prompts two important questions: Are today’s cultural critics still offering deep insight into the maladies of modernity? Or are they mainly just ginning up angst and anger? There is a fine line, after all, between critiquing civilizational threats and wallowing in despair. “Despair” has unquestionably been a prominent theme of right-wing literature for several years now, and it’s important to recognize that the above-mentioned works are not cherry-picked or exceptional. There are many, many more less-successful works in a similar vein, from Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come to The Dying Citizen. A vast river of despair literature has been running through the right for several years now, enough to supply bedtime reading for the right-wing reader from now until the real apocalypse finally comes to end our manufactured misery.
Despair-mongers often pitch their ideas with a kind of veneer of bravado, adopting a “fighting pose” that gives the impression they are reclaiming the culture. Digging into the details, they rarely offer much beyond revanchist rage. Even if they do spearhead some counterpunches against the progressive left, they almost never have a clear and realistic vision of where religious traditionalists should be trying to go. It’s time for those traditionalists to recognize that this posturing is overwhelmingly false. In reality, despair is pusillanimous, a refusal to face up to the hard tasks of the moment. In politics, as in life, real courage requires discernment, prudence, and a willingness to work within the confines of an admittedly fallen world. It requires an acknowledgement that, however real and daunting our problems, it is highly probable that “the end is not yet.”
In the Christian moral tradition, despair is a grave sin. St. Thomas Aquinas states that despair, though not technically the worst possible sin (which is hatred of God), is in fact the most dangerous, because it saps our willingness to continue seeking the good. In the Summa Theologiae (II.II q. 20), he states that:
when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin, and are drawn away from good works. Wherefore a gloss on Proverbs 24:10, “If thou lose hope being weary in the day of distress, thy strength shall be diminished,” says: “Nothing is more hateful than despair, for the man that has it loses his constancy both in the every day toils of this life, and, what is worse, in the battle of faith.”
St. Thomas is thinking first and foremost of theological despair, which is not quite the same as the political despair that fuels the above-mentioned literature. The sinner in the above passage despairs of God’s mercy, believing himself to be unable to attain salvation. That’s different from despairing of a constitution or political party, and it’s clearly possible to take a grim view of one’s earthly or political future while still hoping for better things in the world to come. Nevertheless, I believe there is a real kinship between the despair Thomas references and the mood that is exploited and deepened by the volumes of that overstuffed bookshelf. Despair, it turns out, has its charms. In the Christian worldview, the devil understands these temptations pretty clearly, and despair-industry influencers seem to see the same thing.
Odd as it may initially seem, there can be real comfort, particularly in confusing and tumultuous times, in throwing in the towel. Giving up can make the burdens feel less heavy. It relieves one of the responsibility of continuing to fight. It’s said that people who have resolved on suicide often become cheerful in their final hours; if a long-depressed person inexplicably perks up and becomes euphoric, it’s wise to keep a close eye on him. The psychology is fairly intuitive: When the journey feels arduous, quitting can be a real relief. The anxiety of indecision settles into the stability of fixed expectation. What is true for the sufferer of clinical depression is likewise true for a person suffused with political despair. It seems to relieve us of the responsibility to go on persuading people, working for incremental change, or fretting about the best course of action. Perhaps most important, it creates the illusion of moral clarity, which in turn offers profound relief to one agonizing over complex and weighty questions.
It’s hard to overestimate the comfort that moral certainty can give in fraught times. If we must live through days of darkness and depravity, aren’t we at least entitled to a pick-me-up in the form of industrial strength self-righteousness? To the reassurance that we ourselves are still on the side of the angels? When a society seems to be flying off the rails, there is a real solace to be found in the reflection that “at least I was right all along.” Acknowledging mistakes, reevaluating one’s own premises, and living with deep moral ambiguity is far more difficult.
A classic example can be seen in the proverbial “single-issue voter.” No doubt it is possible for a single issue to be so morally weighty that it truly does swamp all other political considerations. However, it seems clear that for some there is a great benefit to selecting a single issue as “the most important of our time”: It saves the citizen from the difficult and potentially anxiety-ridden task of having to discern the right way to vote. The moral gravity of the chosen issue (at least in the voter’s perception) enables him to retain a sense of righteousness with very minimal effort. Researching candidates and issues takes time and energy, of course, but it’s worth noting that time and energy aren’t always the limiting factors. Moral certainty may itself be the most valued commodity, and the one the single-issue voter is most loath to risk.
This is not to deny that it can be appropriate at times to hold tightly to serious convictions. It’s not always wrong to take pleasure in “having been right,” especially if one paid a real price for taking an unpopular stance. Let’s be honest, though: Moral righteousness is intoxicating. Which leads us back to the subject of despair.
Very few things convey a sense of personal righteousness quite so powerfully as feeling “persecuted for the sake of righteousness.” Activism is frequently driven by the craving for that heady feeling, and surveying its many strains we might detect that modern people have cultivated some truly exquisite victim complexes. Despair books cater to that same romantic yearning for quixotic quests and windmills to tilt at. It makes for a refreshing draught when life has handed us some political lemons. But there are real downsides to imbibing that beverage.
Just as theological despair obscures the path to salvation, so political despair tends to radicalize people, foreclosing realistic pathways toward a better future. It’s appealing as a short-term salve, but it’s a dead end. By sacrificing truth and prudence for the simulacrum of moral clarity, we may bring on disasters that were in fact avoidable. So it’s important to be circumspect. When culture takes a surprising and unwelcome turn, should our go-to response be, “It’s exactly as I thought, only worse”? Or should we carefully consider why we did not expect the culture to develop in that particular way? The future will likely belong to those who learn from their mistakes instead of using them for an elaborate exercise in confirmation bias.
Christians in particular should reflect that theirs has always been an “end times” faith, in the sense that Jesus himself spoke vividly of the end of the world in its current form, something his earliest disciples clearly anticipated in the near future. Millennia later, we are still here. But over that time, Christianity has remade the world in extraordinary ways that the early Christians couldn’t possibly have foreseen. One begins to appreciate, looking across Christian history, that there is a relationship between the end-of-days mentality and Christianity’s transformative power. Jesus’s apocalyptic words infused a certain urgency into the apostles, and yet he also urged them repeatedly to prepare, to save souls wherever and however they could, working assiduously for the Kingdom in their own time. That dynamic juxtaposition of the Kingdom “within us now” and “not yet” seems to have turned the Christian faith into an incredibly transformative force.
Could it perhaps be that still? When one considers Christianity’s impressive legacy of driving cultural change, it really is rather extraordinary that Christian cultural critics have made such a bustling business out of peddling gloom. Anxious moments may be, in a certain way, ideal for a faith that pairs a rich and well-developed tradition with a restless energy and proven capacity to adapt.
So don’t despair. And don’t binge on despair books. We live in an anxious moment, marked by a great deal of rapid change, but there are many resources at hand for surviving that transition. Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper to “take heart, for I have overcome the world.” How extraordinary to look at the world two millennia later and think how much truer that statement seems than when it was first uttered.
