I haven’t read Rod Dreher’s book, and don’t plan to. But judging by Dreher’s other (incessant) writing on his “movement”, which I have read, and by the blog devoted to the book, “crunchy conservatism” seems to be a strand of conservativsm that abandons all of the philosophy’s better tendencies (most notably, it’s appreciation for the power of markets) for its crappier ones (most notably, reverence for “tradition” taken to the point of out-and-out luddism, and soul-crushing, spirit-sucking piety).

Come to think of it, I’m not really sure who speaks for the “good” parts of conservatism any more. But I digress.

Dreherian conservatism owes more to Barry Schwartz and Nicols Fox than it does to Milton Friedman. Which is fine, except that (1) in that sense, it isn’t really conservatisim, and (2) Dreher needs to realize that, like similar “back to the earth” movements (see “self-sustaining” farms, for example), his niche wouldn’t be possible if not for those same crude, ugly, creative destruction forces he seems to so loathe in the first place.

Only after raw, unabashed capitalism has taken care of more primitive problems can we begin to have places like Whole Foods, or targeted products like no-chemical, no-additive, no-hormone, free-range chicken. Only after industry has knocked down a lot of trees and sullied a lot of streams on its way to feeding us, medicating us, and giving us good reason to think we’ll live past the age of forty do we get the luxury of beginning to worry about the health of the environment, and the survival of beings outside our own families, much less outside our own species.

I don’t begrudge Dreher his Birks and his granola, but talk about the excesses of capitalism and so-called conspicuous consumption are innevitably followed by calls to slow things down — maybe idle the engines of progress for a bit. There’s generally little acknowledgement that it is excess and consumption that have put them in the position of being able to write books about the problems associated with…you guessed it…excess and consumption.

Much as I hate to agree with John Podhoretz, there’s something inherently silly about waxing forlorn about the corrosive effects of modernity….on a blog.

One last little irony in this whole crunchy con business: There are a few billion people on this planet still in danger of starving to death. They’re in desperate need of modernity, technology, and all those crass, crude, unsightly accoutrements of emerging markets (see environmental pollution, “sweatshop” labor, etc.). Dreher can lament the Internet age, access to world markets, our abundance of choice, and mass globalization all he likes. Unfortunately, most of the rest of humanity hasn’t yet made it to the “lamenting our prosperity” stage of economic development. Dreher pooh-poohs the tools the very poor need to get to where we are (globalization and world markets, technology, GMOs)) because he, Rod Dreher, yearns for a simpler lifestyle.

Which means that despite all its facades of earnestness, piety, and restraint, “crunchy conservatism” is, at its heart, pretty darned self-indulgent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 7:07 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.