The Essential Neoconservative Reader. - book review

David Brooks

I still remember the shocked expression on the face of the rabbi who performed my wife's conversion. We were sitting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and this nice liberal rabbi asked what being Jewish meant to me. I threw out the first thing that came to mind, a series of names: Kristol, Podhoretz, Trilling, Bellow - a bunch of Jewish intellectuals around Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Public Interest. The poor rabbi was appalled. He'd prepared my wife for her conversion ritual bath and now here she was potentially emerging from the mikvah straight into a meeting of the Committee for the Free World.

I admit that my answer was appalling, a perfect example of how life can become too politicized. But reading The Essential Neoconservative Reader,(*) I began thinking that maybe the response wasn't completely ridiculous.

The book, edited by Mark Gerson, is a collection, arranged chronologically from 1963 to 1995, of many of the classics of neoconservative thought. The opening section includes two of the formative pieces of neoconservative skepticism about the liberal project: Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem - and Ours" and an excerpt from Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. From there, the book moves to the neoconservative response to the New Left - for example, Nathan Glazer's "The Campus Crucible" - and its approach to the free market as developed by Michael Novak, George Gilder, and Irving Kristol. There are also sections on foreign policy - including notably, Jeane Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards" - as well as sections on the welfare state and the culture wars, featuring essays by Thomas Sowell, James Q. Wilson, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Kass.

But the last section, appropriately labeled "The Way Home," is about, broadly defined, religion, with essays by Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and William Kristol.

Though it is true that most of the neoconservative memoirs and analyses were written in the 1980s, when neoconservatism was more secular, if you appraise neoconservatism now, in 1996, a different picture emerges. It is the story of a group of former leftists, who cut their teeth with sectarian disputes over the various strains of Marxist materialism ("Lovestone guilty of Lovestonitism!"), moved their attention to the liberal social sciences, wrote about the limits of social policy, discovered the importance of virtue, and now tend to write about religion and morality.

Perhaps neoconservatism will, in the long run, be seen not merely as a move from left to right but as a move from secularism to a more religious view of public life, as a slow discovery of the sacred in the profane. Neoconservatives are, of course, already famous for their contributions to American politics. They helped the conservative movement come to terms with the civil-rights movement; they helped conservatism articulate a tough, but compassionate, approach to poverty; they pioneered a form of urban conservatism that made clear that being on the right did not necessarily mean you preferred the rural to the urban, the native population to the new immigrants, the parochial to the cosmopolitan. But perhaps there is another legacy they will leave behind that hasn't fully played itself out yet. Perhaps another of their contributions will have been to articulate a way of thinking about religion in public life which is not specific to the Christian right.

The neoconservatives are getting older (they aren't making any more of them) - so maybe their new religiosity is just the product of their facing (how can I put this politely?) the great alcove in the sky. But I think probably not. After all, if you look at the younger people who are loosely affiliated with neoconservatism, you will see many writers who regard religion as central to their social thinking and a merger of Jewish conservatives with Christian conservatives. Elliott Abrams now runs the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that emphasizes religion in its approach to social problems (and that has never before had a Jewish director). The relatively new Institute for Religion and Public Life was expelled from the Rockford Institute for allegedly being part of the neoconservative conspiracy. The institute's director, Neuhaus, edits the superb magazine First Things about religion and public life. William Bennett is comfortable in both neoconservative and Christian conservative circles. I work at a magazine, the Weekly Standard, at which two of the top editors are Jews (named Kristol and Podhoretz coincidentally enough), while the third, a fellow named Barnes, is an evangelical Christian. And they work together seamlessly on social issues.

Moreover, among the social scientists who have contributed to The Public Interest, Commentary, and other neoconservative magazines, there is a greater emphasis on the public role of religion. John J. DiIulio, Jr., a political scientist at Princeton, has argued that only a religious revival can change the culture in our most distressed neighborhoods. Glenn C. Loury, an economist at Boston University, has been making similar arguments. For example, in a recent issue of the American Enterprise, he wrote:

I doubt that the cleverest economist (and I know some smart ones) could design an incentive scheme for responsible parenting that would be as effective as the broad acceptance among men and women that they are God's stewards in the lives of their children. The best pregnancy deterrent may be to inculcate in the heart of each adolescent the belief that, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit Therefore honor God with your body."

In the 1960s, everybody was talking like economists; these days, you have neoconservative policy mavens talking like ministers.

One of the key texts that describes the shift in neoconservative emphasis from social science to public virtue is the essay James Q. Wilson wrote in The Public Interest's twentieth-anniversary issue, "The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy," reprinted in this anthology.

The essay begins with this sentence: "The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed - and experienced - over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry." Wilson recalls the economic machismo that pervaded social-policy thinking in 1965, when The Public Interest was born. That issue contained an essay by Moynihan on the triumph of macroeconomics: "Men are learning how to make an industrial economy work," Moynihan wrote, in a sentence that now looks quaint (and not only for the use of the word "men"). Under the sway of economics, thinkers in those days, Wilson writes, tended to regard a person's tastes as given. "All that is necessary in public policy," he continues, summarizing that ethos, "is to arrange the incentives confronting voters, citizens, firms, bureaucrats and politicians so that they will behave in a socially optimal way."

But now we have learned that personal tastes are not unproblematic, and that some problems don't respond to incentives. We know that schools don't necessarily improve with increased funding, race relations don't necessarily improve as more blacks achieve middle- and upper-class status, poverty doesn't inevitably come down as more money is poured into anti-poverty programs. It now seems obvious to most neoconservatives that culture, the invisible tug of the Zeitgeist, plays a role not sufficiently appreciated by the economics-minded.

"The traditional understanding of politics was that its goal was to improve the character of its citizens," Wilson writes, clearly with a mind to reviving this tradition. Actually devising policies that do this is a tricky proposition. But, he continues:

The essential first step is to acknowledge that at root, in almost every area of important public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be law-breakers or voters and public officials.... By virtue, I mean habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences.

Wilson concludes by stressing that the economics mode is complemented, rather than replaced, by the emphasis on character. We want to use incentives, but in ways that reinforce good habits and so lead to better character.

Now it is a leap from an emphasis on character to one on religion. And some neoconservatives don't want to make this leap. They argue that secular creeds can help us to make sense of morality, while also instilling virtue and giving life a sense of purpose. Not being particularly religious myself, I long for such a creed. There are plenty of options. Some people have used nationalism as a path to the transcendent, others History. But in present-day America, these creeds don't seem to have much oomph. Americans are patriotic but fortunately not ultranationalist. And for better or worse, there is relatively little of that traditionalism for its own sake which one finds in British conservatism. When you go down the list of secular creeds that lead to a moral revival, you find that they either don't have much power, or they don't have much purchase in the American context, or, as in the case of radical libertarianism, the cure is worse than the disease. God isn't dead, but the secular gods seem to be.

Many of those neoconservatives who still resist the inexorable march from character and virtue to religion are Jewish, and if you talk about conservatism and religion in one breath, you inevitably end up talking about the Christian Coalition and the Christian right. For some Jews with conservative leanings, the sight of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson standing with open arms at the end of the hallway causes an immediate U-turn.

But over the past years, one detects a sharp lessening of that hostility, at least toward Reed if not Robertson. There are now numerous examples of Jewish and Christian conservatives working together, co-founding organizations, and finding agreement. And lo and behold, the Moral Majority types have not stormed out of their drive-in churches to ransack the yeshivas.

It has to be said, however, that the neoconservative literature on remoralization is not as scripturally specific as the Loury passage quoted above or the writings that emanate from Christian conservatives. But it's still easy to see which aspects of the Judeo-Christian ethos would be congenial to long time neoconservatives. First, humility. Neoconservatism was built on the back of skepticism of the idea that government policies could have wonderful impacts on individual lives. And so too the religious mind recoils from such dramatic earthly salvations. Second, limited understanding. Neoconservatives have always emphasized the Hayekean view that humans can only possess a limited understanding of what goes on in the world because man is infinitely more complex and mysterious than most social theorists assume. And so too religious thinkers who have always argued against simple-minded secular descriptions of human motivation and makeup. Third, Original Sin. This doctrine offers a plausible explanation for why social engineering tends to fail: Human beings sin and behave badly even in the face of rationally ordered incentives.

But the neoconservative interest in religion is by no means only a matter of epistemology or abstract political belief. Many neoconservatives seem to have noticed, along with a lot of other people, that the tasks that, in their liberal days, they hoped government could do, are now being done, and to greater effect, by religious institutions. Churches and synagogues seem to be better at the welfare-state business than the welfare state itself. Gerson includes an excerpt from To Empower People, the 1976 essay by Neuhaus and Peter Berger, that now stands as a forerunner to much of the current talk on civil society. Neuhaus and Berger brought back to public attention the notion of "mediating institutions" that exist between government and the individual, and the way these institutions provide a moral framework for communities. The emphasis on these institutions is another pathway leading neoconservatives to religion, for as Neuhaus and Berger write, "Religious institutions form by far the largest network of voluntary associations in American society."

There is a great appreciation in neoconservative circles for the superiority of Catholic Schools (James Coleman's pioneering research was published in The Public Interest). And one cannot help noticing that agencies that work on the salvation of souls have tremendous success when it comes to helping people overcome drug addiction. More generally, studies by Harvard's Richard Freeman find that religious observance is a better predictor of who will not fall into drugs and crime than family income. A recent study by the Heritage Foundation links regular church attendance to all sorts of good things such as lower divorce rates, lower drug use, lower rates of clinical depression, and so on. The study even finds that church attendance correlates to lower blood pressure and lower cancer rates! In any case, there is a growing suspicion, even in the most secular heart, that the reason these religious institutions do better at molding character than the secular ones is not only because they have a more powerful sense of mission, or because they demand more of their charges, but also because they place human life in a transcendent context. Neoconservatives have been writing about the limits of social policy for decades, but God turns out to be a pretty good social worker.

This inevitably leads to all the usual complaints that arise when a group of intellectuals decide that religion is good social policy. There are the usual cries of hypocrisy against those who preach religion to others while themselves staying home from church or synagogue. And the truly religious raise the sensible concern that religion gets cheapened when dragged into politics. Neoconservatives are quite familiar with these old and powerful objections. Which is not to say they have devised powerful answers.

Yet, in his essay in the Gerson book, "Christian Conviction and Democratic Etiquette," George Weigel works through some of these tensions. (The magazine in which this essay first appeared, First Things, is itself an effort to perform this task). Weigel argues that religious conservatives need to develop a grammar that will enable them to talk comfortably in the public square, just as the apostle Paul did: "Paul was a man at home with at least two moral-intellectual 'grammars': the Judaic in which he had been rabbinically trained, and the Hellenistic, which dominated elite culture in the eastern Mediterranean at the time." Paul presumably regarded the Judaic grammar as superior, but he did not hesitate to use the other, boasting famously, "I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some."

Weigel begins his search for such a grammar by going to Lincoln's Second Inaugural, which used biblical language to include every American in the working out of a great moral drama. "Lincoln spoke as one who had understood the frailty of all things human, and especially of all things political; he did not suggest, even amidst a civil war, that all righteousness lay on one side, and all evil on another." He used religion, rather, to show that the American experiment relies on a virtuous people, and that great national dilemmas could only be understood with biblical references and a religious sensibility.

The neoconservatives are sophisticated urbanites. Through American history most socio-religious movements have been hostile to cities and to sophisticates, and the sophisticates have returned the sentiment. It would be remarkable, if in part due to the neoconservatives' efforts, the urban ethos were to combine with the religious conservative ethos, to produce a way of looking at the world which would render reverence unto God and unto Caesar a high degree of skeptical social analysis. That's a difficult ethos to create, but not as difficult as writing an appreciation of neoconservatism in Irving Kristol's magazine without once quoting from Kristol or any member of his immediate family.

* Addison Wesley. 467 pp. $27.50.

DAVID BROOKS is senior editor of the Weekly Standard and editor of Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage).

COPYRIGHT 1997 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group