The Road to Serfdom is Paved with B.S.

A review of 'The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn't Enough.'

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A few weeks ago, I saw a rave review in the American Conservative of a new book, The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough. Judging by the review and what I know of the reviewer, I fully expected to hate it.

I got the book, picked it up, and … I loved it. It’s written in brisk, inviting, oddly unpretentious prose. The author, Michael Warren Davis, is a knowledgeable, confident writer, who writes of cobwebby things with remarkable clarity and verve. It’s fun, informative, thoroughly quirky in a good way, and full of things—mostly of secondary or tangential relevance to his thesis—that I agree with to one extent or another.

And now that I’ve gotten the sure-to-be-unexpected, blurbable praise out of the way, I should get to my primary criticism: It’s b——t.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Davis’ advice at the end about how to live a good life is lovely and constructive, if not necessarily universal or wholly practical in its applicability. His proudly reactionary interpretations of history are fun and occasionally enlightening, but also on many occasions jaw-droppingly wrong.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Andrew

    A+ on the headline. Nearly a spit take.

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    jhc

    "little more than the Hippie communitarianism and Frankfurt School Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s with some paleo-bro testosterone caulked into the seams and some ultramontane Catholic gold leaf slapped on." 😄👍

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    Keith

    To paraphrase Kevin Williamson on this topic of nostalgia: If you think that life was so much better in the 1950s or 1200s, there's literally nothing stopping you from adopting that standard of living and level of technology ***right now***. If you want to restrict yourself to the medical technology and knowledge of some glorified past era, again, there's nothing stopping you. When someone extols the virtues of these bygones eras, I feel like queueing up the online gif of Ron Burgandy saying "I don't believe you." and lighting a cigarette. Oddly enough, very few of the proponents of this nonsense actually seem to want to adopt this "simpler" lifestyle.

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    Khal Spencer

    Does Davis think that all serfs lived like the people in "The Constitutional Peasants Scene" in Holy Grail? Sure sounds that way.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

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    Ben Connelly

    “ And now that I’ve gotten the sure-to-be-unexpected, blurbable praise out of the way, I should get to my primary criticism: It’s b------t.”

    Yep. Those paragraphs describing serf life read like the daydream of a guy who’s read too many epic fantasy novels. I love Tolkien and Robert Jordan, but part of the fun is imagining a world in which medieval life wasn’t brutally terrible. But the key here - and this is a point Davis seems to have missed - is that it’s (bear with me)… fiction.

    I sure have my complaints about modernity and technology. But nothing that can’t be solved by people going outside, getting a little exercise, talking face to face, and turning off their devices once in a while. (Ok that’s a simplification but you get my point.)

    I was probably more Luddite/reactionary/anti-technology until I read what the actual reactionaries think, at which point my reflexive response was the same as Jonah’s, “this is bovine excrement.”

    Although I understand their point, I can’t fathom why people think the abundance of choice in the cereal aisle is an insurmountable problem. If you can’t compartmentalize enough to walk down the aisle and only buy the one you want, don’t walk down the cereal aisle. The rest of us can choose for ourselves just fine.

    Has Davis ever spent much time outdoors or done manual labor? I’m no woodsman or farmer. But I’ve squatted in the woods to relieve myself and it’s not an idyllic circumstance. Indoor plumbing (and the rest of supposedly cursed technologies), get this, make life a little better.

    Finally, do people who pine for the days of Christendom really believe medieval peasants were all good Christians? Or would they just rather a society in which people gave lip service to Christianity so their heads wouldn’t be cut off, but their wouldn’t be any competing religions in the public sphere? Poverty can corrupt just as easily as wealth and I’ve yet to see a coherent argument demonstrating that improving people’s actual material circumstances (not just giving them phones but reducing their physical hardship) corrupted them in ways that life as a serf couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t have porn in 1203, but they sure had prostitutes.

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  6. GregS

    "We lack the greatest freedom of all: freedom from desire... I would argue that (the serf) was freer, because he was free from meaningless choices."
    Not to run afoul of Godwin, but Michael Warren Davis's position on serfdom is distressing close to "Arbeit macht frei" is it not?

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    Alec

    Another dolt longing for a past that never existed.

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  8. The Logrus

    He makes the same mistake most Marxists make - Assuming technological progress and the creation of wealth are automatic, and not a direct result of all the things he hates about Capitalism.

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    Antebellum Whig

    exactly so:

    This gets to my fundamental problem with the new “integralists.” When they talk of the “common good” they aren’t speaking to how they want to live, but how other people should.

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    BrettH

    Thanks Jonah, I'll stick with liberal democratic capitalism based on the available options.

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