Shackles of liberty

Conservatism, in Davis’s view, has long since stopped standing for any particular set of virtues, working instead to delay and perhaps tidy up the messes incurred as progressivism marches inexorably onward. If liberals are trying to propel us into postmodernity and conservatives are trying to make modernity tolerable, the reactionary, in Davis’s telling, “lives in open revolt against the modern world. He believes in simplicity and piety, strength and sacrifice. He categorically rejects both politics and economics; he has no opinions, only principles. He minds his own business, though he strives to be useful to others.”

Davis wants to get back to a mode of life developed in a time and place he believes has been unfairly maligned: medieval Europe. Already, this is enough to cause the average reader, even the average conservative reader, a moment of trepidation. But Davis does his best to explain that that period, often referred to as the “Dark Ages,” was really nothing of the sort.

In this, he is correct. The disparagement of the medieval period was contrived by later generations of people who thought to burnish the credentials of the ancient world by deriding the era that came after, imagining it as a time of pure backwardness. Davis explains that even the serfs, who occupied the lowest level of medieval society, were neither as oppressed nor as ignorant nor as unfree as we imagine them to be.

That may be. Even so, life in medieval times was worse than the average American’s life today, right? The short life expectancy, the lack of social mobility (or any mobility), and the absence of self-government make for a life that most of us would rather not trade for our own.

Our error, Davis suggests, is equating material wealth and expanded freedom with happiness. “For too long we’ve confused happiness with comfort,” he says. There is some truth to this. We have known for a while that having more options can sometimes increase anxiety. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a book about this in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, and Davis seems to agree with his thesis that having a bevy of choices for each and every decision we make is driving us mad.

Davis holds that it was an error of Enlightenment thinkers to assume that all people want to rule their own lives to such a minute degree. In the feudal order, everyone knew his place in the world. The serf lived under the noble, who lived under the king, who lived under God, each in his place, each fulfilling a role in the divinely wrought system. Davis says the serf was freer than we are “because he was free from meaningless choices.” Most serfs did not want to be Aristotelian philosopher-kings — “they were content to be men.”

Can this be true? Davis does not offer much in the way of evidence of their contentment, and each peasant revolt of the medieval period is a point to the contrary. Still, the events of the past few years have certainly shown that many Americans, despite living in the freest society ever known, are more than willing to give away at least some of their liberties. As the coronavirus pandemic raged, many people acted just like medieval peasants in a plague year, offering perfect obedience in exchange for protection from the unseen enemy. Even members of Congress have acted like royal courtiers rather than members of a separate and superior branch of government, demoting their own status in the hierarchy in return for lifting the responsibilities of representative government off their shoulders.

But too many critiques of liberal democracy seek to answer the question “is liberalism a perfect system?” when they should instead ask “is liberalism the best system we have?” No society is perfect, and the flaws of ours are easy to see. Liberal democracy is hard work. Weak men crave a king, but the strong know they must rule themselves. The gift of freedom is the ability to discover and live the good life as you and your family see fit. The burden is that you must figure out what that means. This is a trade-off, but it is one that is superior to the alternatives.

The collapse of local institutions is so deadly to a people’s attempt to embrace the virtues of personal responsibility precisely because that which replaces it — decrees from a distant capital — can never have the same moral authority as traditional customs encouraged by community leaders and family members. That is true whether the far-off leader calls himself “king” or “president.”

Having centralized power in Washington, we have proven to be poor judges of whom we elect to wield it. Medieval rulers were accountable to God, but modern rulers are accountable to no one except the vague idea of “the people,” a charge that could be stretched to justify any action. Such was the ideal, anyway. But the fact is that our ancestors lived under an awful lot of bad kings. There were despots and madmen, and even when kings tried to rule well, they were often unsuited to the task. A virtuous, godly king could still make terrible decisions, and no one could do anything about it.

Davis accepts that most people will never join in this level of reaction. So he offers some good advice to those who wish, as Rod Dreher suggests in The Benedict Option, to pull back from the political struggle and live virtuously, pursuing their own happiness. Community, family, friends, work, prayer, and all of the ancient things that sustained people can still exist. Davis is humble enough to say we should not “wait for a groundswell of popular opinion” but that we should live better by imagining a better past. The past he describes here is somewhat imaginary, and its flaws are different from those of the present, but they’re no less glaring. Perhaps it is only in taking the best of both that conservatives, or reactionaries, can build a better world in their own homes, if not beyond them.

Kyle Sammin is the senior editor of the Philadelphia Weekly and the co-host of the Conservative Minds podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.