Influences: On Hold
I realized that trying to
write extended write-ups of the most influential books was getting
tedious and distracting me from some other good blogging. But I'm
going to jump ahead temporarily and mention one of the most influential
articles I've ever read: The Way of Love, Dorothy Day and the American Right by Bill Kauffman.
Chesterton may have answered too quickly - but the spirit is right.
If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:G.K. Chesterton once answered the objection of many, when confronted with a truly reactionary propositon. They say "You can't turn back the clock." - Chesterton's reply was "Of, course you can."- if the clock is wrong, you set it right. A clock, like a civilization is a thing made by humans.
I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land
Chesterton may have answered too quickly - but the spirit is right.
Posted on 6/10/2005 01:44 PM
by
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Under the Influences
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Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Under the Influences
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Reader Comments (6)
Bill Kauffman seems like a wonderful fellow and his prose is really tip-top. I'd love to see more of him.
That analysis of Day's Catholic Worker movement is quite astute. Right now I half-believe the NR critiques of her movement as naiive and economically ignorant, but I'm more interested in exploring my half-belief in the possibilities for a widely-distributed economy.
Have you read Baylor prof Scott Moore's essay "The End of Convenient Stereotypes"?
http://www3.baylor.edu/~Scott_Moore/essays/Stereotypes.html
He sees potential for an alliance between certain movements on the Right and Left. Having imbibed the media stereotype of Evangelicals at the time, when I first read this piece on my way into conservatism in '97 or '98 I believed Moore was a particularly generous man of the right himself. In a revelation that supports his own thesis, I recently learned he's actually more in sympathy with Nader-types!
P.S. found your site via the New Pantagreul blog.
as a self-described Paleo-Green/Geo-Libertarian who has read Kaufman you may be interested in reading some of Kevin Carson's website on Mutualism (free market anti-capitalism) and his blog...
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/
http://www.mutualist.org/
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html