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Sohrab and the Chocolate Factory
If you’re a regular listener to the Commentary Podcast, you probably came to know Sohrab Ahmari in his capacity as a contributor to that enterprise. Sohrab’s immigration to America from Iran and subsequent conversion to Catholicism have also produced a much-discussed memoir – From Fire by Water – and another outgrowth; the curious creation of an entirely new branch of conservatism, which he calls “David French-ism.” Setting aside for a moment that nascent political movements love to identify heretics and then place them on trial in order to better indulge the narcissism of small differences (this gets the juices of the true believers flowing), what is this thing and why should we care?
The definition he gives of this philosophy is that it essentially consists of a “polite, (David French-ian) third way around the cultural civil war.” That’s it. The notion of “liberalism” itself is called into question as liberalism is inherently agnostic about ends, and cares considerably more about the means by which cultural and political questions are sorted out. This is clearly seen by Ahmari and those at First Things as some type of bug, not a feature. David has done a better job of defending himself from this spurious straw-man than I likely can, but I’m more interested in the other side… in what French-ism’s flip side “Ahmari-ism” consists of.
What is its goal? Again, Ahmari: “[T]o fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”
What is it that Sohrab really wants out of politics? An Everlasting Gobstopper, obviously. (Record Scratch…) Whaaat? Follow me for just a moment while we go on a wee side journey.
The fundamental unreality of the whole situation baffled me until I began to contemplate this contretemps from a different perspective – that of a morality play. In this play, Sohrab takes on the role of Charlie Bucket, from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the titular hero is a poverty-stricken yet well-meaning urchin living in a Dickensian hellscape. Eating candy seems to be the primary obsession of this wasted and evil society; indeed, the consumption of Wonka treats provides the only meaningful release from the suffering induced by the grinding poverty afflicting the Bucket family, and Charlie in particular. The Wonka Company itself essentially forms the confines of the public square around which everybody gathers in the Wonka-verse.
In the story, other vices which bedevil the world are also put on display such as avarice, sloth, and gluttony. Note how cleverly this ties into the crises of morality which supposedly inflict America? Obesity, opioids, pornography, and divorce… Tell us, Sohrab:
How do we promote the good of the family against the deracinating forces arrayed against it, some of them arising out of the free market (pornography) and others from the logic of maximal autonomy (no-fault divorce)? “We should reverse cultural messages that for too long have denigrated the fundamental place of marriage in public life.” Oh, OK. How do we combat the destruction wrought by drugs (licit and illicit), by automation and globalization and other forces of the kind?
Hm. This sounds very similar to the Dahl’s-eye view of society that Ahmari holds up as being the natural outcome of the “Liberal” order: a culture which appeals primarily to the basest instincts and leaves people in a Bucket-like spiritual penury, constantly looking to inhale the next treat and forget the searing pain of their miserable existence.
The ill-considered conflation Ahmari engages in is to equate “Liberty” with “License.” This linguistic sleight of hand intentionally divorces liberty from its necessary counterpart: responsibility.
But as you know, the story moves on. In the midst of this hedonism and debauchery, a great light appears on the horizon: Wonka himself is offering Golden Tickets contained within his sweets representing an opportunity to tour the facility where the candy is made. For the Buckets, the ticket means salvation; to be raised from the slough of despond into a kind of secular heaven.
For those with less pure motives, the ticket turns out to be poison. As Charlie and the assembled crew of heathens are ushered through Wonka’s factory, they are picked off one by one by the various temptations contained therein… not because Wonka is a sadist, mind you, but by their own intemperance. (I will leave you, gentle reader, to decipher the meaning of that particular allegory.)
Be that as it may, Ahmari advances the argument that the indulgence made possible by liberal values (the temptations of the factory) will ultimately get you sucked up a chocolate pipe, dropped down the trash chute (you’re a rotten egg, Veruca!) or generally waylaid because those same liberal values “failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else.” But what are those permanent truths? Who gets to decide them and more importantly: who gets to enforce them? Ahmari is coy about this part, but if you read between the lines, the plot becomes clear.
The MacGuffin of the 1971 adaption of the book Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is that Everlasting Gobstopper I mentioned above. Getting that Gobstopper is the point of the Moral Journey that Ahmari thinks “David French-ism” isn’t up to handling.
His goal it seems is nothing short of gaining control of the factory to start churning out those Gobstoppers. What if you don’t like Gobstoppers? It is known that the Gobstopper is the ultimate truth of the candy universe, and all who deny it are wrong at least, and fools or evil at worst.
What do you think “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good” means? Gobstoppers for all whether you like hard candy or not.
But there’s a little hitch at the end of the tale we all need to know:
Do you see what happened there? It seems in the end that even Charlie Bucket is more of a French-ite than an Ahmari-ite.
Not to get our pop culture metaphors hopelessly tangled, but if we’ve learned nothing else this year perhaps it is that we ought to be skeptical of placing those in power who would ruthlessly enforce their own judgment over what ultimate good consists of?
Remember: “They don’t get to choose.” Enjoy your Gobstoppers.
Published in Journalism
Conformity to leftism, which demands conformity to ever changing standards. It’s totally capricious, and therefore chaotic.
I agree that autonomy isn’t exactly the right word. It’s autonomy within a radical and historically poorly performing framework of basic understandings of justice, the good, etc.
The second problem with that autonomy formulation is that devotees of leftism undoubtedly think they will be maximizing their autonomy within their understood boundaries (just like all of us want for ourselves), but that belief framework in particular has the fatal flaw of misreading human nature (denying any such thing as human nature?) and resulting in totalitarianism and nihilism. It saws off the very branch its devotees are standing on, sometimes by design of those bent on power sometimes simply as a result of the inherent contradictions involved in that project.
How many times have I heard people say that there is no such thing as society or culture in any real sense. There is only the aggregate of individuals exercising their own autonomy. Attempts to view the result of these individuals acting and living in proximity to one another as an entity with interests apart from those individuals comprising it tend to be rejected the closer one gets to the anarchocapitalist end of the spectrum.
Yep, it’s BOTH autonomous individuals AND social consensus together.
On the flipside, the far left seems to only believe in social entities, with individuals being secondary at best. So autonomy is fine for them as long as it serves/doesn’t interfere with the social goals of the current zeitgeist. Autonomy is also fine for them as a weapon to destroy the underlying framework of Western Civ so that whatever new framework can take its place.
Unfortunately, conservatives have to fight on both fronts as both ends of the spectrum have an interest in eliminating the traditional Western Civ framework to the extent it retards either extreme.
I don’t know your point here, but if you are going to quote me, why leave off an important first sentence?
I agree with this to the same extent…
I was obviously speaking to the comment by HeavyWater. This kind of editing is exactly what the Mueller team did to Trump’s lawyer Dowd.
I consider ‘cultural appropriation’ and anti-assimilation to be aspects of a conformist (even totalitarian) ideology, namely that which divides people into hierarchical and strictly defined groups of oppressor, penitent oppressor, and oppressee, with harsh punishments for either belonging to the first group, or straying from the second two groups. It is, as WC said, a chaotic form of conformity, as the standards and parameters are in constant flux, partly out of design, but as much due to the inherent contradiction that Ed G. talked about: they are in large part designed to cope with emotional needs, but do so in a manner that is in conflict with healthy psychology (both individual and social) within the limitations of human nature. On an individual level it makes them paranoid, entitled and high-strung, while systematically the definition and boundaries of ‘oppression’ have to constantly change in order that their worldview continue to group them into the same box that provides them emotional relief, with new enemies replacing the old as necessary.
In other words, they’ve turned themselves into NPC’s, and artificially induced mental illness in themselves in the process, all in adoption of, and compliance with, a conformist ideology that children are indoctrinated to believe to be the moral and natural state of being.
That said, I would agree that there comes a point in which virtue (individuality) becomes unsustainable vice (anomie, alienation and dysfunction), and both family and community (including both local community and national culture) act as shapers and filtering agents in that regard (we are, after all, a social as well as egoistic species). One of the reasons David French is wrong to oppose things like conservatives criticizing and boycotting the NFL, though I believe his TDS had a lot more to do with that idiocy than the individualism of classical liberal thought.
That is fine. Drew just said no one in this thread criticized French for criticizing Trump so I was just excerpting people who did just that.
No offense intended.
I am a Christian, an American, a Conservative and a Republican in that order. Trump is not part of the Conservative team, he is part of the Populist team. He is not my quarterback.
I may vote for Trump, and I may not. But if I vote for him, it will be with a clothes pin over my nose.
if David French is written out of the Consevative movement, there are many people like me who will withhold our votes from Trump.
I hope that my fellow conservatives will learn the lesson of 2018 where we lost the votes of women, the young, the college-educated and the suburbs. Those who do not learn the lessons of history will be condemned to repeat them.
I guess I am not familiar enough with this concept of conformity to recognize it.
My idea is far more basic/simplistic in conformity being everyone is the same.
Fascinating. You’ve been trying to kick all Trump voters out of the party since 2016.
So when you said yesterday that your mind is being changed, I told you all you had to do was lie down for a bit and the feeling would go away. Looks like I was right. Feeling better? ; )
You got me. Apparently I haven’t been paying close attention.
However, I would differentiate between French’s criticism of the President vs. his attacks on Trump’s supporters — specifically Evangelicals. He says he understands why they chose the President over Hillary Clinton, but in the same breath shames them for not just abstaining. (Which would have gotten us Hillary Clinton.)
I’m glad he feels good about his decision. But if all Evangelicals had followed suit, where would we be today? Serving President Hillary Clinton.
French is benefiting from actions taken on his behalf, and then claims it was wrong for those actions to be taken in the first place.
I won’t abide that.
I think I know where we’re talking past each other. The Left demands conformity of thought/opinion — not being. It pays lip service to “diversity,” but its diversity is only on superficial things like race. Everyone is supposed to knuckle under to the Left’s ideas of strong central government, command economy, sexual “freedom” (really licentiousness), etc. If that weren’t the case, Georgians would feel free to limit abortions without worrying about losing business from Hollywood, for example.
Heh. I do tend to sound pretentious at times, don’t I? I realized about halfway through that I was basically just restating the NPC meme in what is probably an unnecessarily convoluted way. Even when I catch myself, I can seldom figure out how to say what I mean gracefully.
I’m familiar enough with the meme to get the idea ;)
Classical Liberalism is the worst political-economic regime ever tried, except for the alternatives.
You do know there’s such thing as spectrums, right?
This is very black and white thinking. You do not need purity to still have the system.
And classical liberalism was a political philosophy – not a life philosophy. Meaning, the state views us as individuals in the application of law, not that society need view each other in such limited capacity.
Certainly, a certain amount is necessary culturally, but not unfettered and all the way to the extreme.
I don’t think David French is averse to all cultural battles on behalf of the Republican based. I do think that French is less likely to take on a cultural battle that contains a racial “edge” than e is likely to take on a cultural battle that contains a religious edge.
The NFL Players were mostly African-American opposing what they saw as an anti-black law enforcement regime. French didn’t take the right-leaning view that “Blue Lives Matter.”
But French was eager to support Alabama’s pro-life legislation and has criticized Mike Pence for backing down as Governor of Indiana during the fight over religious freedom.
So, David French might be generally described as an across the board conservative, but his passion lies with the issue of religious liberty.
I wasn’t advocating purity, although my definition of Classical Liberalism and my support of it does make me more willing to support, for example, the phasing out of Social Security and Medicare (and a host of other social-welfare programs) than most people.
I acknowledge that I am out of the mainstream for being skeptical of minimum wage laws, farm subsidies, anti-discrimination laws and so on.
So, I don’t see Classical Liberalism as the same thing as my watered down Libertarianism (watered down because most Libertarians don’t think I am Libertarian because I don’t support Open Borders and I did support the Iraq War).
I do see Classical Liberalism as a belief in a competition of ideas, instead of one faction of society telling the rest of the country to shut up or be put in the gulag.
A Classical Liberalism is against gulags, regardless of whether the people who run the gulags are Leftists or Right-wingers.
The key question, as I see it, is do people like Sohrab Ahmari really think that the United States of America can or should be converted from a liberal democracy to Catholic Theocracy, where religious leaders, instead of voters, make decisions about how society is run because the voters are too sinful to make responsible choices.
Does Sohrab Ahmari see General Franco’s Spain as the best option available?
How far does this Jihad against individual autonomy go? Ban no-fault divorce?
Ban Rock music, including the Beach Boys?
Ban birth control so that we can “be fruitful and multiply?”
How far does Ahmari want to go with this culture war? How many people will volunteer to fight along side him once people figure out what his agenda is?
That’s not a key question. That’s not a suggestion Ahmari even raises, and when I see the “theocracy” charge leveled against him I can’t help but catch a whiff of anti-Catholicism.
So many straw men.
Good grief. What is his secret agenda?
There is the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ position, and the position that important symbols of national cohesion such as the National Anthem (I think I might have referred to as the Pledge of Allegiance previously, I sometimes get them mixed up since they serve the same function) should not be disrespected in pursuit of any cause. French is a religious conservative, but not much of a cultural conservative, and if his position was informed by the belief that the issue should be viewed through a racial lens, its an indication of a culturally progressive hypersensitivity and moral panic regarding such things; for whatever reason, he chose to ostentatiously distance himself from a large percentage of the conservative coalition on an issue of great importance to them, and used a distorted view of classical liberal principles to justify it. Such actions have consequences, in terms of coalition politics as well as popular perception of classical liberalism.
You call yourself all kinds of things. OK, I’ll take your word for it. I’m pretty certain you have confirmed here on Ricochet that you did not vote for Trump in 2016. My guess is chances are you will find a reason to not vote for him in 2020. My opinion is that Trump is much more important to the future of this country than any of us or even Mr. French. Your threat to withhold your vote from Trump rings a bit hollow to me. Sorry. No one person can write David French out of the Conservative movement except himself. But I don’t believe calling oneself a conservative and then doing everything you can to undermine a President who is actually doing conservative things bodes well for the “Conservative Movement”.
I agree. The kneeling NFL players offended many conservatives sensibilities. I admit that I have not read every word David French has written regarding the kneeling NFL players controversy. But I would guess that I would disagree with him, at least in the sense that boycotting NFL games in response to the kneeling players during the National Anthem is even more justified than the kneeling is.
But I remain, in general, a fan of David French, despite my occasional disagreements with him.
I am an agnostic-atheist. But there are lots of Catholics in public life who I agree with on political issues.
Examples are National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, former Speaker Paul Ryan and US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
I have my disagreements with all of these people on various issues. I have no more anti-Catholic bias than I have an anti-Mormon bias or an anti-Jewish bias.
Here are Rich Lowry, Charles C. W. Cooke, Alexandria DeSantis and Michael Brenden Dougherty discuss the Sohrab Ahmari versus David French controversy.
Episode 150: Define Your Terms
Another Great National Review Podcast.
He probably hasn’t read any of Wesley (forgot his last name) at The Corner.
I have missed the Editors Podcast; thanks for the link!