Solzhenitsyn’s appreciation of Stolypin has been largely unknown because it appears in the second edition of August 1914: The Red Wheel I (1989), which few have read. What Solzhenitsyn claims in the Stolypin chapters is that a moderate alternative to Tsarist autocracy existed in Russia in the early twentieth century —- namely, a peaceful evolution toward a European-style constitutional monarchy under the enlightened statesmanship of Prime Minister Stolypin.

The main features of Stolypin’s plan were the preservation of the Romanov dynasty and Orthodox Church, combined with economic and political reforms —- reforms that would have given land to peasants and established local self-governing councils. Tragically, Stolypin was assassinated by terrorists who feared the success of his plan (which Solzhenitsyn estimates could have created an independent peasantry in twenty years and prevented Communist revolution). Mahoney’s analysis shows Solzhenitsyn to be a Burkean-style admirer of constitutional monarchy that gradually evolves toward ordered liberty while preserving his nation’s distinctive traditions.

Reading this sent me rushing back to a passage of Chesterton that, by some fancy of Providence, sticks in my mind. Here it is, from G. K. C.’s controversial writings on the First World War:

When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the [1905] Revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wresting with an inferno of atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin, and said he was chiefly known by the halter called “Stolypin’s Necktie” [the noose]. As a fact, there were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie: his policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as crown and captain of his Christianity.

One cannot resist the old cliché about great minds thinking alike. The Modern Age has seen few minds greater than Solzhenitsyn and Chesterton.

People get on the streetcars at three-thirty in the afternoon with cases of beer; no one seems to think anything of it; the open-container law is a subject of much dispute. Somehow the carousers have managed to resist, with occasional success, the much-more disciplined teetolers in Louisiana’s august legislative bodies. New York outlawed smoking in sports bars, but the neopuritan decadents of the Modern Age can’t seem to break Naw-lins boozers.

I read a lot of G. K. Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity while in New Orleans. Now if ever there was a better title for a book, I haven’t heard it. Chesterton was right, too: the modern world is quite thoroughly insane. His defense of the sanctity of private property in the aforementioned brilliantly-titled book is as refreshing as a cold beer (or a Hurricane at Pat O’Briens) after wandering around the French Quarter in 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity holding a squirming three-year-old.

And the food is tolerable, too.

We approached Saint Louis Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in North America, and I told the story of Saint Thomas Aquinas at the court of St. Louis: “And that will settle the Manichees!” declared St. Thomas, bursting from a tremendous revelry to startle all the guests at the dinner table of the king, for this cathedral is named after both a saint and a king —- one in the same. Thomas was not wrong often, but he was wrong there, for the Manichees still haunt us; they have reappeared in a rather vulgar, if breathtaking form in the film series The Matrix. It’s hard to blame men, though: if so great a man as Saint Augustine could be seduced by Manichaeanism, then what hope have we moderns?

Something about New Orleans, maybe its richness, its humanity, reminds me that patriotism is at base a local sentiment. Men have always been willing to die for their homes; they are less willing to die for some idea. When men turn a swamp, a damp and stifling climate, into a nobly debauched citadel of commerce and homes and heaths, they have infused things with their own humanity —- and to see it threatened is to envision a nightmare in its own ways as terrible as the amputation of an arm or leg. But we moderns have new ideas, innovations full of grandeur. We want patriotism as an ideology, or as a slogan. We want it as a weapon.

Bingo! I predicted in a UPI article on Wednesday that Annika Sorenstam would miss the cut by four strokes, and that’s exactly what she did, so I’m feeling like a seer. I crunched a lot of numbers to come up with that prediction, so forgive me for tooting my horn.

After playing what she called one of the best rounds of her life on Thursday in shooting a one over par 71, on Friday she regressed toward her mean, shooting a 74. That’s five over par for the tournament, thirteen strokes off the lead. That puts her four strokes over the cut of one over par. Her troubles came not from her driving, which would be moderately short but quite accurate for a male pro. Instead, as I expected, her chipping game betrayed her.

She still beat 13 men out of 114, so she played extremely well under pressure. She hit a disastrous stretch of five bogeys in eight holes in the middle of today’s round but then she gutted it out and closed with seven straight pars to stanch the bleeding. Congratulations to her.

I think the results support my conclusion from Wednesday that she probably couldn’t make a living on the men’s tour (i.e., her travel and caddy fees would exceed her winnings), in contrast to Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell’s prediction that she could win one or two tournaments on the PGA tour. Sorenstam carefully selected the Colonial tournament because the course suited her, and because its field is limited in both quality (Woods, Love, Weir, Els, and Singh passed it up) and number (about 35 fewer golfers start than in the normal tournament, but the same number make the cut). She gave it her best shot, and did what I expected her to do based on her average scores on the LPGA courses, which average about five strokes per round easier than the PGA courses.

I compared her in my article to the small, short-hitting old-timer Corey Pavin and suggested he was at least two strokes per 18 holes better than her. Here, he beat her by seven strokes over 36, even though they both averaged 268 off the tee (99th out of 114). The odd thing is that male pros generally have more delicate touch around the greens than the women pros.

That probably stems from how few American teenage girls want to become golf pros relative to American teenage boys. In other words, women pros are selected from a much smaller group of golf crazy teenagers than men pros are selected from.

A major problem for the LPGA tour is that all but one of its tournaments in the last eight months or so have been won my non-Americans. In Sweden, where Sorenstam is from, and in East Asia, golf is much less unfashionable among heterosexual teenage girls than it is here. Golf used to be trendy in the U.S. among young women —- my Mom gave me a book of golf memorabilia that included lots of fashion magazine covers from the 1920s of young ladies swinging their mashie-niblicks while dressed in the height of flapper fashion. In that decade, P.G. Wodehouse sold dozens of romantic comedy short stories about beautiful girls who shoot scratch and the duffers who love them to the Saturday Evening Post. At some point, though, golf stopped being sexy for American girls. Nowadays, the great majority of amateur women players in America are the wives of male players. Typically, they are post-menopausal. Most of the fans at LPGA tournaments are middle-aged or elderly husband-wife couples. The next biggest cohort are groups of women who look like gym teachers.

(The role of hormones in golf’s appeal is a fascinating subject. My wife became highly enthusiastic about playing and even watching golf both times she was pregnant with our sons. As soon as the boys were born, however, the oxytocin started flowing and she lost 101% of all interest in golf.)

So, the real problem for women’s golf in America is that young girls don’t think it makes them look sexy, and I’m not sure that Annika pumping herself up to look like Hans and Franz is going to solve that.

I apologize for the sparseness of posts recently. With the assistance of my three-year-old, I spilled coffee on my laptop, rendering it unusable, which in turn makes posting from home difficult; more importantly, it makes writing at home more difficult.

I am also leaving town for my brother’s graduation in New Orleans from Loyola University, followed by a week at the beach, so it is unlikely that there will be any posts until after Memorial Day. New readers from Tacitus and Yglesias may be interested in some of my longer pieces, which I have collected on the right (scroll down a bit) under “Longer Essays.” All readers are encouraged in my absence to visit the fine bloggers and links on the right.

First, I expect decline. That is very different from saying I regard it as inevitable. If ever there was an abused word, it is that one: inevitable. I certainly believe that the decline I anticipate can be arrested if men set themselves against it. If a man were to awake from a long and torturous fever-induced nightmare, and discover with a start that he is rushing wildly toward a precipice, all he need do is stop; having committed his will to simple survival, his vista opens wide from there. He need not thoughtlessly turn, almost as if beguiled by a new fever, and march precisely backward in his own wild steps. To his left may extend a daunting though ultimately navigable path along the mountainous crags back to his home; to his right may open a broad and primordial forest, imposing but by no means malicious, through which he can arrive at the home of his fathers. He may even find it necessary and desirable, after careful deliberation, to attempt a risky descent off the cliff before him, anticipating that below, perhaps, there is a solid road around the mountains or the forest; and for this he will need sturdy and reliable equipment, which upon consideration is readily available all about him, though most of it was dreadfully concealed by shadows and monsters in his nightmare. The point is that what he must not do, what in fact only a man of terrible insanity would do, is commit to a fatalism about his rush toward oblivion, or fancy somehow that oblivion is desirable, and plunge headlong in silence.

The whole illustration could be complicated by the presence nearby of other rushing dreamers, even thunderous crowds of them, who have not wakened from their own personal nightmares, and will in all likelihood fall to their deaths. Some may be stricken by that feverish lucidity that sometimes grips the delusive, and insist, against all reason and all the evidence of the natural senses, that oblivion is indeed desirable, or that it is not oblivion at all but Utopia; that the crags to the left are only bloody death and the forest to the right merely frightful doom; and that the reliable instruments around them, the equipment that Man has employed for survival amidst adventure since the dawn of Time, are but the rubbish of ancient beasts, treacherous and unusable. In this complication, our hero may perceive a few moments for the action of charity toward his fellow men, during which he can implore them to free themselves from the fever and halt their rush; but those moments will pass rapidly, and he may well be unsuccessful, for his influence on the wills of free men, even free men frenzied by a dream, is quite limited. And then he must entrust their souls to the God of Mercy —- for thereafter the action of charity will be best used in steeling himself for the difficult journey to his home (or the home of his fathers) where decent men can be mobilized to discover the source of the fever and defeat it.

All this is to say that a man or a nation or a civilization, even once on the road to oblivion, need not end up there. To say something is inevitable only makes sense, in a strict literal sense, after the fact; we more often hear it said that something was inevitable, that looking backward on history events seemed to gather and point toward some conclusion, which, surprise of surprises, in fact occurred. The occasional prophet, aye, has appeared and flashed like lightning with his vaticinations across the arc of history; but even the greatest of prophets is wrong more than he is right, and usually right only in the broad strokes, not the details.

My second purpose here, which is, so to speak, on the other side of the problem, is to say that it is still valid for a observer to presage decline. Critics of such presages often scoff that every age has had its declinists, its doomsayers and pessimists; this jeer they seem to imagine to be the end of the argument. They seem to think that the mere fact that previous doomsayers have been wrong means perforce that today’s doomsayer is wrong; that he is disarmed and his arguments trussed. It is a strange logic indeed that animates this line of dispute; that a thing has happened (or failed to happen) before means it is happening (or failing to happen) now. America will not decline. Why? Because Whittaker Chambers in the 1950s said America would fall to the Communists but it did not. Or because Henry Adams made a presentiment of doom at the end of the nineteenth century and was wrong. The truth is, it doesn’t really have any bearing on the severe question of whether modern American civilization is declining, that other controversialists have fulminated against what they perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the decline of America or Rome or the Carolingian Empire or imperial Britain. In fact, now that I think about it, what bearing it does have might be gleaned from the plain fact that those older empires did actually decline and fall. Salvianus said Rome would fall —- “The Roman Empire is luxurious, but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs” —- and fall it did. The very language of “decline and fall” I have borrowed from a famous book about Rome with that in its title.

All that is to say that there is nothing inherently disreputable about articulating a presentiment of decline —- anymore than it is disreputable to articulate an elated sense of advancement or improvement. The thing must be judged on its own merits. It will do no good to laugh that every age has had its pessimists, because every age has also had its optimists, and indeed its romantics. Frankly, I might persuaded to go further and say that the pessimists can often be the real idealists: they have an ideal, and perceive that their society is not approaching, but rather receding from it. Meanwhile the misguided optimists suppose that what is in fact decline is secure advancement instead; they are the real dreary realists.

My final note here is this; that I do not presume to set myself up as some towering prophet on the order of a Whittaker Chambers or a Salvianus. It is the duty of all serious men to contemn such arrogance where it to flows from the pen of one such as I. But I do presume to defend the privilege of writers great and small who envisage a period of decline, even a period of steep decline, to enunciate it; and to sound the alarums to others; so long as they do not succumb to the sin of despair. That privilege I will not grant to anyone. But there is a great deal of quite unseemly priggishness in the air, an atmosphere which suggests that to make profound criticisms of the trajectory of American society, or to be ill at ease with what is fancifully called the “American creed,” is to be unpatriotic or almost anti-American. This will not do; for what if some of the very ideas that make up this creed are part of the decline? part of the fever?

Mr. Little also chides another blogger for imagining that “hating the Russians and wanting war” was “was fundamental to Reagan’s supposed revival of ‘patriotism.’” To be indelicate for a moment, this is a traducement of a very low order. Substituting “Russians” for “Soviets” or “Communists” is a clever piece of legerdemain, but Reagan did not hate “the Russians”; he respected them and believed they deserved to live in a country where famine and death camp were distant, historical nightmares, not instruments of state policy. He did hate the Communists, because they were hateful, depraved creatures —- the most murderous band of thugs and plunderers ever to achieve political power in the history of mankind. They fashioned, as near as man ever has, Hell on earth; and then they spread it around the world through subversion and lies and terror.

Reagan didn’t want war; but he preferred it to subjugation by the sword of this armed doctrine.

It is said that the Czech hockey player Jaromir Jagr came to America knowing four words: yes, no, Ronald and Reagan. He still wears number 68 to commemorate the Prague Spring of 1968, where others who preferred war with the Communists to subjugation by the Communists finally got massacre instead.

Either communism is a system that is inherently flawed and can never work or Reagan majestically defeated communism. You can’t have both. I’ll take the former.

In fact, you can have both. Communism can never work at achieving its ideals, or even its own stated goals —- precisely because those ideals are unachievable. Moreover, Communism cannot even approximate the Good Society because it wages war on human nature; because it empowers the wicked; because it annihilates what is human and organic; because it accomplishes the ruin of private property and crushes the creative impulses of men; because it consolidates and monopolizes wealth and power, and enervates and subverts each province of opposition to its concentration, unlike any other system of government ever devised. Granted all these things, Communism can still rule; for there is no law of nature forbidding tyranny from enduring despite its manifest flaws. Indeed, we might say that the flaws are what allow it to endure. There was nothing inevitable about Communism’s fall, because there is nothing inevitable in history.

Reagan had his faults, but cloudy thinking about war and International Communism (the two are nearly synonyms) was assuredly not one of them. To the extent that Reagan “revived patriotism,” it was in large measure because he knew exactly what was at stake in the Cold War, what was worth fighting, killing and dying for in it, and, finally, why Lenin’s demonic vision had to be obliterated —- and he knew these things at a time when so many others were unsure.

As loyal Cella’s Review readers might expect, I cannot answer so confidently. The following should be taken as a demurral, as a instance of “thinking out loud,” so to speak. My ideas here, taken as a whole, are tentative: while some are held with solid confidence, of others I am hesitant. But if a blog cannot be used for thinking out loud, what purpose does it serve?

First, it is my observation that conservatives tend to underestimate or overlook the real spiritual perils of prosperity. The Christian philosophy, illumined by Sacra Scriptura, makes no such mistake; indeed even the most pious of Christians might be forgiven for the occasional suspicion that Christian teaching overestimates this peril. Our Lord himself marvels at the shriveling effect of wealth on the soul: “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” Those are words, I confess, that lead me to tremble for our age. And indeed, at the same time that economic growth rates soared and Western nations, invigorated by the materialist enterprise of human science, prospered unlike they ever had before, men were slaughtered like cattle by the various armed doctrines of the materialist West. “Treat men like raw material and raw material they will be,” C. S. Lewis wrote. Materialism, where it slipped the harness of conscience, where it became the enemy of the Creator and fancied itself as embracing all aspects of the universe, did just that. And the corpses piled high like mountains.

All this is not to prejudice liberty, which I believe reason amply demonstrates is a gift from God to man; and among the most precious gifts it is, and surely the highest ideal for the secular order. But freedom is instrumental; it was provided that men might faithfully seek virtue, and seek God. That great material wealth has been a product of freedom is no small fact; and that too, rightly ordered, is a blessing from God.

Secondly, whenever I read of optimism, I perceive a host of specters gathering on the horizon, all signified by the dread word Progress. Conservatives have been speaking altogether too glibly of progress of late. We are full of enthusiasm of democratic revolution across the Islamic world, not unlike, to my ears, the cries of permanent revolution by the Trotskyists many years ago; when what Muslims might need instead is a regression, a retreat from delusion and fanaticism. It was precisely the Western idea of progress, in my admittedly limited reading, which transformed Islam from an austere faith in Fate, into a revolutionary fantasy; and it was precisely Western technology and Western decay which made that fantasy anything more than a trivial irritation. I worry that our fatuous and irresponsible rhetoric may haunt us for years to come. “Men have been sometimes led by degrees,” wrote Burke, “sometimes hurried into things, of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach.”

Perhaps my demurral here qualifies me as a pessimist; I do not feel like a pessimist. I am not wracked by despair, or doubt about the unparalleled nobility and worth of our civilization, despite all its manifest flaws. I do not expect catastrophe. I expect slow decline. My sense is that our vitality has left us; that we are a spiritually diminished people; that we are living on habits of enterprise and virtue borrowed from a previous age of vigor; and that, even as we depend on these habits, all the action of our own age is to discredit and traduce their principles. A civilization cannot long survive on habit alone, and cannot long sustain the sort of wild and maniacal hacking at the principles of those habits to which we so often bear witness. Our culture has come to despise the organic sources of its vitality; those who value their own heritage have become the outsiders. But vitality has not abandoned the world of men, for its Author still sits on the throne.

The role of conservatives, then, is more counterrevolutionary than it is “conservative” in the strict sense of the word; for to conserve the structures of decline and fall, the forms of cultural rapine and plunder, is to shelter a friend in lonely despond, and secure him from desperately needed succor in his moment of despair; it is to guard against the approach of solicitous physicians in the patient’s hour of agony; it is, in short, to make the civilization of the West safe for suicide. The conservative’s role is properly restoration, not conservation.

As an example, reflect on the following question: Should the Right reconcile itself to the French Revolution? Now, of course we must reconcile ourselves to it as a human historical fact; but should we reconcile ourselves to its principles? to its universalizing abstractions and utter intolerance for departure from in practice, and disagreement with in principle, those same abstractions? Should we reconcile ourselves, that is, to the logic of the Guillotine?

Or should today’s conservatives still regard themselves as opponents of the principles of the Jacobins? Well, I submit for consideration this vivid historical update depicted by the gifted John Zmirak:

Remember when the L.A. riots spun out of control, and engulfed the whole United States? The key moment was no doubt when police and Army commanders took fright and changed sides, throwing their support to the Committee for Public Safety led by Tom Hayden, along with Noam Chomsky, Barbara Boxer, Michael Moore, and Edward Said. After Hayden’s fall and execution, his successor, Marion Barry, insisted that President Bush and his wife Barbara be tried for treason. Their executions shocked the world but sparked wild celebrations in the capital, as the First Couple’s severed heads danced on poles in daylong parades. A crack whore was duly enshrined in the National Cathedral as the Goddess of Reason . . .

Of course, Hayden and Barry were each executed in due course, and replaced by the “incorruptible” Maxine Waters. The ensuing Terror killed tens of thousands including corporate executives, Indian software engineers, Korean grocers, many harmless courtiers and celebrities such as Liz Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Bill Cosby and Adam Sandler, and unnumbered professors, priests, ministers and cloistered nuns, all accused of “subversion.”

When conservatives rose up in Arkansas and Louisiana, the Army crushed the counterrevolution, crowded its supporters onto rafts on the Mississippi, then sank them, drowning thousands of unarmed civilians. The Terror only ended when General Louis Farrakhan used a “whiff of grapeshot” to cow the mob. His ruthless secret police calmed the chaos at home —- ended the church burnings and massacres, for instance —- but his foreign policy adventurism started wars with Mexico, Canada, Great Britain and finally Russia, ending only with his ignominious defeat and exile to Staten Island. But all this is ancient history now. The Revolution and its wars have ended, at a cost of over 20 million lives, and the U.S. standard of living now equals Serbia’s. Was it all worth it?

Sort of puts a new face on what seems so distant a historical event, doesn’t it? (Click to the whole article: it is excellent, and includes convenient links to the actual historical events corresponding to each of Mr. Zmirak’s modern renderings.) If conservatives cannot bring ourselves to denounce this sort of collective madness, what standing have we to denounce all the other calamitous innovations of the Left? And surely we can concurrently acknowledge, even as we denounce the rapacity and insanity of the Jacobins, and their miscellaneous radical progeny, that the brittle ancien regime they broke up with such ferocity, was in plain fact a feeble and dismal despotism in its own right. Surely we can hold two true ideas in our minds at once; and yet hold up Reformation or Restoration over Revolution as our guiding principle.

If I am pessimistic, it is because (with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Orrin Judd) abstractions are in the saddle and ride the conservatives. Conservative circles seem all abuzz with talk of progress and democracy, words that should fall discordant on our ears. If conservatives are to be optimists, which I do think is possible, it must not be because we have simply capitulated to the ideas of the Left, and reproach only their excesses. It must be instead because we know our ideas to be superior; because we favor what is human to what is mechanical, what is organic to what is regimented, what is venerable to what is fashionable. Conservatives never hated Progress and Democracy until they became slogans on placards, catchwords to conceal the armed doctrines of the revolt against God.

The modern world is in revolt against the Augustinian reminder that Man cannot conquer Sin. My fear is that conservatives, influenced as we all are by the pressures of our age, have joined in the revolt —- or at least wearied of resisting it.