PROGRESS, RETURN, OR RENEWAL?: More on rock’n’roll conservatism. Leo Strauss has a famous essay, “Progress or Return?”, contrasting the metaphor of progress (which tends to imply historical determinism, disdain for the past, and denial of an inherent and ineradicable corruption in human nature) and the metaphor of return. He was playing on the Jewish understanding of return, teshuvah, which has connotations of repentance. A return to the source.

But in contemporary political discourse, “return” has been downgraded to nostalgia. Conservatism, mostly due to its unfortunate name, has been accused of being little more than a desire to return to some imagined past–the 1950s of “Ozzie and Harriet” is the usual suspect. And many varieties of conservatism play into that stereotype, making a fetish of medieval guilds, 1950s diners, or Victorian sexual mores (eep). There are worthwhile ways of drawing on the past for inspiration and examples–I think The Tragedy of American Compassion effectively mines the Victorian era for a sense of the possibilities, needs, and challenges of private charity. But it’s easy to slide from that kind of inquisitive, imaginative investigation of the past to an idealization of the past and a demonization of the present. So one aspect of rock’n’roll conservatism is that it’s focused on the future, not the past. It’s not about a return to some past era–real or imagined.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal specifically use that name, rather than talking about a “restoration” or some such, precisely because they emphasize that they are a new thing that is nonetheless tied to a pre-existing tradition. They are a response, from within the Franciscan tradition, to new circumstances; they’re open to new ideas; they have an attractive vigor that can’t be gotten from groups that view the 1950s as a lost Eden and the present day as a “Slouching Toward Gomorrah”-style wasteland. Their very name connotes hope, and engagement with the culture around them. And those are key elements of RNRC.