Many so-called conservatives know a certain blue bird well. As Edmund Healey noted in January in these pages, “despite what you might hear about Big Tech censorship, the conservative world is thriving on social media—whether it is homeschool mom Facebook debates or Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and his 1.7 million followers.” From Twitter to Parler, conservatives use – and create – online platforms as primary modes of expression.
Last autumn, for example, all kinds of outsiders – undoubtedly paid for their crusading efforts, whether in followers or dollars – joined a handful of Grove City parents and alumni online. Knotted together by Twitter, they used the mediums of social media and various Internet petitions to call out supposed failures in the conservatism and Christianity of Grove City College.
At the time, some current Grovers, like myself, wondered: how well can conservatism and Christianity be communicated through tweets and subtweets, petitions and counterpetitions? Can significant communal conversations take place through the sham community of social media – of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village?”
In the 1960s, media theorist McLuhan famously quipped: “the medium is the message.” Witnessing the steady technologization of politics and public life, McLuhan postulated that new mediums of communication would alter “the scale and form of human association and action.”
Twenty years later, in the opening pages of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman echoed McLuhan’s critique of the media industry. Our main method of conducting conversation, he wrote, “will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.”
Decades before the Internet Age, McLuhan, Postman, and others suggested that certain media might shallow and shrink our perceptions of our neighbors, our lives, and our selves. “A medium is not something neutral – it does something to people. It takes hold of them,” McLuhan wrote.
Modern media is not a neutral mechanism but a vessel already bent towards rapidity, not reflection – towards contention, not interaction. It is a vessel that, as such, requires delicate use – a vessel we must not weigh down beyond the limits of its frame.
We know from everyday experience that other vessels of communication contain frames far sturdier than mass and social media. Statements of affection – like “I love you” – fit the frame of in-person interaction and often seem trite through iMessage. Dramatic symphonies fit the frame of attentive concert-hall consumption and often seem merely “relaxing” and “pretty” when played as background music for department stores. Intricately woven stories and arguments fit the frame of full, written texts and often seem flimsy in SparkNotes summaries or YouTube animations.
We know that modern media may shallow the multidimensional, hence our unshakeable desire to speak about intimate matters in person. Hence our habitual preference for live music over recorded tracks. Hence our teachers’ continual request that we simply read the books assigned, instead of trading the difficult for the easy and the depths for the shallows. But modern media uniquely positions us to make such trades.
Yet “conservatives” – who, from their very etymology, must take care to conserve the good – readily load modern media with the burdens of conservative “activism” and expect the shambly vessel to carry the weight.
Between the bricks and trees of Grove City College, “conservative” reverberates. Repeatedly ranked as one of America’s most conservative colleges and historically composed of Republican voters, our school hosted former Vice President Mike Pence as a commencement speaker and houses a uniquely collaborative conservative think-tank. But does the common Grover – crossing the Quad with Airbuds in, face turned towards a screen where Snapchats await – understand or exhibit a conservative disposition? And can the rather-uncommon “activist” Grover – whether petitioning, protesting, or tweeting – comprehend or exhibit a conservative disposition via the blue bird?
Conservatism, after all, “is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition,” as philosopher Michael Oakeshott perceived. Per Russell Kirk, “the forgotten father” of American conservatism, this disposition “is certainly not an ideology” to be parroted in posts.
The late twentieth-century visions of Oakeshott and Kirk may remain for college students in 2022: conservatism, still, is not a party affiliation, a set of policies, or a collection of bullet-point beliefs to be imparted through programming. Conservatism is fundamentally a character, a habit of mind, a way of being and living.
T.S. Eliot knew – and Kirk reiterated – that this disposition concerned preservation of the “Permanent things.” For Kirk and Eliot, these things included family ties, tight communities, Western tradition and the intricate ideas of virtue it rested upon, and, fundamentally, faith in the Logos as the ordering principle of all reality. The fools of Eliot’s “East Coker,” who fear “belonging to another, or to others, or to God,” fear such permanence.
A traditional understanding of conservatism – which embraces Eliot’s fearful belonging – naturally begets convivial conversation. Cultivating such conversations represents a rare consistency. Meanwhile, sidestepping true conversation through distinctly modern mediums – while yet claiming the name of a Christian conservative – represents an unfortunately ubiquitous contradiction in terms.
Preaching Christian conservatism with Twitter as a primary pulpit or attempting conservative conversation through posts and petitions intrinsically contradicts the conservative disposition.
Cogitare Magazine, however, began from convivial conversations between GCC students discontented with the often-reductive mediums and manners of our generation. Cogitare’s founders desired to spark conversation about Permanent things and maintained that written reflections – despite a partially-online format – could present an alternative medium for such discussions and depth.
We maintain that this medium can, to use Postman’s schema, deepen the ideas conveniently expressed and therein enrich “the important content of a culture.” We maintain with Kirk: “it remains possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront the age’s disorders boldly.”
In its second year, the contributors, staff writers, editors – and even readers – of Cogitare can and will continue to pursue Permanent things and He who is supremely Permanent – Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.
Image via The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Constable, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds” (1825).
Thank you for this well-written article, Sarah!
Well thought-out and insightful.
You are an excellent writer and I hope you will continue to write!
May the Supremely Permanent One guide you as you pursue Him first,
and use you profoundly in His kingdom!