When I learned that Turning Point USA had ejected an electronic sex worker from one of its events, I expected to hear that she had then and there so energetically plyed her trade as to redefine “TPUSA Student Action Summit.” The story was, in fact, rather dull and occasioned instead a multitude of social media pronouncements about the meaning of conservatism. Under digital tribalism every irritation, as a matter of course, issues in conceptual warfare, but this manner of argument is the clue to an affinity between the porn star and the Christian student group. Charlie Kirk and Brandi Love might have more in common than their appeal to young people. To understand why, let’s return to one of the perennial disagreements of the conservative tradition.

Some conservatives demand dogma, while others distrust it. Because both claim to represent true religion, there is odium theologicum to spare. Here is Chesterton accusing Burke, “father of conservatism,” of atheism:

“Burke [stood] for the atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity…‘I know nothing of the rights of men,’ he said, ‘but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.’ There you have the essential atheist.”

Richard Weaver’s Ethics of Rhetoric would repeat this charge in similar terms: the “argument from circumstance” so frequently employed by Burke is, Weaver claims, unprincipled and therefore “fatal to conservatism”:

“The argument from circumstance is, as the name suggests, the nearest of all arguments to purest expediency…and it seems to be preferred by those who are easily impressed by existing tangibles…By thus making present circumstance the overbearing consideration, it keeps from sight even the nexus of cause and effect. It is the least philosophical of all the sources of argument, since theoretically it stops at the level of perception of fact.” 

“One can scarcely do better than quote the judgment of Sir James Prior in his summation of Burke’s career: ‘His aim therefore in our domestic policy, was to preserve all our institutions in the main as they stood for the simple reason that under them the nation had become great, and prosperous, and happy.’ This is but a generalized translation of the position ‘If it exists, there is something to be said in its favor,’ which we have determined as the aspect of the great orator’s case.”

For both Chesterton and Weaver, the religious attitude and method favor the abstract and dogmatic, and are unimpressed by the contingencies of embodiment—precisely the view identified as irreligion and heresy by Allen Tate in “Some Remarks on the Southern Religion”:

“[A]bstraction is the death of religion no less than the death of anything else. Religion, when it directs its attention to the horse cropping the blue-grass on the lawn, is concerned with the whole horse, and not with (1) that part of him which he has in common with other horses, or that more general part which he shares with other quadrupeds or with the more general vertebrates; and not with (2) that power of the horse which he shares with horsepower in general, of pushing or pulling another object. Religion pretends to place before us the horse as he is…[T]he modern mind sees only half the horse—that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horsepowered machine. The religious mind, on the other hand…wants the whole horse, and it will be satisfied with nothing less.” 

Half horse or whole horse? Who is on the Lord’s side?

The greatest of the theological virtues is charity, on which, Christ says, the whole of the Old Testament is predicated: 

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Christ’s statement will seem incompatible with the Old Testament’s panoply of thou-shalt-nots only to the unreflective: because dependent on context, it is easier to say what love is not than what it is. Love must be responsive to the needs and desires of its object: pignoli make a lovely gift, so long as the recipient doesn’t have a nut allergy. “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” Love is, in Weaver’s terms, “easily impressed” by the “existing tangibles” of the beloved, and holds that if the beloved exists, “there is something to be said in [her] favor” and in favor of her preferences. Love is a “how” rather than a “what”—love is not made merely by formula or by principle. 

The celebrated and abused thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians acknowledges the distinction between abstract knowledge and love: 

“Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.”

Christianity then “wants the whole horse,” but there’s no need to choose: half the horse is part of the whole after all. Burke and Tate denied only the preeminence of abstraction; they recognized that both ways of looking at the world—rationality and perception, principle and love—are necessary. Rationality must, however, be subordinated to perception, writes Schopenhauer:

“Reason is feminine in nature; it can give only after it has received. Of itself alone, it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation…No science can be capable of demonstration throughout any more than a building can stand in the air. All its proofs must refer to something perceived, and hence something no longer capable of proof, for the whole world of reflection rests on, and is rooted in, the world of perception. All ultimate, i.e. original, evidence is one of intuitive perception.”

This insight—which you may find variously stated by Goethe, Pascal, Cardinal Newman, Dostoevsky, Ernest Becker, and Stark Young, among others—has, according to Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, been fortified by neuroscience. McGilchrist explains that the hemispheres of the brain specialize in different faculties. The left hemisphere, the “emissary,” handles abstraction, literal expression, linear rationality, analysis, and tool use; in keeping with its abilities, it prefers the non-living, and is motivated by power and control. The right hemisphere, the “master,” specializes in perception, context, intuition, metaphorical language use, and non-verbal and emotional expression and interpretation; in keeping with its abilities, it is more at home in the body and with the living, and is motivated to understand. McGilchrist’s description of the cooperation of the hemispheres recalls Schopenhauer:

“The left hemisphere cannot deliver anything new direct from ‘outside,’ but it can unfold, or ‘unpack,’ what is given. Its very strength…lies in the fact that it can render explicit what the right hemisphere has to leave implicit, leave folded in. Yet that is also its weakness…The value of the left hemisphere is precisely in making explicit, but this is a staging post, an intermediate level of the ‘processing’ of experience, never the starting point or the end point, never the deepest, or the final, level.”

The master, with a view to context, to the whole, recognizes and appreciates the contribution of his emissary, but the emissary, with his partial view, denies his own limitation and habitually denigrates the role of his superior. The story is too long to summarize here, but McGilchrist argues convincingly that in our civilization, the emissary has at last deposed the master, and now wages war on the intuitive, the embodied, and the ambiguous. Fundamentalists and narcissists—whom Lasch considered representatives of the same cultural development—may be viewed as energetic soldiers in the usurper’s service.

At the moment, the emissary’s chief campaign against the body is fought by means of the mask, the jab, and the lockdown. The body must be hedged in and controlled. Natural and herd immunity, beyond the manipulation of the emissary’s instrumental reason, cannot be trusted. The emotional and social costs of lockdowns are an irrelevance, and any caviling on this point indicates allegiance to the deposed king. The face is a traitorous organ of emotion—let loyal soldiers mask up! Death will be denied at the cost of living. 

A scuffle between allies in this war occurred at the TPUSA event. The fundamentalists so loathe the body that they cannot permit a pornographer to walk among them, while the latter, by making sex explicit and a commodity, cripples the self-renewing of bodily desire. There is more than one way to serve the emissary. McGilchrist writes:

“Although it might seem that we overvalue the body and physical existence in general, this is not what I deduce from our preoccupation with exercise, health and diet, with ‘lifestyles’…Nor does it follow from the fact that the body was never so much on display, here or in cyberspace. The body has become a thing, a thing we possess, a mechanism, even if a mechanism for fun…The current tendency for the flesh to remain opaque, in the explicitness of pornography for example, bids to rob sex of much of its power…Like most answers to boredom, pornography is itself characterized by the boredom it aims to dispel.”

The TPUSA tussle among the emissary’s servants does not justify making an ideology of conservatism, which, perhaps alone among surviving political traditions, maintains some resources against instrumental reason.