Action or Reaction? Michael Warren Davis’ “The Reactionary Mind”

In his new book, Michael Warren Davis rescues the reactionaries. With a jaunty air and the panache of all the ridiculous warriors from Cyrano de Bergerac to Don Quixote, he stands up for all that is alternative, counter-cultural, strange, spare, and delightfully luddite.

I thought I was a fogey, but Michael Warren Davis, in his new book The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn’t Enough informs me that I am, in fact, a reactionary. I didn’t take to the term too happily because we all know that a reactionary is another name for a grump, a curmudgeon, an out-of-date, dyed-in-the-wool fuddy-duddy.

If the mainstream media and elite educators are to be believed, I am all of that and more: I am also privileged, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and just about everything-phobic. I’m also a snob, a religious hypocrite, a white supremacist, and a just plain nasty specimen of humanity.

But Mr. Davis rescues the reactionaries. With a jaunty air and the panache of all the ridiculous warriors from Cyrano de Bergerac to Don Quixote, he stands up for all that is alternative, counter-cultural, strange, spare, and delightfully luddite.

He pokes at progressives and punctures the pomposity of our contemporary assumptions and the pride of our techno-affluent power. He is for the virtues of an earlier time and the sanity of a simpler life. His book is a reminder that in a world of fugitives, the one who returns home will seem to be running away.

In his first ten chapters, he outlines the main traits of the reactionary: He is a man who marches to a different drum; he looks at facts, not propaganda, and assesses truth according to a higher standard than yesterday’s trends and tomorrow’s fashions. So the reactionary sympathizes with Savonarola, enthuses about the inquisition, doubts the assumptions of science, and questions the trickery of technology.

In other words, like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple of Dagon, Michael Warren Davis pushes against the pillars of our modern, techno-political power structures. He resents our unthinking reliance on technology and refuses to “follow the science.” Instead, in the second part of his book he lays out an alternative path. He calls for a return to simplicity and prefaces his book with a winning quotation from Robert Frost, “Well, if I have to choose one or the other I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer.”

In Part Two, he sketches the outlines of a simpler life, beginning with ideas on a more humane economy that is centered on the home and family rather than the office and the marketplace. He endorses a retreat from the non-stop lies of the mass media and entertainment industries, encourages us to switch off the screens, step back from our love affair with technology, and pick up the “patient arts”: reading, writing poetry, learning an instrument, smoking a pipe, drinking tea, gardening. In “Musings of a Human Liberationist,” he takes healthy potshots at the idiocy of contemporary conservatism with its marriage to unrestrained consumerism and internationalism.

Finally, Mr. Davis makes an appeal for “The Strenuous Life.” “Men lost their health when they lost their meaningful work on the land, which also cost them their freedom and independence. Today they settle for little things like “fitness” and (God help us) “wellness.” Attacking the gym culture for producing fake masculinity—all muscles and fragile machismo—Mr. Davis calls for a return to the rugged individual like Teddy Roosevelt who loved the great outdoors and the fresh air that it offered. The reactionary should therefore combine the patient arts with boxing, hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping.

Mr. Davis’ book is s delightful rant against the idiotic modern world in which we find ourselves. It is observant, well-researched, suitably absurd, irreverent, and iconoclastically silly. Like that other great reactionary John Senior, Mr. Davis’ manifesto is in many ways unrealistic, romantic tosh. Not many of us can do a Thoreau and go live in the woods. We’re tied to our mortgages, our jobs, and yes, to our gym memberships, our Netflix, and our social media.

However, rants like Mr. Davis’ can inspire us to take small steps. All of us can read more and watch the screen less. All of us can get outside more, challenge the system, doubt the headlines, distrust the politicians, and try to accept that we will have enough just as soon as we realize that we have enough.

Furthermore, idealistic books like Mr. Davis’ often inspire movements that do change the world. John Senior, for example, wanted a boys boarding school where the lads would rise at five to milk the cows before going into chapel to sing lauds in Latin and then troop off to the dining hall for a hearty breakfast. He never founded such a school, but some of his students went to France and became Benedictine monks, then returned to Oklahoma years later and founded Clear Creek Monastery, which is now chock-full of young men who live pretty much the way John Senior dreamt. (The monastery is so successful that they’re planning to plant a priory in New Mexico.)

So who knows, Mr. Davis’ muscular conservatism may inspire an army of young men to get married, have lots of kids, go to church, choose country living, and raise hearty, red-cheeked children who know how not only to survive in the wasteland of modernity, but to thrive and build a better future.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.