The Politics of Sex and Other Essays: On Conservatism, Culture, and Imagination.(Review)

 
Robert Grant The Politics of Sex 
and Other Essays: On Conservatism, 
Culture, and Imagination. 
Palgrave, 240 pages, $55 

Cultural conservatives are always at a rhetorical disadvantage to utopians and ideologues: they do not have a theory of everything. This means that they are unable to appeal to the paranoid mode of explanation that rarely lies far beneath the surface of political discourse (it is a singular, though little remarked, fact of our existence that the failing human brain often, if not always, turns to paranoia). The conservative appeals to reality, the utopian to fantasy: and to the disgruntled, that is to say the majority of the human race, fantasy is more real than reality.

The lack of a theory of everything does not mean that conservatives are entirely without beliefs, however, but their beliefs give a tenor to their thoughts rather than determine what they should be on any given subject. Conservatives tend to acknowledge that the world did not begin and will not end with them, and that those who came before them were neither less intelligent nor worse intentioned than they; that man is a fallen creature, susceptible to improvement sometimes, but open always to the temptation of evil; that politics does not encompass the whole of human life; that not all desiderata are compatible (for example, those of safety and risk-taking) and therefore there can be no final resolution of all human conflict; that to criticize existing institutions from first principles or from the standpoint of an ideal normal is ultimately to leave no institutions intact; and that order, tradition, and continuity are as important as change.

These ideas, one might have thought, are obvious to anyone of mature reflection and minimal experience of life, but they are not. On the contrary, the conservative's lack of settled doctrine by which to judge all questions is generally taken by intellectuals as a sign of conservatisms intellectual nullity. Conservatives lack the holy or magical bo tree under which to achieve final enlightenment.

Robert Grant is a member of that endangered species, rarer now than the spotted owl, and facing the inexorable fate of the dodo, the conservative university teacher of English, a literature don who does not examine all he reads through the distorting lens of gender, racial, or class resentment. As a conservative, resentment is not his cup of tea. This collection of his essays, which shows him to be a man of wide learning and sympathy, ranges from political philosophy to art criticism and commentary upon aspects of popular culture. He never writes less than clearly, he often crystallizes complex thoughts in happy formulations, and he is sometimes very funny. For example, remarking upon the title of a fashionable designer's coffee-table book, Living with Design, he writes "[it] suggests that interior decoration is a kind of crippling disease." Which, of course, it is.

There are essays, inter alia, on the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott and Edmund Burke, on "conceptual" productions in opera and the theater, on the meaning of death, on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the House Beautiful, ...