546
PARTISAN REVIEW
that's the profit side-now, if you like, let's see what it costs": for
even in the making up of the accounts, the two sides have a habit
of fusing. In consequence those who defend the middle-class ideal
tend to take the bit between their teeth at the earliest possible mo–
ment and defy all criticism that might come their way with a bravado
that may excite admiration but is scarcely calculated to win support.
For this reason and others, the word "middle-class," when it appears
as part of a specifically political label, serves as the English transla–
tion of
«poujadiste"
and is fast on its way to becoming one of the
unmentionable words in the contemporary political vocabulary.
Here then we see in England today the bankruptcy of the Argu–
ment from Knowledge. (But what, it will be asked at this stage, of
Mr. Eliot and his "Christian society"? The question however rightly
goes into parentheses. For though Mr. Eliot stands in the highest
esteem as a poet, though as a playwright he enjoys a popularity usu–
ally reserved for those who can write good parts for the matinee
idols of the day, his political and social writings do not receive any
serious attention-except perhaps from those oversolemn admirers
who from time to time feel compelled to defend him from loose
charges of being a 'crypto-fascist.')
We are then by elimination left with the Argument from Ignor–
ance as the vehicle of whatever is both new and thoughtful in modem
conservatism, and it certainly does seem to be the case that in so
far as there is a movement critical in an informed way of the doc–
trines of the Left, it is bound up with skepticism. And in saying this
I have the support of Mr. T. E. Utley, a conservative intellectual
himself who is also a discriminating and subtle purveyor of conserva–
tive thought. Writing about a large and confused body of opinion
which he collectively calls "reaction," he says:
The demand for empiricism, though it has Conservative antecedents,
has also a certain kind of Liberal ancestry. But whatever its pedigree–
and however much encumbered by its own cliches-it is this appeal to
empiricism that is the only valuable-and genuinely Conservative–
element in the emotional revulsion which I have described ("Reaction",
The Twentieth Century,
January 1957).
(And by "empiricism", Mr. Utley following standard conservative
practice means of course "skepticism".)
