For weeks, Andrew Sullivan has been teasing us with hints of his about-to-be-published book, The Conservative Soul, with the added drama of the need to pulp the entire first print run because of misplaced pages. 

I was interested to run across an early review of the book today – in Books and Culture by the excellent Mark Gavreau Judge (author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep and numerous other writings).

One of Sullivan’s primary topics in the book is conscience, as well as his struggle with his Catholic faith. Judge handles the discussion very well, pointing out the ultimate, obvious and ultimately empty subjectivity at the core of Sullivan’s project  – the assertion that the true conservative is ultimately a relativist, subjectivist and skeptic when it comes to questions of truth.

Then what’s a liberal?

Just wondering.

Anyway – do take a look at the review. I think the most important point Judge makes about Sullivan, and one that has been made many times before in other contexts, is his failure to honestly and completely engage his ideological opponents – he parsing of their writings and views, eliminating important points that would harm his own argument as well as mischaracterizing what he does take on (Judge takes time to highlight Sullivan’s presentation of Pope Benedict’s writings on conscience):

While Sullivan praises "the marking of nuance, the weighing of things from different perspectives, the desire to understand something as it is, and not as we would like it to be," his thirst for knowledge falls short when it comes to the teachings of his religion. This champion of the supposedly hungry and expansive mind can’t be bothered to honestly engage with ideas with which he disagrees. He touts his Catholicism and pushes homosexuality and gay marriage but can’t be bothered to tackle John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the late pontiff’s massive and revolutionary work about the meaning of sex and the human body. His engagement with Benedict and other thinkers he disagrees with is superficial and dishonest. Apparently for the thinking, reading, praying, ever-expending conservative like Sullivan, there’s just no time to read things one disagrees with, or engage opposing argument honestly. Sullivan is like Jesus’ friend Mary—that is to say, like Mary in Sullivan’s version of the story. He sits at the feet of Jesus, not listening.

Pulled from the comments, hot off the presses, from Patrick Rothwell:

I attended a lunch presentation today at the CATO Institute by Andrew Sullivan touting his book (sorry, Andrew, I didn’t buy the book today ‘cos I’m saving pennies for a little while – maybe next month) with a response by David Brooks. Andrew Sullivan’s "conservativsm of doubt" was in fac the central theme.

I came away with the impression in my mind of the old dictum of heresy being the intellectual vengeance of a suppressed truth. That is to say that Sullivan has transformed traditional conservative "doubt" or skepticism of the ability of human society to perfect human nature, either by the radical suppression of vice or the enforcement of virtue, into a foundational governing philosophy. Traditional conservatism would look askance at any utopian movement, whether it be led by Cromwellian puritans, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Marxian Communists, Robspierres, Northern abolitionists, etc. Sullivan is surely right that much of the vanguard of the so-called religious right represents the kind of utopian vision (though he did not put it in those exact words) that the traditional conservative would (or should) oppose, at least in their most zealous manifestations. Doubt, therefore, is indeed an essential component of conservatism, a check upon the power of the State that takes into account human realities, strengths, weaknesses, frailities, and so on.

However, the one thing that these utopian movements have in the favor, whether from our friends from Regent University on the right or the Communists on the left, is that they have a working governing philosophy. What Sullivan seems to do is make doubt the foundational principle of governance. Radical doubt is an intellectual black hole – how can doubt serve as a governing principle? How would Sullivan’s conservatism of doubt affirm anything, even the goodness and necessity of gay marriage or the evils of torture – to name two of his crusades, if doubt is his governing principle?

A person who I attended the lecture with helpfully pointed out to me that Sullivan also ignores conservatism’s emphasis on the preservation of traditional institutions on the basis that those institutions which have stood the test of time have earned the presumption to be allowed to remain unchanged. Thus, as my interlocutor said, these institutions have the benefit of doubt, and are not the subject of radical doubt. That benefit of the doubt can be overcome, of course, but it cannot be overcome by utopian imperialism on the one hand, or the nihilism of radical doubt on the other. Alas, Sullivan has avoided the Scylla of the first, but not the Charybdis of the second!