Mint-and-Corn Country, Indiana — I’m not entirely sure why, but while I was driving my grandfather to an appointment today, I started to think of an essay that I first encountered long ago, and to which I occasionally return, written by Peter Kreeft (I’m a fan of Kreeft, so I’ll forgive his being at BC and his enjoying — at least in the past; maybe he has mended his ways since then — Rush Limbaugh’s show.), about finding common ground with an avowed leftist and agnotheistic pagan regarding something of unquestionable import: architecture and place.

We were driving through a part of Cambridge that had been a slum a few decades ago. Then it had been torn down and replaced with big, clean, new, red- brick office buildings and apartments, with plenty of space, lighting, greenery, and walkways: a planned city within a city. I had always classified the architecture as “colonial Nazi”: intimidating, inhuman, Bauhaus lines, but in red-brick softness. Everything was either square or scalene and off-center. There were no arches, whether pointed or rounded; no palladium windows, no fancy doors-in fact the only thing fancier than it needed to be was a modernistic outdoor sculpture. What shocked me was Newton’s comment: “That’s my new apartment, there. Isn’t it great?”

I looked at the abomination of desolation he pointed to, and gasped, “You’re kidding.” “It’s absolutely perfect,” he argued. “It’s got everything: location, roominess, parking, workout room, low condo fees. And it’s a real community. Look.” He directed my sight to the variety of people walking through the commodious walkways: businessmen, teenagers, a family with a baby carriage. “What don’t you like about it? It’s designed for people.”

“People, that’s good,” I said. “But designed, that’s bad. It’s artificial. It’s not a real neighborhood. It’s the Liberal concept of a neighborhood. I can see how Dwight would like this place, but not you.”

“Well,” Newton said, irritably, “It’s not something we should be arguing about. It’s not important. Let’s get back to politics, if we want an argument.”

Dwight started to do just that, when Dick interrupted, “Not important? Of course it’s important! It’s your world. It’s your image of the real that you see every day. How can you say it’s not important what you see every day?”

“You artsy-fartsy types,” Newton snorted, “you think beauty is the most important thing in the world and ugliness is the worst, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I do think that,” Dick replied. “Why don’t you?”

“I think I have higher ideals than just sensory beauty. Aristotle said . . .”

“No, don’t give me Aristotle. Give me Newton. What’s more important to you than beauty?”

I was hoping he’d say “God,” or “being a saint,” or “going to Heaven,” but instead he mumbled something so vague I don’t remember what it was- something about the good society, or the good life. I found myself suddenly spiritually far from Newton and close to Dick. Then we turned into an older section of Cambridge, where the houses were crowded, tiny, old, and poor. Newton sensed that Dick and I were together now, against him and Dwight. Gesturing at the rundown and ramshackle houses we were now passing, he challenged us, “I suppose you two would rather live in one of those?” I surprised myself with the vehemence of my answer. “Damn right we would! This is at least a real neighborhood, with real people.” “Small is beautiful,” Dick explained. “It’s not plastic,” I added. But nothing we said could move the other two to more than patronizing little smiles.

In the ensuing ten minutes Dick and I discovered that we both loved bluegrass, madrigals, the Bea-tles, Peter, Paul, and Mary, fires, storms, caves, waves, mountains, Victorian houses, Martha’s Vineyard, England, Provincetown, San Francisco, and Seattle. (Why, by the way, do those with the worst moral tastes so often have the best aesthetic tastes? Why is Sodom such a pretty city? Why do the nicest people live in Iowa?)

It became obvious to all four of us that there was some sort of a serious spiritual division between “us” and “them”: with the radical and the traditionalist on the one side, and the liberal and the conservative on the other. It was more than a set of aesthetic preferences. It soon became clear that it unexpectedly flowed over into social and political issues. Dick and I discovered that we shared a preference for “small is beautiful” populism, a suspicion of bigness whether in government or business, a lack of interest in economics, a dislike of suburbs, a love of nature, and a concern for conserving the environment. (I’ve never understood why “conservatives” aren’t in the front rank of conservationism.) We didn’t get into moral and religious issues, but I suspect that even there we would have found a psychological kinship beneath our philosophical differences.

I’d imagine that, with “a suspicion of bigness” and “a lack of interest in economics”, not to mention “a concern for conserving the environment”, Kreeft fails as a conservative. To hell with that word, then: Sign me up for his traditionalist camp; I can make friends with radicals. (Hell, the word comes from the Latin radix, “root”, and I’m all about roots, something that most conservatives rarely seem to care about conserving.) But this, I think, is a strikingly beautiful essay, and echoes a lot of what Professor Deneen argues in his two-part essay on “liberalism” and “conservatism” and the Alternative Tradition.

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