THE RIGHT IS THE LEFT:

Wolters's distinctive metaphysical vision has significant political implications. When it comes to a political worldview, people can be roughly divided into three camps: those who believe the world they have inherited is irredeemably flawed and must be replaced with a new one based on abstract ideals; those who consecrate the status quo and reject any movement for change; and those who see the world as flawed but with the potential for redemption and improvement, who support prudent change but not the full-scale destruction of what they have received. The first camp belongs to the various strains of ideologue, most notably progressive liberals and Marxists, but also ideologues on the Right. The second camp belongs to uncritical traditionalists. The third camp belongs to conservatism. Wolters's arguments in Creation Regained lend much credence to the third and deal powerful blows against the first two.

Like Eric Voegelin, Wolters equates the ideological camp with the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. "There seems to be an ingrained Gnostic streak in human thinking," he writes, "a streak that causes people to blame some aspect of God's handiwork for the ills and woes of the world we live in." By the same logic, those who oppose social and cultural change outright are Gnostics, too. While ideologues reject the goodness of creation as given, rigid traditionalists reject the goodness of creation as developed by human beings. Only conservatism threads the needle between these inverse heresies and is compatible with Christianity's "uncompromising rejection of all attempts to confuse structure and direction."

Wolters's framework also positions conservatism as the virtuous mean between the extremes of political optimism and political pessimism. Wolters states that outside of what he calls the "reformational worldview," one is doomed only to see either "the debilitating effects of sin" or positive development of God's creation in the work of society and culture. Contemporary American politics bears that out. Some on the Right blithely overlook the sins of America's past, and some on the Left ignore the limits of human progress, because they see only structure in history. Meanwhile, anti-modern reactionaries and the Democratic Party's critical theory adherents cannot look past the directional flaws of the present.

Because none of these groups sees America for what it truly is, none is capable of doing it much good. The optimists are in love with a fiction and therefore cannot engage effectively with reality, and the pessimists are not interested in reforming America so much as they are in replacing it, whether with an imitation of medieval Europe or a neo-Marxist utopia. A Woltersian conservatism, on the other hand, would allow us to approach our country with neither optimism nor pessimism but with an eye toward healing and cultivation. 

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