In the absence of organized religion, the only vehicle for redemption is art – not just the fragmentary arts of painting or music or poetry, but the kind of art that creates a whole world in itself and in that world we see ourselves reflected and see our religious life perfected.
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
Kant’s position is extremely subtle – so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.
Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.
Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead.
A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable.
Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.
Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.
It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible”.