I believed that ‘freedom’ is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that ‘freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere’.
The French Revolution sought to replace one religion with another: hence its fanaticism and exterminatory zeal. But the new religion of the nation was demonic, fraught with contradiction and self-hatred, with no power to survive. It quickly gave way to the Napoleonic project of empire, through which violence was externalized and a rule of law re-established at home.
Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption – of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.
The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.
When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.
Every form of social and political belief that lies before us today is related to the Romantic movement, for that is the archetype of our ongoing attempt to live by our own devices. This is more true of socialism than of conservatism, in fact – socialism being a kind of diseased nostalgia for the future, which is yet more damaging than nostalgia for the past.
People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.
Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.
The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says.
I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.
And so I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative.
It seems to me, therefore, that you should prepare your children to be happy in the way that you are happy. Treat them exactly as you would if your own ideals were generally shared. After all, your ideals, like your children, define you: between them, they are all that you have.
The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have.
What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.
Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.
At the very moment when universities are advocating diversity as a fundamental academic value, the true diversity for which a university should make a stand, namely diversity of opinion, has been steadily eroded and in many places destroyed entirely.
If you ask yourself, why was it that communism finally collapsed, there wasn’t any external force causing it to do so, it collapsed largely because the Poles woke up to their sense of national identity.
Once we start to celebrate ugliness, we become ugly to.
We should distinguish national loyalty from nationalism. National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.
Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.
The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.