Why I became a conservative
Jeffrey C. Dege
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/burke.htm
Why I became a conservative
by Roger Scruton
I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative
at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the
term "conservative" as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told,
was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future,
authority against innovation, the "structures" against spontaneity and
life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no
choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The
choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve
society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole
my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing
what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.
In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and
smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back,
shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections
suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars
rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from
unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one
lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form
a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.
The van - known then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh
that covered its windows - came cautiously round the corner from the
Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened
policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them
fell. One rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the
blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an exultant
shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van, and the students
ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian
cobbles as they went.
That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades
with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti.
She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin
Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist
theater - the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the
day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored:
policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The
bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime
would be begging for mercy.
The Old Fascist was de Gaulle, whose Mémoires de guerre I had been reading
that day. The Mémoires begin with a striking sentence - "Toute ma vie,
je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France" - a sentence so alike
in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that equally striking
sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu: "Longtemps, je me
suis couché de bonne heure." How amazing it had been, to discover a
politician who begins his self-vindication by suggesting something -
and something so deeply hidden behind the bold mask of his words! I
had been equally struck by the description of the state funeral for
Valéry - de Gaulle's first public gesture on liberating Paris - since
it too suggested priorities unimaginable in an English politician. The
image of the cortège, as it took its way to the cathedral of Notre Dame,
the proud general first among the mourners, and here and there a German
sniper still looking down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression
on me. I irresistibly compared the two bird's-eye views of Paris, that
of the sniper, and my own on to the riots in the quartier latin. They
were related as yes and no, the affirmation and denial of a national
idea. According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by
institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture;
in times of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must
be protected and reaffirmed. The funeral for Valéry followed naturally
from this way of seeing things. And I associated the France of de Gaulle
with Valéry's Cimetière marin - that haunting invocation of the dead
which conveyed to me, much more profoundly than any politician's words
or gestures, the true meaning of a national idea.
Of course I was naïve - as naïve as my friend. But the ensuing argument
is one to which I have often returned in my thoughts. What, I asked,
do you propose to put in the place of this "bourgeoisie" whom you so
despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you
to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture
compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to
put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous:
but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger,
finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people
I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucault's Les mots et les choses, the bible
of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form
of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It
is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively
appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are
nothing but the "discourses" of power. The book is not a work of
philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not
truth, and it is careful to argue - by the old nominalist sleight of
hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies - that "truth"
requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and
is tied to the form of consciousness, the "episteme," imposed by the
class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit,
which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a
new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers,
and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where
there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below
my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
My friend is now a good bourgeoise like the rest of them. Armand Gatti is
forgotten; and the works of Antonin Artaud have a quaint and dépassé air.
The French intellectuals have turned their backs on '68, and the late
Louis Pauwels, the greatest of their post-war novelists, has, in Les
Orphelins, written the damning obituary of their adolescent rage. And
Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the result of sprees in the bath-houses
of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an intellectual
celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all over Europe
and America. His vision of European culture as the institutionalized form
of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have
neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. Only in France is he
widely regarded as a fraud.
By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at
Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could
discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was
Nunzia - Maria Annunziata - the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the
Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering
her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.
One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular
antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial
Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy
taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing
with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he
retained until he could retain it no longer - the Party, to his chagrin,
having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer
be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was
rewarded, at Mr. Blair's behest, with the second highest award that the
Queen can bestow - that of "Companion of Honour." This little story is
of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom
and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the
Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University,
which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he
had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret
Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain's first
woman Prime Minister. We should ponder some of the other recipients of
honorary degrees from British academic institutions - Robert Mugabe,
for example, or the late Mrs. Ceausescu - or count (on the fingers of one
hand) the number of conservatives who are elected to the British Academy.
Suffice it to say that I found myself, on arrival in Birkbeck College, at
the heart of the left establishment which governed British scholarship.
Birkbeck College had grown from the Mechanics Institution founded by
George Birkbeck in 1823 and was devoted to the education of people
in full-time employment. It was connected to the socialist idealists
of the Workers' Education Association, and had links of a tenacious
but undiscoverable kind to the Labour Party. My failure to conceal my
conservative beliefs was both noticed and disapproved of, and I began
to think that I should look for another career.
Because of Birkbeck's mission as a center of adult education, lectures
began at 6 P.M. and the days were nominally free. I used my mornings to
study for the Bar: my intention was to embark on a career which gave
no advantage to utopians and malcontents. In fact I never practiced
at the Bar and received from my studies only an intellectual benefit -
though a benefit for which I have always been profoundly grateful. Law
is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no
place in it. Moreover 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.
Inspired by my new studies I began to search for a conservative
philosophy. In America this search could be conducted in a university.
American departments of political science encourage their students to read
Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Leo Strauss,
Eric Voegelin, and others have grafted the metaphysical conservatism of
Central Europe on to American roots, forming effective and durable schools
of political thought. American intellectual life benefits from American
patriotism, which has made it possible to defend American customs and
institutions without fear of being laughed to scorn. It has benefited too
from the Cold War, which sharpened native wits against the Marxist enemy,
in a way that they were never sharpened in Europe: the conversion of
important parts of the social democratic Jewish intelligentsia of New York
to the cause of neo-conservatism is a case in point. In 1970s Britain,
conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao,
but no Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of
socialist monthly, weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that
confessed to being conservative.
The view has for a long time prevailed in England that conservatism is
simply no longer available - even if it ever has been really available to
an intelligent person - as a social and political creed. Maybe, if you
are an aristocrat or a child of wealthy and settled parents, you might
inherit conservative beliefs, in the way that you might inherit a speech
impediment or a Habsburg jaw. But you couldn't possibly acquire them -
certainly not by any process of rational enquiry or serious thought. And
yet there I was, in the early 1970s, fresh from the shock of 1968, and
from the countervailing shock of legal studies, with a fully articulate
set of conservative beliefs. Where could I look for the people who shared
them, for the thinkers who had spelled them out at proper length, for
the social, economic, and political theory that would give them force
and authority sufficient to argue them in the forum of academic opinion?
To my rescue came Burke. Although not widely read at the time in our
universities, he had not been dismissed as stupid, reactionary, or absurd.
He was simply irrelevant, of interest largely because he got everything
wrong about the French Revolution and therefore could be studied as
illustrating an episode in intellectual pathology. Students were still
permitted to read him, usually in conjunction with the immeasurably
less interesting Tom Paine, and from time to time you heard tell of a
"Burkean" philosophy, which was one strand within nineteenth-century
British conservatism.
Burke was of additional interest to me on account of the intellectual
path that he had trod. His first work, like mine, was in aesthetics. And
although I didn't find much of philosophical significance in his Essay on
the Sublime and the Beautiful, I could see that, in the right cultural
climate, it would convey a powerful sense of the meaning of aesthetic
judgment and of its indispensable place in our lives. I suppose that,
in so far as I had received any intimations of my future career as
an intellectual pariah, it was through my early reactions to modern
architecture, and to the desecration of my childhood landscape by the
faceless boxes of suburbia. I learned as a teenager that aesthetic
judgment matters, that it is not merely a subjective opinion, unargued
because unarguable, and of no significance to anyone besides oneself. I
saw - though I did not have the philosophy to justify this - that
aesthetic judgment lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep
social imperative, and that it matters to us in just the way that other
people matter to us, when we strive to live with them in a community. And,
so it seemed to me, the aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the
past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt
to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and
settlement. Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world
as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the
past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.
Like Burke, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative
politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in
each case, I was in search of a lost experience of home. And I suppose
that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has
been lost can also be recaptured - not necessarily as it was when it first
slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and
remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we
are condemned by our original transgression. That belief is the romantic
core of conservatism, as you find it - very differently expressed - in
Burke and Hegel, and also in T. S. Eliot, whose poetry was the greatest
influence on me during my teenage years.
When I first read Burke's account of the French Revolution I was inclined
to accept, since I knew no other, the liberal humanist view of the
Revolution as a triumph of freedom over oppression, a liberation of a
people from the yoke of absolute power. Although there were excesses -
and no honest historian had ever denied this - the official humanist
view was that they should be seen in retrospect as the birth-pangs of
a new order, which would offer a model of popular sovereignty to the
world. I therefore assumed that Burke's early doubts - expressed,
remember, when the Revolution was in its very first infancy, and
the King had not yet been executed nor the Terror begun - were simply
alarmist reactions to an ill-understood event. What interested me in the
Reflections was the positive political philosophy, distinguished from
all the leftist literature that was currently à la mode, by its absolute
concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary
and unexalted forms. Burke was not writing about socialism, but about
revolution. Nevertheless he persuaded me that the utopian promises of
socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human
mind - a geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the
vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings
live. He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized
according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history,
and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress.
Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope
to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality,
fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant
irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue
liberty, equality, and fraternity, not only because those things are
lamentably underdescribed and merely abstractly defined, but also because
collective reason doesn't work that way. People reason collectively
towards a common goal only in times of emergency - when there is a
threat to be vanquished, or a conquest to be achieved. Even then, they
need organization, hierarchy, and a structure of command if they are
to pursue their goal effectively. Nevertheless, a form of collective
rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war.
Moreover - and here is the corollary that came home to me with a shock of
recognition - any attempt to organize society according to this kind of
rationality would involve exactly the same conditions: the declaration of
war against some real or imagined enemy. Hence the strident and militant
language of the socialist literature - the hate-filled, purpose-filled,
bourgeois-baiting prose, one example of which had been offered to me in
1968, as the final vindication of the violence beneath my attic window,
but other examples of which, starting with the Communist Manifesto, were
the basic diet of political studies in my university. The literature of
left-wing political science is a literature of conflict, in which the main
variables are those identified by Lenin: "Kto? Kogo?" - "Who? Whom?" The
opening sentence of de Gaulle's memoirs is framed in the language of love,
about an object of love - and I had spontaneously resonated to this in the
years of the student "struggle." De Gaulle's allusion to Proust is to a
masterly evocation of maternal love, and to a dim premonition of its loss.
Three other arguments of Burke's made a comparable impression. The
first was the defense of authority and obedience. Far from being
the evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be,
authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he
argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as
the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority -
by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power
to compel it. And obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of
political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern
them, and without which societies crumble into "the dust and powder of
individuality." Those thoughts seemed as obvious to me as they were
shocking to my contemporaries. In effect Burke was upholding the old
view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view
of him, as citizen of a state. And what struck me vividly was that,
in defending this old view, Burke demonstrated that it was a far more
effective guarantee of the liberties of the individual than the new
idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only
abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined. Real freedom,
concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed,
and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The
abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing
more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. Those ideas
exhilarated me, since they made sense of what I had seen in 1968. But
when I expressed them, in a book published in 1979 as The Meaning of
Conservatism, I blighted what remained of my academic career.
The second argument of Burke's that impressed me was the subtle defense
of tradition, prejudice, and custom, against the enlightened plans of the
reformers. This defense engaged, once again, with my study of aesthetics.
Already as a schoolboy I had encountered the elaborate defense of
artistic and literary tradition given by Eliot and F. R. Leavis. I had
been struck by Eliot's essay entitled "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," in which tradition is represented as a constantly evolving,
yet continuous thing, which is remade with every addition to it, and
which adapts the past to the present and the present to the past. This
conception, which seemed to make sense of Eliot's kind of modernism
(a modernism that is the polar opposite of that which has prevailed in
architecture), also rescued the study of the past, and made my own love
of the classics in art, literature, and music into a valid part of my
psyche as a modern human being.
Burke's defense of tradition seemed to translate this very concept into
the world of politics, and to make respect for custom, establishment, and
settled communal ways, into a political virtue, rather than a sign, as my
contemporaries mostly believed, of complacency. And Burke's provocative
defense, in this connection, of "prejudice" - by which he meant the
set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and
which reflect the root experiences of social life - was a revelation
of something that until then I had entirely overlooked. Burke brought
home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and
unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify
them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract
rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational
and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less
well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very
reason that they are justified by ourselves. The real justification for a
prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a
rational conclusion of an argument. In other words it is a justification
that cannot be conducted from our own perspective, but only from outside,
as it were, as an anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals
of an alien tribe.
An example will illustrate the point: the prejudices surrounding sexual
relations. These vary from society to society; but until recently they
have had a common feature, which is that people distinguish seemly from
unseemly conduct, abhor explicit sexual display, and require modesty in
women and chivalry in men in the negotiations that precede sexual union.
There are very good anthropological reasons for this, in terms of the
long-term stability of sexual relations, and the commitment that is
necessary if children are to be inducted into society. But these are not
the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men and women. This
conduct is guided by deep and immovable prejudice, in which outrage,
shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds. The sexual liberator has
no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational, in the
sense of being founded on no reasoned justification available to the
person whose motives they are. And he may propose sexual liberation as
a rational alternative, a code of conduct that is rational from the
first-person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of practice
from a transparently reasonable aim, which is sexual pleasure.
This substitution of reason for prejudice has indeed occurred. And the
result is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not merely a breakdown
in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the reproductive process -
a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other,
but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which
were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left
exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of rationality. Hence
the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have replaced
common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of "date-rape" take the
place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive
are routinely penalized as "sexual harrassment." This is an example of
what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of reason, without
regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill. And
indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of sexual liberation,
and the joyless world that it has produced around us, that I came to see
the truth of Burke's otherwise somewhat paradoxical defense of prejudice.
The final argument that impressed me was Burke's response to the theory
of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he
argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either
dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of
social contract was to place the present members of society in a position
of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came
after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of
inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological
vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal
danger of modern politics. In Burke's eyes the self-righteous contempt for
ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting
of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership
among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the
"hereditary principle," according to which rights could be inherited as
well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized.
Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke's view, the only real safeguard
that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges
to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract,
in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an
inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else in Burke,
since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions
that I had had in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window and
thought of Valéry's Cimetière marin. In those deft, cool thoughts,
Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation,
all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in
the future that has dominated and perverted modern politics. In effect,
Burke was joining in the old Platonic cry, for a form of politics that
would also be a form of care - "care of the soul," as Plato put it, which
would also be a care for absent generations. The graffiti paradoxes
of the soixante-huitards were the very opposite of this: a kind of
adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions,
and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could
have no lasting sense save anarchy.
It was not until much later, after my first visit to communist Europe,
that I came to understand and sympathize with the negative energy in
Burke. I had grasped the positive thesis - the defense of prejudice,
tradition, and heredity, and of a politics of trusteeship in which the
past and the future had equal weight to the present - but I had not
grasped the deep negative thesis, the glimpse into Hell, contained
in his vision of the Revolution. As I said, I shared the liberal
humanist view of the French Revolution, and knew nothing of the facts
that decisively refuted that view and which vindicated the argument
of Burke's astonishingly prescient essay. My encounter with Communism
entirely rectified this.
Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism was its
ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole populations
to "live within the lie," as President Havel put it. George Orwell wrote
a prophetic and penetrating novel about this; but few Western readers
of that novel knew the extent to which its prophecies had come true
in Central Europe. To me it was the greatest revelation, when first
I travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1979, to come face to face with a
situation in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the
book of history, in which truth could not be uttered, and in which the
Party could decide from day to day not only what would happen tomorrow,
but also what had happened today, what had happened yesterday, and what
had happened before its leaders had been born. This, I realized, was the
situation that Burke was describing, to a largely incredulous readership,
in 1790. And two hundred years later the situation still existed, and
the incredulity along with it.
Until 1979 my knowledge of Communism had been entirely theoretical. I
did not like what I had read, of course, and was hostile in any case to
the socialist ideas of equality and state control, of which I had already
seen enough in France and Britain. But I knew nothing of what it is like
to live under Communism - nothing of the day-to-day humiliation of being
a non-person, to whom all avenues of self-expression are closed. As for
Czechoslovakia, as it then was, I knew only what I had gleaned from its
music - the music of Smetana, ~DVORAK, and ~jan in particular, to all
three of whom I owe the greatest of debts for the happiness they have
brought me. Of course, I had read Kafka and Ha~s\ek - but they belonged to
another world, the world of a dying empire, and it was only subsequently
that I was able to see that they too were prophets, and that they were
describing not the present but the future of their city.
I had been asked to give a talk to a private seminar in Prague. This
seminar was organized by Julius Tomin, a Prague philosopher, who had taken
advantage of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which supposedly obliged the
Czechoslovak government to uphold freedom of information and the basic
rights defined by the U.N. Charter. The Helsinki Accords were a farce,
used by the Communists to identify potential trouble-makers, while
presenting a face of civilized government to gullible intellectuals in
the West. Nevertheless, I was told that Dr. Tomin's seminar met on a
regular basis, that I would be welcome to attend it, and that they were
indeed expecting me.
I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted
streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied by some dark
official business, and in which Party slogans and symbols disfigured
every building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted.
Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air-raid
has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction.
Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized
me as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Dr. Tomin came out, and
an altercation ensued, during which I was thrown down the stairs. But
the argument continued and I was able to push my way past the guard
and enter the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the same
expectant silence. I realized that there really was going to be an
air-raid, and that the air-raid was me.
In that room was a battered remnant of Prague's intelligentsia - old
professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets; fresh-faced
students who had been denied admission to university for their parents'
political "crimes"; priests and religious in plain clothes; novelists
and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst. And in
all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope; and
the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help
them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession: that of
the stoker. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment blocks;
one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Some stoked where
there were no boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be,
for me, a fitting symbol of the communist economy.
This was my first encounter with "dissidents": the people who, to my
astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders of
post-war Czechoslovakia. And I felt towards these people an immediate
affinity. Nothing was of such importance for them as the survival of
their national culture. Deprived of material and professional advancement,
their days were filled with a forced meditation on their country and its
past, and on the great Question of Czech History which has preoccupied
the Czechs since Palack~y\'s day. They were forbidden to publish; the
authorities had concealed their existence from the world and had resolved
to remove their traces from the book of history. Hence the dissidents were
acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise
in what Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten
things. Something in me responded to this poignant ambition, and I was at
once eager to join with them and make their situation known to the world.
Briefly, I spent the next ten years in daily meditation on Communism,
on the myths of equality and fraternity that underlay its oppressive
routines, just as they had underlain the routines of the French
Revolution. And I came to see that Burke's account of the Revolution was
not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was like Milton's account
of Paradise Lost - an exploration of a region of the human psyche: a
region that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by
way of a miracle, to a world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the
memories of Hell. To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision
of Satan and his work - the very same vision that had shaken Burke to
the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect
of Burke's philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of
the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient
vindication of our life on earth.
Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo only,
but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always
be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to
act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow
the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties
into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from
the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience has
taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long,
that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values,
and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite
them only in the short-term.
As to the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern
politics, the philosophy that Burke made plain to the world, this is
perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do not despair of it;
but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires
not a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.
--
Government does not solve problems - it subsidizes them.
- Ronald Reagan
Plutarch
anything but a conservative, no matter what
he says. Further, just offhand, I'd say he was
never a libertarian either, except as it provided
some slight cover for his advocacy of the most
destructive, dangerous and greedy aspects of
the far right.
Now that he has entirely removed the libertarian
cover from his function as mouthpiece for the far
right, he's become so much more ordinary, hardly
distinguishable at all from the dozen other jerks
parroting the same nonsense in mn.politics.
Jeffrey C. Dege
>Allow me to opine that Mr. Dege never was
>anything but a conservative, no matter what
>he says.
First, that the author of the piece has become a "conservative", does
not mean that I have become a conservative.
Second, the author is a brit, and what "conservative" means in the UK
is far from what it means over here.
Third, Plutarch needs to get a life.
--
If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may
be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority, which may at some
future time urge the minorities to desperation and oblige them to have
recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will
have been brought about by despotism.
- Alexis De Toqueville
Az Akial
"Jeffrey C. Dege" <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote in message
news:slrnb4m1v4...@jdege.visi.com...
> On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 20:43:17 -0600, Plutarch <@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >Allow me to opine that Mr. Dege never was
> >anything but a conservative, no matter what
> >he says.
>
> First, that the author of the piece has become a "conservative", does
> not mean that I have become a conservative.
>
> Second, the author is a brit, and what "conservative" means in the UK
> is far from what it means over here.
>
> Third, Plutarch needs to get a life.
>
First, pluto needs to grow up.
Then he will be mature enough to "get a life"...
Plutarch
> "Jeffrey C. Dege" <jd...@jdege.visi.com> wrote in message
> news:slrnb4m1v4...@jdege.visi.com...
> > On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 20:43:17 -0600, Plutarch <@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > >Allow me to opine that Mr. Dege never was
> > >anything but a conservative, no matter what
> > >he says.
>
> > First, that the author of the piece has become a "conservative", does
> > not mean that I have become a conservative.
Of course not. You were never anything but.
> > Second, the author is a brit, and what "conservative" means in the UK
> > is far from what it means over here.
Heh. I love it when you deny your own spam. In any
event, regardless of what conservative means or
doesn't mean in Britain, I was not replying to your
repost. I made an unequivocal statement about you
which, in your usual warbling fashion, you have managed
to avoid addressing at all. Surprise, surprise. The title
conservative once represented honorable positions; the
definition you have brought also can be pronounced "pig."
> > Third, Plutarch needs to get a life.
Heh. A weak response from anyone named
Dege. Others, who have an even remote interest
in the need for lives, may run a Google Groups
search on Dege to see where he lives.
> First, pluto needs to grow up.
> Then he will be mature enough to "get a life"...
An even weaker response from Ass Akial, whose
only function is nether mouthpiece for his hero,
Jeffrey. Heh. What a devine couple you make
on the dance floor. Show us more.