One thing that was painfully missing was the kind of ‘common good conservatism’ that takes seriously the public nature of the moral law, which may have helped to bring to the conversation about race some lasting solutions.
Pope Benedict’s expansive mind formed me in the humane habits of awareness that harmonise the intellect and the affectivity of the heart with the culture and civilisation that is our proper inheritance.
The modern mind, which reduces everything to a means—a mere apparatus of use—subordinates even God to such a perverse conception of reality.
A free country is not one in which one can do whatever one wills. That is anarchy and chaos. A free country is one in which the liberties of its members are sufficiently protected that they can do what is good.
I have repeatedly defended the monarchy against fellow conservatives who feel that it is rapidly becoming another celebrity clique, jumping on the popular ‘woke’ bandwagons. Now, the royals have once again appeared to prove their most cynical detractors right.
We have become, it appears, a people who simply accept arbitrary power as a satisfactory substitute for due process and the rule of law. If that is the case, then the looming tyranny under which we shall soon be toiling is one we entirely deserve.
Whilst I’m reluctant to trivialise the many mental health illnesses and anxieties that modern people claim, I suspect that much of their emotional confusion is just what everyone normally feels. The difference being, however, that the young modern was told that such feelings had been—or would be with the next cultural revolution—banished by Progress.
The take-home lesson here is that among the world’s politically functioning countries, there are three dominant regimes, namely authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and progressive liberalism, all of which share family resemblances.
Streets in Bucharest are lined with decaying neo-Brâncovenesc buildings. Instead of restoration, city-planners are heaping rubbish upon rubbish, building the same junk that has ruined cities from one end of Europe to the other.
Names are important, and the name ‘conservative’ is important if we are not to forget who we are and what we strive for. Conservatives are not merely reactionaries. We affirm something. We affirm our civilisation and we want to conserve it.
Christians, whatever their religious divisions, should work together to undermine and ultimately destroy the liberal and progressivist supremacy that dominates the West, recognising that it marks a settlement incompatible with even a basic Biblical worldview.
The desire of boys to carry pocketknives, it seems to me, is one that should be nurtured. A pocketknife makes one more useful to others, and being at the service of others is what turns a boy into a man.
