Any discussion of Christianity as part of a conservative resistance to revolutionary changes needs to make a sober assessment of the religious situation in Europe—without wincing at uncomfortable truths.
A constant undercurrent of the conference was the oscillation between equally eloquent articulations of despair at the present and an intrinsically Christian hope for the future.
To engage in judicial activism is to embrace a spirit of anarchy, in which the means of determining law are dependent upon who happens to be in power at a given moment. As Lincoln said, “we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”
From Europe’s north to her south, it is difficult to avoid the sense that the prevailing order is coming apart, that the cultural revolution to which her people have been subjected is being met with some real resistance.
Like the world which Kojève observed in 1945 and again in 1957, ours is a world of great powers vying for global dominance.
Police now show at least as much interest, if not more, in what people think and say as they do in obvious kinds of criminal behaviour. The new paramilitary social worker will sooner quiz a TERF than catch a thief.
While there may be fewer rainbow flags around and more room for self-expression on sensitive topics than is present in Western societies of today, ‘woke culture’ is spreading in Poland.
I would go so far as to argue that unadulterated liberalism corrodes democracy, and true democracy is opposed to liberalism. Illiberal democracy is capable of integrating what is valuable in liberalism without allowing the liberal framework to take over.
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.
Without the root of prayer, Europe is like a drowning museum and a place of cynical intrigue, but at prayer Europe is in the fight of her life—where darkness and collapse beckon the annihilation of identity. In such times, civilisations require saints.
Though kitsch wears the costume of reality’s vocabulary, it does not describe things as they are. You could only call it good without qualms of conscience after downing a Dionysian dose of expired boxed wine.
The police have become an alien presence in our society. Gone is “the historic tradition,” as Peel put it, “that the police are the public and the public are the police.”
