How To Shape Culture

This article is based on a speech delivered at the conference “El Conservatismo hoy: la defensa de las libertades, las tradiciones y la cultura,” co-organized by CEU-CEFAS and held on 20-21 October 2023 in Madrid.

Last time I was in Madrid, only a month or so ago, I was engaged in a Socratic to-and-fro with a bunch of metrosexual libertarians. Their basic argument was that it is vulgar and low status even to care about the state of the culture, so long as the market and the individuals within it are maximally free to pursue their self-determined interests.

It has been refreshing to spend time with sounder people who recognise the folly of that outlook. Culture is vital precisely because it sets the terms for everything else. Whether we like it or not, only a very limited number of people have the intellectual courage or moral fibre to resist and escape the prevailing notions and prejudices into which a dominant culture will seek to socialise them. 

It is precisely because most people outsource their thinking to the culture around them that we, as self-confident conservatives who believe ourselves to possess at the very least provisional answers to life’s questions, cannot afford to neglect it. How might we go about doing a better job?

First, we must stop being shy about seeking and using the commanding heights of political power. When left-wing parties achieve high office, they do not dither. They do everything they can to reshape culture, passing anti-white diversity laws, making constitutional changes, and overhauling the curriculum. In my country, the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party has been in power since 2010. Yet an Englishman waking up today from a coma that began in, say, 2009 would find nothing in British culture to suggest that this has been the case. 

Upon being told that it was indeed true, he would no doubt be dumbstruck to find the nation’s children being programmed to hate their own history, to despise Britain as a hotbed of systemic racism, and to believe that perennial teenage angst is a sign that you should probably be put on a conveyor belt to having your own genitalia mutilated. 

This is what happens when conservatives blindly trust in customary institutions and vacate the cultural battleground which informs their outlook. Unless we re-engage, at both a local and state level, we will remain where we are now: under what Alexis de Tocqueville presciently called “the soft despotism of a tutelary elite.”

Second, we must pay urgent attention to the demographic conditions that shape culture. The gravest threat to our national traditions across all of Europe is the mass immigration of endless foreigners with no ancestral connection or instinctive loyalty to what we have built. One of the more hoary excuses wheeled out to justify this destructive policy is the idea that Europe is an ageing continent—so much so that we need younger, more vigorous third-world imports to pay our pensions. 

Europeans used to have an ingenious way around this demographic cliff: we had plenty of children. This does two things. First, it gives us a long-term edge in the culture war over our (generally) anti-natalist left-wing adversaries. The future belongs to those who show up for it. Plus, I have it on solid authority that it is a great deal more fun to outbreed leftists than it is to out argue them. Second, replenishing the continent with plenty of our own babies dispossesses Western elites, corrupted by a mix of oikophobia and chronic short-termism, of any possible pretext for the importation of fighting-age men—most of whom are a net fiscal burden in any case—from distant lands into our countries.

This concern has nothing whatsoever to do with racial or any other kind of bigotry. The simple fact is that children born into a national home built and sustained by their forefathers will feel an emotional loyalty to the culture that mere civics courses, with their idle talk of synthetic values, frankly cannot replicate in the hearts of foreigners born elsewhere.

The sublime cultural tapestry of Europe is not a pristine, self-sustaining gift from the gods. As conservatives, we cannot trust it to remain whole of its accord, leaving us all at liberty to devote our energies to cutting red tape and slicing capital gains tax. The task of civilisational vigilance is ours. That means using political office to fight for our traditions at the culturally decisive institutional level, while also preserving the fragile demographic conditions of belonging without which they are bound to perish.