![](https://europeanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1024px-Tischbein_Joh._Hr._d._Ä._Achilles_Dispute_with_Agamemnon@Kunsthalle_Hamburg.jpeg)
Homer and Heroic Freedom
Protesting to assert our rights might give us a solution Achilles didn’t have when he contested Agamemnon’s authority. But we also lack something Achilles had—heroism—and so we find ourselves powerless.
Protesting to assert our rights might give us a solution Achilles didn’t have when he contested Agamemnon’s authority. But we also lack something Achilles had—heroism—and so we find ourselves powerless.
In my country of Great Britain, I am worried by those Muslims who use the country’s liberties and laws to undermine our civilisation and heritage. I went on a journey across the country to understand modern British Muslim culture, but I kept one eye on the history of Islamic civilisation, too.
Today, we might find Dune’s imagery allegorical. The world, or the public sphere, has in many respects been rendered inhospitable. The once baroque diversity of cultural forms has been drastically reduced. A desertscape has replaced the lush filigree characteristic of more traditional societies.
Once we have firmly established truth and beauty as the foundations of our educational efforts, we can start with undertaking the first and most difficult task in the educational adventure of making visible the hidden seed: character formation.
The Enlightenment had its fair share of such confusion. It was a time of truly scientific pursuits; of Voltaire’s brave and sharp remarks; of Hume’s observant rationality. But it also produced Rousseau, whose romantic view of freedom inspired generations of rebels. They thought that only monarchs and nobles could be oppressive, for they had not yet seen tyranny of the people.
The terrible incident of the Notre Dame fire should have been the occasion to renovate a church so damaged by the ravages of time, to make it even more beautiful. Instead, the sorcerer’s apprentices in charge of its destiny have preferred to indulge in their dreams of experimentation, as if a centuries-old cathedral were a creative laboratory subsidized by the Ministry of Culture.
We are, then, in a rather odd situation. It seems that conspiracies are deemed believable when they arise in fiction. It also seems that conspiracies are thought to have really happened, and are considered an essential component in even a superficial understanding of history. But anyone who suggests that we may be in the grips of a conspiracy now is a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ a pejorative term that denotes a person who does not assent to all he is told by mainstream media outlets.
Progressives believe that the right-wing populists must be destroyed. Not because populists are smashing norms; it is because they are, in many cases, defending the norms that progressives are busy dismantling.
The mere hint that a point of view is outdated serves as a signal that it need not be taken seriously. It can be legitimately vilified and condemned.
There is a path forward, but it is a narrow and tricky one that winds along the knife-edge between revolution and reaction.
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