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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   30952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Is the controversy:

Lindsay seems to think that Conservatives are the Liberal party and therefore should be embarrassed at publishing a famous criticism of Liberalism (by someone most Conservatives don't like, but many who read Marx agree with him on this point.)

OR

The Christian rag should be sorry for publishing something clearly plagiarized.

From Lindsay's response to criticism, it seems like he thinks #1. I don't get it. Growing up in a Conservative household, "liberal" was an insult, synonymous with excess and licentiousness. There are some Conservatives where the thing they are trying to conserve is the Liberal order, and they lean Libertarian and vote Conservative. But I wouldn't expect every Conservative publication to be Libertarian.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities...

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

None of this really requires the philosophy of Liberalism. Many writers are trying to ponder what the next best thing could be. If Liberalism has problems, lets do a Retrospective and figure out how to learn from it and find the next best thing from a Conservative stance. How can we use the lessons of History to preserve and bring back things we love? Catholics use the name Postliberalism for this, but I hope it doesn't stay a Catholic thing.

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