Majorityrights Central > Category: Conservatism

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 it was greeted with enthusiasm by the young intellectuals of Europe.

The English poet William Wordsworth was no exception. He wrote verses in support of the Revolution, including these significant lines,

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was bless’d as free, for he was Nature’s child.
He, all superior but his God disdained,
Walk’d none restraining, and by none restrained,
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wish’d, and wish’d but what he ought.

In these lines Wordsworth is claiming that man is naturally free in the liberal sense of having no impediments to his individual will and reason. The individual man is superior to everyone else but God; he needs no restraints and recognises no laws except those accepted by his own reason; he follows his own will in all things (but always chooses to do the right thing).

A few decades later another famous young English poet, Shelley, was still holding firm to the same political ideal. In his work Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley advanced his ideal of a “new man” who would “make the earth one brotherhood”. This new man would be,

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Have you ever read an article which begins well but then takes a disastrously wrong turn?

There’s an article being praised amongst some conservative groups here in Melbourne, written by Augusto Zimmermann. Augusto hails from Brazil but is undertaking his Ph.D in law at Melbourne’s Monash University (he appears to be of German descent). Augusto is an obviously intelligent young man, who appears regularly in the Christian conservative press.

His latest article takes aim at Victoria’s religious vilification legislation. Augusto begins by noting that the legislation contradicts the Western legal tradition by disallowing the truth of a statement as a defence. That’s why two Christian pastors could be prosecuted under the legislation for accurately quoting parts of the Koran to a private church gathering.

Augusto then criticises the idea that the legislation will help to create a “multicultural democracy”. He argues that not all cultures are equally committed to democracy, and that democracy and the rule of law might not be preserved if Australia “eventually decides to reject its own culture on account of multiculturalism”.

Augusto’s article then reaches its high point when he observes that,

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David Cameron, the young lion of the left of the Conservative Party … and the centre … and everywhere, really, where desperate men dream, has spoken.  And he has written.  So there is no longer any cause for doubt about what this blank-faced, almost smart, tolerably personable font of ambition stands for.  Besides himself, of course.  We have been told.

We have, in fact, been told this:-

Our task now is to move the argument forward: to show how a changed Conservative Party will offer an attractive alternative programme at the next election.

To be attractive, our programme must be balanced, compassionate and modern: balanced in the sense of improving the quality of life as well as creating prosperity; compassionate in the sense of helping people in Britain and the world who are least able to help themselves; modern in the sense of recognising the challenges of today’s Britain and offering effective solutions. And our programme must be based on optimism: trusting people and giving them the responsibility and the power to do the right thing for their families and their communities.

Oh dear.  Changed.  Attractive.  The man has been thinking about change and attraction.  As if the electoral angst of politicians hadn’t done enough to change Conservatism and repel people already.

What, young lion, is the history of post-Reform Conservatism but the failed effort to adapt to the sinking game of One-Man-One-Vote democracy and a liberal polity?

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I’ve just finished reading The Cousins by Max Egremont. It’s about two members of the English gentry, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham, who were both politically active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The impression you get of the gentry in the book is largely positive. Being part of the tradition of a landed estate, and having a good education and time for leisure, seems to have made the gentry both more cultivated and more genuinely conservative than the upper class we have today.

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Most readers will be aware of the Southern Poverty Law Centre: a well-funded left-wing American group which targets those who don’t accept the “diversity” agenda.

Well, the SPLC have scored another victory, one which is politically revealing.

Kevin Lamb was managing editor of a weekly magazine called Human Events. It’s a magazine which professes to have conservative social values, in particular on family issues. Yet after just one phone call from the SPLC Kevin Lamb was summoned to his employer’s office and given his marching orders.

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This is an apposite moment, following John Ray’s “Oakeshott” post, to set down some fundamentals of my view of Conservatism – and invite considered criticisms accordingly.

The great and recurring difficulty in debating Conservatism is that there is much discussion of the phenomenon but no agreed definition of it.  As a basic direction in modern political life it is often thought to have dated from the accession to the English throne of Henry Tudor on 30th October, 1485.  Henry VII was a great and wise monarch who sought to entrench stability in his realm, to avoid expensive entanglements abroad and to place his exchequer on the sound foundation of equable taxation.  As a result he was able to bestow upon his subjects a rare and priceless period of peace and quiet, and to bequeath his son a settled and prosperous kingdom (which inheritance the turbulent fellow duly ruined).

Over the next three centuries or so this beneficent confection periodically appeared and disappeared, until it finally matured with the Ministry of William Pitt the Younger.  Pitt was a political genius and the acknowledged “inventor” of Conservatism proper.  Perhaps inventor is the wrong word.  But he formalised it into a complex and sophisticated political philosophy and a prescription for good government.

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One unforeseen and rather special consequence of starting this blog has been my re-acquaintance with the kindness of strangers.  Of course, one knows perfectly well that goodwill and understanding are key to all in-group thinking.  The least visible in-groups can be among the most imbued with such qualities and, God knows, a blog-based in-group, being by definition atomised, is pretty damned invisible.

Still, I have one of our thoroughly atomised MR bloggers to thank for the kind and thoughtful gift of a subscription to Chronicles Magazine, the first copy of which – dated February 2005 – landed on the doormat this morning.

It took me a good two minutes to sniff my way to page 34 and a piece under the Principalities & Powers header by Sam Francis, “Towards the Hard Right”.

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The original meaning of the word ‘liberty’ does not suggest at all ‘liberation’ - in a sense of emancipation from collectivity.  Instead, it implies inheritance - which alone confers liberty.

Alain de Benoist, Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns

We are not free men.  How can we be?  We do not have the freedom to own our natures, the most near and ineradicable of all our inheritances.  Indeed freedom exists, we are told, only to the extent that we white, heterosexual males disdain this inheritance and take to ourselves something fictitious … something from which our oppressive whiteness, heterosexuality and maleness have been assiduously expunged.

Well, notwithstanding the sheer, bloody racism of this demand, its central postulate of an absolute psychological plasticity under the general-ship of reason would undo our psychological health in very short order.  Crude artifice, self-deception and the perpetual battle against Nature would generate only galloping individual and societal psychopathies.

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