John Ray asks in a previous post,

“Why are Americans who advocate broadly the reverse of what 19th century English liberals advocated still called liberals?”

The answer, I believe, is that there is no such reversal of politics. Modern left-wing liberals share the same underlying principle as nineteenth century liberals.

Both groups believe that we express our humanity by using our own individual will and reason to shape who we are and what we do.

However, once you adopt this view you have a problem. If we are all atomised individuals pursuing our own individual preferences, how is a society to function? How can millions of competing wills be reconciled?

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Occasionally, one comes across a stunningly original website into which some loving soul has poured hundreds of hours of labour.  One such I found by chance yesterday.  It is Luminarium - the work, apparently, of Anniina Jokinen.  I commend it to one and all.

Like many, I am aware of Fred Ross’s visually ravishing Art Renewal Centre, and agree wholeheartedly with its stand against “flat art”.  There must be many other, equally arresting and informative art and culture sites out there.  A pointer in the right direction would always be welcome.

Those who still try on the old RDNE line and the one about evil white racists have some explaining to do this morning.

White farmers may be allowed back on their land in Zimbabwe as part of a plan by the government of Robert Mugabe to solve the country’s deepening economic crisis.

The president’s key finance aide has called for some of the farmers whose properties were confiscated in a land seizure programme to be allowed to resume growing crops to boost the country’s flagging agricultural output ...

“In order to ensure maximum productivity levels, there is great scope in the country promoting and supporting joint ventures between the new farmers with progressive-minded former operators,” said Mr Gono in a state radio and television broadcast that lasted nearly three hours.

He added that the skilled whites and other new investors would be given special guarantees of uninterrupted tenure of five to 10 years, backed by government force to prevent any disruptions on the farms.

Mr Gono was careful to say that it would not reverse Mr Mugabe’s redistribution of white-owned land to blacks.

However, observers say his plan would be an implicit admission that the land seizure policy has failed.

A Zimbabwean economist, John Robertson, said: “This shows the desperation of the government to improve the economy. They say it is not a reversal of their land seizures, but it is. It won’t get very far.”

I hope it doesn’t.  Not out of the simple desire to turn a profit ... not out of some romantic notion of Africa ... not out of any satisfaction born of righting the injustice of Mugabe’s land “reforms” should Zimbabwe’s former white population turn again.  A bitter lesson should have been very thoroughly learned.  White Rhodesians are stateless until they come home to where they truly belong.

How do we define conservatism? For John Ray the answer is clear. We simply follow “how people use” the term and we find that people agree in applying it to certain individuals and parties.

John declares himself to be bemused that some of us at MR don’t follow this procedure and that we insist on questioning the credentials of certain mainstream “conservatives”.

To prove his point, John gives us a selection from Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”. He introduces the selection as follows:

“Here is another quote from a famous conservative thinker whom certain wiseheads here will no doubt declare to be a “liberal” - despite everyone else thinking it otherwise.”

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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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This post is an attempt to place Western civilization at the current time among the seven stages of a civilization’s rise, expansion, decay and collapse as articulated by historian and philosopher Dr. Carroll Quigley in his 1961 book,

“The Evolution of Civilizations.”  It also examines what role the recent legalization of abortion in western countries (but mostly in America) has had in our civilization’s recent development.  Was Roe vs. Wade a cause or a symptom of our civilization’s decline? 

First, however, a brief summary of Quigley’s thesis:-

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Today the Monarch read out probably the densest but by no means most radical Queen’s Speech for years.  The programme stretches to forty-five bills and a host of somewhat predictably worthy international intentions.

The government will now feel entitled to make a great song and dance about New Labour vigour in a third term while Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition tries to find something, amid all its leadership woes, to which it really objects.

Here are a few objectionable high-lights that might possibly help:-

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I can only shake my head at this kind of stuff. Jason Soon (who else?) likes the fact that capitalism has “tamed our desire” for honour by “corrupting us with a taste for comfort and luxury”. Mr Soon thinks it’s much safer to live next to “greedy but rationally self-interested Homo Oeconomicus” rather than dangerous men of honour like “jihadis, samurais, fanatics and Crusaders.”

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