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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I’ve been quietly waiting for Mark Richardson to introduce MR readers to this high-class take-down on John Bradford’s article, The role of ‘loser males’ in elections in the Australian liberal-left magazine, Dissent.

Of course, I could have just pleaded with him to put the damned thing up on this site.  But then I’d have to have restricted my own, perhaps not very startling observations to the comment thread.  Didn’t fancy that.

First, then, here’s Mark’s article in full:-

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MR regulars will have noticed from the jpegs that daily decorate our banner that war has a prominent place in my understanding of Western intellectual, social and political development.  War shapes our society for decades after the last shot has been fired.  It is the father of social instability as well as some truly rotten ideas about a “better world”.  Some time I might try to prove that the advanced phase of liberalism with which Western Man is now struggling is wholly the product of The Great War and its continuation a generation later.  What, one wonders, might our world be like today had peace prevailed in 1914?  Liberal no doubt, but not marxian.

But whatever one’s reasons for paying heed to those two great European upheavals of the Twentieth Century, it is something worthy of our personal time.  So I was interested to read this report of the regal progress to England this summer of Ricky Ponting’s Australian Test side.

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Yes, yes, I know.  The Gene War is still raging elsewhere.  But thus far in this extended discussion with GNXPers, the combined forces of MR contributors and commenters have mostly bearded them with the pursuit of the very EGI’s they deny to us.  I want to tilt the discussion towards the purely political motives of the GNXP boys and since I happen to own this political hoosegow I can do it, too!

Now, the formidable David B has very courageously showed-up on our threads.  For that he has my thanks.  But not political asylum.  I’m throwing in a few observations here about the smoothly fashioned but overt and singular political intent in his Opus Salterium at GNXP.

Just taking as an example the piece to which I have linked, David writes: In its primary, everyday sense, we use the word (interest) to designate the wants and needs of individual sentient beings (usually humans, but sometimes other animals). These may be either subjective wants (such as a desire for food or sex) or objective needs, such as survival, but in general we value the latter only as preconditions for the former. Survival is usually in our interest, but not if we are in constant pain, or being kept alive as a senseless vegetable.

Senseless vegetables?  What price EGIs for senseless vegetables?  Or strawmen.  Let’s, instead, put it this way:  In its primary, everyday sense we use the word (interest) to designate the pleasures and advantages people seek.  Obviously, some of these pleasures and advantages hold no implication for our role in Nature.  But others do, or we would not exist at all (a world of liberals, for example, could not exist at all).

So the question, really, is whether these latter pleasures and advantages are of the individual, as David desires to prove, or not.  They’re not.  Post “Out of Africa”, we didn’t evolve as individuals but as the members of an ethnic group.  So the question we should ask David is: why must you number those pleasures and advantages (such as ideals of attractiveness in the opposite sex and all the striving that goes into attaining that) among the sanctities of individualism, rather than among the commonalities of ethny?

The honest answer would be: It’s my politics.  But we don’t hear it.

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