“Human beings make a radical distinction, of course, between the past and future, and they know in their hearts that the future can be changed, whereas the past cannot be. But they also know in their hearts that the future is unknowable but the past is knowable, and there’s a conflict, a natural division among human beings between those who are interested in changing things and those who are interested in knowing things. Among the latter, of course, are conservatives—those who want to know about their condition and know it by looking at the past and seeing what in the past is useful and valuable and what is not. That backward-looking attitude is fundamental to us. But of course, it isn’t about changing things, it’s about understanding them; whereas the left has this emphasis on the future, always, because the future can be changed. The only problem with it is that we don’t know how to do it and the evidence of history is that when we think we know how to do it, we will always make it worse.”
From volume I of the file · Spoken · 21st century
Themes: history · politics · tradition & conservatism
More from Roger Scruton
“A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.”
“In the long run, it must be good to be open to the truth that different societies maintain equilibrium, order, and peace in different ways. The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.”
“Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things: that our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient, with only a fleeting claim on the things of this world.”
“The contradictory nature of the Socialist utopias is one explanation for the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.”
“The dispute between the unscrupulous optimists and the dystopians will not disappear, but will be endlessly renewed as new futures occur to the one, and a renewed past detains the other. In emergencies, and all changes that abolish old routines, the optimists hope to turn things to their benefit. They are as likely to consult the past as a battalion fighting for its life in a city is likely to protect the monuments. They strive to be on the winning side, and to find the path into the future on which the light of ‘I’ stays shining.
The ‘we’ attitude, by contrast, is circumspect. It sees human decisions as situated, constrained by place, time and community; by custom, faith and law. It urges us not to throw ourselves always into the swim of things, but to stand aside and reflect. It emphasizes constraints and boundaries, and reminds us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities. Its decisions take account of other people and other times. In its deliberations the dead and the unborn have an equal voice with the living. And its attitude to those who say ‘press on’ and ‘ever onward’ is ‘sufficient unto the day the evil thereof’. It does not endorse a comprehensive pessimism, but only the occasional dose of pessimism, with which to temper hopes that otherwise might ruin us. It the voice of wisdom in world of noise. And for that very reason, no one hears it.”