tradition & conservatism34 quotes

“We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.”

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”

“The university’s task is thus well-defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving—by keeping alive—the works of those who best addressed these questions.”

“We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the idea of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law upon our pert loquacity.”

“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

“The conservatives who fear developments that they believe will ignore indelible aspects of the human condition would gain by attending to history and geography before they claim to know what mankind is, for the forms that the human enterprise has taken are sometimes more varied than they might think. But the followers of progress would do well to learn their own history and geography before legitimizing and legalizing any social development, for the forms of human existence are more coherent than they think, and they risk reestablishing archetypes that contradict their own points of reference.”

“The subject is he who opens his eyes to human weakness and organizes society in a way that responds to this reality. Instead of unconsciously assimilating his heritage like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his heritage like the contemporary individual, he recognizes that he is an heir. Instead of remaining submerged in his world like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his world like the contemporary individual, he engages himself in this world. Engagement and the recognition of one’s heritage are expressions of accepted finiteness even within the quest for freedom.”

“Codes tend to live on in debased form, often long after the necessity that called them forth is dead.”

“Change, of course, is inevitable. We need not be committed to change as good in itself to have the experience of change. We are mortal, temporal beings and change is ineluctable. Fixity is not our earthly fate, even if we long for it. Yet to subscribe to the idea of change as intrinsically good (and not to think of it as simply a necessity), and to couple that idea with efforts to engineer change in the hope that someday we will be content, is a recipe for oscillation between utopian expectations and disillusionment.”

“Human beings are what they learn to become within an already ongoing world of ideas which they discover in their unsought entrance to it. From the outset, each of us encounters a world presented to us by others as something already understood, compelling us to seek to understand what others seem already to understand.”

“A human being is not a waxen rubbing, a lifeless imprint taken from some great stony face. Rather he is a Minuteman or a dog soldier at liberty to use the inclinations of the past as he sees fit. He is free to perceive the matrix, and, within his limits, change from it. By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different?”

“Carelessly we have abandoned the stabilizing values of our forebears, from the simplest traditions and values to the most complex strategies that survive over generations, since we believe we no longer need them. Enduring values that transcend the individual have been set aside, and at the center of the world we have placed the individual, around whom everything revolves and with whom everything ends. By giving the appearance of pushing back disease, famine, and war and leading longer lives in general, we believe in our own immortality during the best years of life. But that isn’t true, no matter how much we gloss over the decline of the body and banish the process of dying from our everyday lives and consciousness. The cathedrals of faith and prayer have been replaced with clinics of health and science. But clinics are not cathedrals. They can only treat physical ailments. We have replaced the spires of churches with towers of books in university libraries. But all this rational knowledge is not the same as wisdom.”

“There were a multitude of these little worlds in the past… It should be obvious at this point that there was no typical single farm or community. In the same way that every life course was unique and colorful, different from any other at the time in ways that are not the case today, so it was with every piece of property, every farm, and every community. What was typical was the colorful mosaic-like quality of life: the richness and multiplicity of possibilities, the lack of uniformity.”

“Today we have largely done away with such customs and like to make fun of what seem to us to be pointless traditions. But the question is whether instead of the supposed freedom we have gained (in this case, the choice of wedding days), we have lost in the bargain a framework for life that these customs provided. At the very least we have created more problems for our-selves.”

“‘It is true,’ said Sandy, ‘many have left this life. But I will never leave it. To leave this life is to scorn the life of my parents, to say there is something superior to that life. Of course, we can do things to improve. We should educate our children, so they can understand better how to treat the animals, how to work with people in the city. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon this life. To be a Tuareg is to be a herder.

We are free and independent. We walk differently from the people in the town. Our life is a good one, as long as there is pasture, water and security. It is the best life I know.’”

“It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.”

“Any idea of education that is not connected to an idea of formation—of habitation in virtue, inculcation in tradition, veneration of the high and noble—is unavoidably impoverished.”

“That’s what conservatism really means, fundamentally, is to understand society not as just individuals and government, but to think of it in terms of everything that happens in between. That huge space between the individual and the state is where society actually is. And that’s where families are, it’s where communities are, it’s where the market economy is.”

“This is often exactly the task of the conservative—to restate old truths and reassert their relevance by helping a new generation understand them in its own terms. It is vital not only because conservatives believe that old truths remain true but also because we think that human nature does not change, and therefore that every generation—because it starts from scratch—must be helped to see what our civilization has learned through countless rounds of painful trial and error.”

“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.”

“Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.”

“In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to stay afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior to make a friend of every hostile situation.”

“To be conservative, then, 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. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated.”

“What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artifacts and utensils—in short, what Dilthey called geistige Welt.”

“No one today except maybe in Bhutan, in dark nooks of Japanese imperial palaces, or similar fossil pocket holdouts has any right to the luxury of continuation of tradition. The reason conservatives and especially social conservatives appear to be both disingenuous and also losers—to always lose, to always play a caricature or foil of the left, ultimately to play the cuckolded husband who is being mocked by adulterous mistress and her lovers and all the audience—is because of what we call roleplaying or LARPing, but which is the pretense or even worse the belief that you are upholding traditions or institutions when these have been violated, impregnated, and transformed by interloping others into something else. And therefore you are reduced to a steward and protector of your enemy’s aims and offspring, which is after all the definition of the cuckold, in this case with the added buffoonish humiliation of having the trappings and airs of the patriarch and Head of the Household.”

“The past and present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts. Each annual task is also a memory of the many times we have done it before and the people we did it with. As long as the work goes on, the men and women that once did it live on as well, part of what we are doing, part of our stories and memories, part of how and why we do those things.”

“Since it is above all the analytical attitude which predominates in philosophy, its latest disciples have everywhere been engaged in dissolving and decomposing. In physics, they have found nothing but objections to make to the author of nature. In metaphysics, they have found nothing but doubts and subtleties. Ethics and logic have provided them with nothing but harangues against the political order, against religious ideas and against the laws of property. They have aspired to nothing less than the reconstruction of everything, by means of a revolt against everything. And without remembering that they themselves are in the world, they have torn down the pillars that support the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.”

“Even while I protest the assembly-line, production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance.”

“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.”