Conservatism

The will to live and survive and reproduce successfully is like the raw ingredients used to develop wine, or fine cooking. We might be able to survive on the raw ingredients, but why would we want to?

Even if the radicals and revolutionaries succeed in destroying the evolved traditions, the raw ingredients, which they attempt to use to form their new societies, will themselves naturally evolve more or less the same wine-making and cooking techniques all over again, because human nature does these things.

It is better to carefully revitalize the customs and traditions, reforming yet conserving, or even revitalizing as a means to conserve, which seems far more reasonable, practical and possible than attempting to start all over again from scratch.

The forms of wine and cooking techniques will vary from one people to another, as Burke’s “Chartered Rights of Man” develop from a peoples’ historic experience. Destroying customs and traditions dehumanizes men. The savage and the brute–and not the noble savage–lurks beneath the evolved customs and traditions.

A good society needs not only good laws but also religion, tradition, customs and the complex relationships that make up the ingredients of a successful, healthy society.

It is the revolutionaries and radicals who think that perfection is possible, who therefore destroy the long-evolved things, attempting to make more perfect things from simple ingredients, which they never accomplish.

Contrary to what the modern liberals say, conservatives are not against change, change is seen as the way nature works. When conservatives seek to modify the strange and ugly alterations to custom and tradition, they are following nature, where 99 of 100 new mutations don’t survive.

It turns out that traditions, customs and ethics are founded on permanent human nature, more or less, which includes such traditional things, seen in virtually all cultures, as gender differences, territoriality, kin-centeredness, monogamy, hierarchy and ethnocentrism, even xenophobia. Modern science, e.g. sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, have now affirmed this view of human nature. The traditionalists, at last, can claim science as affirming the basis of traditions and customs.

However, we cannot rush to found our entire worldview on science, since we adjust culture and politics to nature, including human nature, with its many arts and mysteries, and we do not merely adjust to science, which is only a part of human nature. Science alone is like one of those basic ingredients before they are developed into fine cooking or fine wine. The Enlightenment, for example, tried to base their new societies on basic, uncooked ingredients, such as science alone, and this eventually led to the monstrosities of communism, fascism and decaying liberal democracy.

Can a remnant hang on

Can a remnant hang on to Western culture, and is that what we must do?

We are prone to the great weakness of the creators of ideologies who develop abstract systems on paper, often with little reference to real life or real living.

Perhaps there is some inherent human need for an orderly long-lasting worldview. Nietzsche thought we would have the void as purpose rather than a world of no purpose.

I begin with what we have learned about human nature as the base of any further speculation on human culture. I apply knowledge I have gleaned from sociobiology and evolutionary conservatism, and whatever other knowledge I can find along the way.

During the age of decay, human nature will probably fall back on its own reserves, as we try to survive the attempted destruction of the old order. We may gradually reaffirm regionalism, more out of necessity than any other reason. The various regions will develop according to their needs and talents.

This, of course, depends on our first not destroying ourselves, or destroying the earth, which is not impossible.

So how do we live in the meantime, what do we believe, how do we think? This blog examines these questions through poetry, and occasional essays.