Mar 22 2009
The Tragic Nature of Conservatism
Conservatives are rarely cast as optimists, but rather as curmudgeonly nay-sayers pining for days gone by. There is some truth in this, as conservatives do genuinely lament that what once was is no more. Thinking about this today, I was suddenly struck with a recollection from reading Kierkegaard. In his exposition of The Unhappy Man, he describes him as hoping for a past. This notion is obviously tragic in nature. Here is a paragraph from the essay I wrote on this topic:
This interpretation gains more credibility as A expounds upon the nature of unhappiness. Its fundamental characteristic, he explains, is that the unhappy person “has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, his real nature in some way or other outside himself.â€Â By this A means that unhappiness is linked to difficulties with temporality, one is unable to live in the present: “the unhappy one is absent.â€Â He completes this explanation by saying,
The combination can only be this: that what prevents him being present in hope is memory, and what prevents him being present in memory is hope…on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering…On the other hand, he constantly remembers something he has already taken up, he has experienced it in thought.
Unhappiness for A is being mired in the impossible, and futile, position of hoping for a past and remembering the future. Whether it is due to a general situation or a specific event, the unhappy one so desires things to be otherwise that he wishes for a past that can’t be and so fiercely anticipates the future that he finds no joy in it when it comes.
So what is the answer to this dilemma? In a few words, it is the ethical through the lens of love. More on that later…
(CC) 2010
Forget, please, “conservatism.” It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
PS – And “Mr. Worldly Wiseman†Rush Limbaugh never made a bigger ass of himself than at CPAC where he told that blasphemous “joke†about himself and God.
I couldn’t agree more. Sounds like your position is one of terminology. But while I agree the term “conservatism” has been more or less hijacked by the GOP and dragged through the mud of secularist materialism, it remains, inconveniently or not, the best descriptor in theory of what it once stood for in practice.