This will be a short one and necessary only because there are so few who really care about ideas nowadays. We think in terms of policies, of immediate flows of cash and the resources which cash can buy in the modern world. And so it makes some limited sense in the context of our times that most people are called conservatives if they favor the policies of the liberals of yesterday.
Admittedly, many of them have the good intention of trying to return to a period when moral order seemed to be better-established. Few of them, including the professional commentators know enough reliable history to even realize, as one example, that the suburb which seemed a stronghold of moral order in the 1950s was invented as a desperate move to protect children and their mothers from the marketplaces of the industrial age. I tell this story in To See a World in a Grain of Sand and won’t tell it again here. Marketplaces are necessary and good but we should not be living in them. When we do, those marketplaces will grow at the expense of the human institutions which are the foundation of morally well-structured societies. Extended families and local communities and communities of worship will be weakened in the interests of the marketplaces.
The term ‘conservative’ means only one who conserves. It can be allied to the ‘radical’ cause of returning to the roots, of religious belief or moral traditions, or it can be allied to yesterday’s liberalism. Most who call themselves conservatives are nothing more than nostalgic liberals who want to crawl back up the slippery ramp. Then the next three generations can live through a replay of the 20th century. I hope we have better options than either staying at the bottom of the ramp or trying to crawl back up that particular slope.