“The conservative refuses to accept utopian politics as a substitute for religion.”
Russell Kirk wrote this in the 1986 preface to his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, and if I’d heard this before, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble.
Also, this, written before even my parents were born:
“We ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.”
Brilliant stuff. Seventy years later we see the results – for the nature, society, politics economy – of worshiping the insatiable human wants above any deity or any moral principle. We’ve got to the point where people treat even their own bodies like costume because the idea of anything remaining immutable, free from the tinkering of the desiring humans is intolerable.
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