I was asked in anonymous comments to provide reading suggestions for a newly formed readers’ club for people interested in conservatism. The club appeared in a very unexpected place, and I am very glad. I want to recommend this syllabus on conservatism in America, which is the only syllabus I have been able to find where conservatism is explored honestly and without hysterical name-calling.
If the syllabus is too much, I recommend starting with the books The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by Russell Kirk and Towards a Conservative Left: Selected Writings of Jean-Claude Michéa.
If you are wondering whether you might be a conservative, you need to ask yourself a single question. When you look back at the history of humanity, do you believe that you are morally superior to the mass of people who came before you? If you can accept a possibility that the many many generations of the past were not complete idiots mired in a pile of rotting refuse of bigotry, if you can look at the past with love and pride, then you can be one of us. Welcome to the club!
Clarissa's Blog 
How do you call somebody who is not into black and white thinking?
Believing that something is better now than it was in the past does not require one to believe that everything in the past is a pile of abhorrent refuse. If you want a “moral” example, and not something technology-focused… I consider women being treated as equal human beings an improvement over them being treated as semi-property. Why can’t one accept that on one hand we (most of the mankind, there were some exceptions here or there) did not know better in the past AND simultanelusly not to want to return to the past situation now?
You sound as if anybody non-conservative must be inacapable of self-reflection or self-improvement. Or self-awareness. Any person capable of those things is capable of a) being tolerant towards past version of themselves and b) simultaneously believing that they actually improved with time and should not go back to less functional / psychologically unhealthy / etc ways.
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The dramatic improvement in the lot of women is actually almost completely technology-related. Not dying in childbirth, not having several of your babies die, housework becoming very easy, food and clothes becoming easier to obtain almost everywhere in the world. As Curtis Yarvin says, we keep confusing technological progress with societal.
As for societal progress, 84% of women over 40 in Spain say that they didn’t have as many children as they wanted. An increasing number has not been able to have any children at all. And this in spite of medical advances, free healthcare, reproductive medicine, longer fertility windows. Have these women gained some sort of professional advancement in exchange? Nopey nope. Most of them will live with roommates well into middle age, going from one part-time short-term gig to another. For twenty years, thirty. And these are the lucky ones. These are not the global poor, dragged around like chattel to be raped and then sold into serfdom as maids.
Of course, there’s a small group of women who absolutely did gain enormously from all this. Curiously, it’s usually the women whose great grandmother’s weren’t doing all that badly either. But we tend to notice them more and mistake them for the trend.
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Yeah, as some of us age, we notice and acquire some wisdom — but few seem to develop any gratitude.
Kid, you know the hellish conditions in Communist easterm Europe, but few grasp conditions in even the wealthiest of the West only a couple of centuries previously. It wasn’t until the 1850’s that British parliament finally outlawed the use of women in coal mines — their smaller bodies allowed using narrow seams without the expense of removing overburden with costly wooden bracing (the use of young boys continued through WW1).
But as gratitude, British men got the nasty, narrow minded spite and “white feathers” by the suffragettes — largely, as you observed, “women whose great grandmother’s weren’t doing all that badly” and, some things never seem to change, i.e., today’s selfish DEI swine ;-D
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Even technology is complicated in that it’s both good and bad. The bad side is nuclear weapons that can destroy the entire humanity at any moment. It’s never as easy as “yay progress!”
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Every technology is good and bad.
Literacy, cheap paper, and the press destroyed the way we used to commit huge things to memory. “Learn by heart” Its normalization also eliminated the ability of those who could not acquire literacy to meaningfully participate in the culture.
Every widely adopted innovation is a similar fracture point.
-ethyl
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That’s exactly it. Nothing is as simple as rah rah more new stuff! It’s all trade-offs.
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LOL, Kid, all of civilization, hell, even our existence, was for better or for worse, developed from the continual need to provide and protect. Nuclear weapons was a desperate race between the Allies and the Axis powers. And yeah, it can be truly a bitch, but what would have happened if we did not develop it, or worse had we lost that race?
Paglia once suggested that “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” But that is mere feminist insolence, frankly, we would still be living in the bloody trees ;-D
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This is so funny. The syllabus wasn’t rendering on my browser so I didn’t know which one you posted. I’ve been looking for this syllabus for years now and the worst thing is I had forgotten where I had first seen it. I was going to recommend it to you when I saw the title of the post and turns out it was on your blog that I first saw it. That professor at Appalachian State actually passed away during Covid, and his site went defunct after that, which is probably why it’s been so hard for me to track this down.
This also tells you how useless prestige games are in academia. Here’s this professor from an unknown college, and just from the syllabus alone you can tell how sharp and serious he was as an intellectual. Meanwhile world-famous professors at ivy league universities yell fascism every time a violent felon gets deported. This is their level of knowledge and understanding of our current situation, yet we’re supposed to believe that they’re the elite who truly belong on top of their profession.
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He died? Oh, I didn’t know. Memory eternal. What an excellent professor he must have been. The syllabus is very impressive. And yes, absolutely, this is not the kind of person that is valued, unfortunately.
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” if you can look at the past with love and pride, then you can be one of us”
I don’t consider myself conservative in any real way.
The past is, to overuse the cliche, a different country filled with people who perceived reality and their place in it in very different ways from anything I can muster.
I’m sure most people were just doing the best they could and there were of course some wonderful people and real rat bastards sprinkled among them as well. I’m profoundly grateful for lots of things they did and neutral about others and hostile about others.
For human beings, standing still isn’t an option – lack of change = death. The problem is rate of change and being able to evaluate good and bad changes and be selective, and most critically, being able to pass on some changes. I’m an incrementalist at heart.
There are sooo many options for change now and no real accepted criteria for separating the wheat for the chaff.
Most changes in the digital world in the last 15 or so years have been awful, public roll out of AI has been awful as well.
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As Oakeshott says, all innovation is certain loss and possible gain.
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