Oakeshott and Being Forever Young

OK, one last post on Oakeshott and I will move on to other conservative thinkers on my voluminous list. Oakeshott believed that young people should not have much of a place in politics because the great qualities of youth are poisonous for politics.

But here is the problem. When I read Oakeshott’s description of youth, it becomes clear to me that, in a setup where the most important thing is to remain always young to avoid being replaced by a newer, shinier model, everybody is like this at any age:

Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands – unless it be a cricket bat. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. . . Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.

Our politics today is a battle between the eternal adolescents described perfectly by Oakeshott. He was conservative in a different world, one in which people were people very unlike to how we are people. What he said is still very much on point but in a much larger way than what Oakeshott himself could have imagined.

Who likes this new series and how much do we like it? I’m liking it a lot.