Friday, June 20, 2008

The trouble isn’t that conservatism and traditionalism aren’t true
But that they’re not enough. It is meet and right that they’re not an ideology but without something else, Catholicism for example, all you’ve got is ‘I like the old one better’ or ‘that sad feeling when your favourite clown dies’.

I think Helen Rittelmeyer and I agree with Burke: defend not just any old traditions but good traditions which is where the ‘something else’ kicks in.

That said...

Conservatism is the failure of tradition
Arturo could have come up with this:
Traditionalism is unreflective and an immediate experience of a way of life. It has no need for intellectual formulation. It just is. Conservatism is the representation of the gap between the traditional and the political; for conservatism as an ideology is self-conscious. It is a reflection of the fact that the meaning of tradition is no longer self-evident.
Rather like when all is well our holy mother the church doesn’t need to call a council and define doctrines. The faith just is. Doing so in the first millennium was always a reaction to a crisis, a new heresy threatening the souls of the brethren. So having to define a doctrine, though necessary and helpful, was in a sense a failure.

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