The Global Citizen |
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We make our friends. We make our enemies. God makes our neighbors. G.K. Chesterton
Is there a great moral nation, The Global Citizen is published in conjunction with The McGill Report, where international news is a good local story.
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11.26.2002
WHERE SMART MEN HAVE GONE BEFORE: "Conservatism," writes William F. Buckely in Up from Liberalism, "is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before." Now here is a prime example of a mystico-religious sentiment, with the eschatalogical "all that is finally important" broadly hinting that repentance and redemption is the process that's under discussion. But what has this spiritual transformation to do with politics, with law, with compromise and splitting differences, and with the muddling through each day which is the only consummation we can hope for in daily human life? This is my problem with conservatism. Not that I don't believe every word of what Buckley says, on the religious plane. It's just that as politics these ideas aim way too high, or, I'd guess you'd say, way too deep, to be useful as a foundational principle for consensual political life. The idea that man is, if not a perfectible being, at least an improveable one, is much the better axiom on which to base social life. Hope for a raise, rather than to be spiritually raised, is the greater motivation for the greater part of mankind. Hope for improvement in the here and now, and not the hereafter, gets most of mankind out of bed in the morning and out the door to do a good day's work. If America has shown anything in its 200 years, it's shown that such improvement is possible. That's a victory for the liberal idea.
 
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