The Spirit of Conservatism Vol. II
Adapting conservatism to the post-Liberal age
In the first volume of The Spirit of Conservatism, we conducted an analysis of the state of contemporary conservatism, and sketched out some rudimentary steps towards a positive vision for the future. Now, we shall turn our attention to the situation of modern British society and assess the role of the state in shaping the culture towards better ends.
We will introduce a couple of frameworks through which to analyse the subjects of personal freedom, social responsibility, and culture, which can be used to give a tangible form to conservatism as a modern political philosophy. These are the concept of ‘tempered individualism’ and an analytical framework which observes the four fundamental societal units - that of the individual, family, community, and nation - exploring the interrelatedness of these fundamental components of society and examining how the health of all four elements is necessary for a healthy, thriving, and moral culture.
It is highly recommended that you have read the first part of The Spirit of Conservatism.
The Post-Liberal Future
The spirit of our age is fragmented, refracted through the broken lens of post-modernity, projected to us by the narrative-setting arms of power, the late-capitalist octopus that is the media-entertainment industry. Having smashed our unifying metanarratives in the 20th century, with no common frame of reference, constructive dialogue between those with opposing views has become impossible. As we have been made to revert to a bleak subjectivity, and as democracy has forced politics into every facet of culture, ideology has become preeminent, causing widespread polarisation and division. The West is suspended precariously over a gaping abyss.
The motto of the French Revolution - Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (liberty, equality, and fraternity or unity) - heralded the beginning of the modern age. Following the Revolution, politics steadily came to be defined by three ideologies: Liberalism, Socialism, and Fascism. These three ideologies are simply distillations of each of the three aspects of the French Revolutionary motto, and therefore of the Enlightenment paradigm which we have now outgrown - and they have all been shown to fail.
Following the crushing of Fascism in the 1940s and the collapse of support for Socialism after the failure and dissolution of the USSR, Liberalism, the victor and lone survivor of the Enlightenment trifecta, has, for decades, been walking with a limp. Politicians attempt to delay its demise through short-sighted reform, incredible levels of spending and debt accumulation, and a massive expansion of inter-continental immigration intended to artificially spur economic growth and prop up sputtering economies with cheap third-world labour.
Hence the obsession, in the media-entertainment industry and in even ostensibly conservative politicians, with ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’. They understand that mass immigration dissolves native culture and causes division, but, entirely enthralled by liberal assumptions, consider themselves too enlightened to allow the apprehensions of the native population whom they represent to prevent them from transforming their country into a culture-barren economic zone. The small-minded masses who wish to retain their parochial ways and live amongst their own people are routinely castigated for holding what had, until recently, been a completely normal opinion held by everyone.
Liberalism has deluded itself into believing that, as the survivor of the Enlightenment trifecta, it represents the true path towards inevitable human progress. As it refuses to recognise its manifold failures and its impending collapse, it attempts to justify itself and cling on to power in ever more demented and desperate ways. Hence why an ideology originally founded on the premise of maximising liberty resorts to increasingly tyrannical measures to artificially prolong its lifespan.
One method is the use of its media-entertainment arm - the instrument of narrative-creation and thus its most powerful tool - to villify what it perceives as its most threatening philosophical opponent - traditional conservatism. We have finally arrived at a state of anarcho-tyranny, in which degenerate behaviour is not only permitted, but pushed as a tool of pacification and mollification, while modes of being which favour self-sufficiency and independence of thought and action, or expression of any views contrary to those of the system, are punished swiftly. Conservatism is not an ideology, it is a natural facet of human nature; an understandable, instinctual resistance to sudden, large-scale change.
Humanity has alienated itself from its natural place in the world through industrial machinery and manufacture, all-encompassing digitisation, and inter-continental travel and communications. We have exerted our intellect onto space and time, manipulating the world, and granting ourselves the ability to observe and interact with phenomena from unnatural positions and in unnatural ways. The microscope and telescope allow us to observe matter which is too small or too far to see with the naked eye. Forms of data processing such as the spreadsheet and computer modelling programs translate qualitative phenomena (tangible, real-world events and experiences) into abstract quantitative data which can be extrapolated and manipulated.
We managed to convince ourselves that we could transcend human limitations and see the world from a God’s-eye perspective, and that we no longer had any use for such primitive necessities as strong family and community ties, manual labour, religious worship, or the concepts of objective truth and morality. More and more people are waking up to the reality that there is far more to life than the abstractions we have created for ourselves.
Defining the Limits of Freedom
Our age is one paradoxically characterised by both freedom and tyranny. Unfortunately, Liberalism allows us only the freedom to do what is detrimental to us, spiritually, mentally, and physically, while the restrictions placed on us are designed to keep us docile and dependent. Part of living in a free society is the liberty to make one’s own decisions, to pursue one’s own goals, to express oneself how one sees fit, free from state interference. The difficulty of a free society, however, is in determining precisely where the limits of freedom lie (for they must lie somewhere), and to what extent the state bears responsibility for upholding the societal moral order, and how it should be implemented without descending into tyranny.
Without freedom, there is tyranny; without restraint, there is anarchy. Without the discipline that restraint imposes, total freedom is a sort of tyranny in itself. Total control is soul-destroying, and stifles creativity and expression. A deficit of freedom threatens to lead to authoritarianism and subjugation to the whims of the state. Conversely, an excess of freedom threatens to poison the culture, which is the most pressing issue we are seeing today.
Any attempt to reintroduce traditional conservative values and wholesomeness into a degenerate, hedonistic society will be met with opposition from those accustomed to hedonism and degeneracy. But these ideals are not ‘fascistic’ or ‘far-right’, as the Left will claim - one of the main tenets of this new conservatism is a reduced state. When people are accustomed to the solipsistic pursuit of short-term pleasure, a reintroduction of proper morality and virtue will feel like oppression, a reduction in freedom. But how free is a man who is a slave to vice?
Think of the act of driving on a motorway: you possess the freedom of how and to where you wish to drive - within the boundaries of the road, and providing you drive in a manner which does not endanger your fellow drivers, naturally. We all agree that we need roads, and we all agree that a condition for being allowed to use the road is abiding by certain restrictions designed to protect others.
As we move inexorably towards a post-Liberal future, there are questions to which conservatives must be ready to provide answers. These are a few:
To what extent should the state attempt to shape culture?
To what extent should personal freedom be restricted, based on what criteria, and why?
How much weighting should be given to individual freedom versus collective wellbeing?
Personal freedom, in a certain sense, has never been more ubiquitous than in the modern West; conversely and simultaneously, however, modern technology affords the state greater control over personal freedom than ever in history. As the curtain begins to close on the Liberal experiment, thoughtcrime laws are quickly becoming ever more widespread, banks are closing the accounts of those with ‘outdated’ views, and bureaucracy increasingly restricts our freedom to do as we wish. The authoritarian measures employed throughout the Coronavirus pandemic were unprecendented in our nominally free 21st-century life.
Modern Western societies have been infected with an offshoot of Herbert Marcuse’s ‘repressive tolerance’, the rabid idea, formulated in 1965, that all right-wing thought must be suppressed while left-wing thought must be allowed to flow freely, as the only defence against a return of Nazism. We have been living in a society of increasing repressive tolerance for some decades now.
This new offshoot, though, seems to be less explicitly political, and more cultural (which is actually more worrying). The new dogma is something like ‘all traditional moral sensibilities must be supressed and deconstructed, while degeneracy must not only be allowed, but encouraged, and propogated throughout the institutions of culture and education, to liberate us from unfair moral restrictions. Freedom of expression is wrong, except insofar as that expression directly or indirectly aids in the project of deconstructing traditional conceptions of morality’.
The great novelist and lay theologian C. S. Lewis coined the term ‘chronological snobbery’, calling it “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited,” continuing, “You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.”
We are undoubtedly living in an age of chronological snobbery, in which opponents of conservatism will write it off as an outdated adherence to old-fashioned values which no longer have relevance. Conservatism is not about being fashionable, it is about adapting eternal principles (such as virtue, communality, and the cultivation of strong families) to the current age. That is why conservatism, as an ingrained sentiment rather than a ‘real’ political philosophy, is always relative. It allows the idiosyncracies of discrete ages to exist, but grounds them in a deeper truth and an appreciation for tradition, respecting and upholding parochial, organically-developed culture.
The remedy to our present disease lies in the conservative-minded silent majority speaking up against the failed status quo, unafraid of repercussions and cancellation. We are engaged in a culture war; one that we did not start, but in which we must fight. It is not enough to keep silent until election day, in the hope that politicians will fix the mess for us. They have repeatedly proved that they have no interest in doing so.
Politics is downstream from culture, as culture determines the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. Those refusing to participate in the culture war, to voice their opinions, are ceding the territory to the Leftist assault on everything we know and love. If our only means of expression is at the polling station, while Leftists have captured our cultural institutions and loudly protest at every given opportunity, it can be no surprise that culture is drifting exponentially leftward. The Left has overrun the media, giving them essentially free reign to write the narrative, and thereby set the terms of debate. Consequently, politics and legislation come to align with this new reality, solidifying the new position of the Overton window. This must be reversed.
Contrary to the belief of most, conservatism does not represent stagnation and calcification of ‘outdated’ modes of societal formation. It does allow for change, even large-scale change. It simply requests that we ‘hesitate’ (as Sir Roger Scruton so aptly put it), since the medium- and long-term effects of societal changes are exceedingly difficult to predict ahead of time, and the risks of introducing them may be catastrophic. Civilisation is fragile, after all.
Another C. S. Lewis quote:
“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
Critics of conservatism on the Right will point out that simply ‘conserving’ what already exists is not good enough. This is true. It is not enough to conserve the Blairite paradigm of modern Britain. But the new conservative movement we are working towards does not seek to conserve what exists presently, but to recover and conserve the basic moral and cultural foundations of Western, and specifically British, society. We are attempting to revive the spirit of conservatism, that natural sentiment, that intangible ideal we feel instinctually, and distill it into something actionable and applicable to our contemporary dilemma.
We are ‘hesitating’ in the Scrutonian sense, and ‘doing an about-turn’ as C. S. Lewis recommends. Though we have strayed from the path, turning back to what is good and proper represents a conservation of the past, in the same sense that animal or environmental conservation is the result of an active interference with the current course in service of preserving and restoring things to a better state.
In order to move forwards we must, in a sense, move backwards. In order to conserve Britain, we must look to the Britain that once was. Reclaiming and reviving what once was is, truthfully, probably impossible. Too much time has passed and too much damage has been done. We can, however, endeavour to preserve the core of our old ways and cast off the superfluous abberations grafted onto it by modernity. That is our goal.
Consent Culture
Morality, in our modern culture, is inextricably bound up with the idea of consent. The prevailing consensus is that as long as all parties involved in an act consent to participate, the act is automatically seen as morally acceptable. Conversely, any act in which one party does not consent is automatically seen as coercive and oppressive.
The prime example of this is our ‘sexually liberated’ culture - nothing is off-limits, so long as everybody involved is okay with it. Do not misunderstand, as far as sex is concerned, the consent of all parties involved is of the utmost importance - though it does not follow that the presence of consent makes all sexual acts correct. It is insofar as the consent standard is applied to every facet of life that it becomes warped. Sometimes we have to do things that we do not want to do; other times, we have to refrain, however unhappily, from undertaking actions that we wish to undertake.
It is a fact of our existence as social beings that the individual will must be tempered to maintain community cohesion. Consent culture - the view that consent is the primary determining factor of the ethical standard - is an entirely solipsistic and materialistic conception of morality which has become all-pervasive; it does not take into account the transcendent, the fact that some acts are simply wrong, regardless of the consensual status of participants.
It has long been understood that temperance is a virtue, in both Ancient Greek thought and Christian thought - the two of which combined to shape what we know today as Western culture. In fact, Plato proclaimed it to be the most important of the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance). Marcus Aurelius considered temperance to be the quality which separates us from the animals - an essential feature of humanity.
The time has come to reassess the limits of tolerance, as we have seen the detrimental effects of the overtolerance of modernity. It is essential, as the impending close of the Liberal age approaches, to conduct an analysis of tolerance, to determine which aspects of personal freedom must be limited in order to restore and preserve the collective wellbeing of society.
Consumption and Function
Consumption is the driving force of capitalism. We are all consumers; there is a reason the homepage of any social media website is called a ‘feed’. It is unfortunate that many areas of human life have been relegated to the status of commodities and products, but that is the era in which we live. Consumption is not wrong in-and-of-itself, naturally. It is an excess of consumption, or consumption of the wrong kind, which are the moral vices to which we all fall prey. This spills over into all aspects of life, particularly sex and relationships.
Modern gluttony is not confined to merely individual overconsumption, however, it is manifest in the economic sphere too - our entire production apparatus is geared to meet the demand for endless consumption. Note the shift from small-scale, decentralised production of quality goods - handmade children’s toys and bespoke furniture - to an unending supply of rubbish from abroad - cheap, mass-produced Chinese plastic and Ikea flatpacks. This is not only undermining our cultural foundations, but also devastating domestic production and ruining the Earth.
Interest (or usury) was historically condemned in societies based on the Abrahamic religions, as well as in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, yet our modern economies are entirely built on interest, in the service of allowing theoretically endless consumption. Our entire economic system relies on a vast web of spiralling debt; on individuals and nations consistently spending money that does not yet exist. The introduction of fiat currency replacing the long-standing gold-backed monetary system was a mistake of which many are slowly becoming aware.
Americanism has had, and is still having, a disastrous effect on the English way of life by way of its atomising influence, its monomaniacal fixation on production and individuality; in other words, its cultural deification of the economy. American expressions and concepts creep into the English language through American hegemony in the fields of entertainment - Hollywood, reality television, rap and other forms of popular music, et cetera. All of culture has become commodified, that which already exists is turned into a product to be sold, and that which is produced now comes mass-produced in a packaged form, replicated en masse for the purposes of consumption and profit.
The function of consumptive acts is forgotten in an era of limitless consumptive opportunity; a return to the recognition of these functions would better equip us to make more informed moral decisions, to exercise temperance in our decision-making.
Take, for example, food. The primary function of food consumption is to provide fuel for the body in order to ensure continued existence and growth. Taste, and the associated pleasure which it gives the act of eating, is a byproduct, not a function. That is not to say that food should not also be enjoyed, for enjoyable food is better than unenjoyable food, but, at its essence, food is for survival, not pleasure.
Sex, in the modern world, is viewed as an act of consumption, which brings with it all the same aspects of gluttony. It has become just another victim of the capitalist instinct to capture and commodify everything, to sell it back to the consumer devoid of meaning. Sex, of the proper sort, in the right context, is a worldly pleasure compared with which there is almost none greater. With greater potential for pleasure, however, comes greater risk of abberation - exaggeration and degeneracy.
The functions of the sexual act are two-fold: its primary function is that of procreation; its secondary function is of facilitating bonding and intimacy between monogamous committed partners.
The primary function, reproduction, has been, in the cultural consciousness, successfully stripped from sex due to the prevalence of contraceptives such as the pill and the condom. Thus, with the potential consequence of pregnancy removed, and any sense of a sacral nature purged, sex has ceased to be viewed in its proper context, as a primarily creative act - an act which holds the possibility of bringing forth new life into the world. It is for this reason that sex is an act which has greater potential for abberation that most others - an act, the primary purpose of which is the creation of new life, should never be taken lightly; it should, viewed properly, command responsibility. Pregnancy is now often seen as an unfortunate potential consquence of sex, rather than its raison d’être.
The second function, intimacy, is now often overlooked as a result of a culture which views and represents sex as an act purely ‘of the flesh’; that is, without transcendent value, merely a carnal pleasure. It’s just what one does with somebody one finds attractive, isn’t it? In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, sex, stripped of its primary and secondary functions - procreation and intimacy - exists only for pleasure, pacification, and distraction, much like today. In the novel, anybody who expresses reservations about sleeping with a stranger is perceived as odd or prudish - sex is just meaningless fun, and ascribing any higher meaning to it is unthinkable for nearly everybody.
Pornography is the main culprit in stripping sex of transcendent meaning, though the advent of contraception enabled this process, and dating apps and modern cultural conventions propogate it. Pornography re-presents - ‘makes present that which is not present’ - sex in the form of an often-borderline violent portrayal of physicality. There is no intimacy in a pornographic video, only a collection of pixels and sounds showing a recording of physical organs interacting with other physical organs.
Sex as presented in pornography is several times removed from sex, the act-itself. It is fake sex, void of meaning, captured by video equipment, edited and uploaded, and accessed by individuals participating in simulated sex acts during the consumption. Everything meaningful about sex has been consciously stripped away, and material, animal behaviour and the pursuit of vapid short-term pleasure is all that is left behind. Sex is not a commodity to be bought and sold, it is a transcendent, intimate act to be shared between two lovers who care deeply for one another.
Pornography does enormous damage to the minds of young men who are accessing it at ever-younger ages, leaving them unable to form genuine relationships with women and giving them false ideas of what sex and relationships are supposed to be like. The feminist criticism that the degradation portrayed in pornography warps men’s attitudes towards women has merit. Adding to this issue is the massive growth of sites such as OnlyFans, which has monetised parasocial relationships and incentivises young women to post nude pictures online in the hope of making easy money by virtually selling their bodies. Women, as the feminists correctly say, are not sex objects. So why are they being culturally inculcated, and economically incentivised, into making themselves into sex objects?
All this is without even mentioning the disgrace that is the rampant human trafficking, sexual abuse, and rape that occurs in the field of pornography creation. Pornography should be banned.
This analysis of the functions of sex is not arbitrary - it is an attempt to convey the fact that many human actions and interactions have an essential transcendent meaning and purpose which does not arise as the product of cultural conception. Put simply, discrete cultural conceptions of the meaning of certain acts are not equally valid; the meaning inherent in certain acts is not subjective - the culture which adheres most closely to the objective function of an act is the most correct one. Sex is simply the quintessential example of this cultural stripping of higher meaning, which degrades the act and its participants, and reduces it to merely a shallow pursuit of pleasure and carnal gratification. Sexual ethics, as with all other ethics, are not social constructions.
Immoral acts
There are two kinds of immoral act. Firstly, there are those which are immoral by nature - acts which should simply not be engaged in, barring some exceptions in certain instances; for example, killing, stealing, or lying. These acts are wrong in themselves, but may be externally justified by context (killing in self-defence, stealing in order to return the object to its rightful owner, or lying to save an innocent life).
The second is abberations, acts which at their essence are acceptable - either morally neutral or good - but are taken too far either in degree or kind. Sex, in itself, is absolutely morally permissible; sex of the wrong kind, however, is not. Sex with multiple partners, or lacking in connection and intimacy, or overindulged in, or in the wrong context, is not. Overindulgence in immoral sexual acts makes itself perceptible in sexual disease, an inability to form intimate bonds, addiction, or in imparting a dehumanising effect on the partaker.
Consumption of alcohol is permissible, in the right context, to the right degree. A few drinks in leisure time, to relax the mind and facilitate conversation with friends is an undeniable pleasure. But drinking to excess, or too often, or in the wrong context (e.g., before work), is an abberation which will make itself apparent through its negative consequences - hangovers, addiction, violence, damage to the brain, or finding oneself in uncomfortable or dangerous situtations.
This is where three of the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, and fortitude - enter, in the God-given abilities humanity alone possesses: to differentiate moral action from immoral action, to comprehend the limit at which a moral action becomes an abberation, and to have the strength and self-control to act accordingly.
Tempered Individualism
The antithesis of temperance is gluttony. When weighing the two concepts together, it is clear that the temperate man is morally superior to the gluttonous man. It can be observed in their physical forms. The man who eats as much as is required, and of the right sort, and exerts himself through regular exercise, and partakes only of acts which he knows to be true, will exude a glow of health and manliness which makes evident his discipline and self-control; the glutton wears the physical manifestation of his lack of discipline for all to see, an unnatural protrusion of fatty flesh which impedes his movement and signals his vice, and his form takes an androgynous shape with a grey hue of sedentary indulgence.
Discipline and commitment have fallen to the wayside as a result of a nihilistic culture. If there are no transcendent ideals towards which to strive, why bother with long-term goals, why struggle for excellence, why suffer through the ‘downs’ which inevitably exist in a committed relationship, when one could simply indulge the carnal senses with a new partner each night and forget all about them the next day?
So, we come to the question: how should the state go about adressing the issues of moral degradation in society, and instilling a sense of belonging and purpose in its people?
Firstly, it is important to make clear that the state should be as small as realistically possible. In any system, and especially so the larger a system gets, a reduction in the number of factors is key to smooth operation. The more complex and interlinked a system becomes, the more catastrophic the damage will be when one or another factor in the system fails.
Ideally the state would cover only the essentials of public necessity: national defence, law, energy, water, public transport and roads, emergency services, and a small social safety net for those who fall through the cracks. But we do not inhabit an ideal world, nor an ideal culture. As conservatives, we must ground our analysis in the concrete, in what we see before us. The state will be required to take part in the formation of a strong, community-focused culture of traditional values.
A balance must be found between a system which is too authoritarian to allow individual autonomy and flourishing, and a system which is too liberal and allows the growth of movements which threaten to bring about its collapse.
Authoritarian systems tend to prioritise collective wellbeing and are content to encroach on personal freedom to achieve that end (though, of course, suppressing personal freedom does actually damage collective wellbeing). Liberal or libertarian societies seek to maximise personal freedom even to the extent that it damages the social fabric, which can lead to less personal freedom (theoretically a man is totally free in a state of anarchy, but in actuality he is de facto restricted by fears for his safety).
While the wellbeing of the state does, naturally, play a role in the wellbeing of its people, the wellbeing of the people is of the utmost importance in defining the wellbeing of the state. A culture of tempered individualism is the form most conducive to the flourishing of the people and their communities, and therefore for the state as a totality. It is for this reason that the development of a culture of tempered individualism must be the pursuit of the state.
We can define tempered individualism as a mode of personal liberty tempered by and grounded in wider community considerations. It is the freedom and autonomy to act as one wishes within certain cultural boundaries - that is, taking into account the effects of one’s actions in a broader social sense. These boundaries include those of morality and practicality; those of responsibility to one’s self, one’s family, one’s community, and one’s nation.
This framework of Individual, Family, Community, and Nation is the lens through which we will explore the relations between different fundamental aspects of a society, and derive a normative vision of personal responsibility. This framework may sound abstract, but it is intensely personal, it reduces scope from the unsustainable universalising frame of modern Leftist theories, while avoiding the Liberal tendency to focus solely on the individual to the detriment of his community. It puts the focus back on the individual and his immediate surroundings rather than the abstract theorising of identity groups and categorisation so prevalent today.
Conservatism takes as its starting point that which is immediate. It recognises that one is ultimately only responsible for his own actions, though this framework grounds that personal freedom within a broader and more meaningful context than the atomised form of unbounded freedom and selfish pursuit of pleasure which liberalism espouses.
Responsibility begins in the immediate surroundings and grows outwards. If one cannot take responsibility for himself, he cannot care for his family; if he cannot care for his family, he cannot contribute to his community; if he cannot contribute to his community, he cannot benefit the health of the nation. Conversely, a sick nation produces degraded communities, which produce feeble families, which produce weak men. It is really a question of constitution - families are constituted of individuals, communities of families, a nation of communities. An individual’s internal constitution is influenced in large part by the care and education of his family, his experiences as a member of his village or town, for better or worse, and the health of his nation as a whole.
As the relations between individual, family, community, and nation are all interrelated and interlinked, a deficit in any of these areas comprises a deficit in all. Thus we can see that the issues facing us today require a multi-faceted approach. Individuals must take up the burden of personal responsibility and co-operate to form strong families and communities. The state bears responsibility for facilitating the ease of family relations (for example through tax breaks for married couples and parents), and for supporting community cohesion, by devolving power to smaller portions of society, allowing communities sovereignty over their own affairs through the principle of subsidiarity.
“Disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family.” - St. Angela Merici
Community
In the paradigm of the modern age, we find ourselves only able to conceptualise ourselves in two ways:
Firstly, in terms of our rootless individuality, owing nothing to anybody, with no responsibilities for social cohesion. Individual self-actualisation is seen as the highest good, and any attempt to interfere with that process is seen as oppressive. Hedonism has become the vehicle through which to pursue this process of self-actualisation; attempts to curb hedonism have become akin to a mortal sin, the argument being that such attempts ‘dehumanise’ the subject by hindering his self-actualisation. To voluntarily refrain from short-term pleasure for the purpose of cultivating discipline is viewed as akin to self-harm.
Secondly, in terms of class identity; membership of abstract groupings, lumped in with other members with whom we often share nothing in common besides an arbitrarily-decided essential characteristic. We are expected to share affinity with people we have never met, on the basis of characteristics both irrelevant and abstract. Examples include the black ‘community’, the queer ‘community’, the disabled ‘community’.
The individual mode of identity formation is flawed for obvious reasons; the vain pursuit of pleasure is not conducive to real individual flourishing, nor is it a foundation for community building, only discipline and hard work can produce these effects. The second, collective mode of identity formation excludes the only real community, a shared physical presence among those whom we care about and who care for us, and with whom we share common material interests and goals.
As a result of the shrinking attention given to real communities, the condition of man is becoming a ‘rootless’ one. With no ties to anything tangible, we become what David Goodhart calls ‘anywheres’ - people whose sense of identity is founded on abstractions - when a deep sense of fulfillment has always been found in being ‘somewheres’, people who exist in and are rooted in a time and a place which impart their sense of identity to them, and care more about those they exist among, than abstract conceptions of communities which are timeless, formless, and placeless.
A cause of our growing atomisation is that we are no longer tied to the area in which we live. Technological developments such as the growth in the widespread availability and access to various forms of transport have made it very easy to move halfway across the country (or halfway across the world, for that matter). Even 50 years ago, it was very commonly the case that children in a local school were the offspring of parents who had also been educated at that school in their youth. Mothers picking up their children from the school gates had been classmates; they had known each other for their entire lives. Everybody in the local pub had known each other for their entire lives. That is to say, each town had a culture of its own, and its inhabitants were all firmly rooted there, possessing ties to other families, and having bonds of sentiment stretching back decades.
Speak to any old person you know, and the chances are they will tell you that, back in their day, when there was a dispute the two parties would have a fair, one-on-one punch-up, and be on civil terms again the next day. This is because they both inhabited the same community and understood that, though they had had a disagreement and come to blows, they were united under something bigger than themselves. They would have to continue to occupy the same space for the rest of their lives, and as such it would be better for themselves and for those around them to make up. Holding an extended grudge would do damage to themselves and the community at large. It was expected that after the dust had settled, everybody could move on with their lives without fear of repercussions.
There is an epidemic of knife crime in this country, as well as a massive rise in gang culture - generally among the children of immigrants. There has been a 75% increase in knife crime in England and Wales in the last decade. There were 282 murders involving a knife or sharp instrument between March 2021 and March 2022 - the highest total since 1946. That is more than 20 fatal stabbings per month in a country historically known for its temperance, decency, and social stability.
We now hear alarmingly often in the news of gang violence in the streets of London. Youths in the capital routinely carry knives citing fears for their safety, and a need to be able to defend themselves. American-style gang culture and Drill rap has imported a state of affairs where a dispute cannot simply end after the dispute ends. Gang culture is inherently a culture of retaliation. What previously would have been forgiven and forgotten after the dust had settled is now dragged out in ever-growing feuds and escalating violence.
The nihilism of urban youth manifests itself in a culture and media (music videos, etc.) which portray forgiveness and humility as weakness. They view the world as a jungle, where one either eats or is eaten, and in which any action undertaken to increase one’s wealth or social standing, or to destroy one’s enemies is permissible, provided one is not caught. ‘No face, no case’. The youth have fallen out of touch with any notion of the transcendent, with any concept of objective morality, and it is damaging them.
The introduction of foreign cultures which valourise a dog-eat-dog state of affairs - taking what you want, showing no mercy to your enemies, a lack of respect or polite conduct - combined with the erosion of community through mass migration, the ease of cross-country relocation, and the atomisation brought about by modernity, leaves all involved unfulfilled, lonely, and distrustful.
Real community, community based on shared proximity, mutual interdependence, and common values, would do wonders for the state of the country as we see it today. Local communities of artisans and small business owners, where repeated physical interaction takes place on a daily basis; where people know the names of their neighbours. To escape the trappings of modernity and globalisation, people must return to buying locally and making the effort to hold community events. We must begin to patronise local businesses again instead of ordering unnecessary, poor-quality, foreign-made rubbish from Amazon.
Buying products and services from the local butcher, carpenter, and tailor, will facilitate a growing sense of community, as money given to them rather than to faceless international corporations will be used to put food on their family’s table. With more money circulating within a local community rather than being put into the pockets of international companies, the community will prosper. This will require individuals to wean themselves off of their expedient luxuries. Making the time and effort to go to a physical shop and buy locally-produced goods may seem too much to ask, but it is well worth it, and when it begins to occur en masse the effects will be overwhelmingly positive. Local producers will prosper, customers will receive better quality goods and services, community ties will be rewoven, the reliance on foreign markets can be steadily reduced, and self-sufficiency and national independence can be reclaimed.
A period of de-globalisation must take place; we must reduce our scope and look to what really matters, those in our immediate vicinity, instead of to the entire world. Real community requires individual responsibility, a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasures in pursuit of a higher cause. It requires effort on the part of its inhabitants to take into account the thoughts and feelings of neighbours before acting, to ground themselves and conceptualise themselves as a part of a broader whole.
In other words, it requires a recognition that we do in fact have responsibilities in relations to others, and that these responsibilities are not unfair constraints on our individuality, but an essential factor in what makes life meaningful. We are intrinsically social creatures, but modern society had made us broadly anti-social. By undertaking the effort to contribute to and rebuild local community, we are reclaiming our humanity from the cold, wire-and-steel systems of modernity. Our society has become selfish; it will take the selflessness of community leaders to re-establish the lost connections between the constituents of their communities.
Class conflict is the enemy of national unity. A heterogeneous society will struggle to possess the quality of solidity, as diversity of interests is antithetical to such a quality. The root of all conflict lies in competing interests. Unless a solution is found to the problems imported by mass immigration, that is, unless the immigrants entering can be satisfactorily integrated, for the benefit of themselves and the native population, further immigration must be immediately halted.
In order for immigrants to be properly integrated into a native culture, the rate of immigration must be low enough and slow enough to allow the integration process to play out - that is to say, there must be a strong culture in place for them to be integrated into, and sufficient pressure to incentivise them to do so. However, with the exponential growth of immigration to this country over the past thirty years, there is increasingly less native culture left; naturally, we see enclaves being formed - see Bury Park, Luton, where the Pakistani population is 80-90% in many areas, essentially a ‘little Pakistan’ in the heart of a historic English town.
A healthy, virile form of civic nationalism can only be achieved when the national consciousness is purged of divisive ideologies which place a greater emphasis on other identity categories than that of nationality. Britain has become weak in large part because Britain houses a class of people who despise it, and work for its destruction from within.
Community is not a matter of race, or sexuality, or any other essential characteristics; it is a matter of belonging. There will, naturally, be an ethnic component to this, as belonging is to an extent dependent on historical ties to the land in question, but that is not necessarily the main aspect. Those who we physically interact with on a daily basis, with whom we share local concerns and goals, a shared local history in which to take pride; that is true community. The same concept also applies to national unity; we share concerns, goals, and a history in which to take pride with our fellow countrymen, just as we do with the fellow constituents of our local communities.
A culture of localism, a commitment and attachment to local community, simply must be reintroduced, and it will take the large-scale adoption of personal responsibility to achieve this.
Personal Responsibility
If one is man enough to bring a child into the world, he ought also be man enough to raise it.
Naturally there will be situations in which, for reasons of safety or sanity, the father and the mother must be kept apart - either formally or informally, legally or personally. In such cases the father must provide financially insofar as that is plausible. The growing pandemic of absentee fatherhood is no good for anybody. Not for the father, who is neglecting his moral imperative to take responsibility for his actions and provide for mother and child; nor for the mother, who, absent a father with whom to share the burdens of childrearing, now must do alone a job typically done by two. Nor, and most especially, is it good for the child.
44% of under 21s have not lived with both their parents during childhood. A staggering 20% of households are headed by single mothers. Children raised by a single parent have poorer cognitive outcomes than those whose families remain intact. A fatherless child will, on average, exhibit less impulse control, be more prone to violence and short-term thinking, and will therefore be less able to take responsibility for himself, care for his future family, contribute to his community, and benefit the nation. If a father does not wish to provide, he must be compelled to do so. For his own good - even enforced responsibility teaches responsibility - as well as for the good of the child he has fathered and the mother he has abandoned.
A community with a prevalence of fatherless children is a community worse-off for this lack. As community degrades, it is easy to see how family structure and individual thriving will suffer as a result. As family structure and individual thriving are negatively impacted by community degradation, these effects rebound outwards and further contribute to community erosion. In this cycle it is shown how, directly and indirectly, the actions of an irresponsible individual affect the community at large.
It is a cycle which must be broken, and which must primarily be addressed organically - government initiatives can only go so far, and attempting to impose culture through top-down planning is wasteful, often fruitless, and contrary to the conservative value of organic development. Real, substantial progress in the reforging of community spirit must begin in individual action and flow outwards. As such, the solution to family breakdown and community degradation necessitates individual responsibility. As families strengthen and communities begin to rediscover themselves, individuals within these families and communities will prosper as a result and the effects will compound one another.
Now, we have said that real change will not come from the state. But the state, insofar as it bears responsibility for the wellbeing of its citizens, has a duty to promote the values of tempered individualism and to support family cohesion, as opposed to the hedonistic, solipsistic, liberal values which it currently propagates. This need not come in the form of a top-down imposition, but in a restructuring and reform geared towards facilitating these organic shifts. Clearing the path, so to speak.
The Youth
The situation for modern youth is dire. A confluence of factors including lower birthrates, societal atomisation, and increased fear of allowing children to play outside has led to a situation in which much of today’s youth is chronically online.
As real community has all but ceased to exist, young people find it increasingly difficult to meet friends and potential partners in real life and thus turn to video games and dating apps. Dating apps are shallow and fuel a culture in which surface-level attributes such as physical appearance are made unduly dominant. Users are to make a choice about a potential partner based on a curated selection of pictures and a short bio; thus, they essentially know nothing about the individual they are about to approve or reject.
On Tinder, the most well-known online dating app, women ‘swipe right’ (approve) of just one in 20 of the men they see, while men swipe right on 53% of the women they are shown. The selection is dramatically skewed in favour of the female.
Fair enough, women should be picky about potential partners, especially as the sex which bears higher potential dangers and costs in the forms of accidental pregnancy, abusive partners, etc., but, coupling these statistics with the ‘sexually liberated’ hookup culture we are engulfed in and the prevalence of contraceptive products, the outcome should be quite obvious - fewer long-term relationships, diminishing marriage rates, fewer children, and fewer children raised in two-parent households.
As casual sex - a contradiction in terms, there is nothing casual about sex - has become the norm among today’s youth, we see that, of dating app users, a tiny proportion of exceptionally handsome men are sleeping with almost all of the women, while the vast majority of men face constant rejection. This means that women are choosing as their sexual partners specifically those men who are least likely to want to start a long-term relationship and a family - hookup culture suits them just fine.
This state of affairs causes only further division between the sexes. Young men are more and more frequently simply opting out of dating altogether, as constant rejection wears away at their confidence. Young women, interacting almost solely with the most sexually desirable and, therefore, most promiscuous of men, decide that long-term relationships are simply unachievable - or undesirable - and opt to continue the ‘liberated’ lifestyle of unsatisfactory one-night stands instead.
Among those who do not use dating websites for hookups, but are instead looking for love, the situation is incredibly disheartening. The modern ‘first date’ is awkward, and for good reason - it is entirely unnatural. Pre-internet, couples met through mutual friends, or family, or community events, or through their church. They generally already knew each other before embarking on a ‘first date’, and the purpose of the date was to signal a formal statement of romantic intent and to act as a test of compatibility. Its purpose was to get to know one another more personally, one-on-one, in a more intimate setting than a group meeting would allow.
The modern first date is essentially a job interview, in which two strangers sit down for food or drinks and assess each others’ worthiness, scanning for deal-breaking inadequacies. Entering a first date with this negative outlook turns the act of dating from what should be an enjoyable experience - getting acquainted with a potential love interest - into a business-like prerequisite for further contact. If one is unsatisfied, he or she will simply ‘ghost’ the other after the date’s conclusion. It is cold and unforgiving.
All these factors, combined with the prevalence of feminism and its disdain for marriage and family life, and its attendant glorification of hedonistic individuality leads to loneliness and a further lack of community; and the cycle repeats. The youth must break the cycle and refrain from having one-night stands. They understand that they are soulless, unsatisfactory, and pointless, but they are not acquainted with the alternative. Chances are, they have grown up surrounded by unmarried adults.
The youth must start cultivating friendships and community; there is no quick fix for this. A large number of young people consider themselves lonely, and it is up to them to take responsibility and change this fact. They must foster their existing friendships, making the time to meet physically and interact. They must not take the ‘easy’ route of ghosting friends when there is a conflict, but rather communicate their issues and reach mutually satisfactory resolutions.
They must respect the feelings and idiosyncracies of those of the opposite sex and cultivate mutually fulfilling relationships with them, and enter into these relationships with long-term expectations. In the postmodern age, vulnerability is hard to accept and a self-defence mechanism of sarcasm and aloofness is widespread, but meaningful relationships require a foundation of sincerity and a willingness to be vulnerable. Trust cannot be built on cynicism.
A revival of Christianity among the youth (or, at the very least, a return to adherence to Christian values) would go a way to reviving a sense of community and the formation and flourishing of the wholesome nuclear families upon which the future depends.
Normativity
It is possible for a society to be tolerant of abnormality without making attempts to deconstruct the very concept of normality. Normality will naturally occupy main stage in a healthy society; it is only through concerted efforts to ‘normalise’ the abnormal that degeneracy is allowed to run rampant. The virtuous state, the state which takes up its duty to uphold the wellbeing of its people, therefore, has a responsibility not to celebrate unwholesomeness or incentivise degeneracy.
There are two factors relating to the state and its responsiblity for culture: the active and the passive. As it stands, the state actively promotes moral decay; this must end. But it also cannot settle for passively allowing moral decay to spread. There will be debate about the extent to which the state has a role in promoting morality. Either the state must actively disincentivise immorality and passively allow proper morality to flourish, or it must actively promote morality. Some would prefer that the state remove itself from the realm of morality, while others would prefer it take on a greater role in the moral development of its citizens. Insofar as the state bears the duty of influencing culture, its efforts must be aimed at incentivising the moral (marriage, the nuclear family, child-rearing, honour, respect, and community spirit) while confining immoral elements to the sidelines unless they grow large enough to threaten societal order and cultural stability.
Television programmes and advertising must be more stringently regulated to stop the unmitigated flood of subversion, hedonism, nudity, and glorification of violence on our television screens. In schools and universities especially, degeneracy must not be taught and proliferated. If it is true, as the Leftist critique of liberalism proclaims, that there are no neutral institutions, then our education system, as well as other cultural institutions such as museums, must promote a positive view of Britain and its history, to foster a sense of patriotism. The enemy within wishes to deconstruct Britain out of existence; this can only be countered with the teaching of a traditional and patriotic history of our nation. Again, assuming that there is no neutrality, it is to the benefit of all citizens that our history be portrayed in a positive light. And in the case of a country like Britain, there is much positive to portray.
Stability is of the utmost importance to the functioning of a wholesome and morally upright society. Degeneracy, along with theories and methods designed to deconstruct the meaning of normality, cannot be allowed to thrive if the goal of a society is to be a healthy one. The Left thrives on instability - nature abhors a vacuum, and Leftists are well-versed in fostering division through the propogation of their sociological conflict theories.
Stability prevents revolution. Revolution is anathema to the conservative, for obvious reasons. Thus, we must do whatever is in our power to return stability to our society. It is the foundation on which organic growth is made possible. Families cannot function optimally without it; communities cannot flourish without it.
Legislating Morality
Often, the Left will accuse its enemies of attempting to ‘legislate morality’. What exactly does this mean? It means the creation of laws, and the subsequent accompanying threat of punishment, which restrict certain actions based on an assessment of their moral wrongness. Going with this fairly impartial definition, isn’t that the purpose of law? Isn’t every law an attempt to legislate morality?
Those on the Left have no qualms about advocating that everything they disapprove of be suppressed, if not made straightforwardly illegal, but conservatives, for some reason, feel a certain squeamishness about it. If we are confident in our beliefs in moral certainty - an objective moral law by which we should abide - why should we be shy about legislating morality? As a friend recently said, “A dictatorship led by people who think like us would be mint. The Left is happy to make that statement, why shouldn’t we?” Now, the purpose of this essay is not to advocate for dictatorship, and his words were said in jest, but a good point is raised there. The Left is happy to make that statement. So why are we so squeamish about doing something as basic as making arguments for law and order, and the legislative restriction of immoral behaviour?
The answer is that many conservatives still cling, implicitly, to the assumptions of liberalism, that individual behaviour should not be interfered with, even if that behaviour disrupts social mores and traditions. As stated above, we already legislate morality - the point raised is that, if we want to turn things around, perhaps we have to legislate that morality a tad more stringently than we are at the moment. Precisely in proportion as society has liberalised over the last 50 or so years, we have seen the decline. As the post-liberal era approaches, the space may open up to begin arguing to reverse some of changes that have taken place under liberalism.
We saw recently the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, state that pro-Palestine protestors climbing on war memorials was “unfortunate, but not illegal”, implying that the police force was therefore impotent to deal with such acts. Never mind that people are routinely arrested for far less disorderly acts than that, such as silently praying in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. The police act as if there exists no power to interpret the law in different situations. If they are so incompetent that we must explicitly legislate every offence, there is a glaring ineptitude in British policing. This is just a symptom of the two-tiered policing system in this country. One of the many manifest failures of multiculturalism is that we are forced to make unwritten rules (i.e., ‘don’t desecrate our monuments’) into written ones.
Recall our earlier discussion of consent culture. We do not legislate against murder, sexual assault, burglary and so on because ‘the second party does not consent to it’, we legislate against these acts because they are understood to be fundamentally immoral acts. In the case of sexual immorality, and the prevalence of gluttonous behaviour that we see today, legislation is not appropriate. At the very least, however, the state should not be celebrating and amplifying degeneracy. It should be properly applying the rule of law, and, if our goal is returning to a wholesome society, implementing policy designed to uphold the monogamous nuclear family, Christian values, British values, and aiding the development of virtue and independence in its citizens.
The Oedipal mother behaviour of the nanny-state today should be terrifying to everybody who values their individuality. It cries, ‘I will give you everything, as long as you worship me’, and, through its system of permissive and restrictive mechanisms, stifles the development of personal responsibility. It is infinitely permissive of degeneracy and hedonism (‘freedom’), while being restrictive of autonomy and self-sufficiency through its bureaucracy and overbearing insistence on ‘procedure’. In an ideal society, the people would hardly notice the government as it would hardly impose itself on them in their day-to-day lives at all. As it stands, the bloat of the civil service means its tentacles worm their way into every facet of our lives.
There is a tendency these days to speak about crime as a consequence of material factors, as if individuals have no control over their actions or agency as they go about their lives. It may, now and then, be the case that a man feels compelled to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family, but the epidemic of looting we have seen in recent years, and the sharp uptick of stabbings and other violent crimes are not the result of material deprivation. It is a culture of nihilism, coupled with a limp-wristed approach to misbehaviour that fuels such phenomena. It is an unconfident society, which makes no demands of discipline in behaviour, and which does nothing to foster the moral development of its younger generations, that invites such issues.
How are youths supposed to care about their communities when there are no communities, only geographic locations, indistinguishable from any other in their lack of culture or sense of belonging? In a strong commmunity, there would not be cases such as the one in which a 16-year-old followed and then killed an 82-year-old army veteran with a single punch after the man dared to challenge the teen and his friends for their misbehaviour. It was once quite normal for older members of the community to tell children off, even children who were not their own, for doing stupid things. It was a method of instilling proper behaviour and manners in the youth of the community. Now such a situation is almost unthinkable as parents would likely side with their children, despite their misbehaviour, over the concerned community member. The cherry on top is that the killer in the above case received a measly two years for violently ending a man’s life. How can we expect order in society when killers receive such laughable punishments?
The worrying trend of making the issue of crime into a ‘systemic’ issue is a mere continuation of the ‘systematising’ of other issues. Systemic racism, systemic sexism, systemic homo- and transphobia, and so on. If a societal malady is systemic, then the response must, naturally, also be systemic. This is the point; this is the reason why those who favour state intervention on all other issues always theorise in this manner. It is a naked power grab which serves the purpose of taking individual action and guilt out of the equation; in other words, making everybody guilty regardless of their individual action. If the system is racist/sexist etc., then everybody within it takes on inherent culpability, and nobody’s sins can be absolved until the issue is resolved through top-down societal change.
Crime is the result of an improper internal constitution, a mental state which places individual thrill or pleasure over the wellbeing of the community at large. There is nobody else to blame when an individual makes the conscious choice to engage in illegal behaviour but themselves. There may be mitigating factors in their upbringing, their situation, or their community, but the responsibility ultimately falls on them as an autonomous being to ensure that they act in a manner which does not harm others. If they harm others, they deserve to be punished.
‘It’s not hurting anyone’
The common objection to statements advocating the supression of degenerate activity comes from the aforementioned concept of ‘consent makes right’. But, looking back at the framework of Individual, Family, Community, and Nation, it becomes clear that participation in degenerate behaviour on an individual level has effects which reverberate outwards, damaging the immediate family, the community, and thereby staining the culture of the nation. Engagement in these damaging acts is a renunciation of personal responsibility which harms the social fabric.
We have already discussed how widespread absentee-fatherism damages societal structure, but there are many other examples of actions which directly impact family and community cohesion, such as promiscuity, vandalism, or robbery. There are actions which take place on an individual level which are hand-waved away as ‘not hurting anyone’. Drug use is an obvious one. It may be someone’s free choice to engage in drug use, but the common claim that ‘it’s not hurting anyone’ can only be believed if one is looking with an incredibly narrow scope. Similarly to smoking, the damage may not be seen in single instances; it is often the cumulative effects over time that make the difference. Having said that, we do often see the acute effects of drug use which make themselves apparent in outbursts of shocking violence, murder, stealing, and so on. Calls for drug legalisation on the grounds that people ‘will do it anyway’ are misguided.
We are so immersed in the culture of sexual liberation; the ‘consent culture’ discussed earlier. Degenerate sexual behaviour, such as polyamory, engagement in orgies, or in consistent one-night stands may not be recognisibly damaging in the short term. These acts are both a symptom of a degenerating morality and a cause of it. These actions would not be so culturally accepted (and glorified, see Netflix shows such as Sex Education) were it not for the degeneration of morality in our culture; conversely, these acts and their glorification in media contribute massively to this degeneration.
The issue with the ‘as long as you aren’t hurting anyone, what’s the problem?’ view, is that what takes place in the privacy of the bedroom does, in fact, spill out into wider society. There are no truly private acts. The more people participate in a certain action, the more other people will begin to engage in that action too. It may be a drop in the ocean, but enough drops makes the ocean. Each individual act of degeneracy normalises degeneracy; as degeneracy becomes more and more normalised, the instances of degenerate behaviour grow expontentially. Every sane person understands that orgies and BDSM are degenerate; that’s why we don’t teach children about them in sex education classes - yet.
Education Reform
In a sane society sex education would be banned. The introduction of mandatory sex education into schooling was a plot to strip children of childhood innocence (something some radical Leftists believe is a ‘social construct’ which must be abolished). Schooling should exist for educating children in those subjects which require academic and pedagogical knowledge to teach effectively; i.e., foreign languages, Mathematics, Science, History, Geography, IT. Sex is a topic which does not need to be taught in schools; it is not a teacher’s place to discuss sex with children. We teach children about sex and then wonder why they are having it. The only ‘sex education’ needed is this piece of advice: use a condom, and only have sex with somebody if you could imagine them being a good mother/father to your children.
Communists, under the spell of Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, claim that we inherently and unconsciously teach children to abide by the standards of the culture in which they are being raised, educating them in the ‘socially constructed’ tenets of Western civilisation through osmosis. They continue on to say that this is wrong since it upholds Western structures of oppression and, since they think about culture and civilisation ‘critically’ (that is, through a Marxist framework), they should be allowed to instead teach children how to deconstruct society to create a new equitable utopia. “Children are unconsciously educated in societal expectations and morality anyway, let us do it properly.” It is no coincidence that educational standards are slipping in proportion as Communist ideology is injected into pedagogy. Children do not need to be, and should not be, taught about such topics as transgenderism, feminism, or white privilege, nor fed a purposely ideologically-infused version of history.
Conclusion
Conservatism is the preservation of a legacy of inherited institutions, practices, and customs. Conservatism is not about being fashionable, it is about adapting eternal principles (family, morality, frugality) to the situation at hand. Stability is a foundational feature of conservatism; throwing principles out to ride the political winds is a short-sighted, unstable mode of operation which degrades us all. Stability is the true foundation on which societies can flourish, on which strong family and community ties can be built; it is the basis of prosperity. Turmoil makes prosperity impossible. It is for precisely this reason that the subversive elements of our culture seek to concoct and then propogate divisive theories into mainstream discourse, using them as a wedge point with which to break unity in order to sow chaos and create turmoil within the nation.
Subversive elements must be supressed, quite mercilessly if need be. The longer degeneracy is allowed to infect the institutions which fuel culture, the deeper it will embed itself. ‘Queer culture’, Socialist ideology, hedonism, and the undue influence of the field of sociology must all be purged. The sooner this cause is carried out, the less painful its effects will be.
Whoever succeeded in raising the moral tone of any society without causing the frustration of some natural desires and the hardship of having to forgo them? Returning culture to a more wholesome state will seem oppressive to those who are accustomed to degeneracy, but the people who would object to a more wholesome society are people whose opinions need not be taken seriously. In any case, the goal of the woke Left is to restrict negative rights in order to tear down and reconstruct society around what they perceive as better ends. Our negative rights, being transcendent and inviolable, must be protected against the onslaught of radical Leftists. Our ends will involve the renegotiation of some positive rights, but positive rights are synthetic and fundamentally negotiable in their essence - created, and revised, by the state - so this need not be an issue.
The Left has been waging war on all we hold dear, our parochial culture, our unique history, our national demographics, for decades. Passivity in the face of conquest is cowardice. As we move into the post-liberal age, this is the moment at which we must turn the weapons of the Left against them. It is the moment at which will be able to extract the most philosophical concessions, the moment at which we must remove the facade, overcome our squeamishness, and begin to advocate, unashamedly, for the future we would like to see realised. The future of our children and our nation depends on action.
We must work to instill and develop the virtue of tempered individualism in ourselves, in our children, and, thereby, in culture at large. We must view ourselves, rightly, as individuals existing as part of a broader whole encompassing the family, the community, and the nation. We must look past the shallow hedonism of modern consumption to those eternal virtues we wish to embody, and take responsibility - for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for our nations, applying ourselves selflessly to their flourishing. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and nor was Britain.
While this task is one which will play out over the coming decades - not overnight - it is of vital importance that we play our part in restoring the spirit of conservatism to Britain. We cannot stand idly by while our national history is torn asunder by nihilists. Such a loss is too great to bear thinking about. With perserverance, solidarity, and focus, we true conservatives will succeed in our aims to restore Britain to its former greatness. The spirit of conservatism is, day by day, being revived and distilled into an actionable political philosophy by a growing force of conservative intellectuals and activists. We stand on the precipice of great change, and we all hold the power to avert this destructive course, and chart a new one aimed at a better future.
Singula, Familia, Communitas, ac Patria.