Why ‘conservative’ isn’t enough.

“Perhaps your favorite Substack essayist,” Calum Darroch writes, “is not being entirely serious when he suggests you can live like a Roman patrician, but you certainly wouldn’t know it.” As Darroch lays out in this excellent article from Islander VI, many on the ‘right’ look to history and to the past to be not just a model but a destination. They look at their favored time- Rome, say, or Puritan New England- and imagine transplanting vast swathes of its social order, its remembered virtues, and its attitudes into the modern day. But that just doesn’t work; as Darroach points out, the world is different now.

(This is article II in the series reviewing-answering Islander VI, but article I will be posted later, on Creational Story.)

For just this reason I often find myself flinching from the term ‘conservative.’ I love my heritage as an American (and thus my heritage as an Englishman, though I am not myself English), but I repudiate mere conservation, mere return. More, I know that return is futile, worthless, and counterproductive.

Darroch writes briefly of return-fantasies that, “The problem is that the social conditions that allowed these manifest forms their full expression no longer exist. As such, any view which draws similarities between us and them is delusional…. We must, above all else, be realistic.” Darroch here is not making the main point of his article (I’ll turn more that direction in the next article in this series). He brings up this point to highlight that these historical returns, predicated on and resulting in the placement of their imaginer at the fulcrum of society, are not realistic to the state of Western man. The peripheral, outcast nature of the Western man, when he does not submit to unmanning, is the dissimilarity he perceives, the denial of which is delusion. Nevertheless, he brushes against a reality all effective work must accept: there is no going back.

You can go There and Back Again, but you will be different, with a thirst for mountains and less furniture; you can try to return, but the world you return to will not be quite what you left. But such is merely on an individual scale, mitigated by heroism which refuses the shedding of virtues. Our case in the West is even farther divorced from the past, rightly and wrongly.

For, first of all, we must divest ourselves of nostalgia and all lies. National legends are proper and salubrious, but they must stand alongside the truth. Our heritage is entirely imperfect wherever it is human, excepting only the Divine hand upon and in it. Even the best parts of the past are riddled with sin. The Constitution is imperfect; Puritan New England was a major part of the American slave trade; the 1950s were rife with heresy and rot.

Moreover, the evils of the past are not unrelated to the evils of the present. History develops forward; the evils of today grew up by exploiting the flaws of the past. The shape of our legal system’s depravity is determined in large part by the need to crack open the Constitution’s weak-points, create them where necessary, and turn the whole affair on its head. Pagan philosophies develop by observing and exploiting the broken parts of their predecessors, using the energy of that destruction (and a measure of virtue’s vigor stolen from God’s reality) to become dominant. Then in turn the next philosophy (religion, ethic) finds the new hegemon’s weaknesses, exploits them, and degrades further. The result is that today’s vices are shaped by their history to exploit the vices of the past; if we return to the past, we simply prepare ripe grounds for the same problems we’re dealing with right now. In all probability, they’ll come back worse (Matt. 12:45).

Second, we must recognize that the world we live in is not the world they lived in. Technology and circumstance differs. We have different people and different mores. These cannot be erased; they can be changed, but they will leave a mark. More, because today’s vices are designed to exploit the flaws of the past, simply trying to turn back the clock on people’s hearts will be at best temporary- and pervasive heart-change is the only way to institute even the convincing facsimile of a back-turn.

And, once again, the world we live in today is not just different from the past; it is the result of the past. We were in the past once, and we developed today as a response to the past. Go back to the past, and you’ll find today still looming, answering all the past’s flaws. Revive 1950s liberalism or 1800s progressivism or 1600s statism, and you’ll just be sitting down at the top of the mudslide again, ready to rush down, even faster now that the first century or three has been surveyed in advance.

The answer, therefore, is not to just turn the clock back. That attempt is, as Darroch recognizes, delusion. The past has been slain by the present; its vices have been used to destroy its virtues. We must take a different path.

History is our foundation, but it is not our end. We should seek in history counsel and example, but we should compare it always to our perfect model, given in Scripture. What is good (and still usable) in history we should revive or remake, but every flaw must be discarded ruthlessly. We should not merely conserve; we must build new, with greater care and rectitude. We may not make again the mistakes of the past; our work, instead, must be to use the past as aid to the complete sanctification of our society, using the only standard without flaw, without weakness: the law of God.

God bless.