The best things are not the things we buy, but those we inherit. In what Burke calls the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” I am struck again by the superb phrase he uses to summon up the nobility and beauty that characterize inheritance: “the unbought grace of life”… In the junior Humanities class this [...]
The ancient rhetoricians, who knew their business, taught that the way to begin a speech, the more so a breakfast talk, was with what they called a captatio benevolentiae, a “capturing of goodwill.” I’ll try that on you—I’ll try to snaffle your benevolence by claiming that we are likely to have this in common: a [...]
As Edmund Burke continued his ferociously intellectual and spiritual attack on the French Revolutionaries in the earliest and least violent days of the Revolution, he noted critically that no one could ever attain or realize the virtues without struggle. […]
Unanalyzed Responses Anxiety and deep insecurity are the characteristic responses evoked by the crisis in tradition. To experience them, it is not necessary for a people to be actively aware of what is happening to it. The process of erosion need only undermine the tradition and a series of consequences begin unfolding within the individual, while [...]
Civilization itself—tradition—falls out of existence when the human spirit itself becomes confused. Civilization is what man has made of himself. Its massive contours are rooted in the simple need of man, since he is always incomplete, to complete himself. The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened [...]
I have recently been hearing a great deal about “the tiny house movement.” Trailers for yuppies did not seem like such a big deal to me at first. But the justifications many in this movement have been making for their lifestyle choice have reminded me of some fundamental changes taking place in Americans’ priorities—changes I [...]
The patrimony of a civilization can be lost at the very moment of that civilization’s material triumph. In any culture worthy of the name, men must be something better than the flies of a summer; generation must link with generation. Some men among us are doing whatever is in their power to preserve and reinvigorate [...]
In a recent essay I noted that tradition is not self-contained or absolute. It’s complex, so that superior, subordinate, and parallel traditions often come into conflict. Local tradition may say one thing, Church or national tradition quite another. Also, tradition is not about itself but about goods toward which it’s oriented, so it’s relative to something higher, [...]
We spoke of much else besides [our business of the day]: of friends and mentors and the tumors of both—their fortunes and misfortunes, their origins and our own; of illustrative stories, many of them drawn from outside the narrow confines of the academy; of adversaries ancient and modern; of our delight in the progress of [...]
One of the reasons I sometimes wax nostalgic for the Middles Ages is for the religious spectacle. This was an age of the dramatic gesture: St. Francis standing barefoot in the snow or the penitent Henry IV crossing the Alps barefoot while wearing a hair shirt. It is the age of the passion and mystery [...]
Nowhere is the concern with the problem of community in Western society more intense than with respect to the family. The contemporary family, as countless books, articles, college courses, and marital clinics make plain, has become an obsessive problem. The family inspires a curious dualism of thought. We tend to regard it uneasily as a final manifestation of tribal society, [...]
An avowed socialist is running for the presidential nomination of one of the two dominant political parties. Same-sex marriage has been proclaimed the law of the land. Levels of church attendance and religious belief have dropped significantly. And political correctness has run amok on campus, on the net, and in the entertainment industry. One could [...]
In his novel Coningsby, the great British Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli noted that the first thing a conservative must ask himself is what it is he means to conserve. Observing many of the men and women in our current political arena who call themselves “conservative,” it is not clear to what sort of political philosophy [...]
American conservatives, when they have felt the need to establish their lineage, have accepted the rather conventional framework of liberalism-conservatism, already existing in American historiography and popular lore. But one possible tradition of American conservatism is the Jeffersonian tradition. As a movement of thought, the resurgent conservatism of twentieth century America cannot achieve maturity without [...]