![]() To put it more severely: culture becomes an object of conservation only when it has already been lost.” For its practitioners it would have meant nothing to preserve their way of life as an idea, rather than as the reality of their being in the world. Lawrence in celebrating the close-knit cohesion of the old mining communities in Sons and Lovers? But then, to whom will such works of art be addressed? Necessarily, to those who have become conscious of the old way of life as something lost, something that can be preserved only in this aesthetic form. Should we then appeal to the state to subsidise a dying lifestyle, establishing wildlife parks like those in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which the agrarian way of life stumbles on, unconscious of the world that lies beyond its sensitively policed perimeter? Or should we devote ourselves, instead, to the idea of the thing that we are bound to lose, keeping it alive in art, as did Strauss and von Hofmannsthal in perpetuating the sugar-coated seductiveness of the aristocratic life in Der Rosenkavalier, or D. But the way of life itself could not be so easily protected. The memory of that way of life could be preserved, and its spiritual meaning enshrined in works of art. “Cultural conservatism originated in the experience of a way of life that was under threat or disappearing. ![]() To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have far-reaching influence over human affairs but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.” As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. “It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Hence Burke described them as 'prejudices', and defended them on the grounds that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril.”Ĭonservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, far less justify them. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. We are discussing *answers* that have been discovered to enduring *questions*. Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. ![]() or Burke, traditions and customs distil information about the indefinitely many strangers living *then*, information that we need if we are to accommodate our conduct to the needs of absent generations. ![]() Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next. Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Like those cognitive abilities that pre-date civilisation they are *adaptations*, but adaptations of the community rather than of the individual organism. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, and the inherited solutions to problems that we all encounter. “Social traditions, Burke pointed out, are forms of knowledge.
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