Conservative Cabal

Jangle, wrangle, squabble, and quarrel

- Grenville Kleiser, from his list of “impressive phrases” in Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases

No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.

- John Ruskin

A note of caution from The Founding Father,

(The Spirit of Party), unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

- George Washington, The Farewell Address

Since we missed Friday, and apropos of Katy’s comments on the “Stimulus Package”…

It is useless for the few remaining followers of Herbert Spencer to discuss whether the English, in entering Socialism, will sell themselves into slavery.  They are already in the slavery: but they have not sold themselves into it.  For they have not got any money for it, nor even the promise of any.  It is vain for Individualist orators to adjure the people not to lose their birthright for a mess of pottage.  Their birthright is lost; it is the mess of pottage that cannot be found.  It is almost the only kind of mess that we have not managed to produce.

- G.K. Chesterton, The Intrusions of Officialdom

Katy’s turn for QOTD (but stolen from a Mark Steyn article in NR):

“Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return”

Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

For this, know you that I would

Make my poem, as I would make myself,

From all the best things, of all good men

And great men that go before me.

Yet above all be myself.

- Ezra Pound, from Capilupis

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.

- William Blake

Socialism in Nihilistic… A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.

- Camus, from The Rebel.

And steals unabashedly from Little Green Footballs:

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

— Thomas Pynchon

I like that one.  There might be a more original one later, and QOTD will return in earnest next week, M-F.

Bonus Carlyle!

What then is this Thing, called La Révolution, which, like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins?  La Révolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing no where to be laid hands on, to be clapped under lock and key: where is it?  what is it?  It is the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men.  In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.  Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality.

The quotes are meant to illustrate certain ideas, observations, and even emotions which are part and parcel to Conservatism.

Let’s look at the most recent example (just below).  Carlyle’s wonderful book on the French Revolution has one great theme; the world we live in, this civilized world of ours, is a very thin shell enclosing all the unholy terrors which man has ever devised.  Man freed of the fetters of “society” or Civilization is not the noble savage of Rousseau, he is merely savage.  This sense of the contingency of this civilized world, it’s very palpable fragility, is one of the things which informs the Conservative heart and mind.

Carlyle was horrified by what he learned of Revolutionary France.  Not just the literal tanning of human hides, but the simple disintegration of sensibility.  When one thinks of efficient evil, one is immediately drawn to tales of Hitler’s Third Reich where the machinery of the modern world was turned to the task of human extermination.  But the French beat him to it by a hundred and fifty years.  They would tie people to barges and then sink the barges, allowing them to kill many people at once.  The guillotine was invented to be a more merciful form of execution, but it was adopted because the executioner could work more quickly and for longer periods of time.  Rationalism freed from civilized morals does not protect us from our inner demons, quite often it amplifies them.

Understanding that what we call Civilization is very valuable, and very fragile is one of the core tenets of Conservatism, and that is what Carlyle’s quote is meant to illuminate.

The other quotes highlight other aspects, and I hope to add to them as time goes on.  And that is what the heck is with these things.