Conservatives are the real progressives

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Because they base their actions on learning from the past, and doing so is what gave us modernism. What gave us the enlightenment, what gave us the industrial revolution and the huge gains in material and health prosperity in the world over the last four hundred years. That’s what makes conservatives progressive. 

Historian David Starkey tells us the reasons why. 

Along the way, quoting Chaucer: 

For out of old fields, as men saith, cometh all this new corn from year to year; 

and out of old books in good faith, cometh this new science that men can learn 

Consider G.K. Chesterton’s Fence, an argument against hasty abolition of laws, institutions, or customs. A person comes across a fence in the middle of a field. If he’s progressive he doesn’t know why the fence is there, and so tears it down. If he's conservative he also doesn’t know why the fence is there, but thinks that perhaps someone else has put it there for a reason and so leaves it alone. We’re currently infested by people who don’t know why the fence is there, but don’t care to wonder why, and so they tear it down. With no agreement from others who think that perhaps we ought think about it a bit more. 

We are facing a very real threat to our western civilisation. Both from inside, in the case of the Woke new-Marxists, and from outside in the case of Islam. 

Brendan O’Neill was saying something similar in Australia recently. He, like the goat Thomas Sowell is an ex Marxist. In Brendan’s case “mugged by reality”; in Sowelll's’ case changed his mind “due to facts”. I’m something similar. Not that I was ever Marxist. But I was something of a squishy socialist in my uni days. Then was mugged by the reality of Marxist China in 1976. A poor, corrupt and polluting society. 

Starkey recommends a dose of Friderich Hayak to set one straight. 

And in the end, around here, takes of what Britain has given the world, of “historical transcendence” and quotes T.S.Eliot from the “Little Gidding” from the Four Quartets:

We hear the feet that walked before

the rustle of the clothes that have moved here before

The echo of the ideas and of the hopes 

and the fears and the achievements.