On Conservatism

The terms 'right' and 'left' emerged out of the French Revolution. Those who defended the traditions and customs of Old France sat on the right side of the National Assembly; the liberal revolutionaries sat on the left. Political and cultural thinkers who opposed the extremism of the Enlightenment project - men like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre - came to be called conservatives.

The true right-wing 'extremist' is not an extremist at all. Conservatism is about ordered charity, not violence or ideological neatness. The man furthest to the right loves his family, community, country, and God in ways that contradict the selfish individualism of our age. 

Conservatism recognizes that a healthy society contains a natural hierarchy of institutions - ordered, complementary, and oriented to the common good of a common people.

The conservative is a classical realist (think Plato and Aristotle). We affirm the reality of transcendent, unchanging universals that exist independently of the human mind... Conservatism is the politics of the real. It does not project an abstraction onto a people; it receives an inheritance, judges it by reason and experience, and reforms prudently where reform is truly needed.

• Forms like 'dogness' or 'humanness' are not inventions of language but real structures that make particulars intelligible. Realism matters for politics because it gives us the first principles that make reasoning possible. As Thomas Aquinas (following Aristotle) recognized, law is an ordinance of reason ordered to the common good.
• If things possess real, intelligible natures, then by reason we can discern what they are for; that teleology is what the tradition calls natural law.
• Form and meaning are embedded in the world and invite our recognition. Once you deny that, power steps in; if meaning is merely made, then the strongest maker wins. Inpractice, such logic drifts toward totalitarianism: the forcible imposition of a theory onto public life, the attempt to make the world fit an abstract scheme (think of the "-isms" that ravaged nations in the twentieth century).

The conservative recognizes the inherent authority of tradition. 

• Tradition is the storehouse of wisdom and beauty transmitted across generations.
• We reject the rationalist dogma that endless deconstruction is required for human flourishing. Stable societies hand down tested moral and aesthetic judgments.
• Tradition is not infallible, but it is authoritative. If we seek to change a custom, we must first know why it arose and what good it was meant to secure (Chesterton's Fence). If, after understanding its purpose, we judge it contrary to edification, reform is justifiable. Reason stands above tradition as a standard.
• Cultures that sever themselves from tradition do not become more rational; they become forgetful and therefore gullible.

The social continuity needed to carry wisdom forward requires institutions.

• Institutions are a people's traditions made visible and durable.
• A functioning social order includes three natural societies: the household, the local community, an the complete community (the nation). Alongside these we find three enduring orders with distinct ends - domestic, civil, and religious. 
• The household cultivates virtue at the personal level, the polity secures peace and justice at the civic level, and the Church orders all to their ultimate end in heaven.
• When we fix our minds on what is good, true, and beautiful in the world as it really is, our work takes on its proper scale: our laws become more just, our homes more humane, our arts more luminous, and our politics more modest - because all of them finally point beyond themselves to their fulfillment.