Our Mission
posted by robert - June 21st, 2007 at 11:58 PMSuccinctly summarized by T.S. Eliot:
The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.
More excellent reading over at Novae Militiae, wherein I discovered this Eliot quote.
Another link from that site led me to a late 2006 post at Sobran’s, Hijacking the Conservative Movement. Find an excellent excerpt from this piece summarizing the difference between conservatives and liberals after the jump.
Conservatives tend to believe in Original Sin, or something like it, This is the lead article to the November 2006 issue, Hijacking the Conservative Movement — Read Joe’s columns the day he writes them.that will forever prevent man from achieving perfection. This attitude produces a disposition that tends to be both skeptical and tolerant, deeply dubious about overhauling society. Societies and traditions can’t be built from scratch; as Burke said, we must build out of existing materials — that is, real human beings and their habits, rooted in history.
Hijacking conservative movementLiberals, on the other hand, speak freely of “ideals,” imagined perfections that we can achieve if only we have the will. “I have a dream,” as Martin Luther King said. Hence liberals typically talk of abolishing evils — “eliminating poverty,” “eradicating racism,” “doing away with prejudice,” “ending exploitation,” and so forth. This usually means strenuous government action, massive coercion and bureaucracy, because these things don’t just evaporate of themselves.
Hijacking conservative movementConservatives don’t speak much of “ideals.” They think, more modestly, in terms of norms, which are never perfectly realized, but only approximated by sinful man. Consider homosexuality. Whereas the liberal wants to impose “gay rights,” by law and coercion, the conservative sees homosexuality as a defect, which to some extent can and must be tolerated, because it can’t be “eradicated,” but it can’t rationally be exalted to the plane of normality; and he knows that all talk of “same-sex marriage” is nonsense, like trying to breed calves from a pair of bulls. But to the liberal, the only issue is equal rights; human nature and normality have nothing to say to him. What the conservative sees as life’s mysteries, the liberal sees as mere irrationality.
Hijacking conservative movementOne word is notably absent from the liberal vocabulary: enough. For the liberal, there is hardly such a thing as “too much” government. There is no point at which liberals say, “Well, we’ve done it. We’ve realized our dreams. We have all the government we need, and we should stop now.” No, they always want more government. There is no such thing as enough government.
Hijacking conservative movementAgain, Chesterton sums up liberalism in a phrase: “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” We see this again in the grisly business of abortion. To the typical conservative it is an ugly thing, something that may not be entirely “eliminated” but must be contained, condemned, and above all must never be accepted as normal. But to the typical liberal it is a right — even “a fundamental human and constitutional right”!