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FeaturesJanuary 2008 Conservatism & the morality of impulse On the challenges of responding to modernist morality. Conservatism is a form of political wisdom that consists in thinking that the present can best be understood through what the past reveals. It is a way of “accessing” political reality, often obscured beneath confusing talk, the chatter and “noise” of the moment. That is why the historian Maurice Cowling thought that conservatism was a kind of historical method, a discovery procedure. Conventional academics may find this view absurd. How can a practical, value-laden idea like conservatism play an explanatory role? The answer is that it can help us avoid falling into at least some illusions. I propose to follow this thought in asking: What is the reality of early twenty-first-century Anglophone life? I take my bearing from the last decade of the nineteenth century—from Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, or perhaps in American terms from the Spanish-American War of 1899. Queen Victoria and Teddy Roo ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 January 2008, on page 8 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Conservatism---the-morality-of-impulse-3730
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