“Lying behind every choice we make is a choice between ourselves and God, and we should be possessed by a holy fear of choosing aright.”

Few would contest that to be a conservative is to defend some body of ideas and convictions handed down from the past. From Edmund Burke’s protests against the barbarity of the French Revolution through Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, the most celebrated conservative affirmations have sought to make intelligible and attractive the virtue of piety and the fundamental stance of gratitude towards our forefathers. Indeed, should the conservative movement stand in need of a motto, it might do well to choose St. Paul’s admonition Depositum custodi, “guard what has been entrusted to you.” (I Timothy 6:20) It is, however, also true that to be a conservative today is a more difficult task than it was two centuries ago. Burke and his contemporaries, after all, were able to defend a civilization that they knew from personal experience and had received, at least partially intact, from their own fathers. Like them, a conservative today seeks to protect and to hand on a store of wisdom from the past, but unlike them, he must choose between two very different legacies. The reason is that in the intervening two centuries the Enlightenment has effectively displaced traditional culture and has itself become the soil in which our minds grow. As in any age, we have inherited our customs, laws, and institutions, but ours were born of the Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century revolutions. One may today, therefore, be a conservative in one of two very different ways: by defending as traditional the legacy of a century that rebelled against tradition, or by criticizing our inherited culture from the standpoint of an older tradition. Both kinds of conservative must face the charge of being self-contradictory in their very principle, and so the choice is not an enviable one. I believe, however, that the choice must be made, and that the more true conservative is the one who takes his stand against the Century of Lights and in defense of the wisdom of the ancients.

Why are so few conservatives convinced that we must choose between two opposing inheritances from the past? I think in large part it is because we are not often enough moved to think about the past, because the love of novelty has a stronger hold upon us than we are ready to admit. Our culture is the product of the Enlightenment’s quest for autonomy. The philosophes sought and planned for a world in which individuals could exercise their choices as broadly and freely as possible. That world has to a great extent been created. We are now free to seek the delight of our senses, to fulfill the desires of our passions, to be always seeing and tasting something new. It is this temptation to love the new that threatens the very identity of a conservative. How can one cultivate a love for the permanent things and at the same time be eager to keep abreast of the latest posting on a favorite blog? A candid assessment of the changing voice of the conservative movement will certainly bear out that we conservatives are today younger, more conscious of passing fashions, more apt to be cynical, less grave, less learned, and less immersed in the past than we were a generation ago, when Kirk’s living voice was heard. The fault must not, however, be laid at the door of our public figures alone; we ourselves have accepted them as leaders and are little different from them in our personal lives. Indeed, the fault lies deep in human nature: our wounded souls seek new things as distractions and are easily content with mere shadows if they be in some small way gratifying to us.

Curiosity, moreover, is not the only vice inculcated by our media culture. T.S. Eliot warned over seventy years ago that “paganism holds all the most valuable advertising space.” Since then, the grip of Madison Avenue and of Hollywood upon our souls has tightened all the more. A few taps of the index finger are all that stand between us and the immediate gratification of our desires, however base or banal. But the more unrestrained our passions, the less free our choices really are. And when our very habits incline to excess we are no longer able to perceive where the mean of virtue actually lies. Here are the fetters with which we have been bound by the Enlightenment’s version of freedom. Are we doomed to be forever satisfying our shallow desires and distracting ourselves from what really matters? Not if we begin the quest for wisdom with a salutary fear of the Lord.

To identify fear as the origin of right conservative thinking may seem paradoxical or perverse. Yet there is a salutary kind of fear that begins with the realization that through our own choices we have come to deserve punishment. It so often happens that we incur the punishment before we realize that we have deserved it. Perhaps a conservative is, at first, merely one who has suffered some punishment and has then come to recognize his own guilty choice as its source: an erring word of disrespect towards a father, spoken in anger, that creates coldness where there should be love; a quarrel giving rise to hatred and bitterness where once there was friendly affection; an act of lust that pollutes the waters of a budding relationship and replaces innocence with shame; a lie, told from spite, then spread abroad by malice, that begets harm. Deeds such as these are the causes of our suffering. If, at first, we fear them only for their consequences, it is enough. For to own that we deserve the suffering we have brought upon ourselves is the first step towards redirecting our choices towards the good. We have been badly damaged by our own choices, but we are kept from acknowledging the wounds they have caused by the distractions with which we choose to surround ourselves. The first step towards health, plainly, is to admit that we are not well and that we fear to become worse.

From the fear of rightly-deserved punishment grows in time the fear that a child feels towards his Father, the fear of displeasing the Author of our being. As the first painful steps of self-command are taken, and the distractions of the world set aside in favor of the sweet teachings of wisdom, the soul begins to question its own choices. It is as if we were reading a letter written by an all-knowing spectator that lays bare our motives for acting. “Until that moment,” the soul says, “I never knew myself.” We have been beguiled and tricked by our common culture into thinking that our enemies are outside ourselves. There is always another warring people to pacify, another kind of animal to save, another disease to cure, another prejudice to overturn. The conservative, however, has learned to confess with Racine: “My God, what a cruel war. / I find two men within me.” The real battlefield does not lie outside us. Every single act of our will belongs to one or to the other city, to the heavenly or to the earthly, to “the love of God even unto the contempt of self,” or to “the love of self even unto the contempt of God.” Lying behind every single choice we make is a choice between ourselves and God, and we should be possessed by a holy fear of choosing aright.