Hooray! Maximos posted again!
Faithful readers will recall Maximos, and all others ought to know that I have dibs. Because this stuff rocks:
Whither, therefore, conservatism? Shall conservatism be reduced, theoretically and pragmatically, to a ratification of the ceaseless flux of creative destruction, as if to asseverate that the burning question of political life is abstention from interference with the coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of contingent economic relations, all within the context of an economic process or state of becoming that is ever new, yet ever the same - the eternal return of the same? Shall conservatism be nothing more than the idea that conservation is merely the letting be of the eternal revolution of our modes of being in the world? - nothing more than the preservation of the rights of the innovator, revolutionary, and progressive to deny us the fixities by which we locate ourselves in the world? That for the sake of mammon, we will sacrifice all?
If so, let us confess manfully that conservatism is nothing more than another doctrine of interests, that it does not concern the preservation of a precious legacy, the stewardship of a heritage of inestimable value - because it is ours - but that it is naught but a vehicle of arbitrary self assertion: now for the particular and traditional, because this suits us presently, now again for the revolutionary, because this enriches us and gratifies us. There would be some consolation in consistency: at least Diogenes was a fool. As for the inconstant and lukewarm, they will, as we have on good authority, be spewed out and forgotten, as are all temporizers and would-be conciliators of the implacable.
I might agree with some of this. I might also not. I might also wonder if Maximos would not have made a good foe for The Tick, as they seem to employ similar rhetorical strategies. Destiny's powerful hand has made the bed of my future, you know.
Manfully. Of course.
