A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things VI: The Workshop

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

This Proposal has thus far argued for an alternative vision of many areas of our life together – the homes we live in, the voluntary society we create, how we educate people at different stages of life – but the chief activity of many people has scarcely been covered. I mean, of course, “remunerative work”. Childrearing is a true remuneration, of course – training carers for our senescence is a form of pension plan! Education can have a vocational purpose. But ultimately, every household must find money and resource one way or the other.
 
There is virtue in graft. Setting oneself to a task – even a menial one – is a form of self-cultivation, ordering the soul to detail and diligence and creation. This is as true for menial tasks, indeed, as for more elevated ones. Street cleaners actively beautify the world by picking up litter – can actuaries confidently state that they do better?
 
Yet employment is so often a degrading, insecure, dislocating task. Commute for 90 minutes to a job in London where your boss constantly criticises you; drive an hour to a school for a supply job for months on end, without any promise of a permanent contract; have key staff removed from the work you manage with no warning or apology; work in a shop for minimum wage and ever-increasing demands upon your emotions and ability. The main constituent of many of our lives is toil, a Sisyphean four or five decades of boulder-pushing.
 
We normalize this. We say everyone is in the same situation; perhaps we see few who manage to escape Boulder Pushing PLC, and look on with either envy or admiration, hoping perhaps to do the same one day. We may go so far as to read books or listen to podcasts on escaping the ratrace. But most of us are systemically trapped. If you are in your thirties with kids, and you provide for them, you can’t just let the boulder roll down the hill whilst you take a few years out to work out your business plan. Hades pays only he who pushes.
 
There has always been toil, ever since the Garden. This is a fallen and constrained world, and we can only work within the parameters set by external forces. Yet this does not mean there are not better and worse situations. This does not mean it is much the same if you are a Sicilian mine slave in the 1^st century AD, or an accountant or builder’s mate in 21^st century Britain. Now, the Sicilian slave may, by the cultivation of virtue and gratitude, be a happier person – but that does not render his circumstances themselves happier or more noble.
 
In the slow building of our Citadel, what may we do to render work more dignifying and purposive? The greatest question – how we as a culture redeem workers from dry, mechanical role-functionalism where they act as fungible units, how we invest economic production on the grand scale with beauty and dignity – can partly only be answered in retrospect, in the far future, after a long and slow period of organic social coordination. The answers begin to be found, however, in the little we can attempt ourselves.
 
We must each build a sort of Workshop, a realm of dignified labour, which offers a space where transcendent purpose – the creation of beauty, focus on structure and detail, communication of meaning – can be followed and nurtured.
 
There are two contexts in which we may build a little Workshop of our own, and two species of “product” that Workshop may produce. The contexts are the “public” and the “private”, for-profit or not; the two species are solo and collaborative. It must be admitted here that – though income diversification is wise, because it improves resilience – most of us will be unable to go into business for ourselves, especially on any labour of love. Gone are the Roman Cardinals of the Baroque, gone are the eccentric Marchionesses funding their cicles, gone are the self-educating workers’ circles. We will see their rise again, in some new form – the gyres of history are inevitable, if sometimes delayed – but in this era, we must accept that we are largely limited to the realm of leisure, or the small-scale “pocket money” sidework.
 
Well, a thriving business would be valuable, and a business of virtue beautifies the public square, but our little projects now lay foundations for those greater edifices in the future. There is great value to hard work and beauty filling our leisure, or constituting our moonlit employment. So what might we do?
 
Alone, we are free to pursue our inclinations. We may have little enough space – perhaps a room desk, or a cold garage bench, or even just our beat-up old laptop – but a world cam be constructed therein. Set the light just so – start the ambient mix, drown out the noise from the house – imagine yourself stepping across the threshold of some medieval guild workshop where fine tapestries were woven, before being sent to kings; or imagine yourself corresponding with the eccentric pioneer-protectors of the Permanent Things, writing to Aelred or Federigo de Montefeltro or Eliot or that redoubtable old bush stump Les Murray. In this insignificant private Workshop, you surrender yourself to the stream of history and do insignificant works – all to a great significant purpose.
 
Who would have imagined that some great purpose lurked behind gluing plastic plane models together, or crocheting little hats for your friends’ babies, or illustrating cards to sell on some tiny scale? Indeed – can we imagine, briefly, that enchantment and deeper realities lie behind household chores? This is not really the essay for that point – and yet what an ordering and enlivening thing is washing dishes and clearing worktops! To defy the ever-gnawing chaos in the soul and the polis by stacking the dishes neatly in the oikos is the silently heroic act of the questor for the Permanent Things.
 
Orwell observed that eccentric little hobbies were the essence of the English delight in privacy – and it is possible to build a monastery in the heart through trivial and silly hobbies, committed to earnestly. As the polystyrene cement drips on to the wing, as the eccentric recipe goes in to the oven to bake, a sort of Matins is sung: “Yes, I cannot solve the world’s problems, or even my own – but life is gratitude, and I give it to God; and today I will build, not destroy.” The atheist does it against his own will, but the song is all the louder for that!
 
There is, I suggest, a need to actively set aside space and time for matters of no economic import, of no easy entertainment value, of no obvious, immediate social utility – to mend and sand and glue and sew and bake, to gain skills, to craft and transform rude matter into something better.
 
This can be shared, too! The private Workshop cultivates the individual soul in its creative and industrive facets; the shared Workshop, even (especially?) in hobby situations, models the human community. Is there anything more hope-inducing, when honestly considered, than a group of peculiar middle-aged men coming together to build a model railway display? (Especially if they can somehow get their wives involved!) You despair about the Middle East; I reply, without a hint of flippancy, that if lonely children can be accepted into wargames clubs (as I was), or if AmDram types can conquer their own neuroses and egotisms to create something of real value together, then we have a sliver of temporal hope. There’ll be no peace this side of the grave, but if we cooperate on building things together when no outside force compels us – and if we choose to learn the attendant lessons! – then we may be the kind of people who can be better neighbours, sharing resources more equitably, living more sustainably.
 
How many difficult people – like me, like you – learn social rules first or best when co-operating on some shared envisioned project? Schoolrooms of our usual type often perform this task poorly – the lack of native willingness on the part of many of the children means they may learn obedience to Teacher or to the loudest child, but rarely joyful mutual submission. Only when something worthwhile is in view can the truest expressions of co-operation appear – whether men seeking to survive together and conquer in battle, or three little children attempting, with faltering beauty, to sing a hymn together whilst they dance on the grass.
 
Of course these corporate efforts are flawed, and full of ego and misunderstanding and small-scale but utter heartbreak. The whole Creation groans, for now. Yet we want to build a Citadel around which the roiling mass of post-society might gather, and which might provide shelter to the rising generations. Perfection is not the objective – civilising means, virtuous modes, are what we seek. On that basis, voluntary co-operation in frivolous beauties must be one of the best uses of our time imaginable.
 
One can imagine how this all might happen, in the fragmentary Shadow Society we seek to build, flowing out of the Schoolrooms and ramshackle New Colleges, returning always to the Home. You can see the man in his shed with his lathe, turning tiny legs for doll-chairs. Next door, sitting in the garden, the violinist hosts her quartet, and they struggle with some new, transporting piece. Their friends from church build battlefields from foam and PVA glue – worlds for little Hanoverians and French to march over, history entering the present and casting its companionable shadow over proceedings through a silly shared love. One lady takes up tatting, lacework, with peculiar tools straight out of a textiles museum display! There are special books; there are clubs; there are codes. Perhaps someone, somewhere, even makes some sustenance out of their eccentric waste of time!
 
The models end up in the bin, and the doll’s chair is burned. The violin is stolen and broken. The lacework moulders. Everything goes down to dust – but the products of the Workshops we must build are not built to last forever; they are built to last, to last long; but they do not steal fire from the gods. They are built well to proclaim the awful givenness of life, the deep design we discern behind the clouds of chaos – even if we fear we are deluded, that chaos is truly all there is! Do children bang pots and pans in a mock brass band to set posterity to terror? No, they do it for joy, and to proclaim that friendship and fun and perhaps even nascent harmony exist, and are worth the effort. The Workshop is where our means of living come from – but in the Citadel of the Permanent Things, those means of living ought to come accompanied with gratitude, pleasure, and community. Such Workshops are what we ought to begin to build now.

The Truth in Paradox

 “One may not like [aristocratic] courts (I don’t much like them myself), but at a certain stage it is only in a court that a man may do something extravagant for its own sake, because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And it is sometimes through such wilful, superfluous actions of individuals that men discover their powers.”
 
That is Lord Clark, reflecting on the relative social narrowness of the early Italian Renaissance. The parenthesis does not appear at all in his script. It’s very much an aside. Yet there is something here of vital importance to understanding – well, nearly everything, perhaps even He who goes beyond thingness.
 
It is that the ability to hold matters in tension, to embrace paradoxes without abandoning claims of objective truth, is central to being an integrated human being, to engaging with matters of truth, and to building worthwhile civilisations.
 
Paradox does not mean contradiction. A paradox is a demonstration of the limits of our understanding. To take a famous and simple example, “This sentence is false” is a paradox – because it creates an irresolvable conundrum. We cannot conclude the sentence is actually false, for that would mean it were true – but if it were true, it would be false, and so forth. Nor can we escape down the deconstructionist’s escape slide and declare that the sentence is possible because language is meaningless – because we are using language to understand the sentence, and to communicate to others that language is meaningless!
 
Paradox demonstrates constraint. It demonstrates the grandeur of reality – uncontainable, irreconcilable when drunk neat by mere humans. That is at the heart of Clark’s act of honesty – that one may resent hierarchy, but hierarchy, wealth, and even excess can all serve the human spirit. Clark’s aside was no pretence. He was a lifelong socialist of the old English breed, much more Morris than Mao. He was made a member of the House of Lords – and sat with the Labour peers. His contemporary political beliefs were egalitarian – and yet his artistic and civilisational beliefs were much more complex. Civilisation must be disseminated – but often originates with self-selecting elites. Social cooperation and obedience is necessary for the development and survival of civilisation, but individual Heroes (for Clark, this group included Bernard, Michaelangelo, Luther, Mozart, and Turner – amongst others) defy social expectations to push the whole body onwards, usually for a mixture of good and ill. No-one, to Clark, better represented harmony (that most social and humane grace) than Raphael, yet this very harmony ended up corrupting the civilisation it enriched, by its emphasis on the perfect human figure. Luther purged Europe of suffocating stasis and consuming cant, yet unleashed waves of sectarian violence.
 
Paradox is not simply a logical or mathematical category. It is really the only way in which we can grapple with the mystery of other humans – why does the Dark Lady smile one moment, and turn away the next? Why was Father so heroic, generous, wise – and yet cold? It is a sign of the times that these sound like banalities. Even the “Save The Statues” campaigns tend to defend controversial monuments on the basis that it was a different time, and preservation is a historical necessity – but really, what ought to be derided is the desire to simplify to “good” or “evil” a being so numinous and paradoxical as a human.
 
Orson Scott Card’s most famous character, Ender, ends up as the “Speaker for the Dead”, who speaks honestly at a funeral, as a sort of priest-eulogist. No false praise; no hysterical condemnation. Just an honest seeking of the mosaic truth of the other self, transfigured now by death into memory. This is the embrace of paradox.
 
Paradox is not, I repeat, a surrender of moral values. It is not an announcement that black is white (Now, have I outed myself as a racist? Is my statue to be toppled?). It is not a declaration that up may as well be down. An acceptance of paradox is, in truth, an acceptance of the opposite – that good and evil exist, and beauty and ugliness exist. What’s more, beauty and beauty exist, in the stern eccentricity of Virginia Woolf and the forlorn classicism of Greta Garbo (to take two examples, again, of Lord Clark’s). How to reconcile beauty to beauty? How to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem? More than a mere man might compass.
 
Yet every such pair of poles conceals some deeper synthesis, perhaps imaginable if never, in this life, attainable. Two converging roads – sometimes separated by waste tracts, sometimes made of quite different materials – but converging, ever converging, on a still point in the hazy distance of this turning world.
 
The great assaults on truth in our age do not come from the paradoxically honest, but the monologically deceitful. To declare that one’s body is not one’s truth – that one’s gender is up for construction – is not the embrace of paradox, but its denial and atomisation. The marvellous, sobering, heartbreaking relationships our body can have with our sense of self are tensions – but like the tautness of refined musculature (a fitting analogy). A form of tension here is to be preferred to slackness or ease. Embrace the body; embrace the soul; find synthesis somewhere beyond yourself, sometime beyond now.  Do not collapse the tension.
 
Love all men totally, yet love your close neighbours exceptionally, and your family exclusively. How is such a set of loves possible? Surely it is impossible – yet every truly benevolent man or woman has accomplished it, at least in part, in fits and starts. Somehow the most singular, irreplicable of loves – that erotic love that transcends itself in marriage – is a fitting partner on the village green to the love of country, and is completed (Somehow! Beyond its own immediate essence!) by the bearing and sharing of children, and for all its consuming fire can never destroy the need for the comradeship of men for men or women for women. Are not, in fact, men and women the ultimate embodied paradox? Why this difference, why this alien flesh? And yet – and yet!
 
The truth waits beyond ourselves, in the wood beyond the limit of our sight. Paradox is the path.

Small Apple Night School – Overview, Curriculum, and Sign-Up Details

This is a “technical” post, to summarise what I’m planning to do with the “Small Apple Night School” (see https://wallsofutica.blogspot.com/2020/10/proposal-for-citadel-of-permanent.html for more).

 

WHO WILL BE INTERESTED?: Do you want a space where philosophical conservatives can learn together? Where you can make up for a misspent youth by soaking in great literature, all whilst discussing it with like minds? Where the workload fits in to the boiling pot of daily life? Then this is for you.

 

WHEN IS IT STARTING?: Monday 30^th November 2020

 

HOW WILL IT WORK?: In a pod of six (including one facilitator – in the first tranche, this will be me), you will read 5 classic books or shorter works, or top-rate modern nonfiction, over the course of 6 months. You will then have the opportunity to discuss those works on a private Slack Channel, both in the text chat and, if desired, via voice chats.

 

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?: At this point, it’s 100% free!

 

HOW CAN I JOIN?: If we know each other already, even passingly (like being Twitter mutuals!), email me at owenedwards@hotmail.com or DM me on Twitter (@owenedwards), including your email, and I’ll add you to the slack channel. If we don’t know each other, either get someone I know to recommend you to me, or get in touch anyway and we'll have a chat.

WHAT'S THE FIRST SYLLABUS?:

• Plato, "Euthyphro"
• Shakespeare, “Richard II”
• Macaulay, “Horatius at the Bridge”
• Runciman, “Constantinople 1453”
• Kirk, “Politics of Prudence”

Letters from the Imperial Fringe #1: Would Biden or Trump be better for the UK?

To be an imperial subject is to ever look inwards to the centre. The Centre is like some Oriental despot, whose every gesture carries gnomic meaning – when the Padishah scratched his chin, did that mean we ought to invade the Gokturks? When he demanded more wine, was it a metaphor for the consuming cupidity of the aristocracy?

 

The Centre is also the most entertaining theatre of action – one can imagine the provincial Roman in Aquitanian Gaul hearing with delight distant reports of the latest acts of Claudius. The messenger to the Prefect rides into the city; the report is delivered; the news disseminates. There is finally something to talk about!

 

So it is when we in these rainy isles look toward America. Which Emperor shall we have next? Trump or Biden? What are their respective strengths and weaknesses? Of course, the Imperial citizen will occasionally sniff at the idea that they rule far beyond their shores, imposing their aims and mores upon others – but we provincials know better. Who over the age of 30 has not noticed the subsuming of our media consumption into the American machine? Who has not accepted the subordination of our foreign policy to theirs since 1956?

 

But at least we receive the Imperial news, and obsess about it.

 

Who will be better for the UK? Trump or Biden? Well, one person might say, Trump is more likely to support a post-Brexit UK; he is more likely to resist China, to our benefit. But the other person may say – you want this guy in charge of our foreign policy? And doesn’t he give as often to vile dictators as he resists them? Who else could imaginably praise Kim Jong Un on Twitter – not once, but often?

 

But the auxiliary, ultimately, can grumble about these matters, but ends up serving with the legions nonetheless. As a poet once said of a war between old Empires – one now conquered by America, one ruling continental Europe:

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

One may find Trump deeply distasteful; one may believe Biden is weak on foreign policy priorities. But no-one can, when thinking coolly and rationally, believe that either will greatly affect their imperial subjects. A little, perhaps; a fringe chance of more; but in all likelihood, the marginal impact involved will be irrelevant to most Britons.

 

Who will be better for the UK? Neither, probably.

 

* * * * *

 

The Australian or Canadian settler of the late 19^th century was a cultural evangelist – they represented the dynamo of world civilization, they had an intercontinental identity and destiny, they had unbounded sunlit horizons. They were, I suppose, a little like the American pioneers of the same period – yet more so. The American believed in his Manifest Destiny, no doubt – but the Australian represented the Rome of his day. The rallying of the white colonies to Britain’s side in the 2^nd Boer War and World War 1 was the affectionate and proper response of children to their mother’s call for aid. The rallying of Britain to America’s side in the Iraq War was not the same; it was that of a client to the imperious demand of a patron.

 

It’s strange living in a nation in clear decline, dependent on a Great Power to provide direction and meaning. Perhaps, rather, I should say two Great Powers – though the German-led bloc is not quite there, fractured as it is. Yet this explains much about the vote to leave the European Union. I do not mean there was some strange reflexive racist vote from nostalgics for Empire (this is an onanistic fantasy of liberal-left Britons, ever eager to justify their own imperial ambitions). I mean that the utter confusion of the “Brexit” vote, the empty rhetoric from each side, was the result of the Egotism of Small Stakes – no-one here has been used to thinking of great deeds for many decades now. The nation is halfway to a palliative coma; the drip is already on line; and the referendum vote was indicative of the opiatized confusion of the polis.

 

Of course, the unlikely result occurred: a decision was made to polish up the old armour and return to the list of nations. What strength remains? Well, we are finding out, not entirely to our comfort. But as I say, it is strange living in a nation such clear decline. Who is better for us, Trump or Biden? Which Venetian doge of the 15^th century was better for the Eastern Empire? Which British Prime Minister was better for those last Ottomans? As we languidly gaze upon our Twitter feeds and scan the ugly front pages of our decayed newspapers, as we argue about which of two decadent bureaucratic elites would better handle a plague as entrenched as the Japanese at Okinawa, we may well be in some Constantinoplan bathhouse in 1450 or 1850, wondering about the news from Bulgaria (really, someone should work out what’s really going on with those guys). We discuss it because it doesn’t matter. We obsess about it – about the referendum, about the US election – because it is easier than getting a leather apron on over our checkshirts and getting down to some kind of work.

 

* * * * *

 

Unless Joe Biden straps me on to the missile racks of an F-35B, or Donald Trump hold a plague rally in my town in Northern England, each is only going to nudge my prospects a little, for good or bad. Perhaps the cynically pro-life positioning of a 2^nd Term Trump will hearten the nascent pro-life movement in my country (that would be good, for the record; infanticide is bad). Perhaps a President Biden would encourage international co-operation over vaccines and screening tech (these are also good things).

 

But I am only obsessed with these commeddia puppet-men because they are like fireworks above a prison camp – distracting me from the muddy greyness around me. Their dancing and gyrating briefly draws my eyes from the plaguecart. One bops the other over the head – what fun! I could go to the local Abbey for guidance, but the Abbot has peasant-girls sent to his rooms; the harvest was taken by the condotta in pay (from our lord, eight mountains away); and so I turn back to the puppet-men.

 

Chasteningly, I know there is only one proper or decent reaction to Who will better for us? Trump or Biden. The only proper reaction of the Imperial subject is to turn away from the puppet-men, open a fairytale, and tell their sons and daughters about foul treacheries and high deeds, and the call to chivalrous life lain upon each one of us. Perhaps they will at least, when their day comes, preside over their own souls; and perhaps by that bless their neighbours; and then they will have a sensible answer to such questions. For me, I can only pray God for strength to leave the puppet-men behind and return to real life.

Two Types of Conservatism: PolCons and PhilCons

How are Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Ron Paul all defined as “conservatives”? In niche British terms, how are Dehenna Davison and Sir Edward Leigh in the same “Conservative and Unionist Party”? Of course any successful movement or party is a broad tent, coaxing together a coalition of overlapping interests. Yet there is something strange about the enormous elasticity of the word “conservative”. It is, marvellously, somehow more prone to stretching and warping than the word “socialism”, that most gymnastic of ideologies!

 

This is because the word “conservative” indicates a disposition – to conserve – rather than a single project – socialism. But are you in favour of conserving private liberties, or human life? That will determine what “conservatism” means for you regarding abortion. Are you in favour of conserving your nation’s constitutional heritage, or its modern governing institutions? The examples can be easily multiplied. Conservatives want to keep something valuable intact, preserve it, maybe even strengthen it – but that is prone to relativistic or historicist confusion, as different “conservatives” want to conserve contradictory institutions or values. This leads to conservatives particularly suffering from accusations of hypocrisy. Pertinently in recent times, it is asked: How can any conservative support a disruptive candidate or project – that doesn’t conserve the status quo!

 

Let me suggest, then, that we consciously divide “conservatives” into two groups. Not policy-preference groups, because we have made those divisions and seen them feed into the confusion about “conservatism”. If “classical liberalism”, “neoconservatism”, and “traditionalism” are just preference groups within conservatism, then conservatism is so broad a tent the light of the sun cannot pierce to the centre.

 

The two groups define specifically what the conservative involved wishes to conserve. These groups are: Political Conservatives (PolCons) and Philosophical Conservatives (PhilCons). These terms have the great benefit of meaning what they say.

 

The Political Conservative is precisely that – someone politically aligned with “conservative” groups or parties. Their conservation desires centre around the status quo: present political institutions, present social forms (marriage, for instance), economic stability. Of course this means the institutions the PolCon desires to conserve will differ by era and setting – the same fellow might morally abhor slavery in 1852 and abortion clinics in 2002, but seek to preserve their existence whilst mitigating their use. Someone might oppose joining the European Union in the 1960s, and oppose leaving it in 2016.

 

Now, the PolCon is open to Chesterton’s jibe that conservatives exist to conserve the ruins the progressives have left behind, but it must be said that understanding Political Conservatism this way allows these PolCons to present a coherent view. They prefer the devil they know, and generally oppose change (“Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?” as Salisbury apocryphally asked). The PolCon is the instinctive and inveterate supporter of the Permanent Bureaucracy (even if they believe in trimming bureaucracy!) and the stable Constitution – not out of any love for either, but for expedience.

 

The Philosophical Conservative (PhilCon) approaches matters from a different direction. The PhilCon is not, first and foremost, a conserver of what happens to be reified into the social and political order at any one time. The PhilCon desires to conserve and nourish good and healthy things, those quite real norms which govern the human experience through all ages. Where do these norms come from? Some PhilCons may be chary of giving an answer – they have a simple givenness and no further certainty can be had – but most will say: from God, or the Eternal, or the Numinous. They are the Permanent Things, in Eliot’s phrase (really popularised by Kirk): they are what makes existence “reasonable tolerable”, and which provides mankind with dignity and purpose. They do so reliably and universally, even when denied and effaced by popular trends, because they are rooted in Permanence, Eternity – Heaven. The PhilCon believes value and truth comes from outside transient human experience and opinion, and instead defines the human experience – in this sense, the PhilCon is ultimately the Realist to the PolCon Nominalist. The PhilCon will never reject a natural good simply because it is unpopular, or tolerate a natural evil because it is accepted. Nor will the PhilCon ever despair in the face of That Hideous Strength; there is always a sweet haven in the soul from the City of the World for the one who serves Permanence.

 

The PhilCon knows that societies are big ships, slow to turn, with hulls that need protecting from reefs – they will prefer caution and adaptation to destruction in hope of new growth. To put it differently – the PhilCon prefers to recycle and not waste good material than to burn the old chairs and cut down yet more trees for new ones. The PhilCon, knowing all too personally the scope of human limitation, will never claim too high a wisdom in system design, preferring rather to espalier the tree than cut it down and plant a new one.

 

Yet the PhilCon has a rather dangerous streak in him. When a situation is plainly intolerable – when ultimate values are violated in the coliseum of public opinion, when the abundant decencies of life are consumed like scraps for pigs, when enormities are perpetuated daily in plantations and camps and clinics – then the Philosophical Conservative leaves the cosy armchair and magazine rack with its copy of The New Criterion (or the home prayer room with its icon of St Barnabas, or the allotment shed), and heads off to battle, an unlikely Don John of Austria. The Hobbits left home farther and farther behind, quite against their preference, but because there was a higher calling to preserve what is good in the world; they returned home to find ruin, and cleansed the lanes and fields with sword and justice. I am afraid the typical Permanent Bureaucrat has too little taste for the Permanent Things to do any such thing. No respectable Chief of Staff has ever seen his vanquished forerunners “in a sheet of flame” and yet still declared “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set”.

 

No, the Permanent Bureaucrat is quite different from the Lover of the Permanent Things. Now often they make alliance – PhilCons historically prefer conservative parties, and so do PolCons – but this is no more important definitionally than it is that Liberals often find their way into conservative parties because conservative parties are sceptical of human virtue with centralised power. The PolCon conserves institutions as a matter of primary conviction for the purpose of expedience; the PhilCon conserves principles for the purpose of humane values. Those principles, never being abstractable, inhere in sensible institutions and persons – but if an institution is void of said principles, the institution is fit only to be burned.

 

If you say you are a conservative, then, which type are you? What do you find worth conserving? Why? A conservative movement with clear answers to these questions may find surprising traction in the coming days.

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things V: The Night School

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

A reader considering the last two numbers in this series – on the Schoolroom and the University, respectively – may mutter at me: “This is all very well, Edwards; we shall educate our children into the tradition, and we shall redeem higher education with collegiate bodies and seminary-farms educating Guardians of the Permanent Things. But I’m past all that now; I can’t benefit. I am alone in my little battle, and armed, metaphorically, with a pitchfork and nothing else.”

 

The problem is this: that we are ill-equipped to build the Citadel we desire and our cause requires. We have no knowledge of masonry, nor building cranes to lift the great sandstone blocks into place. We don’t know our merlons from our mullions. We have scant tools in the shed – a rusted leaf-rake and a rubber mallet. How are we supposed to begin building and cultivating the future?

 

Some means of remedial education is necessary. We are as the first penal-colonists in Australia, cast upon some fatal shore by the whim of the prevailing culture, a gaggle of shoemakers and labourers with no wisdom with which to tame the soil.

 

Of course a person minded to serve the Permanent Things might study on their own, set themselves reading lists, do all in their power to gain the knowledge necessary to teach and guide and build for their great-grandchildren. Yet not all are capable of this, given the whirlwind of their life, or the exact set of their character, or prior educational limitations.

 

We look for will, not wit, when it comes to those who would drag the great blocks up the hill to the building site. Wit is admirable, and useful, but there are already many mayfly men out there with more than enough wit to sink our own civilisation. Will is what lacks – will to build and endure, to take a sunny view of the dismal weather predicted, to build soil year by year with little yield in the short term. Traditionalists, of all people, have lost their will – defeatism or presentism or apocalypticism have infected them. Will is the well from which we water our cattle; without water, the whole herd dies, no matter how well we brush their coats. So with will – our pious presentation means nothing without will.

 

So the remedial student – and so are we all! – who has will, has much. What they need is a guide, or an institution, or a fellowship, to aid them in their intellectual and cultural growth. How might we provide such aid? Well, by the Night School.

 

What do I mean?

 

The previous number posited the creation of the University of the Permanent Things, perhaps with constituent Colleges. Scholars band together and accumulate apprentices. This is a traditional mode of higher education. The collegiate lifestyle involved, the life of reflection aimed at, the preparation of young people for leadership in their homes and in the nation – they require a full-time commitment from most of those involved.

 

If you are 30 with a job (whether at home or in the office!)  and two children and another on the way, this isn’t an option. You have – quite properly – committed yourself to a field of work and your family. Yet you know you lack; you have not the tools to build the Citadel. Some of that missing knowledge is likely of a practical nature, and can be learned as you make compost and make decent scrambled eggs. Some, however, serves the cultivation of the intellective self, and requires energy and focus.

 

I have observed above that not everyone can marry energy, focus, and native ability – but will can suffice where wit lacks. Will is what drives a partisan of Permanence to seek out like minds in the hidden valleys of culture – whether physical or electronic. Such a partisan, whether an accountant or stay-at-home mother or council clerk, seeks mentors and comrades to talk to at 11pm; to message with brief impressions of politics and culture; to learn from, and offer to.

 

This could become a formal or semi-formal activity. This could become a reading circle – or a Night School. Those who have learning can offer it in the smaller hours, or at weekends, to those who have not the time or vocation to go to the University. It may be a corporate effort, or solo – an Institute, or a Socrates. Either way, the essential thing is that this body serve the willing with primers in culture, history, literature, and philosophy. If you like, they are the “political education” wing of the coming Permanence Revolution! They slip amongst the populace, meeting in dingy pub barrooms, or connecting to dissidents on Twitter. They do not subvert the workplace, as the covert Communist does – but they do cultivate the revolutionary vanguard.

 

This concept – of a formal or semi-formal educational body aiming at part-time cultivation for those committed to the moral imagination and civilisation building – can take any number of forms. I have discussed some possible archetypes in the second number of this series, “The Shadow Society”, but I will offer one possible form – one I intend to pursue myself – that may offer inspiration.

 

Could we not create a “Slack Channel Club” with the express purpose of studying small reading lists together? There could be a new reading list every six months, and each reading list could consist of only one or two longer books, with the rest short books or long essays. One member could take the particular duty of leading conversation – preferably whoever has the widest reading and the most experience in the life of reflection.

 

Of course, if some Man of Letters should emerge from the jungle, bedecked in three-piece tweeds, carrying a copy of Milton in one hand and Donoso Cortes in the other – well, then, recruit him to tutor you all! But we must cope in the lack – like half-savage survivors in the wake of the fall of empires, we must scratch through the ruins and accumulate, speculate, and then articulate the meaning of things. The Baptistry at Poitiers is a haphazard, almost ugly pastiche – and more than a pastiche, a literal recycling, as the biggest stones were Roman! What did those half-pagans clad in stinking wool know of architectural principles? Yet without the faith in civilization that led to its rebuilding by the Merovings – no Charlemagne, no Alcuin, no Carolingian Renaissance, no Iron Crown – no Italy, no France, no Germany – no Goethe, no Arthuriana, no Dante! The faith to step into the ruins and lift one worn block on top of another is the sacred flame of civilisation in the breast – of peace, and friendliness, of good things – without which we are condemned to at the best a dissatisfied wandering, carving our dragon prows and seeing only despair in the stars.

 

Any of us can take our handcart to the ruined villa and gather stones – any of us can gather a few friends, or be so gathered, and read together. Even reading English, we will struggle in translation – what on earth are these dead men and women saying? What world do they hail from? What is this strange idea? Even where we have some grounding, we will often feel lost in a wide rereading of the classics – but that is as it should be. The Night School is a journey of rediscovery. It is the careful collation of the living fragments of a world – occluded, perhaps, by our present darkness, but ready to be reforged, like some fell fae sword from a faerytale.

 

What might we read together, then, in our Affirming Flame Club? Take this as a sample “semester reading list”, to be read and discussed over 6 months:

• Plato, "Euthyphro"
• Shakespeare, “Richard II”
• Macaulay, “Horatius at the Bridge”
• Runciman, “Constantinople 1453”
• Kirk, “Politics of Prudence”

Three booklet-length works, one shorter history book, and something a little longer. This is beyond the capabilities of barely anyone – it is will that lacks. Perhaps there is some prospective embarrassment – bumbling men and women trying to decode Shakespeare, reading it out loud on Zoom and laughing at each other’s pronunciation; one fellow reading about the legendary background to Horatius on Wikipedia, half-bemused. Who would volunteer for such a task? Only explorers and monks and gardeners, and the world has dearth of all three – but perhaps we might aspire to such an honour.

 

But what is the point? Are we aiming at mere intellectual satisfaction, knowing just how much better we are than those dreadful progressives, sitting happily in the sewage? We, after all, have ascended to a standing position; thank God we are not such as these.

 

No, this shared study in the Night School does not aim at partisan superiority. It is the founding of a new Cavendish Laboratory, or Round Table, or Citeaux – there is a Quest involved. The first aim, as in all things, is the cultivation of the self – a turning away from the mayfly world of social media, of the news cycle, of the endless churn of Prestige Dramas – a turn towards ancient wells waiting to be redug, brimming with Wisdom’s waters. The order of the soul must be attended before the order of the city can be considered. Providence uses men of blood, but the wise civilisation knows in which barracks to keep them. The Traditiologue, desperately seeking to balance their own ill-wrought edifice upon pillars of public discourse, ever seeking public superiority to hide private roil, is merely a cassocked Jacobin, and his fall shall be the shame, or worse. The traditionalist gives to his neighbour from a private plenitude – a storehouse of soul and mind. So turn inward if you desire to turn outward. Build yourself before worrying about building the world.

 

The second goal of the Quest requires patience, and the historical view. We gather the stone today; we plant the small apple seeds. You embarrass yourself now on the Zoom Athenaeum because you want your great-granddaughter to sit with her grandchildren in front of an Aga in a brick-floored farmhouse kitchen, reading the Bible and Longfellow and the Narniad. You train yourself to be a Meroving so that they might be Carolings. You build your haphazard little chapel so they might build the Palatine Chapel at Aix, fit as the resting place of Emperors. The Night School is, in our grand concept, the humble theatre of action for regulation consultants and Environmental Services assistant managers – it is where we groundlings feed the flame, and sear into the wood of our wandering longship blackened words of promise: “We shall rebuild.”

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things IV: The University

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

One may wonder if there is a role for higher education in so revanchist a vision as I have been outlining in the prior numbers of this series. We are to fill homes full of old furniture and young children, start private clubs and societies and reading circles all of which subsist upon tradition, and build schools and train governors and parents to educate children on a small-scale, humane, classical manner. Universities are in our age often the public face of the rejection of the Permanent Things – even if an abhorrence of the Past And Ever-Present is common, even ubiquitous, elsewhere, in schools, the media, and so forth, it is most pointed and most articulate in the Universities. The rebels of ’68 are the Professors of today, and are too hidebound for their junior colleagues, let alone the student body.

 

Yet when we find a wild, overgrown, thorny, fruitless tree, we should ask many questions prior to acting upon it – what is this tree? Why is it so worthless, and even invasive and destructive? What are its advantages? Can it be salvaged? If not, is there anywhere else we might plant such a tree, to grow its fruit?

 

Why did the medieval found universities? They were a peculiar zone between church and state, if one is to trust a common view, articulated by Newman amongst others; they were places submitted to God, but not strictly ecclesial institutions; their role was largely one of the Higher Teaching. All subjects gradually found their place in the University – it was a universal institution.

 

But there is another body to consider, which was coterminous in many medieval universities, and is now a distinct “name” – the College. The college was a body of scholars gathered to study and spur one another on. These admitted junior scholars as time went by, forming a mixed body of the seeker, the acolyte, and the master.

 

This leads to a confusion of terminology when considering what institutions we might wish to build. When Newman wishes to define a higher education institution that can serve as a traditional “composter”, a finisher of mind and manners, all in his case with a Catholic emphasis, he uses the term University – like his own Oxford, and the Catholic University of Dublin he is founding. Yet when Babbitt or More discuss the same concept, they invariably use the term College, from the American concept of the small liberal arts college. Newman is cautious about the newfound interest in research as a focus of the University, as the University is a place of teaching. Babbitt and More are outright hostile to most manifestations of the research mindset in the College, considering research to be the business of the University! The terms are at points inverted depending upon which side of the ocean you fall.

 

If we say the University is the body which teaches all subjects, and the College is a subordinate body of scholars, we can see a complementary pairing within the new institution. It is this that I wish to explore as a subject for our building.

 

The schooling discussed in the previous essay in this series took education to the age of, say, 14 or 16 for most children, or perhaps a little older. It was a topic-based learning, generalist, based on a classical canon, with a lot of scope for individual projects and emphases. It aimed to provide a basic cultural grounding for all children of the nation, watering their imaginative and moral taproot.

 

Most pupils of our Schoolroom finish their education in their mid-to-late teens, heading off to professional, trade, or service work. They have received their cultural dowry, and settle into adult life. What need has the intelligent but unintellectual engineer for a four-year college course? Callings can be partially exclusive; some plumbers will benefit from higher education, some will benefit from reading Great Books in their spare time, and some won’t, Accepting the essential material inequality of persons – in the positive sense, that people do not have equal skills or giftings or callings – releases us from encouraging the future actuary into a costly finishing school they will largely resent.

 

This affirmation of different vocations does not just benefit the person, it benefits our putative University. The University can be an outrageously elitist and demanding environment – if its role is explicitly to finish and furnish an intellectual elite, rather than be a general certificate granter and shared social experience for the upper half of 18-year-olds. Indeed, if its role is that, it must be elitist and demanding. Anything less is definitional failure.

 

Only a very few students will go from the Schoolroom to the University, then. The number will depend on a variety of factors, but 10% of the population is surely as high a number as is viable for the task we have in mind. With that in mind, we can turn to the two practical questions: what is to be taught, and what shall the institution look like? To answer these, let me propose two Universities of the Imagination – a vision, or a single iteration, of the general proposal.

 

One begins as a body of alienated scholars meeting in a pub’s backroom in medium-sized city. Some may work in academia; others do not. Yet they desire companionship – fellow brains to drink beer and argue minutiae with. The scholar searches the small things of the world – the volume of angels, the location of subatomic particles, the effects of money supply – not truly because these things have practical outputs (though they do), but because the scholar has so large a scope of mind they are able to properly magnify the minute. It turns out, in long experience, that many lenses are better than one – focussing ever more light on to the target. And the beer is good, too.

 

This body desires more than mere companionship, or intellectual stimulation – they share a common goal. They desire to love the Good. They desire to uphold the Permanent Things which make humans truly human. They love the intractable realities of the earth, and the transcendent flights of Dante and Thomas and Spenser and Lewis. They know that there is no production of new knowledge in the Humanities, and that Deconstruction is the errand of a fool or a monster. They desire the fellowship of like minds, but also to build together – to declare to the world that God is on His throne, Beauty still exists, and that the cow and the buttercup are still stubbornly Real and refusing to be Gnosticised away by our new mystics.

 

But what happens if some neonates want to join this fellowship? Ought they be expected to be as competent, as developed, as rounded, as the rest of the rebel band, all from Day One? Of course not – they require a finishing education, a final transmission, so that they might contribute and receive fully. How is this to be provided? Well, most naturally by a sort of apprenticeship to senior scholars. Here we have the College, on its way to becoming a University; it begins for “collegiate” purposes, but expands into a teaching role. How might this development continue?

 

As they gain followers, this new College will outgrow the pub backroom. Perhaps the landlord will be sad to see them go; perhaps his pub was a “Moon Under Water”, full of little communities and good conversation. More likely, now, he will miss the cash but feel relieved at the sight of those pretentious so-and-sos leaving, never to return.

 

Where next? Perhaps, first, a hired room – but the chairs are hard and the hall draughty. Next there is the friend’s dining room, but that is quickly overcrowded. This pilgrimage seems endless and doomed to disappointment. Even their success seems to be cursing them.

 

Yet something deep abides in this wandering company. There is a belief that in a gathering of the humble wise – bearing a never-extinguished flame of tradition – there is something sacred. The spirit of the land, the gifts that God has given a people, the hope of the future, have all settled upon this scruffy academic rabble, the leavings of their profession, whose loyalties and recalcitrance has led to their isolation. Yet when they are together, or when they exchange letters or share manuscripts, there is a transformation – the spirit flares alive, the genii hove close and whisper in each ear, and the lares of Troy come closer to their new homeland. Indeed, not only the small gods travel with the company – their forefathers too, carried on their backs, borne forward by pietas.

 

Eventually perhaps they pool money to set down a lease on a space, or they are able to gather funds from one of those last few eccentric rich who put their money to the use of the Common Good. They move in to an old and roomy three-storey cottage by the half-demolished city gate, and promptly tear down the modern stud walls and rip up the rough-wearing polyester office carpets. Good old furniture is scavenged from garages and charity shops. A grandfather’s dark-stained bookcases are set beside some solid pine shelves to begin the Library. There is an eccentric vow made that every one of the half-score offices (some very small, by necessity) shall have a deep, richly-coloured wingback chair – and the subscription is raised. There is a kitchen, a tearoom, and one teaching room (at the back, with one grimy window facing on to the courtyard; the dozen junior scholars don’t need amenity!). Naturally, everything leaks.

 

But it is a small slice of Permanence. The streets outside cannot imagine the utter, intentional irrelevance of proceedings inside. They would mock at the idea of the junior scholars paying their College membership fee to sit in a dark room listening to wildly gesticulating Classicist teach them about ancient reading habits. Yet something is happening in this seeming irrelevance – not just the building of an ark of wisdom, but also the sending out of doves.

 

The trickle of junior scholars leaving the College as they reach maturity will be better-educated than virtually any University student in the country; they will also be, as the modern term goes, “radicalised”. Less into bombing trains, though; more into building families and institutions. Of course the College would eventually register for some figleaf qualification to offer – at great cost in time, with many bureaucratic hoops leapt through. But the real advantage of their “course” would be for its content, not its certificate. Where else could a young student mix so closely with their mentors, drinking as much up in conversation as at al table (and the wine will be good)? Where else offers even a patch on the deep and absorbing curriculum of Great Books, Philosophy, and History? Formal Logic is one core requirement; Latin another. Even the scientifically-minded amongst the junior scholars benefit from the course – rounding as it is, stretching as it is, logically demanding as it is. Indeed, there is a remedial aspect to the College’s course, equipping those previously half-chewed and spat out by the national education system.

 

Now what should happen if some other proto-College should arise in the same city? What if a few revanchist clergy have begun meeting to study the Summa and Turretin together, and to offer short courses across their churches? What if they come into contact with the College? Ought they fold themselves in? Well – could there not be virtue in multiplying the model? A handsome old Catholic presbytery could be the informal home of a second College – with distinct interests and feel. The long-spare bedrooms could be used for scholars, and the dining table be joysy every evening (even when the priest has other duties to attend to!).

 

Of course, it might be realised that junior scholars across the two Colleges would benefit from more coordinated teaching – if one College there is an expert on early Christianity and in the other the Doctor-Priest with an expertise in Thomas, a student would surely benefit from both. The teaching plans could be coordinated, without compromising the community of each College. Suddenly, the University proper emerges into plain sight – and a Collegiate University, at that.

 

Let me describe another model. Let us say some eccentrics buy an old farmhouse and workers’ cottages, with land attached. It has been a holiday rental to now, killed by COVID; or it is one of the many, many farms likely to change hands in the next decade or so due to farmers “aging out”. The farmhouse needs some work, but the cottages are in decent condition.

 

The eccentrics found a place for teaching Greats and Theology and Philosophy. It is a residential institution, with staff living in the cottages with their families, and students in the rambling farmhouse and a barn conversion (if you have seen one of those three-storey, 8 bedroom farmhouses, you will know what I am thinking about). The students eat together in the big, brick-floored kitchen, warmed by the Aga; they learn together in the one teaching classroom; they have a few small sitting rooms for quieter times. The rugs are old, musty, and heavy. There are little bookshelves dotted everywhere, instead of one larger library. (You will know what is meant when told that a book is in the Attic Nook – and you will perch yourself on the one round-backed wooden chair there and read, free from the cares of the world.)

 

Of course, just as specific benefits accrue to our city Colleges, so do benefits accrue to our tiny country “University”. The residential community is even tighter than in a Collegiate University; there is space for all to roam and reflect; and there is work to do. An indispensable component of the course the student begins is to leave in harmony with the land. They start with breakfast and the prayer meeting; then to milking cows; then to their course on 20^th Century Conservative Philosophy; then to the Translation Class, which today is on Cicero (yes, the tutor is a hard taskmaster!). After lunch a “Fresher” group is taken out to the garden to learn about plant guilds and companion planting, by reference to the annual beds. The mud is still in their fingernails as they return to the Science Primer class. In the winters indoor cricket and table tennis tournaments occupy many evenings; in the summer, field sports. Have you ever played rugby from 6 til 10.30, as the light drops away, before falling exhausted to the grass? Perhaps here some kindly tutor’s wife will bring out a case of ale.

 

The students, as they graduate, will know from growing trees and pouring concrete for new shelter foundations and growing steers to maturity how long any healthy building project takes. They will have learned how long it took for Greece and Rome, for China and Japan, to build stable and lasting civilisations; they will know how long it must take us, in the face of the coming RAN. They will be realists – but hopeful ones. Creation will outlive us all, til the very End. The small apples will keep growing. The Farm University sows the seeds.

 

What stop us from building such institutions? Money – and courage. Money is an obvious practical impediment. What pious Kings and Countesses live to found civilisational institutions now? Our new plutocrats prefer technology to people, and spend their charity accordingly. Yet many things can be accomplished without money, but with courage – and sometimes the two go together.

 

Who will be the first to pool all their capital with friends and, faring forward to the end, buy the farmhouse? Who will surrender professional approbation and accept precarity for the sake of meeting in a damp town cottage to teach the alleged lunatic fringe of 22-year-olds why modern European history begins with Gustav Vasa, or how to decline urbs? Academics are not natural pioneers; yet we are reminded of the Puritan founders of Harvard, or the band of worthies who allied with Newman to found the National University. We recall the dedicates of Citeaux, dedicated to a different kind of study. We bring to mind the Maharajah of Darbhanga, or Yang founding the Guozijian. Many academics are in the position of Robert of Molesme or Bruno of Cologne – children of the gentry with no great settlement, entered into a vocation. Yet what did Robert and Bruno accomplish?

 

Let the money follow; courage must come first. More courage is needed here than to build the Home or the Shadow Society, or even the Schoolroom – because the personal benefits are marginal in the short term. But where the Schoolroom provides the haft of the spear, the University provides the tip – and without that, we cannot strike. Courage and sacrifice now will provide leaders in the coming decades, and sound institutions for our great-grandchildren. Let the building begin.

The Price of Patriotism and the Perception of the Past

Chesterton writes a good essay called “The Price of Patriotism” which makes the following simple argument – that it is right to identify with the triumphs of one’s national ancestors, no matter what the braying pseudo-rationalistic naysayers babble; but by the same coin it is right to identify with the moral failures of our forebears. We ought to feel a species of reflected glory from and pride in the first, and a sorrow and repentance for the latter. If we want the first, we must have the second.

 

This is plainly tangentially relevant to some discussions of the present moment, where the extremes of each side of the discussion demand a wholehearted focus on one aspect or the other – “I’ve never done any slave trading – but I did win two World Wars!” vs “Our nation has only ever done evil, and we must all feel perpetually miserable about it, flagellating ourselves and our public squares” – but the issue is of general interest. The present spasm will pass in due time, and everyone will find the public vandals a historic embarrassment, to be brushed under the carpet – but of course, they are us. The troubled issue of our relationship to our ancestors never end, precisely because the lineage never truly ends. The Greeks now truly are the heritage of Mycenae and Minos. The hybrid stock of the British Isles really does carry the spirit of the Witengamot and the Conquest and the Levellers and Wellington and Nelson in the deep chests beneath their knobbly and forgettable faces. You are still more likely to go to Oxbridge with a Norman surname than with a Saxon – the past is never truly gone.

 

And indeed nations, peoples, are a mystical incorporation – I would say they are so in a genuinely mystical sense, but even the pragmatist must recognise that the role of common identity, between the past, present, and future, is vital to any sort of collective action. There must be a sense that my interests extend beyond myself or at broadest my household, if I am to exert myself to the uttermost for my neighbour in war or famine. The Idealist may appeal to the Brotherhood of Man, but the Pragmatist knows that this is a weak folk story, and stronger legends are needed. A shared history and common future is the strongest legend yet discovered, whether at the national or religious level. (To me, I should add, this is because all such legends point to the True Legend, the City that cannot be shaken.)

 

But how are we to perceive the past? Are we to take our standard from the latest critical retelling of history? Are we to take it from the braying Britannians in their double-breasted jackets? (I mean no disrespect to double-breasted jackets, of course.) Ultimately all things are defined by the True Standard, but for my pluralistic audience, let me offer three pragmatic measures by which we engage with our past, which is also our mystical present.

 

First, and most naturally, there is moral intuition. Intuitions are not wholly trustworthy, and change quickly based on an expanded dataset (it is very common to see people’s view of abortion change once they have learned some basic embryology; they move from indifference to the embryo to passionate defence of it). Yet intuitions are what we have in lieu of a coherent public imaginative and moral world. The true British centrist statistically believes in funding the NHS and hanging paedophiles, and views a little like those are prevalent in virtually every society ever. Even that greenhouse for pederasts, Classical Greece, abhorred the forcible rape of minors. Even the great sceptics of government in the American Revolution believed in some sort of charitably free healthcare for the poor. Randolph of Roanoke spent his estate on buying land for his emancipated slaves. Moral intuitions are surprisingly hardy, for all our fears of moral relativism; the problem is not that we cannot intuit right and wrong, it is that we do so intuit and then do not follow through.

 

When we bring our moral intuition to bear on the past, we will be horrified by the action of every Jacobin, and yet admire Danton’s courage, loathe Marat’s grossness, and have a cold respect for Robespierre’s recognition that man is a religious being. Danton was a Big Heart serving an awful cause – so was John Bell Gordon. Our intuition goes further than the summary of individual persons, of course – when we discover that the Jacobins were genocidaires, we will become French Royalists in that moment, at least for that moment.

 

If we are British, then, when we look at British history, and honestly attempt to learn it, we will find horrors aplenty – the treatment of Ireland for 271 years from 1558-1829 comes to mind most prominently, whether Drogheda or land theft or the Popery Laws – but also begin to exercise caution at our new self-loathing legend. Britain was, by any standard, a mild colonial power across much of its empire; we will damn its crimes, but reluctantly acknowledge that there are always hegemons, and that in historical comparison, Britain has less to be ashamed of than many of its contemporaries. Indeed, we will see the nearly unique feature of British hegemony that it often intentionally furthered humane ends by state power – the extirpation of the slave trade, or of sati, come quickly to mind. The Jesuits of South America were heroic intercessors for their Indian neighbours, but that was a private power; but it was Victoria Regina who pressured her Prime Ministers to maintain frigate squadrons off the African coast.

 

Moral intuition, when married to real historical study, gives us the ability to “judge for ourselves”. Furthermore, when aimed at the worst crimes of our ancestors, it serves as a purgative, as a healthy form of patriotic repentance. Rather than framing our forebears in ideological categories – “Livingstone was a Colonialist and therefore a rotter!” – we judge their deeds by mankind’s moral sextant. We reckon our ancestors’ credit by reference to the bank of human wisdom, not the latest post-intelligent Post-Colonial theorem. We execrate the cold oppressions of the early Hanoverians, submitting those deeds to the sword – we then no longer need to be ashamed of the purge of the clans, though still sorrowful. By the same mark, though, we can celebrate the courage of George II at Dettingen – truly a national avatar, a monarch leading his men, wearing the red jacket he had worn as a stripling at Oudenaarde – “Bravery never goes out of fashion.”

 

Here we move into the second approach to our shared past – absorption into legend. We must have a trained moral intuition as well, if we are not to fall into asinine self-congratulation and self-delusion – but the moral intuition cannot root without rich subsoil. It judges, and then withers; it produces no flower; none of us can graze upon its crop. Legend is the subsoil – it is the half-remembered family history which defines us. The British legend has many heroes – sometimes these heroes even fought each other! Yet now they sit together in the Council of Our Dead. Thus Eliot:

We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.

Montrose and Falkland stand beside the Diggers; Stephen and Matilda, who ravaged England utterly with their brilliance and virtue, sit together on the dais; Arthur and Lancelot are reconciled in Logres.

 

You must drink the Legend. You must stand with the Saxon remnants at Ethandune if you wish to have any worthwhile position on our national story; if you see such time-travelling as mere romanticism, you only show that your “taproot in Eden” is cut. You are a withered thing if you can only live in the present, or only go to the past to analyse or to hate.

 

The Legend, properly applied, will never cover the faults of the present. It will always spur us to prophetic denunciation and a desire to rebuild the slighted ruins of our nation. The Legend is as good a tool to fillet our wretched education system with as any number of outcome measurements – after all, we used to raise leaders like the Pitts, or Salisbury; churchmen of the quality of Spurgeon or Newman; once, nearly every workman had read or heard large sections of the Pilgrim’s Progress. The Legend damns our systems of education and training by showing us how sub-dwarflike our own leaders are, our own standards of knowledge are. I offer that as an example, and a negative one; but the Legend serves in each situation, and sometimes by casting a balmy glow upon our efforts. When one sees the strides in education made by Classically-inclined schools in poor, ethnically diverse parts of London, one remembers the schools for the poor of Renaissance England – that gave the sons of bricklayers a chance to become Poet Laureate.

 

Finally, historical sympathy is vital. This is different to moral intuition and the absorption of the legend. Moral intuition judges right and wrong; absorbing the legend gives us a trans-temporal narrative to inhabit, so we don’t wither; but historical sympathy makes us care. It is very hard to hate your ancestor – or to divinise them, either – if you know them. Virtually every soul is a chiaroscuro of colour, of black and white deeds, or dark thoughts but better doings, of good intentions leading to Hell. We might take a different attitude to statues of Cecil Rhodes if we stepped back from rioting – and counter-editorialising! – to imagine that Cecil Rhodes was once a man, not a statue. Why did he do what he did, both good and evil?

 

We have an especial duty to exercise this sympathy for our ancestors – because we are them. Their story is quite literally our story, and informs every lineament of the struggles of our time. If we cannot imagine what drove a Charles or a Cromwell, we cannot ever truly understand what drives us. If we cannot imagine the fears of both the Chartist and the Landlord – if we cannot travel to Australia with the transported Chartist and their Navy guard – if we cannot be both Grace Growden Galloway, that great Philadelphia Loyalist, and her Patriot persecutors (who were still English, then, for a few mort short years) – well, then, we have no sympathy for ourselves, and our posterity shall have even less. If we make them mere ciphers for ideologies, we make ourselves mere ciphers – only our ideologies are smaller and meaner than the ones we ascribe to them.

 

We own, whether we like it or not, the glories and horrors of our past. The worst Wimbledon-born electric-cycling SOAS student is baptised with the blood on the sand at Abu Klea. They have stood within the broken square – and they have stood. And I have butchered at Drogheda. There is no escape from our past; only an organic reclaiming can make sense of it all. I have offered some suggestion how.

Proportional Justice: A Short Definition and Examples of a Judicial Code

Everybody now is an expert on the complexities of the philosophy of justice. The 3-year-old has always been capable of declaiming “That’s not fair!”; only now does every second adult use the same tone of voice in commenting on matters of justice, whether criminal, civil, or political.

If we are to begin to work our way out of the philosophic morass surrounding crime and punishment, property law and civil recompense, political liabilities, and every other topic relating to “civic responsibility”, then we must first provide a definition, an organising principle, and then practically consider the working out of that definition. This I intend to do here, though only briefly for now.

The nigh-universal definition of “justice” is encapsulated in the term “to each his own”. Each person should receive their due; wages in accordance with the value of their work, civil protection according to their natural dignity, and so forth. It is unjust to deprive someone of something they deserve or have earned; it is unjust to accumulate for yourself via deceit or theft.

Implicit in the idea of “to each his own” is that there is a matter of measure in justice. Justice is not a means of providing infinite things to people – justice is intended to secure the right measure of reward (or punishment) to people. If someone works for an hour, they ought to receive a just wage for that hour – and even the most ardent Marxist is not proposing that an hour of shovelling snow should equate to the buying power of purchasing a yacht. (The most ardent Marxist, in power, usually ends up concluding that yachts ought not be available to the average snow shoveller, even in theory.)

Justice must be measured, according to the right or wrong of the individual – that it, it must be in proportion to the original act. To use a scientific neologism, “for every action, there is a equal and opposite reaction”. Newton (or nature) was only, really, emulating the divine Law of Moses – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. When it comes to matters of punitive justice, then, the punishment must fit the crime.

(A brief diversion for my Christian readers – no, Our Lord did not abolish the lex talionis in civic matters. Matthew 5.38-42 and parallels are directed at private individuals hearing Jesus – hence why the prospect of being sued is raised, but not the subject of military action. Jesus elsewhere articulates the “sphere of Caesar”, those matters over which the state has proper power.)

Before I proceed to offer some examples of how a judicial code based on such a principle would work, two additional observations are necessary.

Firstly: Naturally, when turning to the active “arm of the state” in justice, I have focussed on “negative justice”, in the sense that punishment is involved – but this is only the practical companion to “positive justice”. Positive justice might choose to in some way protect wage levels, and that is easily conceived of as positive; but positive justice also guarantees life and liberty, and it guarantees them by the use of punitive justice. “Steal from your neighbour, and you will pay them back and more” – that is how the right to property is guaranteed, not by polite request.

Secondly: Even punitive justice is “positive” in one sense for the one punished. Indeed, punitive justice is restorative. It is why we say a criminal at the end of a sentence has “paid his debt to society”. It is on this basis that Weil says that punishment – even the death penalty – restores the criminal to the pale of civilised society. Their crime (or civil wrongdoing) puts them outside the pale; as they are an egregiously bad neighbour, no-one can accept them for a neighbour; but the murderer mounting the steps of the gallows has become a neighbour again. They are submitted to the process of peacemaking we have adopted as a society, and come out in a state of objective peace with society – though they only reap the benefits of that peace by acceptance.

Now, what might be included in a judicial code that actually observed this principle of proportion? I will offer three examples, and then briefly draw general conclusions from them.

MURDER. Unless there be exceptional mitigating circumstances – and obviously excluding self-defence – unlawful killing in sound mind must be punished by execution. A life is paid for by a life. We resolve on this penalty because this is the proportional payment for the actual crime; if we dealt only with extrapolations, we might give murder a financial penalty paid in lieu to the victim’s family, and so on. But murder effaces life without any cover of sombre justice, or the lawful power of states; it declares life merely another commodity to dispose with as the wicked see fit. The only right punishment is the sword, dealt by the swift hand of the magistrate. In cases with severe mitigating circumstances, some other punishment must be found that fits the crime. The most obvious example is exile – whereby the murderer is, in a fitting irony, restored to civil society by his exclusion. In either case, some financial recompense could still be rendered from the murderer’s estate.

THEFT. Theft involves the loss of possessions, and therefore of – additionally – dignity, security, and, occasionally, further earning potential. The punishment must fit the crime. The crime has not cost a life, and so ought not require a life; nor has it permanently removed a limb, even metaphorically, and therefore hand-chopping is disqualified; and there is nothing more ridiculous as a punishment for theft than imprisonment. A man steals from a private citizen – his punishment is to be detained by the state, rendered unproductive, and usually costing the private citizen more money in tax. Imprisonment might be a fit penalty for kidnapping, but hardly for theft – it is disproportionate, humiliating the criminal and rendering them useless, and failing to give restitution to the victim. Instead, the thief ought to pay back the item stolen, or the equivalent value, plus “interest” – in recognition of the corollary damage.

ASSAULT. How do we deal with physical violence that does not cause death? We cannot justly hang the inveterate brawler. Neither can we trivially calculate his debt plus interest. Two routes are left open: either a modified form of debt punishment, or corporal punishment. By the latter we mean flogging or similar – some form of physical punishment to fit the crime. However, I incline to treating assault (without intent to kill) as open to full financial restitution. The victim has been disadvantaged, even if only temporarily, by pain, discomfort, psychological trauma, and so forth; the criminal owes them a debt, and the victim may directly enjoy repayment. The criminal has not effaced life, but dignity and security; let him repay in those categories. Of course, the two punishments (flogging and debt repayment) might be combined.

One objection may be raised and answered here: what if a criminal does not have the means to repay a debt? A vagrant might break in to a house and steal something – but by definition has no visible means to support themselves. Well, debt repayment forms a sort of indenture anyway, in all cases, and so such thieves must be given the means of repayment – work. This could be by the dreaded adult workhouse, but more properly might be found in a large patchwork of small-scale schemes, apprenticeships, sustainable farms, and so forth. Indeed, this would not only allow repayment of debts, but provide training for real and meaningful jobs – and a part of such a scheme could even reserve a portion of the thief’s pay in savings for when they complete their working sentence, to give them a headstart in their new life.

The principles we have outlined can be more broadly applied – rapists and paedophiles deserve death, because their crimes efface life in the most heinous ways, even if they do not end life; fraud and property damage are forms of theft; treason seeks to murder the polis itself, and the rope is the only restorative for traitors (“Nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it”). What is more, such a code would achieve an enormous corollary benefit, providing great benefits to the state and people: retaining the productivity of most criminals rather than ending it, and virtually abolishing prisons. The moral degradation of petty criminals in prison would be ended, their future prospects improved, and their social shame limited. If we could find the stomach to hang a few predators and traitors, by the same measure we would render our populace more settled and offer real restoration and hope to the vast majority of criminals. Where we may find such courage is the question.

A Burkean Proposal for Racial and Economic Justice

Is it depressing or impressive that Burke, writing in the 1760s and 1780s, offered more serious and practicable solutions to longstanding racial and economic injustices than we have often seen since? What should startle the starry-eyed progressive, brimming bucket-ful with ideological purities and dissolving solutions, is that      Burke’s ideas are better than theirs, despite the fact that his solutions included retaining a state preference for a religious sect, and the short-term continuation of the slave trade.

Burke’s “Tracts on the Popery Laws” and his “Sketch of a Negro Code” are both pragmatic but bold responses to the abiding social crimes of Britain, which still cast long shadows – its oppression of the Catholic Irish, and its involvement in the slave trade and slavery. Burke does not offer, in either case, an abstract axiom to be declared as policy. He has taken care to understand why each situation has arisen, and which opposite evils may be unleashed by thoughtless “reform”. Nonetheless, he offers material analysis and policy proposals that, if followed here, may have allowed some partial reconciliation between the British and Irish portions of our Isles, and if followed in the West Indies and by the USA, would have had a far better chance of settling ex-slave populations into tolerably ordered liberty and wealth than those policies which were followed. Listening to him still provides a real route forward.

Burke was a Protestant and white man, yet his sympathies were with the Catholic and black man – and that is enough to note. He was not a wild-eyed secularist or abolitionist, preferring rather to work with the intractable realities of the world than against them or without them. He looked to those historic factors which have caused flourishing and abundance and independence, and sought to apply them to the situation of who suffered unjust (and counter-productive) oppression. His natural and moral sympathies were with Catholics and blacks, but he also knew to make his proposals palatable to Protestant whites – because wider real flourishing benefits everyone, including the richest.

The first work – “Tracts on the Popery Laws” – is fragmentary, and largely consists of a negative analysis of the then-existing Laws. Burke applied his influence over later Governments to the good of the Irish Catholics, and of course another Irish Protestant would make larger steps in Catholic Emancipation. However, the implicit drive of Burke’s analysis in the Tracts (explicit elsewhere, as we shall see) was never really adopted, to the Kingdom’s ruin, and the continuing pain of both halves of that divided island.

Burke’s chief target in the “Tracts” are those laws which disabled Irish Catholics from accumulating or developing property. He lists these in detail, rancid and vile in their enormities as the ink is on the page. A Catholic landowner with multiple sons had to divide his land amongst them, in a sort of gavelkind – which accomplished the reduction either of the Catholic menfolk of a family, or of the unified property of that same family. A Catholic landowner whose sons converted to Anglicanism could be sued by his sons for their inheritance in his lifetime. Various similar ways of robbing the Catholic farmer of land were inoculated into the property code, like poison in the water.

Not only these, but their ability to acquire land was crippled. They could rent passels of land for 39 years, and no more. They could not buy. Breaches of various laws punitive only against Catholics could lead to forfeiture – so, for instance, if a rental had verbal clauses in it that breached the Popery Laws, the whole contract would be void and the Catholic lose further land by it.

Burke execrates these Laws utterly. They put strife in the family, the base unit of civilisation – a son was encouraged to defraud his father, a wife to sue her husband. They reduced families to penury as penalty their very fecundity, the very quality that ought to have allowed them to cultivate and acquire. They prevented skill and labour to acquire its proper reward – not by any negative lack, but by positive ban. They, further, condemned much land – whether owned or rented – to deteriorating condition, with short tenures and the inevitability of division rendering improvement a poor investment. These are Burke’s comminations, and they are damning. The Laws attacked the dignity of man, they rendered Ireland poorer and less commercially valuable, and they failed in their very purpose – they did not render the populace more likely to become Protestant, or to be serious in obedience to the Crown, and so did not help secure religious or political peace.

In his early work on Ireland, those were Burke’s criticisms; in some of the last political letters of his life (1793-1795, particularly), he returned to the topic, again taking the side of the Catholics, but with an added urgency. Now, the intransigence of the Protestant Ascendancy risked putting the Irish into the hands of the Jacobins, those great destroyers of peace and decency in France. Burke saw as only prophets see; in 1798, of course, the Revolutionary Government would aid the United Irishmen (who were led by exactly the sort of disaffected radicals Burke predicted would arise). This is how he put it to Sir Hercules Langrishe:

“Next to religion, property is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext . . . but that their real view is, to strip Protestants of their property. . . If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.”

The “Tracts” sum up the destructive effect the Popery Laws had; the later letters sum this up positively, as a need to provide Irish Catholics with the means of acquiring and developing property. Indeed, Burke considers that civic disqualifications – from Parliament, from officer rank in the army, and so forth – were foolish but of much less importance than property. Virtually no Catholics would be returned to an emancipated Parliament, but most Catholics would benefit from the easing of those laws opposing Catholic property. The development of Catholic property would be a bulwark against Jacobin influence in Ireland.

Burke did not give a particular programme for developing Catholic prosperity in Ireland, except in that he supported measures easing persecutory laws. He did offer a programme for providing Negro slaves in the West Indies simple and realistic routes to mass freedom and property ownership. We should not be surprised at Burke’s boldness in this direction; like most educated Christians of the time, he abhorred slavery, but moreover, he considered civic freedom at the heart of the English Constitution. He told Parliament, in his “Speech on Conciliation with America”, that Britain had much still to offer America, if only it surrendered its illegitimate demands:

“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil . . . But, until you have become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.”

The United States did not, finally, have freedom as a gift of the English Constitution, but at the blood price of 700,000 young men and the suffering of millions of blacks.

In “Sketch of a Negro Code”, Burke outlined first several measures to regulate, ameliorate, and diminish the slave-trade and the conditions of slavery itself – including, most boldly, the building of mission-cities on the African coast, to regulate and reduce the trade, to offer educational and economic opportunities to the locals, and so forth. Providing economic security and developed property to local tribes would surely (Burke thought) undercut their economic preference for the slave trade. After that, he turned to how to create a property-owning class of blacks in the West Indies, which was his solution both to vindicate the natural dignity of the slaves, but also to wither away the economic desire for slavery.

The key provisions were these:

(1)   (a) younger slaves must have access to a school three days a week;

(b)   that any who were particularly able should be emancipated at the cost of the crown, and sent to be educated to London to be educated til the age of twenty-four, or if their intelligence not be sufficient for academic pursuits, for them to be given a position in the trades as an apprentice, and later returned to the West Indies as a free black businessman;

(c)    In a related measure, the protector of the slaves was able to emancipate technically skilled slaves and provide them with a craft living on the island itself.

(2)   That marriage amongst slaves should be propagated, honoured, and rewarded as a route to freedom – as Burke put it, “a state of matrimony, and the government of a family, is a principal means of forming men to be a fitness for freedom, and to become good citizens”. On that basis:

(a)    That common-law marriages should be recognised by a church marriage, opportunities for marriage actively advanced by slave-owners, and married men be given more time off;

(b)   That families be protected from separation by sale, as happened so widely in the American South;

(c)    That on top of a day and a half off a week guaranteed to every slave, married men and women with children should gain more and more free time as they get older;

(d)   That masters must provide good houses for every family, and if the plantation were large enough, land as well for the family to maintain in their own right, free from any tithe to the slave-owner;

(e)    That slaves should have the right to pass on an inheritance;

(f)    That fathers may purchase the freedom of their families at 50% of market value.

Now we may react to these with the outrage of men and women of a different time, but I can only say that modern slavery is often quite as bad – just look to the Uighur camps of Sinkiang – and that its problems are often quite as intractable. Burke offered a way to produce a dignified, property-owning population out of those who had heretofore been seen as chattel. His code placed them rather in a position of indenture than outright slavery; he near-guaranteed the withering of the plantation system, by propagating a homestead system in its place; he provided a formal and approved route for Caribbean blacks to gain a higher education, and that in 1780.

What relevance has this for us, anyway? We must draw out the principles of Burke’s Irish and Negro advocacy: government support for stable families, enabling them to more easily accumulate property, incentivizing them to develop it, rewarding them for success; and the provision of educational opportunities of the highest quality.

Now, I must say this need not only apply to African-Americans, or the descendants of Windrush in the U.K. By many measures the most disadvantaged group in Britain is white working-class boys. This Burkean proposal might just as easily be made to them.

First we identify those groups which suffer from structural disadvantages – I do not mean the vague bogies of silent racism or cultural hegemony, but where people are born into poverty, heading for bad schools, and seemingly destined to bad outcomes. The key thing which will nurture the innate dignity of these people, lead to wider societal flourishing, and circumvent the present resurrection of Jacobinism, is property.

Not property via radical redistribution – where every property owner learns that property is as easily taken as gained, and incentives for success are severely depressed or perverted – but property via honourable accumulation, with assistance given for those who have not the early economic resources which accelerate such success. Nor ought this assistance come in the way of unmediated “seed money” or gestural reparations. It ought to be concrete and directed to provide multiple future generations with the agency of their own destiny, and therefore it must be cultivated like the vine.

First, we must provide the educational and trade opportunities that will expand the leadership and business classes of these disadvantaged groups. How many articulate, learned, dignified, rough-background North-Easterners do we have in British politics now? I have written elsewhere, and will write again, at how unfit our educational system (here, and I suspect mostly in the U.S.) is for providing real opportunity for excellence, whether for the rich or poor. We need new systems, new schools, new colleges, new trades schemes – but with enormous scholarship and training funds for those from poorer backgrounds.

We must build thousands of new urban schools, run on principles where children are not seen as either a problem of behaviour management, or a machine for achieving good grades, but instead schools that send out every boy a gentleman and every girl a lady, socially integrated and able to hold their own with those born to much greater privilege. We must guarantee training in plumbing or electrics or some other genuinely dignified and lucrative trade to any of these young people who show a willingness to apply themselves.

Second, we must incentivize marriage and faithful parenting, and provide opportunities for ownership, not renting. Let one hundred thousand urban homesteads flourish in the decayed remains of America’s inner cities, in the vast empty lots; tell poor young men and women that, like Adam and Eve, they may step into a garden rich and productive if they commit to their own dignity and each other.

Let our governments fund golden handshake retirements for the 50% of farmers about to age out of the business, and – rather than seeing Agribusiness buy more and more land and adulterate it further and further – enact new Homestead Acts. Let there be a direct relation between the revenue of corporation tax and the funding of business opportunities and the purchasing of vital equipment for young poor people seeking a start in business. Create competition at the expense of the oligarchic near-monopolies, by putting opportunity in the hands of the poor to innovate.

No freedom will come from Autonomous Zones; no peace will come from Radical Redistribution; no healthy constitution arises from the destruction and humiliation of the old. Since 1789 we have never seen a successful experiment along these lines. But perhaps the pragmatic, realistic, but visionary and bold principles of Burke may aid us.