Ten Books That Changed Me

There are books that you don’t merely enjoy, but that change you. Perhaps you know the experience: there is a sense of shaking within you as you read, and a nervous energy afterward that keeps you up at night. It isn’t merely that you are moved or amused by the book, but that the book reorients the whole world as you watch, as if you were a translunar being watching the revolution of the Earth.

There are many candidates for this title in my life, but here I have selected just ten. I have excluded the Bible, the Book above all books, for the obvious reason that otherwise this list would start with Genesis and end with 2 Samuel, and the list would be altogether too theological for some of my readers. (But read the Bible. It’s very good, as literature as well as true theology.)

1.      Legend by David Gemmell

I must confess that, whilst I adored Middle Earth and Narnia as a child, this is surely the first great moral influence upon me, and one I have often reread since. It was a strange discovery, upon my most recent rereading a couple of years ago, that my deepest moral instincts are articulated in this pulp fantasy novel. The intuitions, surely, come from the divine gift of conscience, but the way I would explain them come from Gemmell.

There is a fortress, with a too-small garrison; beyond, a barbarian horde off the Steppes, sure to win. The novel is simple in form – it is the tale of the siege. The style is at points weak and prone to banality. Yet it is utterly compelling – tales of heroism and villainry, a lesson in human sympathy, an exploration of faith, with an ensemble cast of richly-coloured characters of every type. Gemmell wrote that if he hadn’t been a Christian, he would have surely written amoral violence fiction, like many of the Western pulp authors; instead, he writes moral sagas fit – for their heart rather than their form – to compare with Tolkien and Lewis.

Above all, in this – Gemmell’s first book – there is Druss the Legend, old axeman, the greatest warrior alive. He is a white-bearded widower here, waiting for Death to take him in his bed. The defence of the doomed fortress provides one last opportunity to meet the Old Enemy on his terms. And what was Druss’ Iron Code, which every little boy should learn?

“Never violate a woman, nor harm a child. Do not lie, cheat or steal. These things are for lesser men. Protect the weak against the evil strong. And never allow thoughts of gain to lead you into the pursuit of evil. Never back away from an enemy. Either fight or surrender. It is not enough to say I will not be evil. Evil must be fought wherever it is found.”

2.      Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

This is neither the cleverest or the funniest of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but it was my first. I vividly remember the Christmas I received it from my Uncle and Aunt. I was around 10. We were at Grandma and Grandpa’s. I was sat in one of the red armchairs that now sit in my living room. I was squirreled away reading my present, and I remember howling at the jokes. I remember being lifted into a serious imaginative world, which was nonetheless replete with good jokes. It was philosophy with a smile – a philosophy I never fully bought, and definitely now don’t, but one which coupled withering wit with a humane attitude.

In Hogfather, the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus has disappeared. DEATH (yes, tall bony chap with a scythe, nice if you get to know him) takes on the role, to avoid metaphysical catastrophe. Meanwhile, a gang of criminals led by the sociopathic Assassin Mr Teatime (pronounced Te-ah-tim-eh) seeks to knock off the Tooth Fairy. A crash course on metaphysics, human psychology, and good gags. I had never known anything could be this funny before, except perhaps Mr Bean.

3.      The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

I was an ill teenager, taught at home, with a little bit of money and a local independent bookshop (long gone now, of course). Of course I bought Marx! And Plato, and Freud, and a whole small cache of Wordsworth Poetry Library volumes – what a wonderful series that was, complete works in small type for £2.99 or £3.99 each. Available in an actual shop in Welwyn Garden City! Surely a halcyon age.

There’s a saying about Communism before you’re 20 and after you’re 20, but I don’t think I was ever a real Communist. I have never not been a monarchist, or emotionally bound to knights in shining armour and agrarianism and romance. Yet Marx and Engels gave me something, as a 14 year old, to grasp and care about; if this were merely a sentimental novel, a great deal of mischief would be prevented and much good accomplished. It has heroes and villains, an insightful overview of history, and soaring rhetoric.

Every man must have a cause, and every half-grown man with a heart cannot fail to rise and seek their sword when they hear of the woe of the oppressed proletarian, who has nothing to lose but their chains. In a depth of irony, the great healthy, romantic impulse of chivalry is enlisted in the service of what emerges finally as an inhumane and barbaric ideology – but when you’re 14, this book served its purpose. It gave me a battle to fight.

4.      Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

I have read the Quartets several times, and in many ways think they have had their greatest impact on me only in the latter readings, but those first endeavours – only quarter-understanding, half-pretentious – nonetheless wrought real changes in the soul. Here was philosophy in music, transposing unspeakable truths into parables. Music sometimes bypasses the sceptical and easily-confused forebrain and introduces itself to the wiser intuitions, and that is how I first could comprehend without fully understanding gems such as:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

I first loved “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” most – indeed, I almost want to quote a whole passage of the latter, for the delightful poignancy it causes in me, but let this suffice:

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie

If you do not come too close – the whole trick of real magic, let alone the fake stuff (at least until we meet the Deepest Magic in Heaven itself).

However, with time, I have inevitably turned more and more to Eliot’s true masterpiece (and he is a poet of many masterpieces worthy of the name) – “Little Gidding”. It is this poem in which he most fully expands the good news of the God who saved him from the Wasteland – Jesus “the ruined billionaire” and “wounded surgeon”, and this the stern Gospel offer:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
     To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Here, also, his most articulate summary of the great conservative concern for place:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

Eliot changed me then and changes me now at every read, transporting me and rebuking me and heartening me. In that sense this book is plainly vastly more powerful than the three preceding. The Quartets are the greatest poet of the 20^th century transmuting into sparse words the whole of human experience, and grounding it in the only ground capable of bearing it to fruit, the Ground of All Being.

5.      Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

This may seem like a strange entry. Indeed, I read the whole Narniad multiple times before this book, and the Space Trilogy too. I read The Discarded Image, the key non-fiction work of Lewis’ involved, 2 and a half years prior to this. For all I love this book, I love the novels more, and feel always welcomed to an armchair by Lewis in his non-fiction.

However, this book was the decoder for so much else in the canon that it must represent that canon here. This book is the greatest achievement in literary studies of the second half of the 20^th century and the 21^st century so far combined. Ward discovered – undeniably, to the universal if reluctant assent of Lewis scholars – that Lewis had modelled the Narniad upon the seven medieval planets, and sought to inculcate both the whole medieval worldview and specific virtues and ideas through that planetary themeing. Ward didn’t accomplish this via a chance discovery of a tell-all letter, from which he extrapolated – he harrowed it out via a singular work of genius. Like Archimedes, the eureka moment even happened in a bath!

Read the book for more on that; now back to me! The Discarded Image had convinced me of the beauty and emotional power of medieval cosmology, but it was Planet Narnia that discovered to me that Lewis had been doing his work in me all along, precisely in the secret way he intended. I had long dwelt under the ordered heavens of my forebears, notwithstanding my intellectual assent to the Romantic sky. Much like Legend’s effect on my morals, I discovered I had imbibed a whole understanding of the world from Lewis which I had only half-recognised. This book, then, gave me an emotional cosmology. It brought into view the beautiful and satisfying conception that I had theretofore only been glimpsed in snatches.

6.      Out of the Ashes by Anthony Esolen

I read, and enjoyed, The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher before this, and that is the more famous book of this type, but this has had the deeper impact upon me. Esolen has two qualities that sometimes lack in Dreher: he is a marvellous stylist, and he is hopeful.

Dreher and Esolen both prophesy vigorously against the decline and fall of our civilisation, and they both prescribe Christian rebuilding of the ruins. What Esolen brings is excoriating polemic, beautiful and destroying, that exposes our cancers and begins to irradiate them before our eyes – and he brings the cheerful diagnosis that with time and will, all can be well, because it has been before. Fortuna will turn.

Esolen has enabled me, along with others (perhaps most notably The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray), to frame my view of the world realistically but hopefully. I put no trust in princes, and know that the only true peace for me will come in my End (which is, after all, my Beginning!) – but I know that the small apples Chesterton mentioned are still growing, and there is meaning to our action, and the battle goes not to the strong, but to the faithful.

7.      The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

This is not the Kirk book I would recommend to an absolute beginner – that is Politics of Prudence – but this is his masterwork, undoubtedly. (He is the rare individual who in a sense peaked early – he served for 40 more years after this was published – but never really wilted or withered; he maintained real quality throughout.) It is an intellectual history of conservatism from Burke to Eliot, and more than a mere record at that – a true history, that is, a retelling and framing of the whole. This book is sometimes called the handbook of the modern conservative movement in America, but if they had really listened, they would have been in much better condition than they are.

Kirk gives us heroes – Burke and Brownson and even that wonderful snob Saintsbury – and flawed but noble middlers like Henry Adams. He gives us a general sense of the canons and concepts of conservatism as handed down to us by the Great Tradition – those values which tend to the preservation and cultivations of the Permanent Things. And he gives us himself, a walking library and liberal arts course all in one. He gave me and gives me then, a tradition, a home, and a Cause far greater than Marx ever did. He is the proof of his favourite line by Eliot: “the communication // Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

8.      The Doctrine of Repentance by Thomas Watson

I hope my readers will forgive the intrusion of a Christian devotional book, and one from that most despised and derided tradition within the Church, Puritanism. I can only say that it is here because it, or something very like it, must be. It is a cliché but true that Mere Christianity changed me intellectually a decade ago, but it was only a coordinate cause of the pursuant spiritual changes, separated as they were by some months; those were God direct or delusion, depending on your view.

This book, however, was the first “devotional” book by a Puritan that I read, and that a little over a year ago. The warm, direct, “melting” style, the highly intelligent pastoral casuistry, and the moral seriousness of its focus on self-reflection all deeply impressed me. I can trace a very serious change in my walk of holiness since reading this, and others like it. For that alone, it is a milestone.

But I ought to mention two or three other changes it wrought. It upset an instinctive subintellectual prejudice – I knew the Puritans were not chiefly mad bigots and, well, puritans, but I did not know that in the bowel. This book changed that – Watson and Sibbes and Burroughs and Baxter and Perkins and the rest loved their people, and that love is undeniable when you engage with their actual words. Whenever a book teaches you just sympathy for others, it is worthwhile.

The book has also altered both my communicative style, particularly in preaching – where John Owen is master of the technical clauses and Bunyan is a great exhorter, Watson is master of the simile, of painting the truth of the world – and, in conjunction with that, my pastoral concerns when caring for brethren in the church. What is the right balance between cheap grace and costly legalism? The pastoral casuistry of the Puritans provides the answer for me.

9.      Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

To my shame, I finished this after Kirk. I had started the read-through beforehand, and had read long sections before, but I found Kirk easier. (He knows how to end a sentence, for one.) But Burke is the Master, and the new conservatism that derides him as a trimming Whig compromiser libels him and mutilates itself. Burke held a consistent view of politics and the constitution, both reasonable and mystical, his whole career – developed but never revolutionised. The Reflections are surely his classic of sustained argument. The Letters on a Regicide Peace are higher in polemic, the Speech on Conciliation with America more practical, the Tracts on the Popery Laws more calmly philosophic – but the Reflections, in their enormous scope and set of interconnected arguments, offer the nearest Burke ever does to a system.

So this provoked intellectual change, yes – but it also acted, for me, like an emetic and antibiotic all in one, purging old intellectual disease and strengthening my natural systems of thought all at once. There is such good sense and noble sentiment in this book that it hard to read five pages without needing to sit back to digest. The style is sometimes lengthy, but rarely actually difficult – it is a useful disciplinary tool for the lazy reader in that way. You will even find that the most ridiculed parts – such as his adoring praise of Marie Antoinette – are manful and concrete expressions of deep, true instincts.

This is also where, importantly for me, Burke best sums up his views of the English Constitution – of the “ancient rights and liberties” inherited by subjects of the Crown, not invented or caught in mid-air, of the careful mixture of parts and powers in the constitution, of the contract it forms between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. Though we cannot muster up old armies and refight the defeats of the past, Burke’s transtemporal commonwealth reminds us of Eliot, again: “There are no Lost Causes, because there are no Gained Causes”. If England’s constitution lives in us, it has life yet.

10.  The Need for Roots by Simone Weil

This is the most recent book to jangle me and shake me. I cannot guarantee now that it will stand the test of time – though I think so. But including it here is an important reminder that the power of books is of illimited potential in the reader’s life – just keep reading and you will be struck again by divine lightning, and again hear the music of the spheres move around you in your reading chair.

There is much to draw from Weil – a “genius akin to that of the saints”, thus the ubiquitous Eliot – even including her wildly ambitious economic and social plans, which at first seem impracticable but lodge themselves in the mind. Her time has not yet come, but may soon; she was a post-liberal in policy before post-liberals existed.

Yet for me it is the very first paragraph that told me that here was a philosopher for the ages. It set me on a better axis; the sun shone clearer as a result. It was as if she were the optician giving me a better prescription to see the matters under discussion – or like the glasses, sharp in their clarity:

The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

Obligations are antecedent to rights, not just because they are social necessities and divinely ordained, but because they create rights. Rights can only exist as a result of obligations fulfilled by others – a redemption of the social contract! This was not only an intellectual jigsaw piece in the puzzle for me, but a one-paragraph re-envisioning of social relations, and that cannot help but change a man.

Here is a joy of the intellectual life, secured by the Grail quest for wisdom and discipline in setting yourself to your books, as impractical as they may seem to the average politician or corporate mogul: you will discover new books to change you all your reading life. You will find many friends in the shelves, each a walker with you to the strait gate, an august body of counsellors. Each of us ought to be able to list the books that have changed us; it is the civilising medicine given us by our ancestry.

On Sympathy with the Devil

Milton, Blake told us, was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Though Lucifer in the Paradise Lost turns out, ultimately, to be a populist demagogue, one never shakes the early impression of a tyrant-defying Hero. Milton surely poured out his own republican defiance of the Stuarts into that initial depiction:

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who from the terror of this Arm so late
Doubted his empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall...

Well, sometimes evil comes cloaked as an angel of light, and must be identified and combated. Yet there is a deeper truth here – that to understand and even sympathise with one’s enemies is both practically and morally necessary.

Practically necessary, certainly. Few would dispute this. “Know thine enemy”, Sun Tzu said. (Of course he added “know thyself”, too, like the Oracle at Delphi; but few of us have the rigorous honesty and courage for that.) If you do not know what your enemy believes, or is capable of accomplishing, you will quickly be defeated. If you believe that Panzers cannot cut south through the Ardennes, you will be conquered. Even on this point, however, I fear the point is widely misunderstood. The objective is taken to be a numerical assessment of strength and a hostile, critical evaluation of objectives. This is insufficient, even for practical purposes, for two reasons.

Firstly, this leads to a superficial understanding of a situation; by only knowing contingent facts and purposes of the enemy, we miss their deeper principle, and will be unable to adapt to changes in their posture inspired by that principle. It would be like knowing every chess opening by heart but failing to understand the deeper principles of chess that allow one to transmute such knowledge into a ruling methodology.

Secondly, by taking a hostile approach – one is understanding only so as to defeat – one runs the risk of never truly understanding the enemy, but only one’s projection onto them. Are we seeking to understand our enemy’s stated values and purposes, or merely seeking to interpret them in terms of our own? Psychoanalytic paranoia about the “real” reasons people say or do things leads to personality death. Ever seeking out the “true” motives of their action, we end up in a Freud-invented nightmarescape: a world of mirrors where every other person only ever reflects us to ourselves, til we get lost in the infinite recursion of our warped image.

Before any act of interpretation or translation, we have to “trust, but verify”. We have to listen to the account a person gives of themselves. Yes, they may well be deceiving you, or themselves – but a swiftness to parse their statements in terms of “trauma” or “sin” or “privilege” risks missing what they actually say. Albeit the will is often a divided, tortured thing, but precisely when a person is deluded in their beliefs, they can be said to be sincere in them. Imagine you really believed in the Christian God (notwithstanding the prospect of His nonexistence) – you would act in accordance with that belief, would you not? It would be a delusory motivation, but nonetheless a very real one. Dreams may have reality – as de Gaulle, riffing on Chateaubriand, spoke of achieving grandeur “by leading the French through dreams”. He achieved grandeur largely through the spinning of those dreams, and they were no less real for it.

So when we come to our opponent’s thought, we must read and understand it with a deeply sympathetic imagination. We must imagine what it must feel like to be such a man, dive deeply into the concerns and cares that energise their actions, discover the different and conflicting textures and components of their mind, and finally, in a sense, accept them as they are. We must almost be like the method actor, fully immersed – yes, even staring into the abyss – so that when they talk or write or act we are of one mind with them and know their direction of travel and true intention just as well as they do. Indeed, if we wish to convince them of an alternative view, we must be able to have understood why their account is convincing to them.  To defeat an enemy we must, in a word, love them.

But there is also a moral call to understand and love them “as they are”. I mean neither the noble dominical command to “love thy neighbour as thyself”; nor do I mean any soft-handed, lisping humanistic validation of human goodness (“you are perfect just as you are” – never such a grim lie told). I offer two reasons for this.

Firstly: As Weil put it, true beauty and true ideas are in three dimensions, viewable from different angles by different persons. This is not the Parable of the Elephant, where no-one really knows what is going on, but rather an appreciation that every mighty conception of the world is a grappling with truths, even if in the final event the conception fails. I am a Christian, and a devout one, and yet one of the most moving and stirring books I have ever read is Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ. There, without any canting or hypocrisy, the mad German excoriates the emptiness of a rationalist Christianity, and offers his own heroic conception of the soul – ever striving, ever courageous, never bowing, like Lucifer quoted above. Of course I finally conclude there to be a pleonexia, an overreaching in all this, but the Marlovian overreacher is a stock hero now. Why? Because we recognize in that self-driven seizing for Heaven a profound truth about the human condition in this era after God. I would miss all that if I came to Nietzsche aiming to moralise at first glance, and I would miss the delicately moving nature of his portrait of the Christ Himself, Nietzsche seemingly contemptuous but deeply enthralled: “The only true Christian died on the Cross.” Never a truer word said!

A moralising approach, no matter how right, would deprive my soul of moral pleasures. To put it in a different way, without reading my enemies with a sympathetic ear, I could never be stirred by that greatest declamation of that demented Jacobin Paine:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

A monster may have said it, and it may seem misapplied in part to its situation, but it is nonetheless a true and noble sentiment. Monsters are often the vessels of nobility: “Blow, wind! Come, wrack! // At least we’ll die with harness on our back”. It is a small man who cannot admire his worst enemy when he utters a high and real sentiment.

Secondly: A Christian song lyric goes: “When I look into the face of my enemy, I see my brother”. There is an issue of virtue as well as of aesthetics at stake when it comes to understanding your enemy. To degrade them, degrades you; to mar human dignity, to make uglier the world, all in pursuit of their destruction, has greater consequences than you can imagine. You efface the whole race when you animalise an enemy. If nowhere else, you will find the grub marks on your soul. Rather, where you see that a man is wicked, say and mean “There but for the grace of God go I” – is your heart so pure as to stand in condemnation? The truly pure in heart are always the most pitying, knowing the tragedy that is sin.

This is the continuation of my previous remarks about knowing your enemy by entering into their experience, by “method acting” their role. By widening your understanding of the human experience – not through participating in immorality, but by developing a pitying understanding for it – you gentle your heart. This is no excuse for weak humanitarianism, but the opposite. More surely than ever you will understand that punitive justice is a means of restoring the wicked to the bounds of ordinary society (the gallows as means of reconciliation), and that for some it is kinder by far to force them to face eternity honestly, without the Purgatorio of imprisonment or the earthly Inferno of an unfree life of heinous crime. But you will come closer to the divine quality of love by understanding every lineament of the enemy.

You will see the fugitive glimpses of beauty amidst the ruins of the wicked soul, and learn to identify even the smallest quantities of worth. You will be able to intellectually separate the wrong ends of your political enemy, and appreciate the nobility of their character; or, conversely, you will be patient with their brutality and sympathise with the noble hopes they have. Being capable of these will enable you to forget the childish tribal dichotomies of Good and Evil, just as you have forgotten the trivial quarrels of your youth. You will never abandon the pursuit of real Good, but an admiration of your foe will enable you to root out the little Evils that bedevil every Idealist, hidden like nimble rats beneath the skirts of their ermine robes: pride, a critical heart, ambition, and the incipient violence of the tribal heart. Understanding your enemy on their own terms may not change them, but it will, ultimately, change you, and for the better.

And who knows? With a heart so changed, what else might you accomplish? Remember that no real hero is remembered for hatred, no sainthood is bought with accomplished political rhetoric. There is no risk for the wise man when he looks into the Abyss; the real risk is looking away from it, and letting its Shadows grow behind and around him, as all the while he shouts “I am Wise and Good! I am Wise and Good!” Perhaps that was Lucifer’s downfall, too.

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things II: The Shadow Society

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

All lasting work begins first within the self and then within the home, as I have outlined imaginatively in the first of these essays. Where next ought we build our Citadel? My first instinct is to move to the matter of education, and discuss the whole issue of the transmission of culture. However, there is a certain right and logical order to be observed. If we begin reformation in our homes, where next? Well, for some of us the discussion must immediately turn to educating our children, but we must stop ourselves short. What about our own education? And if we recognize a deficiency in our own education, where do we turn?

Those of traditional instincts rightly despair at much they see in “the world”, but despair is no answer to pressing practical questions. “Politics is the art of the possible”, and so is the maintenance and rebuilding of tradition. What can be done? What are we to do if society is for the time being adrift, wandering from the Permanent Things, and even poisonous to their maintenance and enjoyment?

Building a citadel in the midst of a barbarous people means constructing a city in its midst; it means building a “parallel polis”. We must cultivate forms of corporate life that in turn cultivate the Permanent Things, like a polytunnel for the Soul – we need Permanence embodied in grave exchanges of ideas, in healthy orthodox churches, in networks of fellowship. But, if we are to be God-trusting optimists, patiently waiting for the day that Fortuna turns, we must do more than build the polytunnel and hunker down – we must prepare to plant when the frosts and clouds clear. We must build not just in parallel, but, like a British minority party, “in shadow”, preparing for government, ever dogging the steps of the failing hegemony. We must always be ready to step forward, vindicated by hard experience, to provide for the nations out of our storehouses; we must build a shadow society, ready to emerge from germ or seedling into full growth and flower.

What is needed for a shadow society, never abandoning the rotten husk body, but patiently developing and strengthening in readiness for the Promised Day? We imagined the Citadel Home in the last essay; let us imagine the Citadel Society now.

The indispensable feature of a healthy public life is a healthy leadership class, and an unbending requirement of a healthy leadership class is that it has access to networks and institutions of intellectual and moral sympathy and edification. No matter how great the heart, a degree of withering is inevitable where there is no sympathy around it; no matter how great the mind, if unedified it resembles rather the block of rough marble than the finished statue. These institutions and networks are the founding places of momentous friendships, of persons of shared inclination and conviction, who, in Lewis’ phrase, discover each other there and say: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” Indeed, we may even say that these places are where great rivalries can be founded, where reactive elements may touch one another in a “controlled environment” and in their explosion create new, worthwhile compounds. These bodies are what the Shadow Society must build.

Now, I do not claim no such bodies exist now; it is heartening to see that they do, and they multiply apace. This is especially true relating to educational bodies. However, a coherent vision of the whole we must build would still be of great value, and that is what I aim to offer.

I will not address educational bodies or the workplace here; the remaining four numbers of this series will do that. Rather, this essay will both demonstratively and imaginatively portray the institutions and networks we must build that make up “social life” – those connective, mediating bodies, formal and informal, which spur and protect intellectual and community life. There are three in particular that come to my mind: churches, clubs, and periodicals.

***

I will not discuss churches in great specificity, but I will define my term and offer examples. By churches I chiefly do mean ecclesial institutions of the Christian faith, the spiritual lifeblood of Western civilisation; even my readers who do not share my own religious convictions have much to gain from a quickening of the churches. By a process of extrapolation, of course, other religious bodies might be implied by the term “churches” here – particularly the remaining synagogues and other institutions of the Jewish people remaining in our land, long-oppressed, even now under pressures of different sorts, but nonetheless a community which has existed in both Europe and America since the advent of Western Man. Moreover, there is a reason we sometimes call Western values “Judaeo-Christian values” – there is a natural closeness between the peoples of the two Covenants, exemplified rather than disproven by the vile treatment sometimes meted out by Christians to Jews.

Now, an example. The church in view might be a whitewashed Grace Baptist chapel with large and light windows facing south, or it might be a Tridentine Roman church replete with statuary. Indeed, as the two represent deep wells of the Christian spirit – Citeaux and Cluny, if you will – the existence of both in a nation strengthens rather than dilutes the solution. The battle to demonstrate the truth of the propositions each hold in contrary is a fuller’s fire, not a destroying deluge.

What is necessary is that the church in view is theologically and spiritually serious; that it does not fail to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints”; that it is morally stern, and therefore deeply joyful, enjoying the good things of God, extolling the values of Permanence; and, for our immediate purpose, that it produces a social hub for its wider community, not being a nuclear bunker for the faithful to hide from the Culture Bomb, but rather some Italian mountain city like Urbino, a hub of civilisation and a protector of the whole region (this does mean, yes, our churches need their Federico da Montefeltros).

Now, in ultimate terms God will make His decision between Trent and Geneva, but that is not immediately to our point. What we are seeking is this: institutions that are geographically and socially integral to their local community, without partiality for class, providing vital social adhesive and a community hub; and which, in their activities, defend and extol the Permanent Things as prescribed in that revealed truth accepted in Western Civilization for 1700 years. Whether we see Polish widows clad in black heading down a darkened aisle to an icon of the Virgin to light a candle for their husband, or Anglian squires sitting in a box pew alertly feeding upon the preached word of God in a sunlit temple of whitewash and dark wood, the immediate effect is the same: the protection of the Permanent Things by their reification in the life of the believer.

***

Now, what of clubs? Clubs of any sort are necessarily more selective in one sense than churches; there is a necessary partiality in the club. The church is open to all who would come – the only qualification necessary is an earnest desire to be there, and a consequent willingness to submit to the church’s ordinances. The club selects for specific interests, specific backgrounds, or specific talents, and there is no injustice in this partiality. It would be grossly inappropriate for a church to require musical ability in the penitent seeking God, but it is absolutely vital for the orchestra! To put it differently, when we consider the building of institutions, we must consider their proper respective ends. The Church is the people of God come to Him for mercy, adopted into a new family. By definition no merit is required for entry. The orchestra, on the other hand, aims to produce transporting art – it serves God, knowingly or not, precisely through its excellence. Its members must at least have raw talent.

There are any multitude of forms the clubs of the Shadow Society might (and must) take. It would not be at all out of place for orchestra and theatre companies to form in explicit allegiance to the Permanent Things – certainly rather that than yet more tiresome pseuds announcing their latest wheeze to efface and humiliate Beauty. It may be that such artistic clubs provide some of the best “evangelistic” efforts for the Shadow Society. However, what I have more directly in mind are clubs with less specific aims, but rather a general sort of dedication to the sympathy and edification I mentioned above. Because these bodies must be specific to a situation, rather than trying to offer a single abstract definition of them, let me provide three examples.

The first, and most modern in form, is what we’ll call the Slack Channel Club. A group of intellectual compadres offer their thoughts in the channel, upload drafts of essays, share news articles they’ve seen that deserve comment, and generally chew the fat. It is a time-delayed body – there is no need for immediate attention or response. The channel is a continual digest of the concerns and interests of a group of a certain sympathy. This is in many ways the easiest “club” to set up now, and it is a signal proof of the utility of the Internet to the Cause of the Permanent Things. Find some people of a common mind on Twitter, or connect with those one or two friends from University who shared your instincts, and create a text channel so that one is never far away from succour for the soul and sharpening for one’s mind: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”

The second, and a relative of this, is perhaps the oldest. We need old-fashioned Clubs again – dining clubs, social clubs, conversation clubs. Socrates had his Club, who managed the particular miracle of apparently dining out in every other dialogue at someone else’s expense! There are still a few of these organisations left, as outdated and rejected as they are. The most famous are those like the Carlton Club of London or the Yale Club of New York, with physical properties, but I have known similar clubs in multiple universities. Some common and half-arbitrary bond unites such a club – it might be vague Toryism (as with the Carlton), or alumni identity (as with the Yale), or a common interest (whisky or art, for instance). This arbitrariness has itself a purpose – it creates a bond and loyalty within the club, and promotes common goals.

But aren’t these institutions outdated? Aren’t they hives for dipsomania and cronyism? Well, perhaps in some cases, but this needn’t be the case. Private, selective clubs which provide a social hub for men or women of shared values and conviction are a crucible for ideas and a hothouse for shared convictions. Though one should circulate widely, having a place where one can hide away, read a paper in peace in an old armchair, test ideas over dinner at a long oak table covered with heavy linen of a simple brocade – this is an almost-literal Citadel. (The problem with “safe spaces” is not that people should not have private, secure spaces, but in the absurd idea of creating such spaces in every public fora in the explicit interest of particular groups.)

Even the alleged cronyism can be a natural and healthy product of such clubs. These clubs can produce pools of men or women of proven character and conviction, trustworthy for tasks; if I need a collaborator on a project but know no-one suitable personally, where better to turn than to the Club? This is an absolutely inevitable feature of social life anyway. We always use the networks we have to find fellow travellers for our causes. Why reject institutional forms of these networks?

These Clubs ought to be chiefly physical in their meeting. A phonecall from a friend may be encouraging, but it can never replace the pleasure of old cronies sitting in a half-lit room drinking decent wine and listening to good music. The Slack Channel Club cannot replace the silent reading room with leather chairs, or the parlour with its buzz and the occasional sally at the piano in the corner. No Zoom call can reproduce the vitality of the conversation of the dining club at some cheap, rough Italian restaurant, where the wine comes in carafes. It is hard, as Esolen says, to lie about biology when the cow stands mutely yet immutable in front of you; and so it is much easier to connect, to affirm, when one is physically present with one’s allies.

If we wish to build a Shadow Society, we will need these disseminate institutions, private in character but connected to a wider project. We will need our new St Olave’s College Dining Club (Alumni Welcome), our Reactionary Women’s Institute, and our Kirk Club ensconced behind the unassuming facade of a red brick hall pushing pieces on a situation map depicting the War Of Permanence Against Chaos.

The Club is necessarily elite in its selection. However, as the Shadow Society pushes its tendrils into every overgrown courtyard and rotting parlour of the Husk Culture, this form of association must find its counterpart in ordinary communities. I know to my own pleasure the residuum of these still survive, though now very much on life support: cricket clubs whose membership does not, on the whole, play cricket; Working Men’s Clubs where the whole family spend Saturday afternoon; Catholic Clubs where one’s precise knowledge of the latest encyclical is never tested. One might even include organisations such as the Scouts in what I intend here, whatever the moral degradation of those bodies.

The key thing is that there should be places for pleasurable mixing and learning for the ordinary member of any community. This latter activity is now largely lacking, with the death or gentrification of the Institutes. This is what we must begin to plan to rebuild when money or power is at hand: whether they are Workers’ Institutes of the 19^th century type, re-envisioned by Simone Weil for her nation, or whether they are something new. What we need for our third form of "club" are Institutes of Everyday Permanence.

Imagine that we buy the half-derelict pub in our small town, the one on the corner of the road, and renovate it with the three traditional rooms and an upstairs lecture hall. Of course it can never turn a profit, not how we’ll run it, at cost or near enough; we will need wealthy benefactors and membership dues. I reluctantly accept that there will need to be lager on tap, and that I may be mocked for drinking ale whenever I sit in the saloon to watch the football. Families will be welcome in the lounge at any time, as well as in the spacious garden (with a wooden climbing frame!). The snug will be dark with heavily padded benches and chairs. Contra Orwell – as lovely as the Moon Over Water has been upon my every visit – we will serve more than doorstop sandwiches and scratching, but only at weekends, for the hordes of children we prophetically desire in our community.  The hall upstairs will not host the quizzes and dodgy tribute acts – we’ll shuffle them into the saloon and lounge – but rather be where we offer free violin lessons, and Toddler Music sessions, and a painting class. There will be lecture series, perhaps ill-attended at first but conducted in a popular style, injecting the Idea of Permanence into the community one reluctant attendee at a time, cultivating healthy, balanced intellectual and social aspirations. There will be a reading library in a side room beyond the lecture hall, and furtive aspirants will sneak in to open the storehouse of years. You say this is all fanciful? Mass literacy was fanciful; cheap editions of good books were condemned as unrealistic. We have done it before. It can be accomplished again.

***

My final overall category is the periodical. There are good traditionalist periodicals, and it is again something the Internet has facilitated – some very good papers, such as the University Bookman, are now strictly electronic, which reaches a wider audience than ever and cuts costs considerably. However, the very advantage the periodical gives means it cannot be over-replicated, if the content is worthwhile. The periodical is a platform for ideas; it provides a regular reiteration of a manifesto, if it has courage and clarity; it disseminates good ideas and good books and good poems to its audience. Is there anything more civilised than sitting in the windowseat on a windy Saturday morning reading an erudite quarterly? Even the stickiness of the glossy pages that you have to almost pry apart seems somehow elevating when your effort reveals an illuminating Diary from a country you have never heard of, or an exposé of a crooked system.

I personally intend to begin a periodical as part of my service as a builder of the Citadel. It will be print-only – not in contempt of online efforts, but as a declaration of the stubborn unchangeability of the real world. I want the 30 or 50 initial subscribers to have a tome in their hands, delivered every six months with a satisfyingly material thump on the doormat. I imagine stiff card covers with a contents listing on the front; the whole thing should be text only, so it constantly refers the reader’s memory to certain early and serious journals. There will be essays arguing for ideas about politics and culture and religion; reprints of fine old writing; original poetry observing old canons with new vigour; reviews of actually good books; overviews of fine art and music, because we all need a better education; and, the best or worst of all, pieces in Latin. I am haunted and heartened by the story of C.S. Lewis and the Italian priest – the priest had read The Screwtape Letters in translation, but not knowing English, and Lewis not really knowing Italian, the priest wrote to express his thanks in Latin. There followed a correspondence spanning many years in the scholarly tongue of Pliny and Bernard and Calvin. Of course, English is the universal language now, perhaps to be followed by Mandarin – but turning to Latin (and Greek) for a universal language reminds us of the need to rehumanise the humanities, and of the incalculable debt to the Great Tradition we all owe.

These are four examples. There are others that you may quickly furnish from your imagination. The point now is to concretise imagination, to make real these foundations and supporting beams of our Citadel.  There is work to do.

In closing, let us summarise the purpose of the Shadow Society in the words of that old hypocrite, Auden:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The Three Ingredients of Good Government

“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” – Burke, Reflections

“Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject’s liberty.” – John Adams, “Lord Clarendon to William Pym”

Though it may truly be said that government – both self-government and that government which applies to states – is a gift of God, nonetheless the variety of governments we see across history demonstrate that the specific permutations of government are “contrivances of human wisdom”, as Burke says. Based on natural law, contingent factors, and – I would say – the revealed Law of God, mankind contrives governments to “provide for human wants”. The term “wants” is not to be understood as synonymous with “appetites” – as if governments existed to give subjects or citizens stuff. That is certainly the ordinary activity of most modern governments, but that is a proof of degradation, not a useful form of definition.

In 1765, future Founding Father John Adams identified three components in the British Constitution. He avowedly believed the British Constitution was the best in the world at that time, and was defending his conception of it against those who sought to tyrannise the Colonies. These three components reflected the forms of governments delineated by Aristotle, and each had a particular value associated with it: monarchy (splendour), aristocracy (independence), and democracy (freedom). The three work together to preserve the true “rights”, drawn from Natural Law and established by prescription, to which every member of a society is entitled. Burke summarises these rights thus in his Reflections:

[L]aw itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice…. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.

The manner in which each form of government acting on its own may oppress these are clear to those who have read history. Monarchy alone may be arbitrary, brutal, self-deluded; aristocracy alone is prone to plutocratic and oligarchic excesses, the tendency to factional baronial warfare, the maintenance of an oppressive class structure, and the counting of the small people as no people but rather as kine; whilst democracy alone is prone to anarchy and rapacity, robbing the rich to buy votes, before descending into the historically inevitable contestation of the streets and the coming of some charismatic Caesar or Buonaparte to win the people over and re-enslave them, to resounding popular applause.

When balanced, however, these three ingredients of good government – splendour, independence, and freedom – work together to preserve a tolerably ordered and free society. They counterweight each other; they provide, within the constitution, curatives of those abuses that inevitably arise from time to time in any society.

Monarchy provides splendour in four ways: by its apparent permanence in the form of lifetime terms of office, it spans many lifetimes and personifies the nation as an apparently eternal thing; by its pomp and circumstance, it gives pleasure to the morally healthy subject, and displays the strength of the nation to the world; its paramountcy places other components of the constitution in relief, and allows them to be freely criticised; and its strange manner of gaining (ordinarily by primogeniture) removes it from common ambition and places it in an almost mystical category. (The best American parallel here is the Constitution as viewed by its devoutest advocates.)

Aristocracy provides independence in one chief manner, with a variety of side effects. Let us first define aristocracy in Adams’ terms. It is not necessarily a matter of inherited landed nobility, though that is a historically vindicated form; nor is it the strict meaning of the Greek original, “rule by the best”, though it connects; rather, “aristocracy” here means that interconnected-yet-distinct network of subsidiary centres of power where men and women of private means influence affairs.

A wealthy landowner to whom many owe informal allegiance can make his own decisions about a number of matters, and must be listened to by other decision-makers; a Countess of Huntingdon may cultivate a circle of reform-minded preachers; those old Cardinals of Renaissance Rome could patronise a variety of artists set in competition, thereby providing alternative visions of beauty for the wise to consider.

In essence, the independence of the aristocracy in financial and property terms, and the fact they are a multiple body rather than a singular man (or Parliament), will always restrain any overhaughtiness of the King or mad rapacity of the People, and the aristocrats themselves will only rarely, in a balanced constitution, unite to dominate others, instead lending strength to different causes according to their own conviction. They will only unite when an unbearable attack on their liberty threatens – as the Barons did in the face of King John, or the German Princes and Bishops did when in reaction to the Munster Rebellion.

Democracy provides freedom not by any appeal to equalitarianism – “I’m as good as you!” – but by providing a regular, law-enshrined, and peaceful means of removing bad governments. Popper puts it that the question we ought to ask when constructing constitutions is not “who should rule?” but “how do we get rid of bad rulers?”; this is the basis of his powerful defence of First-Past-The-Post electoral law against Proportional Representation. Bad government always tends to oppress freedom, whether by removing rights or by encouraging license. In a system with only a monarchy, there is no removing bad government except by natural accident; in a system of monarch and aristocracy, armed rebellion is the chief means of vindicating rights; but in a properly mixed system, the electors may go every three or five or seven years to the polls and declare if the government truly is intolerable. If it is intolerable – it leaves, packing its suitcases and heading off to retirement whilst some other group get their chance.

Now, can we see these features thriving in the British Constitution?

We can easily see the splendour of monarchy in the Britain of 2020, faded as it might be. There is a world-admired Queen, born and trained to service, dignified in her bearing, a grandmother to her subjects. There are still fine ceremonies – not just the high pomp of royal weddings, but also the austere splendour of the monarchy in the midst of this plague. I write this just as the 99-year-old Prince Consort, that ancient and unbeaten warhorse, has finally retired from his last colonelcy, handing it over to his daughter-in-law; following immediately upon that, the Queen knighted another old warhorse, the centurion and Captain (Bvt Colonel) Tom Moore.

But the sheer age of those mentioned, and the necessary silence about some other members of the family, are a warning sign – the blood is finally running thin; not in terms of crass genetics, but in terms of that elusive term breeding. We may be confident of honest service from the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge, but we have no guarantees beyond that.

Additionally, the constitutional sidelining of the monarchy has led to a weakening of its splendour. I hasten to say that its constitutional limitation has been of vital importance in preserving both it and its benefits for the nation. France took 169 years to resolve the problem posed by the first crippling of its monarchical element, brought on by charges of arbitrariness (whether fair or not). But a purely nominal monarchy cannot serve the nation as the nation needs; most particularly, if its paramountcy becomes a technical but not a real one, then the subordinate elements of government will increasingly take its place in the public imagination, as we have seen in this country. The awful tensions of the modern Presidential style of government – a figure who must be loved or hated in connection to each and every deed, who is revered by one faction and loathed by another – are fruiting in full in our country, centred around the occupant of Number 10 Downing Street (whoever it may be at any given time). We would be far better served by a more officially “political” Crown.

What of the aristocratic element of our constitution? Well, there are still landed aristocrats, and some still serve in the military, but between their continual effacement in the constitution, by the revenue, and in popular media, they are no real factor except as a subset of one of the three pseudo-aristocracies that now fill this role.

Our last landed aristocrats now – with honourable exceptions – are merely a minor element of the great international plutocracy which forms a transnational aristocracy. I do not resent corporate billionaires their money; I have more sympathy than may seem fitting for their desire not to sink their fortune into the public revenue like a stallion into a swamp; but I loathe their selfishness, their mock cosmopolitanism, their banality. As most have no ties to particular countries for their revenue – as they do not chiefly gain from rents, or from the productive sale of their own goods, or even the management of a particular chain of factories – they position themselves above the fray; but in this case, he who is not for me is against me. Indeed, the sheer scale of the wealth of these corporations, greater individually than the gross product of some small countries, renders them rivals to every constitution for power, rather than constituent parts of those constitutions.

The second pseudo-aristocracy in this country is in the bodies which we like to call “independent”. Indeed, this seems a promising source of aristocracy, if aristocracy is to provide us independence. But these bodies – our independent civil service, our independent public broadcaster, our independent judiciary – are not independent in the way aristocracy ought to be. I do not mean here to comment on whether these bodies are truly “independent” in views; I am merely comparing them to the aristocracy Adams and Burke would have recognised. The Marquess of Suchington and Cardinal della Pozzo are independent by reference to their private security, whilst the bureaucrat is independent (Deus vult) in reference to their opinions and judgement. The aristocrat gains independence by physical means, the bureaucrat by educative ones. The bureaucrat, then, is strong enough only to obstruct, not oppose; they have a natural interest in the maintenance and power of the very machinery they operate, and cannot make an individual stand against it, by reason of self-interest as well as of weakness. They may be diligent and honest and effective, but they cannot provide an aristocracy.

The third pseudo-aristocracy is in the devolved governments. These may appear as an aristocracy because the devolved governments provide alternative centres of power to Westminster, and thereby might provide a counterweight. However, this is an entirely illusory prospect. First, the devolved governments are nests of factional hatred and the haughtiness of small stakes; they have no love for the whole body of the people or the constitution, and that in Scotland actively seeks to destroy the order by which it exists. Second, the devolved governments are truly bureaucratic bodies, and so fall under the disqualification articulated in the last paragraph. Thirdly, as these are merely regional bodies, they cannot have meaningful views on matters of national import, because they do not have any right to oversight upon the whole. Their interest is sectional and geographic, and so they cannot provide a healthy counterweight to national government; the best they can purpose is disorderly rebelliousness.

The prospect of building a meaningful aristocracy in this country is even more remote than that of restoring monarchical splendour. Though the wheel of fortune turns dramatically, those turns are not predictable; and there is no predictable tendency to restoring hereditary landed titles or creating an ecclesiastical Curia in this country.

Finally, what of democratic freedom? The democratic element is certainly in the ascendant here, though often in cancerous ways. There are two loud but contradictory demands made by the most ardent tribunes of the people – on the one hand, more “democracy” in the form of more majoritarianism, more referendums, more “fair” representation, and so forth; on the other hand, an obsessive focus on alleged minority rights, which would be well and good if these were real rights rather than vain imaginations. One can see in this latter, of course, a nascent aristocratic movement, but one entirely unfitted either by intellect or morality or stable wealth. The only temporal comfort one draws in the face of their enormities is that they will soon enough be disgraced and forgotten except as a warning from history. At any rate, the two demands represent the two factions of our Revolution – the “more democracy” Girondins and the “more rights” Montagnards.

Democracy alone cannot preserve real freedom, because it collapses upon itself with comparative speed in its race for greater freedoms. It becomes so free from its body that the blood drains and the organs fall to the floor. Our present democracy increasingly threatens our freedom – by its assaults on good old institutions, by its obsession with demographic mathematics rather than judgement, by the ever-louder demands for more rapacious revenue policies – and, unrestrained, will surely lead to the tyranny Plato and Aristotle warned us about so long ago.

Any patriot desiring the salvation of our fine old Parliamentary democracy and its protection of our freedoms must desire the infusion of splendour and independence into it. Without all three ingredients, we shall soon enough have none.

Tradition, The Great Motivator of Excellence

Tradition is said to be a dead thing. Those old ways and old faces are dead and gone, and too close a connection with them is corrupting, as residing in a charnel house would be. We may like traditions; we may retain, as quaint mementos from a foreign holiday, some few habits from our family’s past. We may give the nod to one or two social traditions – usually innocuous holiday habits, such as Christmas stocking or Easter Egg hunts. Beyond those, however, this generation upon the earth rejoices that it is the freest yet of antiquated traditions and the darkness of inherited prejudices. We will, surely, ascend to the greatest heights of achievements our self-divinising species has yet known.

There are many reasons this Whiggery is a foolish phantasm, but a most significant one is that the abandonment of tradition is a great retardant to excellence. This is true in at least two ways, which can be connected but may also be distinguished.

The first we shall dispose of briefly. All art of any kind must exist in a tradition – it draws upon the “meat” of the past for its sustenance, not merely when "conforming" especially when it is rebelling. Eliot put the general point like this: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

The cow-preservers and menses-framers amongst the lead popular plastic artists of the last generation were not somehow moving away from the Great Tradition, or performing a real act of iconoclasm. Their secular blasphemies can only make sense to us in the context of a tradition stretching from the Apollo Belvedere via Michaelangelo all the way to Henry Moore. Rebellion, after all, is never an act of escape – only the loss of the ability to speak sensibly about oneself. Art – or any endeavour – can only be great when it is cognizant of its suprahistorical situation and in sympathy with it.

The second way in which tradition is a necessary motivator to excellence is in what we may call a moral sense. When the University of Oxford bestowed its highest honour upon Charles F. Adams – great-grandson and grandson of Presidents, son of an ambassador, himself a war hero and admired historian – the Orator of the University said this, in adverting to his family connections, “in these recollections we seem to be unrolling the annals of some Roman family – of the Bruti or the Decii – annals bearing witness to the fact that the ‘strong are born to the strong’, and that by the examples and traditions of their ancestors the descendants are incited to distinguished achievement” (emphasis, evidently, mine).

Tradition is the great corpus of the annals of the tribe; it is a mode of transmission; and it is an explanatory story. The traditions that we are most likely to retain in this mayfly era are those fragments and folktales of our family. Great-Uncle Albert used to take his false eye out and put it in his sherry glass; Aunt Ethel was known never to lie in any way to anyone but policemen; Grandad fought in Malaya and never speaks about it. These do not seem like a “family tradition”, but they are the bones of one. They put you in context. They give you a peopled universe from your birth – they besiege our instinctive solipsism.

They begin to imply moral values, too. Albert never cared who thought what others thought about him. Ethel had a rigid code of honour, never compromising, even where it seemed convenient. Grandad served his nation and, indeed, the free world – but war is hell. The prodigal may travel a long way and drink gallons of pigswill, but the deep poem of his life will always use those lines for a refrain.

Notwithstanding our Enlightened fellow citoyennes, no-one has ever autonomously reasoned herself into moral health. Not only is moral health a matter that does indeed encompass but also surpasses reason – it is an aesthetic and spiritual quality, too – it is also something that desires a salubrious environment in which to flourish. This might include good education and the addition of analytic logic, of course – but it must be a tremendous disappointment to the Pure Reasonabilists that the soundest moral instinct is quite often to be found amongst very dull and ordinary people, with nary a doctorate to show for their ethical insights. You may well be emotionally erratic and undignified – but the memory of your entirely controlled grandmother will always be one last restraint upon your excess. You might be quick to lay out every man who comes within six feet of you when you’re drunk, but you never hit a woman or a child, because that’s the Iron Code handed down to you.

Of course, this sort of morally spurring tradition is not always a family one, though it most often is so. The better sort of revolutionary – or, at least, the more cynical ones – always connects their plans of effacement to the Good Old Cause. There is a throughline in history which explains the need for radical change. It is a compelling counter-story to the prevailing tradition. As Simone Weil observes, even Marx recognizes this, by attempting to riddle the whole mountain of history with the class conflict he identified in the 19^th century. For his account to be authoritative, it must be historically ubiquitous; if class conflict were to disappear without Communism, it would render his insights ephemeral. He therefore had to discover what is, in essence, a tradition.

Similarly, one upholds the traditions of one’s College, of one’s cricket club, of one’s town or region. (The North-Easterner must, by natural duty, defend gravy on chips; she must never confess her own aesthetic loathing; loyalty and tradition demand the last full measure of devotion to spiced meat sauce on takeaway fried potato.) This is, of course, partly a means of being “in” rather than “out”, but that is not at all disconnected to our wider point. The weight of tradition, the expectations of the past, the story which frames our lives, is the greatest possible spur to “moral” behaviour and great achievement.

I do not argue that all such traditions are good, or that ill morals and dark achievements cannot be spurred by them. I merely assert that traditions are inescapable and indispensable motivators of moral behaviour; only a madman would seek to abolish them or dismiss them (and so our world is full of madmen, giving it the air of an asylum); we must instead first bow to them, understand their ancient strength and vision, and then digest them and make them our own, correcting them where we must but always cognizant that they are our moral lifeblood. Without them we will achieve no great deeds. We will be like the man who loses his short-term memory every morning, unable to compass any high and noble task. Rather we ought to desire to march forward under the well-patched banners of the past, to take the heights and win the day. Let me close by quoting, at some length, George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn, offering advice on the nature, acceptance, and cultivation of tradition:

Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.

The Liberty of the Failed Writer

Failure is liberating to the writer.

Failure here means the failure to reach any sort of audience – to be insignificant, unheard, irrelevant. Though there are many motives for writing – “This is the curse – write!” – it is a liar who claims that they would rather be unheard, would rather their work influenced no-one.

I assert that such failure is liberating. Anonymous toil has its benefits. One of the projects I work hardest on – the “Mid-Week Bible Video” – has a core audience in single digits. Most of my essays on culture are read by between 20 and 40 people. My work is of profound irrelevance – and yet the Mid-Week Bible Video feels like perhaps the most valuable thing I write (and record) each week. Why?

Let me illustrate by means of an anecdote. Whilst a New York Police Commissioner, two of Teddy Roosevelt’s friends came to him to ask him about the increasing hype surrounding him – did he also think he would be President one day?

He flew into a rage at them, demanding they never ask him such a thing again. Once he had calmed, he explained – that though he might desire such a post, if he dwelt on it he would lose the very fire that made him effective, the risk-taking integrity that was making his name. He would begin to make politic decisions. He would become useless – even if he did become President eventually.

An enormously productive time in my writing and reading life has come during a period a great uncertainty, personally and nationally. Why? For any number of reasons – but one, I suspect, is my complete insignificance.

When I sit down to prepare the Mid-Week Bible Video, I read Hodge’s Commentary on Romans (our current series), I read the section of Watson’s All Things for Good that will be included in the video, and I check the catechism question for the week. I then spend several hours writing the Bible study. I then spent around an hour recording, prepping, and uploading the video to Youtube. It is some of the best work I have ever done.

My minute audience was initially half-demoralising, but is now a spur; this small audience wants the work I have to give them, and makes no conflicting demands (though critique is welcome). And their very small number focuses my mind and spirit on the work in hand – the explanation of the things of God and the feeding of Christ’s sheep. The complete lack of adulation I receive forces me to write because it is worth writing. The work takes on its own life, rather than having false life given it by the gloss of applause.

I think this sort of popular failure has a clarifying effect on the writer. Do they write because they must, because they are convicted of their subject, or do they write purely in hopes of an audience? Whilst diligently seeking wise criticism, the anonymous writer can focus on the purification of their work, so that it achieves the highest interior and formal excellence possible.

There is, I think, a wider sanctification possible too – if the failed writer chooses to eschew any bitterness at the fickleness of the crowd, they can instead turn that criticism inward, at their own inner mob, baying for the bread and circuses of public plaudits. They can render that internal gaggle quiescent, and truly rule themselves by means of the spirit and intellect.

Eventually, if such a self-ruled and fully convicted writer becomes prominent, they may be able to retain focus and integrity in the face of their audience. That is precisely when they can be useful to their hearers – when they aim to please nobody but their daimon.

For any aspiring writers of talent, then, I heartily wish you failure. I hope your articles receive a dozen views each for years to go. I hope every hack around you gets invited on to podcasts, or gets a column on a blogroll site. I hope you receive little praise and less money. This could be the greatest gift possible for you; it may make your work worthy if fame comes calling.

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things I: The Home

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

What is the impoverished traditionalist to do? The field of action for this tiny minority is greatly limited. No British television network is commissioning arts programmes headed by Catholic experts on the Old Masters; no neo-Puritan brimstone-breathers are called to do Thought for the Day; the Internet provides a promising frontier, with its proliferation of respectable new platforms, but it lacks precisely the concentration and centrifugal force that traditional societies require. Now, if one had great personal wealth or powerful friends, something might be done – but notwithstanding the excellent Jonathan Ruffer, and keenly aware that Sir Roger Scruton has now gone to meet his Maker, there are precious few traditionalists holding the cultural high ground.

What is to be done? You must start from where you are. That means, in the first case, cultivating virtue in the soul – become a balanced and integral man or woman, lay foundations for a purposeful life, be a good neighbour. But after that, it means assessing the prospects of your home situation. Even the vagrant has a home of this sort – it travels with him. There may be no hope of traditional society “out there”, but perhaps some little traditional society can be built in here.

I can only look to my own prospects. Renting on a low-cost long-term tenure under unusual circumstances, free to convert and repair and redecorate as desired. A terrace house, formerly owned by some miner or cartman; added to and accreted over the years, including by us. We use it as two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, an upstairs snug sitting room, a sewing room/spare bedroom, a large office and games room, and two bathrooms. There is a compact but promising garden, and we rent a very small allotment plot.

These are all works in progress, half in chaos, the result of children and workload and ill-health and every other factor that plays into these situations. They are a beginning, though. They can be a citadel. A citadel for what? As the title says, a citadel of the Permanent Things – those irreplaceable and quintessential features of humanity through all ages, those features which separate us from the beasts, which connect us to eternal values and purpose.

The citadel is a place for defence and for training – that is how Russell Kirk saw his own “citadel” at Piety Hill. It is also a statement – an aesthetic declaration about stability and control. The citadel stakes out the claim for the forces of order in a chaotic Wasteland.

My own citadel must be different to yours – not merely by circumstance of property, but also differences in temperament and variety in vocation. Some are called to raise a great brood of children into allegiance to Permanence, forsaking many of their own comforts; others, through disappointments or privation, have an equally high calling as a rover or a hostess or an urban hermit, dedicating all their time to the wider stratagems of our Cause. Yet perhaps my literally domestic aspirations can serve as some inspiration to yours. Concrete examples are better than poetic generalities – you build citadels from stone, not vapour. The arid abstractions of the dreamful young reactionary will not survive the solid shot of our neighbours in Philistia.

Let us talk about physical space, first. There ought to be as many usable rooms as possible, number dependent upon space. Let there be a dining room with a fine old table, under which little boys might hunker down and pretend to be cavemen; let there be different places to sit and relax, with different aspects, levels of light, and furnishing – a different hideaway for each mood. There need to be different places coveys may gather – a yard where cronies may drink good wine at dusk, a secluded armchair upstairs for quiet reading, a parlour where the needy might come to be hosted and blessed. A multifunctional citadel, this – not a vast mock-Scandi waste of open plan minimalism, but a warren, fit to withstand a siege. There will be a place for the ensigns to rest, and a maproom for the castellan, and a storehouse for our pikes and arquebuses.

For decoration, my taste runs to the old-fashioned, though not exclusively. Darker colours suit dining rooms, those Great Halls of evening conversation, where the light must reflect upon rich, absorbing colours; lighter colours suit dayrooms where you ask the sun to amberly light your way as you pore over a book or pass the tea ceremony with a comrade. Little boys and girls, of course, must have bright colours for their bright hearts.

My own idea for paintings is aided by a rich inheritance of objets from a painter uncle. The Verows decorate our family room; once the dining room is finished, more will go up there, accompanied by a variety of Machins, and some Ravilious prints. Where those dreamy pictures of Deep England pass to the downstairs landing, a change will be effected – Chagall’s “I and the Village”, a stranger Deep France. Up the stairs and to a Kandinsky, and then on the upstairs landing a variety of stylish modern media artifacts – a Studio Ghibli promo poster, for instance. Our bedroom has ukiyo-e prints and a painting of the woodland where my grandparents are buried. All these paintings aim to suit their surroundings and carry coherent themes across walls, but also individually declare the Creed of Permanence. I have the unearned blessing of family paintings, and display them in allegiance, both to their diverting beauty but also the echo they are of former times and the names of my kin now translated to pure Permanence.

Furniture is really a different category to decoration. Tasteful furniture, either inherited or picked up on the cheap by careful hunting. The family room has monochrome fabric armchairs and sofa and footstool, a marble-topped side-table, and a sturdy inherited carpet in the middle (and an unobtrusive IKEA shelving unit for the toys and electronic apparel; the mock Scandi aesthetic has its happy accidents). The dining room has a table inherited from a friend, and old barley-twist chairs from my Grandma; there is a giant dark-wood century old sideboard and mighty bookcase, its bottom shelf filled with my Great-Grandfather’s bound Strand magazines. There is a lacquered bureau beyond the table. The nursery has white, cheerful furniture, colourful train table, and a chair-bed. You get the idea; restraint in colour scheme, solidity over ease, comfortable, always transporting the past into the present to frame the future for the children raised here in this little citadel.

But what shall we do to make this one of – God willing! – thousands of Last Homely Houses scattered across England, a refuge in the Trollshaws of postmodernity?  We amateurishly grow veg in the allotment and yard, with our eldest a key farmhand, and have grand plans for the bumpy garden (including a wicker hideout under the leylandii). We now try (sometimes failing!) to eschew electronic entertainment except on the Sabbath – which is time for cartoons and documentaries – and instead provide solid, hard-wearing toys, train sets, teddies, and acres of books. There is almost nothing more heartening than seeing your one-year-old gallop to find a book to read (upside-down, and missing every other page as he paws through!). Let them grow up, on the whole, secured in the unperjurable realm of real, physical things. We are reading Longfellow after dinner now, and for some time we have had family worship between dinner and bedtime. It is a revelation to discover your toddlers can learn literally dozens of old hymns by heart, and will listen to the difficult diction of Puritan preachers, and will ask questions about hoary old Bible texts. I want to give them the weapons for their own defence of the Permanent Things, and it so often happens around the wax-clothed dining table, where they learn to paint with Mama, and build Lego, and hear dead voices speak Permanent truths –

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

We’ve taken – very recently – to reading Chaucer together nightly after chores and work and the boys’ bedtime. That will occupy us for some time. What next? Why not some long and encouraging missionary biography, or Runciman’s Crusades, or the novels of Lewis?

I want there to be a magazine rack – now surely the deadest dinosaur! – with respectable magazines for guests and children and evenings – Apollo, The New Criterion, the LRB. Well – and perhaps some vetted comic anthologies from the old dead past, safely offensive, because I don’t think the toddlers are yet at the point of hmming along as they read a review of a biography of Henry James written by a Lecturer in English at some minor suburban polytechnic.

One day perhaps we will tear out the gas fire – as respectable as it is – and put in a wood-burner. Is that too boho? But there is something inescapably connected about sitting in front of the fireplace, watching logs burn. You can see it, can’t you? The boys pushing trains on the beloved pass-down carpet; the house guest with his fashionable novel on the sofa; single malt on the side table, beside whisky glasses reflecting swaying firelight; a great-uncle’s paintings of landscapes and town squares conjuring scenes he saw and loved, and so we see and love.

I am missing, of course, one of the great ingredients of this citadel, one of the great fruits of all these plantings – there should be serious conversation, and spiritual growth, and appreciation of sublime art – but the perennial sound, aside from respectable radio channels, should be laughter. Rich, healthy, fulsome laughter, laughter at no obscenity but for sheer joy, for silliness, echoing the laughter that fills the feasting halls of Heaven. Laughter in face of despair, knowing, truly, that the Permanent Things to which we are allegiant in this house will stand unshaken at the very End.

"Ere the sad gods that made your gods

            Saw their sad sunrise pass,

            The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,

            That you have left to darken and fail,

            Was cut out of the grass.

            "Therefore your end is on you,

            Is on you and your kings,

            Not for a fire in Ely fen,

            Not that your gods are nine or ten,

            But because it is only Christian men

            Guard even heathen things.

            "For our God hath blessed creation,

            Calling it good. I know

             What spirit with whom you blindly band

            Hath blessed destruction with his hand;

            Yet by God's death the stars shall stand

            And the small apples grow."