An Orthodox Englishman

 When this blog was commenced, the name chosen for it was “ a voice from the shires”.  This seemed most apposite given the focus of the blog was to promote a rural, royalist and sacramental, spiritual argument for English, even British, culture and tradition.

The mystical and Christian meaning of the Monarchy, the spiritual aspect of tradition, the sacred value of English countryside in our identity were of central importance and of concern to the blog in terms of arguing for their protection. There was an underlying Burkean perspective that set the paradigm and perspective of the blog.  This was the more neoplatonic and mystical side of Burke combined with his practical conservatism, as opposed to his more Whiggish elements.  The Burke who won over Wordsworth to conservatism, not the Burke who was himself won over by Adam Smith’s liberal economics.

A key turning point in my thinking was expressed in a blog I entitled A Orthodox Voice in a Western Wildnerness.  https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html

Having been an advocate of the West, concerned about the encroachment of political Islam, arguing for the open society, as per the content of many of my early blogs, I was becoming increasingly alienated from the secularising and reductive spirit of Western liberalism very evident as imposed on other countries via our foreign policy and direct violence.  I began to notice that much of our foreign policy was a manifestation of this reductive universalism that wants to flatten out the world as a bleak wasteland of secularism and rational choice theory.  People will be nothing more than individuals, voters and consumers determined by their most petty passions.

In the particular blog mentioned above I applied Burke’s concept of wisdom of the ancestors to Church dogma and the role of the Church Fathers.  This inevitably put me in the camp of Orthodox theology, as contrasted against the individualism of Protestant interpretation of Scripture and the Roman Catholic idea of unilateral Papal infallibility unrestrained by Patristic Tradition.  Of course there was still a long way for me to go, especially in a spritiual rather than cerebral sense.

My interest in the mystical and spiritual aspect of our Monarchist and Christian constitution inevitably led to the recognition of a type of Byzantine idea of Symphonia that the British constitution strove for, in opposition to all the Victorian liberal constitutionalists from Bagehot to Dicey.  The sacramental nature of the mystery of the Coronation is of course rooted in Orthodox belief that is still there, hidden in the mists of our Orthodox past.  Encounters with British Orthodoxy helped me to understand that a rediscovery of our Orthodox past reconnects us with our mystical monarchy and our mystical countryside – but this is long-forgotten, written out of the Whig history.  Now forgotten it was  connected to our woods and sacred shrines long before 1066 and the arrival of schismatic Roman Catholicism with the Norman conquerors.

It was Constantinople not Rome that the Anglo Saxon aristocracy sort refuge.

With the Normans came  Anselm’s  theory of atonement that drastically distorted Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection, further solidifying the Great Schism.  This bargaining for eternal life and appeasing a vengeful God sank deep into the Western consciousness, combined unhealthily with Saint Augustine’s emphasis on Original Sin.

The Normans, those rootless marauders, who in Southern Europe would fight the Christian Empire in Sicily were content with a feudal God and a rationalistic faith.   

With our ancient Monarchy, preceding the Conquest, there has been an ongoing sense that there is something deeply rooted in the English past that is very different from the theologies and philosophies imposed by the post-Conquest aristocracy.  Not only did Norman England give Anselm a platform for his heresies, but it was also the home for the most damaging philosophy arguably in the West – the reductive nominalism of William of Ockham.  Somehow though the sense has remained that England contains a deep spiritual mystery far removed from Occamite nominalism, naïve empiricism, Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism and reductive and dehumanising utilitarianism.  That mystery is symbolised in our Monarchy in a very Orthodox sense and yet the Monarchy has also become a weapon of the veiled republic of the liberal secularists and nominalists.  This conflict is reaching its height with the coming coronation of a personally spiritual King linked to Orthodoxy, but also ideologically under the influence of the Globalist WEF.

There is a deep contradiction in England and it is contended here that it is because of the spiritual alienation from the Orthodox Church after the Conquest.  We have lived with a continuous tension between a knowing and worldly “realism” that reduces all to a worldly common-sense alienating us further from the spiritual life, tradition in a mystical sense, and from holistic existence and on the other hand authentic Christian tradition.  In accepting the Conquest perhaps the English have adopted a certain fatalism to a materialistic existence where the paradigm is essentially reductive.  In accepting their subjugation a deep cynicism has resulted.  But we know there was something more in our past, when we were still part of the Orthodox communion.

The Sixteenth Century break with Rome might have seemed like an attempt to rediscover the past – but the sacred objects of England were systematically destroyed, the shrines desecrated and an even more barren and reductive theology came to dominate, finally manifesting in regicide after a hundred years.  As the Pilgrimage of Grace showed, the ordinary people still placed value on the old faith.  While that faith came to be identified with Roman Catholicism, this was a striving back towards something yet more ancient.

We see this authentic striving in our country misdirected due to lack of knowledge.  People seek not Orthodoxy, but a pre-Christian paganism linked to our woods and fields.  Everyone knows there is something amiss, but not what is missing and instead people fall into a shallow and sentimental new -age paganism as an alternative to the continued propaganda of the world now promoted by the likes of Richard Dawkins, a man rooted in the world and establishment of the power of the Conquest.

It is in figures such as C S Lewis, in his Anglicanism, even Tolkien and Chesterton in their English Catholicism, Philip Sherrard, who perhaps like our new King flirted a little too much with Perennialism, and of course Kallistos Ware, that Oxford convert, author and bishop who embodies a certain familiar Englishness, and yet is valued and held in the highest regard throughout the Orthodox world – so that at his funeral in England, Moscow and Constantinople were united again despite the geopolitical crisis over Ukraine.

We all have a sense that there is something in our English past we have lost contact with.  While the Sophists, economists and calculators along with neocon warmongers and Atlanticists, the economic and social neoliberals are the voice of the British State, we know intuitively that the English spirit is something far contrary to this. 

It was in part through applying Burke in a way he could not have imagined that it was possible for me to understand the coherence and power of the ancient faith, the apostolic faith from Christ’s disciples in an unbroken line through the Fathers to the Church of today.  There was much more to discover in a spiritual rather than rationalist way.  While discovering the Orthodox faith has opened the doors of Russian and Greek culture, it has also meant a deeper and fuller understanding of what it really means to be English and to belong to “this sceptred isle”, this truly Christian country underneath all the economic and social liberalism, the materialism, the secularisation, the bureaucracy and the love of Mammon.  The spirit of Orthodoxy is still here, if we only look for it and that starts with a recognition that Englishness is not to be found in the utilitarians, the free-marketeers, the liberals, the atheists, the nominalists, those who have accommodated themselves to the catastrophe of the Conquest and the consequent cynicism in high places that results from authority being seized a thousand years ago with a Nietzschean will to power, against the spirit of the Beatitudes and in alienation from the Church, the authentic Church – the Orthodox Church.  The real counter-revolution is not in political activity, it is in rediscovering our own ancient connection to the Orthodox Church.  I have done so by joining the Orthodox Church and specifically the Moscow Patriarchate, which has recently recognised the ancient saints of this island before the Great Schism.  It will seem strange to many, but I have rediscovered the faith of my forefathers through Russia.

Burke versus Gramsci – the Great British Institution and the Conservative Dilemma

 Conservatives look to Edmund Burke as their great founding father.  Central to Burkean thought is the institution with its historical memory as a repository of the wisdom of the ancestors.  In terms of modern philosophy and the Burkean tradition one might also look to Alasdair MacIntyre in his account of institutions and nations acquiring a tradition of virtue and as a Burkean opponent of Burke’s dreaded sophists, economists and calculators .

If conservatism depends for its philosophy upon manmade institutions there is always the risk such institutions will prove fatally fallible and corruptible.  Such could well be the problem in today’s United Kingdom.  Unlike the United States with its revolutionary origins, there has not been such a strong suspicion of Government and institutions within the British Right, sometimes quite the opposite.  The Crown and the Church as Margaret Thatcher once outlined are of far greater import to a Tory than the economy.  This perspective, it should be remembered, was held by the Conservative Prime Minister now looked to as an exemplar by today’s sophists, calculators and economists – the libertarian and neoliberal Right.

Margaret Thatcher though experienced the problem of the dilemma I intend to outline at first-hand.  All the British institutions, the Church of England, the BBC and even the hierarchy of the Conservative Party were opposed to her.  This tension has only grown more stretched and extreme.  While the Conservative Party has moved culturally to the Left, it is still faced by a hostile hard Left in control of the institutions that it should naturally be at home with.

The Church of England is no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, as the saying had it.  The BBC is faced with calls to be defenestrated by conservatives not radicals, because of its cultural Marxism.  Even the Conservative Party itself, at least its high command, is now a proponent of the hard-left cultural agenda in terms of same-sex marriage, “diversity” and equality of outcome.

It seems as though the Gramsci agenda of the “long march through the institutions” as extreme Leftist German-activist Rudi Dutschke put it, has been emphatically achieved in Great Britain.  The universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, the BBC, the Church are all advocates of a hard-line cultural Marxist agenda dressed up in palatable phrases such as “diversity”, “equality”, “openness”.

So what does a Burkean conservative do when the institutions its whole philosophy seeks to conserve and be guided by have fallen into the hands of the Marxists?  One answer is the populist response, looking to the American Right as an example.  Here characters like Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks are notable champions for such an agenda.  Indeed, despite being placed upon the Right, their populist agenda sometimes puts them on the Left.  For example, whereas an earlier Eurosceptic like Enoch Powell was a keen defender of the House of Lords, as well as the Crown and the established Church, Farage and Banks are radical constitutional-reformers.

The other response is the classically liberal agenda, advocated by the sophists, calculators and economists that conservatives should instinctively distrust.  From this free-marketeer liberal perspective privatisation rather than conservation is the answer to the BBC’s political subversion.  The free market is not really a conservative response to dealing with preservation of the institution.  We are not talking about a nationalised industry, but a British institution which is a custodian of many great British traditions.  Would commercialisation and advertising culture really be a conservative answer?

One might contrast arch-liberal free-marketeer George Osborne with populist Nigel Farage as two contrasting answers to the Gramscian victory within British institutions from Oxbridge to the BBC.  To abolish our institutions though is surely not a conservative solution, whether it be BBC privatisation or Church disestablishment. 

The populism of Brexit might have unleashed patriotic forces against the Gramsci institutions, but populist nationalism is not inherently conservative, as any cursory knowledge of Nineteenth Century nationalism will tell us.

It is undoubtedly the case that while the Right and conservatism look to be in the ascendancy, the whole movement is riven by internal contradictions.  This new populism rightly unleashed against the EU has now turned on British institutions like the House of Lords (admittedly corrupted into a culturally Marxist institution by the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg).  It could just as easily turn upon the Monarchy and nationalism again would have reverted to its radical-Leftist Nineteenth-Century roots.

It has to be admitted that when the Marxists own and control what you are trying to defend it is difficult to know how to proceed.  The only answer I believe is not one for people looking for instant solutions.  Only a gradual return to the values of Tradition will rescue our institutions and our culture.  And this might have to be carried out in a radical and unconventional way, outside of the apparatus of British institutions.  It might mean home schooling of our children, to teach them traditional values outside of the Marxist-run education system.  It might mean leaving the Church of England as a Church of Laodicea for a more traditionalist denomination that might feel foreign at first, such as Eastern Orthodoxy.  It might mean stepping back from the rat-race of the neoliberal economy with more self-sufficiency and less consumption.  In short it might mean letting the light of conservative tradition shine before men as an example, rather than trying to fight for it and impose it through democratic elections and the party system.  From the small acorn and with Providential nurture we might see a large oak of conservative counter-culture grow that provides a genuine alternative to the anomie of cultural Marxism and its insipid shadow, neoliberalism.  Only with a cultural change, rather than election victories will conservatives see their institutions restored and again linked back to the Burkean wisdom of ancestors. 

Civic Virtue and the World

Aristotle taught that man’s telos was to achieve virtue.  Just as the purpose of a musical instrument is to be played and thereby produce music, so Man is to live ethically.  Part of that ethical living is to make a commitment to the Polis, the city state, and to devote oneself to public life.  It is ethical to participate in politics.

As Edmund Burke famously pointed out, for evil to triumph good men simply need to do nothing.  If men of virtue do not participate in public life it will become dominated and controlled by the corrupt, the careerist and even the criminal.  In the West after generations of participation, engagement in politics has been decreasing, leaving the field of public life to the cranks and fanatics that our current university system seems intent on churning out of its post-modern system.  Indeed, it seems it is only those driven by vanity as opposed to virtue that have the energy and zeal to enter public life.  

Whether it is fanatics like Corbyn and McDonnell who wish to change the country in a way no normal person could accept or shallow careerists like David Cameron, there seems little room for the man committed to public service as an Aristotlian virtue.  There are two predominant forces in politics today – the ideological leftist extremists and the careerists.

In the United States we have seen a peaceful revolution against this corrupt (in the broadest sense of the word) system.  Donald Trump was elected because there was something rotten in the state of the Western democracy.  A professional and managerial political class committed to its own shibboleths of ideology, well out of step with the consensus of normal people had become isolated in its apparently impregnable position of power.  Donald Trump was elected to change all that – he said the unsayable in an environment of suffocating political correctness.  Paradoxically this New York TV celebrity gave a voice to traditionalist conservatives and Christians deeply troubled by the course the political class had set their nation upon.

It is no cliché to draw a parallel with Brexit.  That other Anglo-Saxon nation, the old country, the United Kingdom went through its own peaceful revolution in the Brexit vote.  Delivering the largest democratic mandate in history the British public voted decisively to leave the international and globalist project that was set up to destroy the nation state and democratic accountability - the European Union.  In England and Wales the vote was emphatically for leave, the figure only being made more marginal by a capital city out of step culturally and politically with England and Wales as a whole.  Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain for specific reasons and should not be considered as having voted against the United Kingdom itself.

Whereas in recent weeks we have seen a significant triumph for the Trump administration, in the exoneration of the President from any suspicion of being complicit with the Russian Government to win the election; in the United Kingdom Brexit has been dealt what is perhaps a fatal blow.  Theresa May will now work across the House of Commons, where there is a majority committed to stopping Brexit.

This tells us much of the decline of British institutions after forty years of being governed by an unelected and foreign bureaucracy.  It is no wonder that when Parliament was merely there to provide a fig leaf for two thirds of laws not democratically processed, the quality of politician and the institution of Parliament itself should have suffered a serious decline.  Our political class is not up to the job of Brexit because it has been enervated and corrupted by the European Union and its corrosive effect on representative democracy.  Participation in politics when ruled by Brussels is a charade and it has attracted those who are happy to play a charade.  Now their bluff is called and they are terrified by the thought of political responsibility and accountability.  What might seem like an opportunity to the public man of integrity is terrifying to the careerist politician.

The corrupt careerists therefore did what comes easiest to them, they lied that they would deliver Brexit while spending three years plotting to subvert the democratic result of the referendum.  This is of course disgraceful, wrong and corrupt.  How should one respond?

Despair or extremism are two very tempting responses.  Our system appears to have shown itself irredeemable.  The public gave Parliament a chance to restore its sovereignty and it preferred vassalage.  Yet neither anger nor despair are responses that one striving for virtue should countenance.

There is the so-called Benedict option  If we look at the betrayal of Brexit not in isolation but as symptomatic of the decline of Western politics, then rather than despair should we not be liberated from placing any hope in temporal victories?    One could then withdraw from the world not in despair, but in a spirit of devotion and hope for the next world.  It is interesting to note that Aristotle himself placed the life of contemplation at an even higher level of attainment in virtue than civic participation.

If we are thinking in typological terms, then an analogy might be drawn between a Brussels-administered United Kingdom and First-Century Judea, with its charade of independence, while de facto power was very much in the hands of the Roman administration.

There was a political movement in Judea, the Zealots, who sought for a political victory over Rome.  They were disappointed in a corrupt Jewish establishment that had come to terms with Rome.  These zealots were also to be deeply disappointed in Christ, because they had hoped for a Messiah who would overturn the oppressors and bring about a political Utopia in the form of a new Davidic Zion, powerful and flourishing.  Yet as Christ taught, His kingdom is not of this world.

The temptation to zealotry in today’s circumstances would be to slip into a revolutionary mindset, perhaps even looking at a violent solution to the political corruption and lack of national sovereignty revealed by the Brexit betrayal.  Such an extremist Brexiteer zealotry is not the answer.

Yet again just as despair and extremism are temptations that should be resisted, abdication of responsibility is not an answer either.  We are in the world at the moment that we should be, with all the responsibilities that entail to act or not.  We cannot entirely disengage from this disappointing and fallen world, but neither can we place the totality of our hope in it.
 

Christian civilization is under attack in subtle ways, for the serpent is the subtlest creature in the garden.  Whether it is the attack on gender as a reality or national identity or marriage, forces have combined to destroy the foundations of our culture.  Brexit is just one example of this attack on all that gives meaning, in that national identity has to be dissolved if the post-modern agenda is to succeed. 

The point is not to give in to despair, but to continue the good fight, with an expectation of all being put right eschatologically.  With the specific example of Brexit our nation shook and destabilised the foundations of the new establishment’s new Tower of Babel.  It is right to continue shaking it, without believing we can replace it with a perfect state ourselves.  If we were to do that we fall into the very heresy of chiliasm that lies behind the concept of the European Union.    There will never be an ultimate political solution to this world, but it is right to strive against corruption and duplicity and attacks on our core values.

WHY MONARCHIES FALL

Today is the anniversary of the brutal regicide of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and the bloody murder of his wife Empress Alexandra (Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter), their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (collectively referred to as OTMA by themselves in family correspondence) and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexey.  Their murders were brutal, clumsy and bloody.

Another anniversary occurred a couple of days before - the celebration of the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789 - which led to the state murders of King Louis XVI and his Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette.  Burke famously lamented the treatment of the Queen with the following words in his famous Reflections: 

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Marx despised this passage, which is reason enough for us to take it to heart.  For Marx was the inspiration behind the brutal crime against the Romanovs.  They were killed in the name of his ideology in a basement of their prison in Ekaterinburg and their bodies dumped and an attempt made to dissolve them with acid.  Thus modern regicide hit a new low of depravity.

Solzhenitsyn, the Russian intellectual, saw a direct link between the horrors of the French Revolution and its reign of Terror and the Bolshevik Revolution that tore down his own country's social fabric and hierarchy.

In our own island the British Monarchy remains and continues to hold the respect and love of its subjects.  It survived where others did not and it is often assumed that is because of the pragmatism of British institutions.  The British Monarchy unlike the Russian Autocrat adapted to a constitutional role in a parliamentary-representative democracy.

Yet such an understanding suggests a shallow and positivist perspective of history.  The British Monarchy has not simply survived because it adapted to the Whigs' Glorious Revolution.  Just like the Russian and French Monarchies it is closely associated with the Church and Tradition.  And if Monarchy is to be what it should be, it must retain a connection with transcendental Tradition.

Nonetheless it is true that while that transcendental aspect of Monarchy inspires loyalty and sacrifice, it also makes it a target of those who would flatten out our society with the aim of breaking any connection with the Transcendent.  Yet our own Monarchy is closely linked to the idea of transcendent Tradition and the power of this idea was demonstrated by the impact of the traditional Coronation service upon Queen Elizabeth II.  The anointing with oil within a tabernacle was a sacramental experience for Her Majesty, which has continued to sustain her through the many trials of her reign.

This claim to a divine connection led to attacks upon our own Monarchy.  It faced revolution and suffered regicide as a result of the Civil War.  Charles I approached his death with the stoicism of his Christian faith so that he is still regarded (albeit quietly) as a Martyr of the Anglican Church.  The same progressive and regicidal forces, somewhat moderated later in the Century, ensured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the Monarchy's powers were curtailed by Parliament, and its survival would be conditional on popular assent, as demonstrated by the lines in our national anthem:

"May she defends our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen"

Yet the Monarchy itself has a place in our hearts and moves us because of its sacred and traditional elements.  This power of Tradition has also shaped Prince Charles' values and idea of vocation.  His Royal Highness has associated himself with perennial and Traditionalist ideas of religion, which has clearly drawn him to orthodox religion of many forms, from his own Greek Orthodox heritage on Mount Athos to traditionalist Islam (which should be distinguished sharply from the revolutionary Islam of the Salafists - unfortunately often misleadingly described as "conservative").

So the British Monarchy does not really fit the Whiggish mould and retains its connection to the transcendent Tradition, albeit less obviously than the Romanovs.  And it was that connection with the transcendent Tradition that meant the Bolsheviks needed to eliminate the Romanovs.  For the revolutionaries believed the Transcendental to be fake and that all could be explained by economics and materialism.  They wanted to break the connection with the Transcendent.

For Tsar Nicholas and his family however, their Orthodox faith was of central importance.  It was for this reason the kindly father and reluctant monarch Nicholas, resisted calls for a full parliamentary-democracy and remained the autocrat.  It was Empress Alexandra's Orthodox faith (combined with her Victorian and Protestant upbringing) that led her to bring up their children un-spoilt and un-corrupted by the decadence of the Russian Court, leading to resentment from the aristocracy.

Often the involvement of Rasputin in the Romanov family is used by secularist historians to point to the superstition of their religious faith and paint it as one of the causes of their tragic overthrow.  Yet this is to take the Bolshevik propaganda at face value and to fail to understand certain important elements of Russian Orthodoxy.

Empress Alexandra was a sincere convert (after initial reluctance) from Lutheranism to the highly Traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church.  A central sacred figure of Orthodoxy is the fool for Christ or yurodivy.  Alexandra became convinced Rasputin was such a figure and furthermore she depended on him because of the love she had for her family.  Only Rasputin had the power to heal her precious son of his haemophilia when the medical doctors could do nothing.  Is the Empress to be found at fault for this?  Rasputin (unlike the Romanovs -declared martyrs by ROCOR and Passion Bearers by the Russian Church) has never been acknowledged by the Orthodox Church, but it is our modern post-Enlightenment mindset that prevents us understanding his importance to the Royal Family.

Just as with the French Monarchy, the Russian Monarchy had to be eliminated in the opinion of those forces that emerged from the Enlightenment.  Monarchy maintained the connection between man and the Transcendent, right back to the early beginnings of our human story.  A Monarchy that has lost this connection, as it can do by becoming secularised or modernised, is no longer a threat to the materialist and anti-sacred agenda of the revolutionaries.  It is no longer a target.  It is therefore of great credit to the the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs that they were considered such a threat as to be necessary to murder.  They courageously went to their deaths believing in the divine aspect of the kingly vocation.  To lose this sense is to lose the point of Monarchy.

While our own Royal Family has accommodated itself to modernism in the mixed economy of the British constitution, made up of representative democracy and monarchy as it is, our Queen has maintained the sacred nature of her vocation and this sense of the Transcendent has shaped her reign.  Albeit with his own personal perspective, Prince Charles too is clearly a believer in the Transcendent Tradition.  Yes such an aspect to Monarchy will always provoke the hostility of those who wish to break the connection with the Transcendent in the name of progress, but to lose that Tradition would make the Monarchy purposeless, causing it to degenerate into mere celebrity.

     

The War to End a Gentler World

Much of the gentleness of Europe had been dissipated anyway, before the First World War.  Commercialisation, the era of the sophist, the economist and the calculator that Edmund Burke long ago identified had already come about.  It co-existed however with a continuing gentleness of Faith, Monarchy, rural life and homesteads.  Alongside the grime and misery of industrialisation, the older world still lingered – sustained because that was the natural way to live.  A portrait of that world was powerfully painted by Siegfried Sassoon in his book Memoir of a Foxhunting Man.

The Great War was the first industrial and first fully-mechanised war.  Men were no longer bands of brothers, but pawns to be sacrificed.  When the clouds of smoke cleared and the barren landscape remained, that gentler world could no longer survive.  The pressures were building, but the Great War ensured the victory of Modernity. 

The combatants indeed represented different worlds.  Austria-Hungary and Germany placed their faith in the new power of mechanised warfare.  The descendants of the Holy Roman Empire again turned on the remnants of Byzantium, supported by the Ottomans.  In its harassment of the small state of Serbia, Austria-Hungary was only following in the spirit of the Catholic Crusaders who sacked Christian Constantinople in 1204 for gain of its treasure.

The new nation of Germany allied with the Hapsburgs made war on an older Christian culture in its attack on Serbia, bringing Holy Russia into the conflict, in defence of its tiny Orthodox brother.  The mechanised horror of modern warfare the Germanic nations wrought on Russia, brought an end to the Orthodox Monarchy and saw the forces of materialism and modernity Dostoevsky foresaw taking control of Russia.  The Russia of greedy, crass oligarchs that we see today is the result of the triumph of those forces and the Holy Spiritual Russia is still battling to re-emerge.

In England things changed forever.  For many the painful losses of War at least meant the forces of Progress triumphed – women’s suffrage, class distinctions beginning to dissolve and a greater faith in science and the Machine (that force identified with all its dangers by that Anglophobe Anglican R S Thomas).

Yet with those many, many young men who died for us – to protect us from a German-dominated single State of Europe – did not something of England’s spirit die too?  For all our progress, didn’t something intangible yet profound die with our boys on Flanders Field?  Haven’t we been left with an uglier world all round – a world where money does the talking, faith is seen as blind not as vital for our existence and our beautiful countryside is disappearing, subject to the forces of greed and gain?

Edward Thomas died for the land of England more than anything else.  The England his poetry describes, however, seems more like a distant memory.

Yet I would not dare say they died in vain.  For by resisting Germany we did retain our freedom in the West despite all the ugliness of the modern world.  By keeping that freedom – unlike Russia’s fate as it fell under the control of the merciless Bolsheviks - we at least have the power to make the choice to rebuild that gentler world.  Much as consumerism and technology can separate us from trusting in older values, the young men who died protected our freedom to resist the erosion by the forces of modernity of our spiritual inheritance.

Bishops against Tories

 A hundred years ago it would have seemed an absurd political division.  The Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer.  In recent times there are constant clashes between the Bishops and leading Conservatives.  Currently the news is not only focused on the letter from the Anglican Bishops to the Government on welfare policy, but criticism from that even more conservative institution, the Roman Catholic Church, in the form of comments in a newspaper interview by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.  Why has Conservatism, the guardian of our institutions, fallen out so badly so often with our culturally most important institution over the last millennium, the Church?

This is not an irrelevant matter.  Anyone who believes in a Burkean form of Conservatism or gives some credence to the idea of the Big Society, must surely recognise the Church as part of our social fabric, independent of the bureaucratic state.  The criticism of Government policy on welfare has not so much come from an ideological standpoint, based upon obscure theological doctrine, as from an empirical reaction to the facts on the ground, in the parishes.

Anglicanism is often dismissed by those on the Liberal Right as a sort of soft-Socialism led by pink Bishops.  When the blogger worked at Church House however he discovered a far more sincere conservatism on issues like Lords reform and same-sex marriage than that put forward by some ostensibly Right wing politicians.

It is the contention of this blog that since Durkheim, the Left has annexed the concept of organic society from the Right and twisted it to forward its own ends.  The Right has meekly accepted this annexation and has been left on the paltry soil of the reductionist doctrine of liberal individualism.  And yet it is very difficult to articulate a conservative position from a liberal individualist perspective.  So we end up in the absurd position of a Conservative Prime Minister leading an attack on marriage to further a concept of individualism and freedom of choice through same-sex marriage legislation.

Of course the idea of a conservative and organic society that emphasises the importance of the church, the monarchy and the family can be traced back to the French conservative thinker Louis Gabriele Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald.  For de Bonald liberal individualism was the error behind the French Revolution.  Our social institutions are of divine origin and precede the individual.  It was his outlook that Durkheim relied on for his own Left wing agenda.  Surely the Right needs to start emphasising again the importance of institutions and abandon some of its socially Darwinist attitudes.  In that way, we can answer the Left’s accusations of heartlessness towards the poor in a way that gives a greater role to the institution and not the bureaucratic approach of targets and means testing.  When our spiritual leaders are speaking out against our morally-driven policies then there needs to be reflection. Surely respect for the wisdom of an institution should come naturally to the Right. 

An Orthodox Voice in a Western Wilderness

There has been a tendency for rebellious Westerners to reject their cultural heritage and to seek it in the East.  From the Beatles onwards this has been a popular trend, yet strangely these Westerners do not gravitate towards that great edifice of Eastern culture based on a view of truth West and East share, the Eastern Orthodox Church, but rather choose those manifestations of belief that renounce all that the West regards as most precious about our humanity.  So the rebellious Western youth chooses Buddhism, a philosophy of renunciation, rather than complementing his own Christian heritage by learning how the East has understood those same truths upon which Western culture is built.

The irony of this is that when a Westerner attempts to abandon his culture in a Cartesian effort to shape the world according to his partial view, he finds an Asiatic culture that places far more emphasis on tradition, wisdom of the ancestors and renunciation of novelty.  The blogger suspects however that this attraction to belief systems that some Westerners engage in is an individualistic fascination with the novel.  It all goes back to Descartes’ great attempt to believe only what he himself could justify.  From that step so much of what is wrong with Western culture followed.

Western culture has always been more individualistic than the East, but that individualism can only function in the context of tradition and a reference to the accumulated ways of doing things, based on valid lessons long since forgotten.  The error of the Westerner who thinks that he can pick and choose his culture is that he can never really escape the traditions and cultural values that have shaped him.  Thus a Western convert to Buddhism or Taoism can never be completely that, he will always be a Christian Buddhist or Taoist, just as an atheist in the West still acts in accordance with the values shaped by a Christian post-Roman culture.

And yet if Western culture is individualist, perhaps we are especially free to pick and choose who we are, like existentialists who think we can define our own meaning?  Well actually the West does have a tradition and when that tradition is strong then we are far more fulfilled and free.  Edmund Burke, a defender of the liberties of the Glorious Revolution recognised this.  As much as he believed in the freedoms won for us by Parliament, he understood that we are shaped by our traditions and history.  We hand on those rights, liberties and traditions passed on to us by our ancestors.  Our social contract is not some individualistic arrangement between us and the State, but a contract between us, previous generations and generations to come.  It is a contract based on trust; we hold what our ancestors have left for us on trust for our children.  Thus Church, Monarchy, nation and tradition should be sustained (including necessary reforms for their survival in a changing world) so that they can be passed on to the next generation.

Burke emphasised the wisdom of the ancestors, the importance of prejudice and, in his aesthetic philosophy, the importance of the Sublime.  With reference to this, I now want to return to the East.  Burke was often accused of a Catholic sympathy and yet was he not pointing out those aspects of a culture necessary for its survival that are often neglected in the West?

In the Catholic and Protestant Churches there is a strong emphasis on the individual being saved by Christ taking our punishment.  When Christianity was accepted in the West it moulded a pre-existing individualist and humanist culture.  These Indo-European races with their human-like gods and god-like heroes and their democratic ideals, placed a strong emphasis on the individual human and the personality.  True to the spirit of the Incarnation the Church met people where they were.  Yet can we not learn something from the East?  And I mean here where the East is relevant to us.  Surely the Orthodox Church has far more to say to us than Buddha, Confucius or the Dalai Lama?

The Orthodox Church places a greater emphasis on the teachings of the Church Fathers than Roman Catholics or Protestants and is this not in some way similar to Burke’s emphasis on the wisdom of the ancestors?  Its emphasis on obedience and authority (as opposed to the more subjective notion of individual interpretation of Scripture in Western Protestant Churches) is similar to the Burkean critique of Descartes.

The importance of the Patristics in Orthodox theology is something the West could perhaps learn from.  You only value learning from the Patristics if you recognise your faith is handed down to you by others who have learnt much on the way.  It is surely a recognition that the Cartesian outlook is by definition severely limited.  From the Orthodox outlook we can learn to value our own fathers’ teachings and our own traditions.

For those who look to the East, Orthodoxy provides a greater emphasis on tradition and on a meditative state through the theosis, which is difficult to achieve in the materialist West, shaped by Calvinist ideas that worldly success is evidence of election.  And most importantly of all the Orthodox Church is an expression of the universal values that the West is also in touch with – the truth of Christianity.

We will always be Western, but we can learn from Eastern Christianity, because we are starting from common ground.  From the East we can learn that Western individualism and liberty can reach their fullest potential with due recognition and reverence of tradition and the wisdom of the ancestors.

The Marketplace and High Toryism

How much of a conservative force is the market?  I have blogged on this for Conservative Home here: http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2013/11/matthew-groves-is-globalisation-the-new-socialism.html

There is more to say on this though, because the market is undoubtedly an organic institution that has arisen naturally.  Its virtue is that it has not been centrally planned according to abstract theory.  It is rather the cumulative effect of individuals trading together, leading to a consequential price from demand and supply that regulates scarcity very efficiently. 

The market then must be defended and recognised as a part of the tried and tested human interactions that have created society.  It achieves what no central planner can in that it overcomes the partial and limited viewpoint of individuals.  Just as much as bureaucrats with fallible and limited knowledge cannot plan for a whole economy without disastrous results, so the market unconsciously regulates scarcity through prices set by no planner but through a natural process of reaching equilibrium.

Friedrich Hayek, that most liberal of philosophers, made the very Burkean point that in our historical origins civilization occurred when society began to rely on accumulated wisdom and knowledge that no individual comprehends or possesses.  So it is, he rightly argues, with the market.  The consequent result of lots of individuals transacting with each other is an unintentional regulation of scarcity.  This is why markets work and why, although Socialist governments in this country nationalised many industries, they would never have risked nationalising the provision of food.

The market is a valid and valuable institution that came about through historic evolution rather than the illegitimate process of political revolution.  The problem with politics today is not so much that it is pro or anti-market as that it regards the market as explaining everything about human interactions.

Rather like the more extreme enlightenment philosophers, particularly French empiricists, who regarded science as explaining everything about our race, this is a myopic outlook.  It ignores so many other important aspects of being human – religious faith, family love, romantic love, patriotism, appreciation of art and beauty, love of our countryside.  It is acceptance of that false Whig cliché that “every man has his price” first coined by our first prime minister, the corrupt Sir Robert Walpole. 

The market is an inadequate explanation for all aspects of human life.  To paraphrase G K Chesterton once you introduce to conversation with a Tory the Armed Forces and what motivates them, the Tory no longer talks of self interest and profit, but patriotism. 

That is exactly the point.  Surely conservatism is a rejection of the idea that human life can be explained in its entirety from one scientific or even one economic perspective.  It is my concern that the modern Conservative Party is in danger of acting as though the market explains all behaviour and is the most efficient way to get the best out of people in other aspects of life apart from trade and industry.  That is an ideological rather than a Tory perspective in the view of this blogger.  

In effect it is no different in its approach from the social Darwinist, the Socialist or any other ideologue who attempts to reduce the complicated nature of humanity to a materialist or pseudo-scientific theory. 

It is the argument here that just as patriotism drives the soldier, sailor or airman, so a notion of public service rather than self interest can drive the civil servant and indeed the politician.  The vicar is moved to his vocation by his faith not profit. Royalty serve us through the values of tradition and duty.  We must recognise that the market has its place, but to try and treat profit as the only motivator for human action will have a corrosive effect on society and if we succeed in reducing our world to one where it is the only motivation, we will be living in a degraded and cynical place. 

Nostalgia is good - Progressives might not like it, but there was a lost golden age

The current political class is dominated by the ethics of vanity identified by Jesse Norman MP in his book on Edmund Burke MP as liberal individualism.  This liberal individualism permeates the thinking of the metropolitan class that has the time and money to govern the rest of us.  It is the nadir of a gradual decline in Western thinking that puts the material before the spiritual, the modern and novel before tradition, the atomised individual before society and science before religion.

On the Left we see this reductionist outlook represented in its disparaging of institutions that make up the fabric of our society, sneering at valuable institutions from monarchy to marriage.  If we are all individuals the Left says we should not be oppressed by conjugal vows or subject to a Queen.

Meanwhile the Right has forgotten its duty to conserve our institutions and has turned a legitimate institution, the market, into an idol. It regards market economics rather than values and norms of behaviour as explaining human actions.  Patriotism and faith are replaced by rational choice theory.

Things really seemed to go wrong after the wonderful scientific discoveries of men of faith such as Isaac Newton.  This great deepening of our understanding of the material world, which began as a wonder at Creation was turned into idolatry of science, where science was claimed as the explanation of all things and our institutions and traditions were only seen as valuable if they could be justified by scientific tests.

Not only was this so-called Enlightenment anti-religious it was also in a sense anti- human.  The one man who did most to pervert our new scientific understanding was that serpent in the garden of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  At university the blogger undertook a whole module on this leading thinker of the Enlightenment and discovered a misanthrope.  He seemed to regard human interaction as leading to a destructive amour propre.  For him the human institutions that bind generations together with their accumulated wisdom were forces of oppression.  He therefore detested the society Man had built up in the light of religious faith. 

The French revolution with its belief that Rationalism independent of tradition could explain everything followed, with Rousseau as its hero.  Since then this rationalist and materialistic outlook has continued to attack tradition and faith.  It has chipped away at our social bonds, questioned the norms of behaviour that make living together possible and indeed life enhancing.

Much is attributed to the Enlightenment from individual freedom to parliamentary democracy.  England gives the lie to this.  Much of what people give the Enlightenment credit for was already underway in these Islands before Rousseau and the others put pen to paper.  Religious pluralism came about following the new settlement of the Glorious Revolution (one hundred years before France committed regicide), but this was only implementing ideas that were gradually developing following the Restoration in 1660.  Charles II’s reign might have seen reversals in the journey towards religious pluralism, but a compromise was being worked out.  It was finally achieved with the accession of William III, but not by reverting to the narrow Puritanism of Cromwell and the Regicides.

A middle of the road solution was reached without reference to abstract theory.  In good Anglo-Saxon fashion a compromise was cobbled together that allowed people to worship God true to their own interpretation of the Bible, Parliament was given freedom from Royal Prerogative and the Whigs therefore got what they wanted.  It was a compromise that worked however because it realised men live by tradition and affections not rationalist theory.  So the settlement preserved the monarchy and indeed the pageantry of monarchy.  It preserved the House of Lords and it continued with the Church of England as an established church – so the Tory affection for tradition was acknowledged too.  It recognised that while we must be free we are also social creatures who need institutions and traditions.

 Over the Channel, when abstract principles were followed rather than the lessons from history, the Terror and the guillotine resulted.  That is not to say that only the French make such a mistake.   While atheism and materialism took power by force in 1789, in the United Kingdom its growing strength has been more insidious and by stealth.  “Clever” people no longer respect our traditions.  They act as though our institutions survive by some strange accident, some oversight when we were embarked on dismantling the structure of oppression while on the road to liberty.  What they do not realise is that true liberty depends on these institutions rather than the false freedom of liberal individualism which is to be lonely and weighed down by the material world.

So people are right when they look back nostalgically to better times, because as these abstract, rationalist ideas have gradually permeated our nation more and more we are constantly losing what is life enriching. 

As we approach Christmas however the whole country returns home, casting off abstract rationalism.  Family, tradition and the Christ Child are seen again for how central they really are to our lives.  It is a return to the Merry England of carolling and wassailing, Christmas pudding (banned by the Puritans), Father Christmas, hunting (banned by New Labour), hawking and feasting.

So our resistance to the liberal individualists with their economic theories and their scientific explanations of religion begins when we wish each other “Merry Christmas”.  Certainly if we start to wish each other “happy holidays” instead, we have given up the fight. 

When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change (originally published on Conservative Home on 31st January 2013)

Conservatism is more of an attitude than a political dogma.  While there are many in the modern Conservative Party who adhere to political creeds such as libertarianism or liberal conservatism, surely a desire to conserve and a scepticism about sudden change is more about values and attachment to the tried-and-tested than ideology or political theory.  And that is a good thing.  I still believe that while the majority of the British public are not necessarily overly enamoured with the concept of the invisible hand of the market or shrinking the state, they do possess an innate conservatism.  It is that commonsense sceptism about political theories that kept the ancient institutions of state, the monarchy, the established church and the House of Lords intact in the turbulence of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and saw the Conservative Party flourish in the era of universal suffrage in the last Century.  Lose touch with that conservative attitude and the Party loses the foundations of its support.

That is why it is deeply worrying that the Conservative Party seems to have developed an enthusiasm to be seen to be doing and changing.  My suspicion is that most people would prefer it if politicians did less not more.  The trouble with politics is that it can attract the sort of person who wants to make their name and usually a name is gained by changing something, whether or not the change is good – Edward Heath taking Britain into the Commonmarket or Nick Clegg’s abortive attempt to destroy the House of Lords spring to mind.  The Conservative Party should be the natural foil to this – it represents the attitude so pithily summed up by the second Viscount Falkland:  “When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.”

It seems that many of the areas of policy where the Conservative Party has been perceived as vulnerable in recent times are where they have been more radical.  It is people’s natural conservatism that leads them to resent the growth of the supermarket at the expense of the local high street and it is again conservatism that leads people to resist development in their backyard; indeed the whole urge to protect the environment is a sort of conservatism – the conservation movement.

I believe Mr Cameron got it right when he realised that much of the alleged toxification of the Conservative brand could be cured while remaining true to Conservative values.  It is right that we are now a party of conservation and a party of localism.  Localism, despite its being given a name like a dogma is fundamentally conservative - as Edmund Burke pointed out patriotism springs from people’s membership of the little platoons rather than loyalty to a large, overweening state.  The Big Society is truly conservative – it is about voluntary organisations holding society together rather than that same overweening state the Socialists look to.

Unfortunately, the Coalition I believe obscures the clarity of who the Conservatives are.  What could be more un-conservative than attempting to unravel the constitution by abolishing the House of Lords or attacking marriage by changing its definition to include same-sex partnerships?  It is very worrying to many voters with a conservative outlook to see the Party that should represent them allowing the Liberal Democrats to run away with policies that attack institutions far more important to a conservative outlook than deregulation of the market.

What is also disconcerting is when MPs seem to rush headlong enthusiastically into reform.  Those reforms may well be justified, but if conservatism is more of an attitude of scepticism than political dogma, much as elected police commissioners may fit in with Localism, should we not have approached the policy with more of a sceptical try-it-and- see, piecemeal approach?  Instead there seems to be something almost zealous about the Party’s approach to change.

A case in point is the reform of the laws of succession, being rushed through Parliament in one day.  To a Liberal Democrat such as Nick Clegg the longstanding nature of primogeniture is a reason to overthrow it.  Surely to conservatives the approach is one of not rushing, but thinking through the implications.  Of course, it probably will be better for the survival of the monarchy if primogeniture is abolished, but there will be unforeseen implications and that is exactly why the conservative response should be to carry out this reform in a slower and more considered way.

One is reminded of the Church of England being disconcerted by the enthusiasm of Methodism.  The Anglican Church reacted in a conservative way; it exhibited an attitude of scepticism about the enthusiastic hymn-singing and evangelism.  Now in the long run it was probably a good idea for the congregation to sing hymns, but the conservative attitude is to take these things step-by-step and not to rush people who might be uncomfortable about change.  So please let’s have a little less enthusiasm and a bit more English reserve!

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2013/01/matthew-groves.html