Thought for the Day
Conservativism is based on the axiom that Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx and even Darwin are wrong about the human condition: Men do not evolve, not in any way that matters.
We are are not about to evolve out of the need for categories of good and evil, or the need for the confessional booth, the marriage bed, the judges’s bench, or the hangmen scaffold, or any of the other instruments of our fallen nature requires lest the social order fail. The modern substitutes, such as the analyst’ couch, the laboratory bench, or the peoples’ gulag, allegedly able to take their place, have proved bloodier than what they replace. Nay, they are bloodier even than the barbarism an utter absence of social order would produce.
Barbarians may pray to false gods, but that is better than none. Wotan may demand a sacrificial victim to be hung upside on the sacred ash tree with his throat slit, but the rune-laws on his great spear Gungnir decree that adulterers and oath-breaker are punished in Nastrond. Socialists have killed far, far more people than Aztecs. Yet even Aztecs did not slay their own children in the womb in the name of convenience or female supremacy. They did it to cow their slaves and enemies, and also to make the sun rise and the rain fall.
In the great scale of being, it seems the bloodthirstiest savages in history rate above some of our contemporaries.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
