Motus Mentis

A reader writes:

If memory serves – never a sure bet – some time ago on your blog, you quoted Winston Churchill saying that “”If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain.”

I learned today that he said no such thing:

I was always skeptical about the provenance of that quote. Churchill was a very wise man, and it would be completely out of character for him to make such a grievously asinine remark.

I don’t think I’ve ever posted that here, though I’m certainly familiar with the quote, and hadn’t been skeptical at all that it was Churchill who said it. But if the Churchill Centre — that outstanding repository of all things Churchillian, whose newsletter I receive — says that the great man didn’t say it, then I guess he didn’t say it.

Come to think of it, though, I don’t think I’d have said that the quote, apocryphal or no, mentioned age thirty-five as the cutoff. I’d say that’s a bit young for the scales to fall from the typical liberal’s eyes. Indeed, sometimes they never fall. There are, without question, lots of old lefties (I just bumped into the unrepentant octogenarian Noam Chomsky in the local hardware store the other day, for example), and it is obvious enough that Congress is amply clogged and besplattered with them (though when it comes to the professionals — the politicians, civil servants and union leaders — one must always ask the question “cui bono?”). But for those whose sensibilities do change, it seems far more common that liberals become conservatives, rather than the other way round.

This asymmetry is perfectly understandable. Beyond the simple fact that as life goes by we tend to have more worth conserving, it is also because as we get older, those of us with curious and inquiring minds have read and learned more, have absorbed more of history’s lessons, and have had more opportunities to see first-hand the consequences of human folly — and to understand and appreciate the immense store of knowledge and wisdom embodied in our ancient traditions. In my own case, thirty-five was still much too young: my own “owl of Minerva”* didn’t begin to spread her wings until my late forties.

Our reader was right about one thing: Churchill was a wise man. For starters, he was deeply antipathetic to socialism. About it, he said:

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.

and

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Asked to characterize Communism, he described it as:

A ghoul descending from a pile of skulls.

He contrasted his conservative views with his opponents’ ideology by saying:

We plan for choices; they plan for rules.

Churchill was well aware of the stifling effect of intrusive government regulation, and remarked that:

The only path to safety is to liberate the energies and genius of the nation and let them have their full fruition.

He also saw the perils of ‘leveling’, and the cost of insulating a society from the consequences of its choices:

We must beware of trying to build a society in which no one counts for anything except a politician or an official, or a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.

He added:

We shall return to a system which provides incentives for effort, enterprise, self-denial, initiative, and good housekeeping. We cannot uphold the principle that the rewards of society must be equal for those who try and those who shirk, or for those who succeed and those who fail.

It certainly cannot be said, though, that Mr. Churchill “had no heart”, despite his low regard for leftist Utopianism:

Our conservative principles are well known. We stand for the free and flexible working of supply and demand. We stand for compassion and aid for those who, whether through age, illness, or misfortune, cannot keep pace with the march of society.

For Churchill, political conservatism meant appreciating the difference “between the ladder and the queue”:

We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue.

Presaging Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark that “the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money,” Churchill once said:

The human race cannot make progress without idealism, but idealism at other people’s expense … cannot be its highest or noblest form.

He had a sound conservative wariness of the Left’s rush to change, to transform, to remake society according to its theories:

We must beware of needless innovations, especially when guided by logic.

He knew also that the right way to make real, beneficial progress is to proceed with conservative caution:

Innovation of course involves experiment. Experiments may or may not be fruitful.

I could go on and on, but enough is enough. No collection of conservative Churchilliana would be complete, though, without citing his view of Leftists themselves. Here, he might have been speaking directly to Howard Zinn (or his comrade-in-arms, the aforementioned Mr. Chomsky):

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.

Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement, into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what do they offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of Utopias?

And:

They are the most disagreeable of people … Their insincerity? Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant superiority of these people? Superiority of intellect! Then, when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings, but to a level which is far below the average.

The species, sad to say, hasn’t changed a bit.

In closing I’ll mention that if Sir Winston were alive to comment on this post, he could simply cite himself:

Verify your quotations.

* Thanks to Bill Vallicella for that lovely phrase.