Motus Mentis

Yesterday, on the nation’s 242nd birthday, I asked if we could set strife aside for a day, and just be grateful to live in such a remarkable nation.

It occurred to me immediately after writing that line, though, that simple gratitude for the nation we have is itself a deeply conservative disposition. Joseph Sobran described it in his luminous Pensees essay as follows:

“To be happy at home,’ Johnson also remarks, “is the end of all human endeavor.’ That is a good starting-point for politics, just because it is outside politics. I often get the feeling that what is wrong with political discussion in general is that it is dominated by narrow malcontents who take their bearings not from images of health and happiness but from statistical suffering. They always seem to want to “eliminate’ something”“poverty, racism, war”“instead of settling for fostering other sorts of things it is beyond their power actually to produce.

Man doesn’t really create anything. We don’t sit godlike above the world, omniscient and omnipotent. We find ourselves created, placed somehow in the midst of things that we here before us, related to them in particular ways. If we can’t delight in our situation, we are off on the wrong foot.

More and more I find myself thinking that a conservative is someone who regards this world with a basic affection, and wants to appreciate it as it is before he goes on to the always necessary work of making some rearrangements. Richard Weaver says we have no right to reform the world unless we cherish some aspects of it; and that is the attitude of many of the best conservative thinkers. Burke says that a constitution ought to be the subject of enjoyment rather than altercation. (I wish the American Civil Liberties Union would take his words to heart.)

I find a certain music in conservative writing that I never find in that of liberals. Michael Oakeshott speaks of “affection,’ “attachment,’ “familiarity,’ “happiness’; and my point is not the inane one that these are very nice things, but that Oakeshott thinks of them as considerations pertinent to political thinking. He knows what normal life is, what normal activities are, and his first thought is that politics should not disturb them.

In light of that, then, the political “strife” I asked us to set aside is due almost entirely to the widening chasm between that “attitude of gratitude” and the insatiable dissatisfaction of the political Left. So in effect, by asking everyone to put strife aside on the Fourth and just be grateful and appreciative for the nation we live in, I was really just asking everyone to be a “conservative for a day”.

I’d have mentioned this in yesterday’s post, but it felt too much like not putting strife aside, so I didn’t.