Motus Mentis

I’ve just read a brief interview with Sir Roger Scruton over at National Review. (Hat-tip to our friend David Duff.)

This caught my eye:

[Interviewer Madeleine Kearns]: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative?

SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

With due respect to Sir Roger (and the amount due is immense), I think that the distinction he makes, although it ought to be accurate, is no longer apt: today’s typical “conservative” is now what, in my youth, would have been considered somewhere well left of center. He is perhaps best described by Michael Malice’s remark that “Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.”

To cherish and respect any part of the past whatesoever — what was sacred, what was respected, and what was understood by all, until very recently, to be good or true — and to wish to preserve and protect it for generations unborn, is now a reactionary stance.

For example, Sir Roger describes as “conservative” the “vital battle to defend fundamental institutions, such as marriage…”. But to restore the traditional meaning of marriage to the primacy in the public order that it has enjoyed throughout history would now require not conservation, but reaction — not an ongoing interweaving of old strands of culture into a new and evolving tapestry, but wholesale reversal and rejection of a new and smothering social fabric that is now blanketing and extinguishing the ancient flame that Sir Roger, every bit as much as any of us over here in the remote fastnesses of the reactionary landscape, hopes to keep alight.

I should say also that I know hardly any self-described “reactionaries” who would simply roll back the clock in toto, or would imagine that such a thing is even possible. (All it would take to disabuse anyone of such a silly idea, I think, would be a toothache.)

Is this terminological nitpicking worth quibbling about? Probably not, so in deference to Sir Roger, I’ll say no more.

I’ll leave you with this gem:

“Populism’ is a word used by leftists to describe the emotions of ordinary people, when they do not tend to the left.

And this:

MK: Can one be a hopeful conservative without God?

SRS: Yes, but it helps to believe in God, since then one’s hopes are fixed on a higher reality, and that stops one from imposing them on the world in which we live.