In a political era in which an Inquisitor DeMint can flourish, this little snippet from a recent Spectator piece by Toby Young was a bracing reminder of an altogether tougher-minded conservatism:
Maurice Cowling, the late right-wing historian, used to ask first-year students of his at Peterhouse [Cambridge] whether they were conservative because they believed in conservative values or because they believed in nothing. The correct answer was that they believed in nothing.
A clue to what Cowling (an interesting writer, if very far from always being my cup of tea, and, incidentally, a religious man of sorts) meant by that can be gleaned from this extract from his Daily Telegraph obituary:
He believed that the strength of Conservatism lay not in any particular set of principles, but in its appeal to a “combination of unashamed materialism and disbelieving scepticism about the power of political parties to give effect to Utopia”.
There are worse things.
I consider it one of the savage ironies of history that the right is generally identified with religion and the left with antireligion.
If there was such a thing as rationality, the left, with their belief in the moral dimension of politics, the raising of intent above results, and their love of intelligent design, would be the natural ally of religion. The right, with their embrace of evolved social mechanisms and comfort with results over morality, would be the natural enemy.
But life is in fact nonrational. So here we are.