The Creative Conservative

Is this your image of a conservative?

I’m not knocking stalwart ladies in tweed suits, but you needn’t be quite so prim to be a conservative. A conservative is not always a hatchet faced killjoy or a prim and parsimonious puritan. A conservative is simply someone who wants to conserve what’s good from the past to build a good future.

A conservative doesn’t just look back with affection and forward with fear. He looks look back with criticism and foward with hope. He wants to learn what was imperfect about the past so he doesn’t plunge into a more imperfect future.

A conservative looks to the past not because everything in the past was good, but because he wants to see what good things from the past have stood the test of time.

He is, if you like, a connoisseur of durable ideas, a cultivator of mature thoughts, a collector of vintage philosophies and venerable traditions. He eschews the ephemeral, the shallow, the gimmick, the gimcrack and the gadget. He favors the solid, the sure, the universal, the ancient, the tested and the tried.

As such he is a sort of scientist of society. He is critical of that which is only a theory. He is doubtful about that which has not been proven or tried, and questions whether any innovation is possible, preferable or necessary.

This attitude may make a person prim, pious and pinched. He may turn into a bigoted, suspicious, narrow minded prig. He may yield to the temptation to build an artificial antique world, or a quaint sect of like minded eccentrics.

However, the true conservative is none of these. He is not bound by the past, but bound for the future. The true conservative is creative. He uses the past not as a prison, but as a springboard. For the creative conservative the past is not an easy chair, but a trampoline. From the past he builds a dynamic present, and from that present he launches confidently into an exciting and unknown future.