We are looking for something. We have looked around, we have looked ahead, and now we are looking back. And when you look back, there are worlds to see. The entire heritage of western civilization. ...
Trudging through the culture war ruins, how refreshing it is to come across these rare individuals who reject the modernist apparatus and who openly appreciate past agriculture, apparel, architecture, engineering, handcrafts, music, painting, philosophy, science and sculptures, and who believe God exists. It's a revitalizing respite from the dishonorable, gyrating, undignified, radical, seething, anti-humanism of the present. It's a special kind of connection, however small, with a brother in arms, because it joins us not only with each other but with something that is older and greater.
It's worth remembering, though, that you and I must still exercise the virtue of discernment. We must love the things we love not because they are old, not because they are Western, not because they are ours, but because they are good. Conservatism requires discernment between good and evil. It is not preservation of everything from the past because it is past. Rather it is the conservation only of what is good. And the evil always mixes itself with good. It is easy to over-romanticize the past but overlook the costs of its triumphs and the blemishes of its heroes. Like the present, the past was permeated by both great achievement and great evil. That is exactly how we arrived at the present.
After all, the way of life leading to moral and intellectual self-reliance ... then individual and civilizational self-destruction ... was rightly named the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
- Philip Nice
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