Why I became a conservative

by Roger Scruton The New Criterion, February 5, 2003 http://www newcriterion com/artic!es c"m/Why#I#became#a#conservative#$%03

was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term conservative as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the structures against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free thin!ing intellectual, save to re"ect conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. #o we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again$ %n the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in &ay '()* in +aris, that I discovered my vocation. In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate glass windows of the shops appeared to step bac!, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in "agged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their "uices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the ne,t van load of policemen. The van-!nown then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows-came cautiously round the corner from the .ue #escartes, "er!ed to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble stones and several of them fell. %ne rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an e,ultant shout, the in"ured policeman was helped into the van, and the students ran off down a side street, sneering at the cochons and throwing +arthian cobbles as they went. That evening a friend came round/ she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of 0rmand 1atti. 2he was very e,cited by the events, which 1atti, a follower of 0ntonin 0rtaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theater -the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day to day meaning of bourgeois life. 1reat victories had been scored/ policemen in"ured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the %ld 3ascist and his r4gime would be begging for mercy. The %ld 3ascist was de 1aulle, whose Mmoires de guerre I had been reading that day. The Mmoires begin with a stri!ing sentence-Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine ide de la France-a sentence so ali!e in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that e5ually stri!ing sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu/ Longtemps, je me suis couch de bonne heure. 6ow amazing it had been, to discover a politician who begins his self vindication by suggesting something-and something so deeply hidden behind the bold mas! of his words7 I had been e5ually struc! by the description of the state funeral for 8al4ry-de 1aulle9s first public gesture on liberating +aris-since it too suggested priorities unimaginable in an English politician. The image of the cort:ge, as it too! its way to the cathedral of ;otre #ame, the proud general first among the mourners, and here and there a 1erman sniper still loo!ing down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression on me. I irresistibly compared the two bird9s eye views of +aris, that of the sniper, and my own on to the riots in the uartier latin. They were related as yes and no, the

affirmation and denial of a national idea. 0ccording to the 1aullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture< in times of turmoil and con5uest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed. The funeral for 8al4ry followed naturally from this way of seeing things. 0nd I associated the 3rance of de 1aulle with 8al4ry9s !imeti"re marin-that haunting invocation of the dead which conveyed to me, much more profoundly than any politician9s words or gestures, the true meaning of a national idea.

%f course I was na=ve-as na=ve as my friend. >ut the ensuing argument is one to which I have
often returned in my thoughts. ?hat, I as!ed, do you propose to put in the place of this bourgeoisie whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades$ ?hat vision of 3rance and its culture compels you$ 0nd are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at ris! in order to display them$ I was obno,iously pompous/ but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I !new. 2he replied with a boo!/ 3oucault9s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soi#ante$huitards, the te,t which seemed to "ustify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful boo!, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and !nowledge are nothing but the discourses of power. The boo! is not a wor! of philosophy but an e,ercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue-by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the 3ather of @ies-that truth re5uires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in 3oucault a new literary formula. @oo! everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. ?here there is power there is oppression. 0nd where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds. &y friend is now a good bourgeoise li!e the rest of them. 0rmand 1atti is forgotten< and the wor!s of 0ntonin 0rtaud have a 5uaint and dpass air. The 3rench intellectuals have turned their bac!s on 9)*, and the late @ouis +auwels, the greatest of their post war novelists, has, in Les %rphelins, written the damning obituary of their adolescent rage. 0nd 3oucault$ 6e is dead from 0I#2, the result of sprees in the bath houses of 2an 3rancisco, visited during well funded tours as an intellectual celebrity. >ut his boo!s are on university reading lists all over Europe and 0merica. 6is vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to resist it. %nly in 3rance is he widely regarded as a fraud. >y '(A', when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at >ir!bec! College, @ondon, I had become a conservative. 2o far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at >ir!bec!, and that was ;unzia-&aria 0nnunziata-the ;eapolitan lady who served meals in the 2enior Common .oom and who coc!ed a snoo! at the lecturers by plastering her counter with !itschy photos of the +ope. %ne of those lecturers, towards whom ;unzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric 6obsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial .evolution, whose &ar,ist vision of our country is now the orthodo,y taught in >ritish schools. 6obsbawm came as a refugee to >ritain, bringing with him the &ar,ist commitment and Communist +arty membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer-the +arty, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. ;o doubt in recognition of this heroic career, 6obsbawm was rewarded, at &r. >lair9s behest, with the second highest award that the Bueen can bestow-that of Companion of 6onour. This little story is of enormous significance to a >ritish conservative. 3or it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the 2i,ties. ?e

should ponder the e,traordinary fact that %,ford Cniversity, which granted an honorary degree to >ill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to &argaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post war graduate and >ritain9s first woman +rime &inister. ?e should ponder some of the other recipients of honorary degrees from >ritish academic institutions-.obert &ugabe, for e,ample, or the late &rs. Ceausescu-or count Don the fingers of one handE the number of conservatives who are elected to the >ritish 0cademy.

2uffice

it to say that I found myself, on arrival in >ir!bec! College, at the heart of the left establishment which governed >ritish scholarship. >ir!bec! College had grown from the &echanics Institution founded by 1eorge >ir!bec! in '*FG and was devoted to the education of people in full time employment. It was connected to the socialist idealists of the ?or!ers9 Education 0ssociation, and had lin!s of a tenacious but undiscoverable !ind to the @abour +arty. &y failure to conceal my conservative beliefs was both noticed and disapproved of, and I began to thin! that I should loo! for another career. >ecause of >ir!bec!9s mission as a center of adult education, lectures began at ) +.&. and the days were nominally free. I used my mornings to study for the >ar/ my intention was to embar! on a career which gave no advantage to utopians and malcontents. In fact I never practiced at the >ar and received from my studies only an intellectual benefit-though a benefit for which I have always been profoundly grateful. @aw is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. &oreover the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can e,ist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to 3oucault. Inspired by my new studies I began to search for a conservative philosophy. In 0merica this search could be conducted in a university. 0merican departments of political science encourage their students to read &ontes5uieu, >ur!e, Toc5ueville, and the 3ounding 3athers. @eo 2trauss, Eric 8oegelin, and others have grafted the metaphysical conservatism of Central Europe on to 0merican roots, forming effective and durable schools of political thought. 0merican intellectual life benefits from 0merican patriotism, which has made it possible to defend 0merican customs and institutions without fear of being laughed to scorn. It has benefited too from the Cold ?ar, which sharpened native wits against the &ar,ist enemy, in a way that they were never sharpened in Europe/ the conversion of important parts of the social democratic Hewish intelligentsia of ;ew Ior! to the cause of neo conservatism is a case in point. In '(AJs >ritain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half mad recluses. 2earching the library of my college, I found &ar,, @enin, and &ao, but no 2trauss, 8oegelin, 6aye!, or 3riedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, wee!ly, or 5uarterly, but not a single "ournal that confessed to being conservative.

The view has for a long time prevailed in England that conservatism is simply no longer available
-even if it ever has been really available to an intelligent person-as a social and political creed. &aybe, if you are an aristocrat or a child of wealthy and settled parents, you might inherit conservative beliefs, in the way that you might inherit a speech impediment or a 6absburg "aw. >ut you couldn9t possibly ac uire them-certainly not by any process of rational en5uiry or serious thought. 0nd yet there I was, in the early '(AJs, fresh from the shoc! of '()*, and from the countervailing shoc! of legal studies, with a fully articulate set of conservative beliefs. ?here could I loo! for the people who shared them, for the thin!ers who had spelled them out at proper length, for the social, economic, and political theory that would give them force and authority sufficient to argue them in the forum of academic opinion$ To my rescue came >ur!e. 0lthough not widely read at the time in our universities, he had not been dismissed as stupid, reactionary, or absurd. 6e was simply irrelevant, of interest largely because he got everything wrong about the 3rench .evolution and therefore could be studied as

illustrating an episode in intellectual pathology. 2tudents were still permitted to read him, usually in con"unction with the immeasurably less interesting Tom +aine, and from time to time you heard tell of a >ur!ean philosophy, which was one strand within nineteenth century >ritish conservatism. >ur!e was of additional interest to me on account of the intellectual path that he had trod. 6is first wor!, li!e mine, was in aesthetics. 0nd although I didn9t find much of philosophical significance in his &ssa' on the (ublime and the )eautiful, I could see that, in the right cultural climate, it would convey a powerful sense of the meaning of aesthetic "udgment and of its indispensable place in our lives. I suppose that, in so far as I had received any intimations of my future career as an intellectual pariah, it was through my early reactions to modern architecture, and to the desecration of my childhood landscape by the faceless bo,es of suburbia. I learned as a teenager that aesthetic "udgment matters, that it is not merely a sub"ective opinion, unargued because unarguable, and of no significance to anyone besides oneself. I saw-though I did not have the philosophy to "ustify this-that aesthetic "udgment lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep social imperative, and that it matters to us in "ust the way that other people matter to us, when we strive to live with them in a community. 0nd, so it seemed to me, the aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement. &odernism in architecture was an attempt to rema!e the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living li!e ants within their metallic and functional shells. @i!e >ur!e, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost e,perience of home. 0nd I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured-not necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression. That belief is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find it-very differently e,pressed-in >ur!e and 6egel, and also in T. 2. Eliot, whose poetry was the greatest influence on me during my teenage years.

?hen I first read >ur!e9s account of the 3rench .evolution I was inclined to accept, since I !new
no other, the liberal humanist view of the .evolution as a triumph of freedom over oppression, a liberation of a people from the yo!e of absolute power. 0lthough there were e,cesses-and no honest historian had ever denied this-the official humanist view was that they should be seen in retrospect as the birth pangs of a new order, which would offer a model of popular sovereignty to the world. I therefore assumed that >ur!e9s early doubts-e,pressed, remember, when the .evolution was in its very first infancy, and the King had not yet been e,ecuted nor the Terror begun-were simply alarmist reactions to an ill understood event. ?hat interested me in the *eflections was the positive political philosophy, distinguished from all the leftist literature that was currently L la mode, by its absolute concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary and une,alted forms. >ur!e was not writing about socialism, but about revolution. ;evertheless he persuaded me that the utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human mind-a geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings live. 6e persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress. &ost of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, e5uality, fraternity, or their modernist e5uivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue liberty, e5uality, and fraternity, not only because those things are lamentably underdescribed and merely abstractly defined, but also because collective reason doesn9t wor! that way. +eople reason collectively

towards a common goal only in times of emergency-when there is a threat to be van5uished, or a con5uest to be achieved. Even then, they need organization, hierarchy, and a structure of command if they are to pursue their goal effectively. ;evertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war. &oreover-and here is the corollary that came home to me with a shoc! of recognition-any attempt to organize society according to this !ind of rationality would involve e,actly the same conditions/ the declaration of war against some real or imagined enemy. 6ence the strident and militant language of the socialist literature-the hate filled, purpose filled, bourgeois baiting prose, one e,ample of which had been offered to me in '()*, as the final vindication of the violence beneath my attic window, but other e,amples of which, starting with the !ommunist Manifesto, were the basic diet of political studies in my university. The literature of left wing political science is a literature of conflict, in which the main variables are those identified by @enin/ Kto$ Kogo$-?ho$ ?hom$ The opening sentence of de 1aulle9s memoirs is framed in the language of love, about an ob"ect of love-and I had spontaneously resonated to this in the years of the student struggle. #e 1aulle9s allusion to +roust is to a masterly evocation of maternal love, and to a dim premonition of its loss.

Three other arguments of >ur!e9s made a comparable impression. The first was the defense of
authority and obedience. 3ar from being the evil and obno,ious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for >ur!e, the root of political order. 2ociety, he argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the 3rench .evolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority-by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. 0nd obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition which ma!es it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into the dust and powder of individuality. Those thoughts seemed as obvious to me as they were shoc!ing to my contemporaries. In effect >ur!e was upholding the old view of man in society, as sub"ect of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state. 0nd what struc! me vividly was that, in defending this old view, >ur!e demonstrated that it was a far more effective guarantee of the liberties of the individual than the new idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined. .eal freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. Those ideas e,hilarated me, since they made sense of what I had seen in '()*. >ut when I e,pressed them, in a boo! published in '(A( as The Meaning of !onservatism, I blighted what remained of my academic career.

The second argument of >ur!e9s that impressed me was the subtle defense of tradition, pre"udice,
and custom, against the enlightened plans of the reformers. This defense engaged, once again, with my study of aesthetics. 0lready as a schoolboy I had encountered the elaborate defense of artistic and literary tradition given by Eliot and 3. .. @eavis. I had been struc! by Eliot9s essay entitled Tradition and the Individual Talent, in which tradition is represented as a constantly evolving, yet continuous thing, which is remade with every addition to it, and which adapts the past to the present and the present to the past. This conception, which seemed to ma!e sense of Eliot9s !ind of modernism Da modernism that is the polar opposite of that which has prevailed in architectureE, also rescued the study of the past, and made my own love of the classics in art, literature, and music into a valid part of my psyche as a modern human being. >ur!e9s defense of tradition seemed to translate this very concept into the world of politics, and to ma!e respect for custom, establishment, and settled communal ways, into a political virtue, rather than a sign, as my contemporaries mostly believed, of complacency. 0nd >ur!e9s provocative defense, in this connection, of pre"udice -by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that

arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root e,periences of social life-was a revelation of something that until then I had entirely overloo!ed. >ur!e brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both un"ustified and un"ustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to "ustify them will lead merely to their loss. .eplacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may thin! ourselves more rational and better e5uipped for life in the modern world. >ut in fact we are less well e5uipped, and our new beliefs are far less "ustified, for the very reason that they are "ustified by ourselves. The real "ustification for a pre"udice is the one which "ustifies it as a pre"udice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument. In other words it is a "ustification that cannot be conducted from our own perspective, but only from outside, as it were, as an anthropologist might "ustify the customs and rituals of an alien tribe. 0n e,ample will illustrate the point/ the pre"udices surrounding se,ual relations. These vary from society to society< but until recently they have had a common feature, which is that people distinguish seemly from unseemly conduct, abhor e,plicit se,ual display, and re5uire modesty in women and chivalry in men in the negotiations that precede se,ual union. There are very good anthropological reasons for this, in terms of the long term stability of se,ual relations, and the commitment that is necessary if children are to be inducted into society. >ut these are not the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men and women. This conduct is guided by deep and immovable pre"udice, in which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds. The se,ual liberator has no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational, in the sense of being founded on no reasoned "ustification available to the person whose motives they are. 0nd he may propose se,ual liberation as a rational alternative, a code of conduct that is rational from the first person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of practice from a transparently reasonable aim, which is se,ual pleasure. This substitution of reason for pre"udice has indeed occurred. 0nd the result is e,actly as >ur!e would have anticipated. ;ot merely a brea!down in trust between the se,es, but a faltering in the reproductive process-a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other, but also to their offspring. 0t the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional pre"udices, are left e,posed and unprotected by the s!eletal structures of rationality. 6ence the e,traordinary situation in 0merica, where lawsuits have replaced common courtesy, where post coital accusations of date rape ta!e the place of pre coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as se,ual harrassment. This is an e,ample of what happens, when pre"udice is wiped away in the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that pre"udice alone can fulfill. 0nd indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of se,ual liberation, and the "oyless world that it has produced around us, that I came to see the truth of >ur!e9s otherwise somewhat parado,ical defense of pre"udice.

The final argument that impressed me was >ur!e9s response to the theory of the social contract.
0lthough society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary .ousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. 6ence these ideas led directly to the massive s5uandering of inherited resources at the .evolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that >ur!e was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In >ur!e9s eyes the self righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the .evolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. .ightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the hereditary principle, according to which rights could be inherited as well as ac5uired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in >ur!e9s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. 6is

preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on. I was more e,hilarated by those ideas than by anything else in >ur!e, since they seemed to e,plain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions that I had had in '()*, as I watched the riots from my window and thought of 8al4ry9s !imeti"re marin. In those deft, cool thoughts, >ur!e summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future that has dominated and perverted modern politics. In effect, >ur!e was "oining in the old +latonic cry, for a form of politics that would also be a form of care-care of the soul, as +lato put it, which would also be a care for absent generations. The graffiti parado,es of the soi#ante$huitards were the very opposite of this/ a !ind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sa!e of a momentary e,ultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy. It was not until much later, after my first visit to communist Europe, that I came to understand and sympathize with the negative energy in >ur!e. I had grasped the positive thesis-the defense of pre"udice, tradition, and heredity, and of a politics of trusteeship in which the past and the future had e5ual weight to the present-but I had not grasped the deep negative thesis, the glimpse into 6ell, contained in his vision of the .evolution. 0s I said, I shared the liberal humanist view of the 3rench .evolution, and !new nothing of the facts that decisively refuted that view and which vindicated the argument of >ur!e9s astonishingly prescient essay. &y encounter with Communism entirely rectified this.

+erhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism was its ability to banish truth
from human affairs, and to force whole populations to live within the lie, as +resident 6avel put it. 1eorge %rwell wrote a prophetic and penetrating novel about this< but few ?estern readers of that novel !new the e,tent to which its prophecies had come true in Central Europe. To me it was the greatest revelation, when first I travelled to Czechoslova!ia in '(A(, to come face to face with a situation in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the boo! of history, in which truth could not be uttered, and in which the +arty could decide from day to day not only what would happen tomorrow, but also what had happened today, what had happened yesterday, and what had happened before its leaders had been born. This, I realized, was the situation that >ur!e was describing, to a largely incredulous readership, in 'A(J. 0nd two hundred years later the situation still e,isted, and the incredulity along with it. Cntil '(A( my !nowledge of Communism had been entirely theoretical. I did not li!e what I had read, of course, and was hostile in any case to the socialist ideas of e5uality and state control, of which I had already seen enough in 3rance and >ritain. >ut I !new nothing of what it is li!e to live under Communism-nothing of the day to day humiliation of being a non person, to whom all avenues of self e,pression are closed. 0s for Czechoslova!ia, as it then was, I !new only what I had gleaned from its music-the music of 2metana, #vora!, and Han in particular, to all three of whom I owe the greatest of debts for the happiness they have brought me. %f course, I had read Kaf!a and 6ase!-but they belonged to another world, the world of a dying empire, and it was only subse5uently that I was able to see that they too were prophets, and that they were describing not the present but the future of their city. I had been as!ed to give a tal! to a private seminar in +rague. This seminar was organized by Hulius Tomin, a +rague philosopher, who had ta!en advantage of the 6elsin!i 0ccords of '(AM, which supposedly obliged the Czechoslova! government to uphold freedom of information and the basic rights defined by the C.;. Charter. The 6elsin!i 0ccords were a farce, used by the Communists to identify potential trouble ma!ers, while presenting a face of civilized government to gullible intellectuals in the ?est. ;evertheless, I was told that #r. Tomin9s seminar met on a regular basis, that I would be welcome to attend it, and that they were indeed e,pecting me.

I arrived at the house, after wal!ing through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied by some dar! official business, and in which +arty slogans and symbols disfigured every building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted. Everywhere the same e,pectant silence hung in the air, as when an air raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction. %utside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. #r. Tomin came out, and an altercation ensued, during which I was thrown down the stairs. >ut the argument continued and I was able to push my way past the guard and enter the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the same e,pectant silence. I realized that there really was going to be an air raid, and that the air raid was me. In that room was a battered remnant of +rague9s intelligentsia-old professors in their shabby waistcoats< long haired poets< fresh faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents9 political crimes< priests and religious in plain clothes< novelists and theologians< a would be rabbi< and even a psychoanalyst. 0nd in all of them I saw the same mar!s of suffering, tempered by hope< and the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession/ that of the sto!er. 2ome sto!ed boilers in hospitals< others in apartment bloc!s< one sto!ed at a railway station, another in a school. 2ome sto!ed where there were no boilers to sto!e, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me, a fitting symbol of the communist economy. This was my first encounter with dissidents/ the people who, to my astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders of post war Czechoslova!ia. 0nd I felt towards these people an immediate affinity. ;othing was of such importance for them as the survival of their national culture. #eprived of material and professional advancement, their days were filled with a forced meditation on their country and its past, and on the great Buestion of Czech 6istory which has preoccupied the Czechs since +alac!y9s day. They were forbidden to publish< the authorities had concealed their e,istence from the world and had resolved to remove their traces from the boo! of history. 6ence the dissidents were acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an e,ercise in what +lato calls anamnesis/ the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things. 2omething in me responded to this poignant ambition, and I was at once eager to "oin with them and ma!e their situation !nown to the world. >riefly, I spent the ne,t ten years in daily meditation on Communism, on the myths of e5uality and fraternity that underlay its oppressive routines, "ust as they had underlain the routines of the 3rench .evolution. 0nd I came to see that >ur!e9s account of the .evolution was not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was li!e &ilton9s account of +aradise @ost-an e,ploration of a region of the human psyche/ a region that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by way of a miracle, to a world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the memories of 6ell. To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of 2atan and his wor!-the very same vision that had sha!en >ur!e to the depths of his being. 0nd I at last recognized the positive aspect of >ur!e9s philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.

6enceforth I understood conservatism not as a political credo only,

but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. 0nd especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and lu,ury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. >ut I do not despair, since e,perience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that the dreams of liberty, e5uality, and fraternity will e,cite them only in the short term.

0s to the tas! of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern politics, the philosophy that >ur!e made plain to the world, this is perhaps the greatest tas! that we now confront. I do not despair of it< but the tas! cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It re5uires not a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.