It is a wonderful irony that the great cultural artefacts of literature, architecture, art et al, which were frequently created by radical or liberal men and women with subversive intent, are most zealously defended in later ages by conservatives.
Benjamin Disraeli is the man who said “A society is judged not by what it creates, but by what it preserves”. But he also made the remark: “Change is constant, change is inevitable.” Politicians should seek to manage and channel this change in the direction of the public interest, while preserving ordered society from disintegration. It is this pragmatic and open approach towards change that distinguishes the conservative from the merely reactionary.
Culture here means both the shared characteristics and practices of a group or groups; and the intellectual and aesthetic manifestations of attempts to understand, work upon and celebrate the human condition.
People are brought and remain together because of shared beliefs, concerns and yearnings, but it is only when these values are enshrined in a ‘culture’ that these people become a society.
A culture is, as Oakeshott would have put it, “crystallised knowledge” – the accumulated results of a society’s attempt to understand the world around it, in an accessible form.
It must be the belief of any conservative that a society is neither the sum of state institutions nor of entirely independent individuals, but is a community of individuals held together through shared values that find expression in a culture. These values will almost always be disputed or in doubt; in fact the strongest societies are those where this is precisely the case.
Debate and competing cultural viewpoints enrich both the culture of a society and the society’s understanding of itself. It is doubt, not certainty, that leads to the most vibrant culture.
Some values do persist across societies, transmitted through history via culture – this is one reason for the importance of the narrative Great Canon School of cultural study, in which we see radical changes in western culture balanced against the preservation and refinement of what has gone before.
Edmund Burke, surveying the destruction wrought by revolution, once wrote that society is “a partnership…between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”
The obligation of every living generation in this partnership is to preserve and add to their inherited culture, so that it may be passed on to the next strengthened.
What are at first cultural change agents, such as fiction with a radical political agenda, become assimilated into the shared culture when the lessons which they seek to teach are accepted and blended with traditional values.
In an episode of The O’Reilly Show on Fox News late last year the allegedly ‘traditionalist’ commentator Bill O’Reilly made an unfavourable comparison between Psy of ‘Gangnam Style’ fame and Elvis Presley, unaware that in the mid-50s conservative commentators would have hotly denounced the King’s music for its African-American influences and uninhibited carnality. What was once risqué or even taboo soon becomes part of the backdrop on which new artists base their view of society.
As an avowed pop culture junkie (give me Van Morrison or Mark Kermode over John Keats or William Hazlitt any day) I would argue that ‘low’ has just as much a place as ‘high’ in our understanding of culture. The snobbery that excludes, say, the music of Katy Perry or the writing of a magazine like GQ from cultural preservation is the same as that which, six or seven decades ago, refused to acknowledge cinema as a legitimate art form.
Traditionally, ‘high’ culture does very often have a greater artistic value than ‘low’ culture: far be it from me to claim that there is greater musical sophistication or more intellectual endeavour in Teenage Dream than in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Conservatives should seek the truth expressed about society in all cultural products. The fusion of moral wholesomeness with liberated sexuality found in Miss Perry’s music is good shorthand for the ideal form of twenty-first century sexual morality.
Conservatism should value culture so highly because it is what makes a collection of people a society, and also because it holds up a mirror to people from different ages so that they can see themselves more clearly.
For instance Henry IV Parts I and II do not just tell us about the relationship between a father and a son in early modern England, but universal truths about fathers and sons.
Not only is there no society without culture, but no understanding of oneself or other people without culture. And since conservatism boils down to the two goals of preserving a stable, dynamic society; and giving liberty and dignity to individuals, there can be no conservatism without culture.
