Skip to main content

The Church Lady

Russell Kirk's Six Points, part four: Prudence
Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among the virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long term consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radaicals, the conservative holds, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be effective. The conservative declars that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are perilous as sudden and slashing surgery. The march of providence is slow; it is the devil who always hurries.
You know you aren not living in a conservative age when Dana Carvey can make as much fun out of prudence as he did back in his SNL days. A measure of prudence would go a long ways towards taking the sharp edge off of the equal rights debates that have dominated the last part of the twentieth century and which continue today in the SSM debate that the Liberals have brought to the house. It's clear in listening to the Libs that many of them will, if they succeed, proudly point to the fact that the sky has not fallen and they will feel that are vindicated by that. And the conservatives will sigh and point out that by the time the problems occur, twenty years down the road or more, no one in the present house will be there to be held accountable. That is what happened with the loosening of the divorce laws, one unintended consequence of which has been the impoverishment of women.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

Da Vinci: It bleats, it leads

The trouble with The DaVinci code is certainly this : the fundamentals of the Christian creed can be summarized in a few sentences easily learned by schoolchildren and recited aloud from memory by the whole congregation on Sunday. They are great mysteries to be sure - Trinity, incarnation, redemption, salvation, crucifixion, resurrection - but they are simple enough to explain. Contrast that with the account Mr. Brown offers of a centuries-long fraud, sustained by shadowy groups, imperial politics, ruthless brutality and latterly revealed by a secret code "hidden" in one of the world's most famous paintings. The Christian Gospel offers a coherent, comprehensible account of reality that invites the assent of faith. It requires a choice with consequences. Mr. Brown's dissent from Christianity offers a bewildering and incredible amalgam of falsehoods and implausibilities, painting a picture of a world in which the unenlightened are subject to the manipulations of the fe...