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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reuters joins CNN on the bench

Makes room for CanWest to join the majors Kudos to CanWest for calling a terrorist a terrorist . Many, including The Last Amazon , will be happy to hear it. Reuters is among the worst of the major western news services, where I would also place the BBC and the CBC. Unsurprisingly, Reuters is not happy about the changes CanWest made to Reuters wire stories: Our editorial policy is that we don't use emotive words when labeling someone," said David A. Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor. "Any paper can change copy and do whatever they want. But if a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline." Mr. Schlesinger said he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations. "My goal is to protect ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"

This article argues that universities are obsolete . Herman Melville said that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville didn't need college to write "Moby Dick." He needed to read and spend time in the world. Before sailing out on a whaler in 1841, he had already worked on his uncle's farm and as a cabin boy on a ship to England. Peter Drucker urged high-school graduates to do likewise: Work for at least five years. If they went on to college, it would be as grown-ups. You wonder whether colleges, stripped of their education function, wouldn't find other lives as spas, professional-sports franchises or perhaps lightly supervised halfway houses for post-adolescents. The infrastructure is already in place. Putting aside the intellectual class' obsession with things passing and thus bringing the great moment of cosmic progression to a thundering conclusion (yawn), I do think there's something to this. The potential of the podcas...
Post a Comment
Read more