Posted by
Anthony on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 12:36:39 PM
There have been some interesting blog posts from catholics on the conservative movement in America. Mornings Minion tries to define what it ought to be in terms of sobriety at http://vox-nova.com/2009/02/17/conservative-leninists/ and Charles Colson does the same in terms of traditional values at
http://catholicexchange.com/2009/02/18/115911/. I do not much care for our political parties, democratic or republican, but I like the two conservative values written about in these posts. For the conservative, sobriety ought to mean we put the sacredness of the human person before any ideology. Because they are sober about the propensity of institutions, especially politcal ones, to use people as a means to end, conservatives see the wisdom in keeping government small and upholding the principle of subsidiarity. From this perspective, the art of politics is all about making sure that human dignity is promoted in our society - that our society is humane. This desire to promote the humane inclines conservatives to want to protect ancient institutions like marriage and the family, rather than to implement to unproven programs for social engineering. We know the ancient institutions work - we have seen in the last century that social engineering without reference to tradition is disastorous. Here, Charles Colson offers an important contribution by quoting G.K. Chesterton's great observation: “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors... Tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”