In his influential Polity Exchange paper Noel Malcolm contrasts ‘political’ approaches to human rights with ‘moral and philosophical’ approaches. I see this as a singular example of English ‘metaphysical illiteracy’ of which the Celtic nations are rarely so guilty.
Given this metaphysical illiteracy it’s quite hard to explain the many exceptions: Cudworth, Coleridge, Bradley, Whitehead etc, besides the metaphysical bent of so much English literature. But there’s a dominant strand at both elite and popular levels wishing to suppress this.
When Malcolm suggests that English declarations of civil rights from Magna Carta to 1689 implies no universal claims he is quite wrong. Church support in first case linked to invocations of natural law, in second British imperialism often assumed British universal exemplarity.
So in the one case Malcolm retreats to a pre-Lingard Protestant whiggish account of Magna Carta, in the other he ignores the often Anglican-based claims to universal disclosure of English constitutional and cultural particularity.
And Malcolm’s view that human rights are fundamentally rights against the state us entirely modern and in line with Hobbes, Locke and the American and French Revolutions. For an older view there was no duality of possessed right and reciprocal justice, nor of state vs society.
All of his ‘conservatism’ (like that of Scruton) is modern and liberal, never looking before the 17thC at best. Real conservatives always invoke the gothic and the genuinely classical and Biblical. Often they are ‘left-wing’ like Macintyre.
Nor do they see democracy as the most ultimate value.
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James Hawes notes that Harry Potter turned round the fortunes of public schools. Their products now over-dominate acting, media, sports, Oxbridge. But have state schools and universities learnt from this that ritual, mystique, religion and arcane learning naturally appeal? No.
Apart from Oxbridge (divided) universities and state schools have gone in the opposite direction of boring and sinister prose. Suggest the relevance of HP to them and they smile condescendingly. Meanwhile the Maoist equality, diversity and identity agenda now has a stranglehold.
Hawes somewhat plausibly reads Harry Potter as our Norman/Saxon duality writ large. A boarding school ancestral with secret knowledge admits some children of commoners (muggles). And yet Rowling while sensibly not PC is most definitely on the Soc Dem left. How to explain that?
James Hawes The Shortest History of England is very good and thought-provoking. It implies a huge tension: since 1066 the English have been colonised one way or another, yet only elite rule has ever roughly united north with south England. Implications for now immense.
If the Celtic nations finally peel away, can England be United at all? The north then loses the support of the rest of outer Britain on which it has so often relied to balance greater southern power founded ultimately in gentler more fertile terrain.
Thus in an English state the Tory south rules forever but could the north put up with this.
Yes terrific article. We should have followed Barcelona and Gaudi and not Le Corbusier. Both were very Catholic in certain ways. This is a theological argument. Le C had a mistaken Thomism denying time and form as including ornament. Gaudi more like architectural Bergson!
It’s not reactionary to oppose architectural modernism. It lines up with fascism, state socialism and liberal utility. The Arts and Crafts, Art Deco etc movements were equally modern. But more in continuity with Symbolism. Ornament and design are linked to mystery and faith.
It’s the same in literature: the best literature was in continuity with the symbolist and ultimately the romantic inheritance.
Deus est semper movens immobilis(XIX): ‘God is always in immobile movement’. Like Victorinus after Plotinus The Book of the 24 Philosophers regards the ineffable God as beyond the contrast of rest and motion.(This improves on Aquinas and gives a readier centrality to the Trinity)
‘God is darkness in the soul; the one who remains after all rekindling light’ (XXI)
XXII says that God removed nothing from its own essence, precisely because he remains true to himself.
It’s a very penetrating critique and denunciation of totally loopy and wicked suggestions that may still prove dangerous. However JC Murray and Bellarmine are *not* the alternative and liberalism as cult of the individual will is all those real and dominant.
The problems here are surely twofold: 1. The ‘integalists’ ironically refuse the integration of nature and grace and so have a modern and heterodox doctrine of the coercive domination of nature by supernature, law by gospel, which then is not the gospel.
2.Inversely the correct refusers of pure nature have since early sixties often inconsistently supported a pure natural and neutral secular liberal autonomy. A ‘left integralism’ after Peguy instead says criterion of just state is its enabling of non-coercive community of charity