nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Bonald writes:

I doubt there are any observations or arguments here that haven’t been written down by past generations of conservatives, many times before.  Given French legitimism, Jesuit natural law communitarianism, Dutch Calvinist sphere sovereignty, German Right Hegelianism, Russian mysticism, American Agrarianism, and the metahistorical masterpieces of Spengler and Voegelin, one sees that conservatism is poor neither in arguments nor in genius.  What it does lack is a tradition.  The irony here is exquisite, isn’t it?  Conservative thinkers do brilliant work, but it doesn’t get passed down.  A T. S. Eliot, say, will produce a powerful defense of some aspect of conservatism.  It will perhaps be noted, but then quickly forgotten, while the grand narrative–”conservatives are stupid; they have no ideas, just inherited prejudices”–remains untouched.  The next generation of conservatives begins intellectually from scratch.  We reproduce a small bit of what these earlier generations did, and we think ourselves very clever.

The obvious difference between modern-day conservatives and earlier generations thereof is that we have much greater access to information. Most research no longer requires days of digging through forgotten corners of libraries in search of the slightest clue as to how to proceed; these days, we can just hit Wikipedia for pointers, and Google Books and the Internet Archive serve up all but the last few generations of conservative thought.

The results? Carlyleanism, distributism, monarchism, slow history made easy. Access to narratives beyond those of the establishment. The power of our technology to challenge the prevailing narratives of our time has surely been covered many times before, but I doubt anyone has considered which narratives those are. We’ve always had Marx, but only now do we have Belloc.

(Incidentally, this is why I have no problem with e-readers. Actually buying ebooks from places like Amazon is problematic, to say the least, but I would much rather not have to stare at a computer screen to read Carlyle.)