Scruton traced back our classical understanding of beauty to the Enlightenment period, and argued that in our increasingly secular world beauty is a path back to the transcendent.
Thousands of years of socio-cultural evolution has made us instinctively inhabit religious thinking patterns, and where actual church dogmas fail to be appealing enough, people start to look elsewhere.
Today’s “objective truth” is not what the majority of the scientific community accepts as such; rather it is what most people share on social media.
Nostalgia, so characteristic of conservatives, can
be understood not in
time but in space instead.
This nostalgia originates from Odysseus’s desire
to return home (νόστος) and means the suffering
of man away from his home that motivates his return.
Modern societies that work well are conservative in that they have a strong sense of homeostasis. This is the sense of continually returning to a point of equilibrium. Upsets, changes, drives, and tensions occur along the way.
The film’s (The English Patient) main protagonist is the Hungarian desert explorer László Almásy. Who was this mysterious person looking for happiness so far from home, in the barren, sandy world of the Libyan Desert?
There is a drastic increase in the number of children confused by their gender identity in countries where propaganda to young people is widespread.
This is Budapest: a big city that dreamed and then built for itself a colourful past during the last decades of the old world, in those final moments before the dawn of modernism.
The revival and reinstatement of tradition, its restoration if you like, is by no means self-contradictory, and constancy is a more important element of tradition than change.
Hungarian Conservative is a bimonthly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.