{"id":391,"date":"2012-03-23T18:29:24","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T22:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=391"},"modified":"2012-03-23T18:29:24","modified_gmt":"2012-03-23T22:29:24","slug":"change-death-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/03\/change-death-and-politics.html","title":{"rendered":"Change, Death, and Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed Ilana Mercer\u2019s Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.\u00a0 <\/em>A week or two after that, my grandmother passed away.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Considered in themselves, each of these events is entirely distinct from the other.\u00a0 But, interestingly, reflection upon the loss of my beloved grandmother has deepened my reflection upon the loss that Mercer relays in her book, the loss of her <\/em>beloved homeland.\u00a0 Although the death of which Mercer\u2019s compelling Cannibal <\/em>is an account has occurred sometime ago, the fact of the matter is that it is <\/em>a death that its author mourns, the death of a country\u2014her country, her world.<\/p>\n

Regrettably\u2014shamefully\u2014it is only now, in the light of my own mourning, that this insight has taken hold of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But with it has come others.<\/p>\n

Death is deprivation.\u00a0 <\/em>The reason that death, whether the death of a person, a country, a marriage, or an era, causes the living as much pain as it does is that death robs them of something that they valued.\u00a0 When that something was the object of love, death is at its most merciless.\u00a0 However, death\u2019s sting is felt even by those who lose, not their beloved, but simply something to which they have grown habituated.<\/p>\n

Now, change <\/em>is an approximation to death.\u00a0 Not every change is for the worst, of course, but every change, like death, inescapably entails loss.\u00a0 <\/em>In depriving <\/em>us of what is, <\/em>change plunges us head long toward what is not yet and what may never be\u2014i.e. toward what is not. <\/em>\u00a0Western philosophy itself entered the world struggling and wrestling with the phenomenon of change, for both those, like Heraclitus, who believed that there was nothing but change, as well as those, like Parmenides, who denied that change is real, recognized that change extinguishes <\/em>identity.<\/p>\n

Change is something that we have no option but to endure.\u00a0 Some of us are generally less averse to it than others, and none of us avoid all types of changes all of the time. Still, in addition to the fact that most of us view death\u2014the Change of all changes\u2014as the most dreadful of phenomena, there are other considerations that disclose that to all of us at most <\/em>times, change is not unlike any other exhibition of untamed nature in that we feel the need to either flee from or domesticate it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One such consideration is the obvious fact that we are all \u201ccreatures of habit,\u201d as we say.\u00a0 There is a very good reason for why there isn\u2019t one of us to whom this saying doesn\u2019t apply: habit is steady<\/em>, reliable, <\/em>and familiar.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

When we appeal to \u201chuman nature,\u201d we see ourselves as appealing to that which is universal, that which is independent of the particularities of history and culture.\u00a0 \u201cHuman nature\u201d is supposed to be intractable, immutable, and, thus, permanent.\u00a0 <\/em>As such, invocations of \u201chuman nature\u201d can, and undoubtedly do, have the effect of soothing the soul, for the concept of \u201chuman nature,\u201d with its semblance of permanence, serves as a sort of fortress within which the change-weary soul seeks refuge.<\/p>\n

Habit has been called \u201csecond nature\u201d because, as anyone who has ever tried to break a bad habit knows all too well, habit not infrequently feels <\/em>as incorrigible as nature itself. The effortlessness with which our habits sustain us and the immense difficulty that we experience in trying to free ourselves from them render us forgetful of the fact that they are acquisitions, <\/em>products of choice.\u00a0 It is not for nothing that the philosopher Blaise Pascal once subverted the standard conception of the relationship between nature and habit by suggesting that perhaps nature was just \u201cfirst <\/em>habit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, habit doesn\u2019t literally arrest<\/em> change.\u00a0 But it does abate <\/em>it.\u00a0 Habit simulates permanence insofar as it prevents change from tearing our lives asunder.<\/p>\n

The counterpart to habit in politics is custom <\/em>or tradition.\u00a0 <\/em>Like habit, tradition does not preclude change, but it supplies us with the resources to accommodate ourselves to it. Tradition manages to preserve the integrity of our institutions by insuring that the changes that affect them occur slowly and steadily.\u00a0 In this respect, tradition is analogous to language, for although language is always suffering changes, those changes are incremental and, hence, readily absorbable. The identity of a language is not impaired by the changes that it experiences.\u00a0 Neither is the identity of a tradition undercut by the changes that it <\/em>undergoes.<\/p>\n

Given that in our personal lives we cling to habit to manage the relentless march of change, and given the equally vital role vis-\u00e0-vis change that tradition plays in the life of our politics, those visionaries among us who never tire of speaking of change as if it is an unqualified good can\u2019t but strike us as the most bizarre of creatures.\u00a0 Yet at the same time, if we really think about it, we must also judge them the most pitiful <\/em>of men and women.<\/p>\n

As Michael Oakeshott once said: \u201cChanges are without effect only upon those who notice nothing, who are ignorant of what they possess and apathetic to their circumstances; and they can be welcomed indiscriminately only by those who esteem nothing, whose attachments are fleeting and who are strangers to love and affection.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Utopia\u2019s champions, whether they are conventional leftists, libertarians of a certain sort, or neoconservatives, dream big dreams, dreams that they would love to impose upon the world and that have all too often proven to be nightmares for those who were supposed to be their beneficiaries.\u00a0 They are foolish, narcissistic, and, more frequently than not, destructive people.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet what makes these visionaries pitiful <\/em>hasn\u2019t anything to do with any of this.\u00a0 That they dream, and what they dream, are irrelevant.\u00a0 Even the ruinous consequences of their magisterial designs aren\u2019t to the point here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The tragic character of the visionary derives from the fact that he doesn\u2019t know love.\u00a0 He is, as Oakeshott describes the person who lusts for change, a \u201cstranger\u201d to \u201clove and affection.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The visionary regards the present as nothing but a device\u2014a \u201cmere means,\u201d to quote Immanuel Kant\u2014to be conscripted into the service of an uncertain future.\u00a0 Love tends to better the beloved, but it also delights in the beloved for what it is.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0Once it insists upon transforming the beloved into what the latter is not it murders both the beloved as well as itself. For the visionary, the present offers nothing in which to delight; it is to be subjugated <\/em>and exploited, <\/em>not loved.\u00a0 For the visionary, the grass is always greener in the pasture of the future.<\/p>\n

These reflections on death and change have confirmed for me with new force my sympathy for political conservatism.\u00a0 Unlike the leftist, the libertarian, and the neoconservative\u2014with which he is all too frequently confused\u2014the conservative knows that the greatest of life\u2019s satisfactions are to be found in the present, however challenging the present may be.\u00a0 If he is to achieve meaning in his life, it is going to be by way of his current relationships and attachments, for it is only these that can be said to exist: the past is no more and the future is not yet.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n

originally published at The New American\u00a0<\/p>\n

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