Conservatism: A Rediscovery

Reading the book “Conservatism: A Rediscovery” and it’s pretty enlightening. Edmund Burke is not the gradualist he gets the reputation for.  Hazony makes the case that it's not the documents or government structure that allows us to thrive, it’s the culture and the people. I think there's a temptation to want to believe there's a "system" (especially for this computer programmer) when, of course, humans are complex, irreducible, and dependent on God. 

We found out, the hard way, in 2004 that democracy and the rule of law were not easily transplantable in the infertile cultural soil of Iraq. But what we learned of late is that democracy and the rule of law is also not salvageable in the infertile soil of modern America. It all makes sense now, what’s happening, when you see it with the eyes that our Constitution is only as good as the people who enforce it (or don’t enforce it). The edifice or false idol is the Constitution; what made us great is a nationalism (common language, law, religion) and the Bible. The sacred founding documents were a kind of “fiat currency”, i.e. only as good as the faith the people had in them and that faith was ultimately dependent on faith in the culture and traditions and religion of Anglo-Americanism. 

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Delivered a shot at company leadership yesterday. Human Resources put out a non-sequitur email saying they are evaluating potential changes to our benefits in response to the recent Dobbs Supreme Court decision. I responded to the HR person and cc’d the CEO saying that I hope we provide additional benefits to those choosing to keep their unborn child rather than encourage or facilitate the opposite. No response obviously. 

It’s kind of a crazy world when a decision to turn the abortion decision back to the states where it belonged is greeted with hysteria. But our CEO understands his audience - he’s always been interested in millennial generation and he’s big on insights about them - and one of the insights is the famous “snowflake” metaphor in which they are fragile flowers easily upset by political events like Trump winning the presidency or now Dobbs. So he has to massage them with either actual benefit changes or instilling this temporarily hope for them that the company will “push back against that evil Supreme Court”.