Sir Roger understood that. You can’t counter nihilism, you can’t defeat the iconoclasts, by critique alone. Indeed, even to focus primarily on critique is already to concede that the game is one of tearing-down, one of destruction.
Once, when I asked him about how to build, and rebuild, he playfully replied: we can’t be about "debunking". Rather, we need "bunking".
We need to know how to build.
Culture, he went on to say, is simply "the things we have loved".
Love is the only principle capable of conserving, of transmitting, or of building, anything at all.
So-called conservatives too often think it is enough to be right: right about the economy, right about systems of government, right about civic association, right about fundamental freedoms and dignity.
But being right isn’t enough. When you have young people burning cities and convinced that their culture is intrinsically oppressive, that its fundamental principles are perverse—then, it is safe to say to conservatives (as the meme goes)—you had one job, and you failed.
A culture does not, it cannot, continue without mechanisms for its own transmission. The West, terrible though it is to say, no longer has those.
Sir Roger understood that. He understood that the only way to pass along a culture, the only way to conserve those things we love, is actually to pass them along—to share that love, to instill it in another, and in the young especially. Naturally, Sir Roger knew this was a bedrock philosophical insight of the Western tradition, wonderfully articulated in Aristotle’s De anima, and taken up by Augustine, Dante, the Enlightenment, and elsewhere: that is, that an act of will follows, and only follows, the illumination of intellect.
Stephen Blackwood, "Thoughts from a Life: The Importance of 'Bunking'"
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