The New “Reds”

One of the most striking features of late modernity—of our decayed and decaying political culture—is our inability to pass on our most cherished beliefs and formative experiences to our children and those who come after us. Something so central to humane conservatism, and civilized life as the continuity of human experience, can hardly be assumed in an era where the past perishes before we can come to terms with the requisite seriousness it requires. As George Orwell showed with his characteristic lucidity, totalitarianism entailed at its core the deliberate, even murderous, extinction of memory and the vital truths it reveals. Yet our postmodern commitment to live in the ephemeral, in the always fleeting present, has much the same result: the extinction of the historical consciousness, of the memory shared across generations, on which all mature civic and moral judgment rests. Without such shared memory, there can be no public realm, no common space connecting the living to our forebears and the yet to be born, to cite Edmund Burke’s always evocative and pertinent image from the Reflections on the Revolution in France.