Building things is hard. Tearing them down is easy.
Behind this brute fact is a profound practical truth, i.e. if we are to summon the immense energy needed to build and to preserve good things, we must first identify what they are, and cultivate a deep appreciation for their goodness. To use G.K. Chesterton's famous example in Orthodoxy, to keep going out into the cold and the heat to repaint a white post white after having done it so many times before, we must desperately love its whiteness. In other words, we must be grateful for it.
Gratitude is no longer in vogue. Indeed, not only is it not in vogue, it is increasingly viewed with suspicion, or downright hostility. And this, I sometimes worry, seems to be increasingly as true of the political right as of the political left, where ingratitude has long been elevated to the level of a virtue, even the Virtue of virtues.
The troubling thing about gratitude, it seems, is that it implies that one thinks or feels that there is something that is going right with the world: that there exists a state, or thing, or person, or institution that is as it should be or that is serving its purpose tolerably well. But to an age in which almost every aspect of our lives has been reduced to a single dimension - that of the political - this simply will not do.
At a minimum it smacks of an embarrassing naïveté, at worst of downright cowardice. Activists, after all, do not organize fiery protests or amass donations by lauding the justice in the world. And politicians do not get elected and pass laws by telling their constituents that their lives are better than they know. For either to come out and say that things might not be as bad they appear - or that at the very least we ought to begin by giving thanks for the good things in our lives - risks making him or her appear a traitor to the cause: a quisling, Pollyanna or Pangloss.
As Jordan Peterson has argued so effectively in his lectures, a rejection of gratitude is baked into the progressive left, where envy is de rigueur. To the progressive left, there is no place for gratitude since "the system" is corrupt to its core. Every aspect of the lives of ordinary citizens is controlled and made miserable by the power structures that protect the economic or social elite while crushing the far more numerous oppressed. To express gratitude in such circumstances is as much as to suggest that one is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The worst thing about it is that it risks conveying the idea that the solution to our problems is less radical than that beloved of every revolutionary, i.e. to "burn it all down." Wokism is merely the latest, most-insidious iteration of this impulse.
This is not the conservative way. Or rather, historically has not been.
Conservatism has historically differentiated itself by its emphasis on the hard, slow, painstaking, and often-thankless work of preserving and building across generations. In this, it moves mightily against the grain of human nature, in the qualified sense in which the pursuit of virtue moves mightily against the grain of human nature: that is, what Christians call "fallen" human nature.
Envy and anger are "natural" to us in the same way that the impulse towards pleasure is natural. We are, it seems, wired in such a way that those things in our environment that are out of place and therefore threatening attract our attention far more insistently than those things that are in the right place and working well.
There are obvious and appreciable benefits to this. We can walk past a certain tree a thousand times without ever noticing its existence; but the moment it leans menacingly over the sidewalk, it explodes into our field of attention. A useful trick.
But there are obvious deficits as well. Only to notice the tree when it threatens to dash our brains out is to fail to notice that the tree is strong and beautiful when it does not. The dull throb in our little toe can dim, and even overwhelm, the pleasure of a gourmet meal with friends. Temporary financial difficulties can cause us to question whether life is worth living, even as we enjoy historically unprecedented levels of wealth and comfort. And awareness of the ever-present realities of corruption, war, instability, injustice, and political defeat risk casting a permanent pall over one's vision, like the protagonist in the Rolling Stones' song "Black".
One of the strengths of conservatism is that it, like the pursuit of virtue, trains its adherents to do the hard, "unnatural" work of taking the long view, recognizing that no matter how bruised and battered the body politic might be, so long as the heart is beating, the blood pumping, and the nerves sending their electrical impulses along, there is very much grateful for, and very much worth working to preserve. "Where there is life, there is hope," and all that.
Everywhere we look now, however, there is evidence of a metastasizing, ingratitudinous, revolutionary, "burn-it-all-down" conservatism. The language is familiar, as if lifted straight from the manifestos of leftist revolutionaries. "The system" is corrupt to its core. "They" are in control of every aspect of our lives. Every single institution is infiltrated with and steered by the "elite" solely for their own benefit. The only acceptable and effective response to their use of raw power is the counter-use of raw power. All discourse is surrender. Anxieties about truth must not be allowed to distract from the single-minded pursuit of victory. And what matters more than anything else...the only valuable thing...is action.
Even at the risk of being called naive or a Polyanna, we must resist this apocalyptic conservatism, which in its fundamental gloominess is more "liberal" (in the modern sense) than conservative. Anger has its place in politics. But we use it well only when we respect and fear its bias towards destruction. Gratitude, on the other hand, with its bias towards preservation and construction, is the hallmark of the conservative state of mind, into which all righteous anger must be integrated if it is to prove productive.
The scope of this gratitude, with its positive respect for what is and attendant fear of the unintended consequences of tearing it down even in the ostensible pursuit of a good cause, is perhaps illustrated no better than in that famous scene in A Man for All Seasons.
St. Thomas More's future son-in-law, William Roper, has just insisted that he would "cut down every law in England" to get the devil. “Oh?" replies More,
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
That is, More would begin with a bias towards gratitude, hesitating even in the face of naked evil to lift a violent hand against what so many had worked so hard for so many generations to build. It is the same impulse that drove Socrates to accept even a manifestly unjust death sentence, out of gratitude for the laws that had protected him his whole life.
Like Socrates and More, we too must begin and sustain our efforts to improve the world and fight injustice with an gratitude for those things in it that are good: such things as faith, family, all the myriad institutions, norms and just laws developed or built over many centuries or millennia that order society in such a way as to promote the corporate pursuit of peace, justice, truth, freedom and virtue, and all the innumerable beneficences that an all-loving God has showered on us, beginning with the gift of life itself.
Regardless of the trials of our historical moment, which are legion, and the threatening political clouds looming on the horizon, which are black, and the corruption of our institutions, which is endemic, there is much in our lives and our world for which we are duty-bound to feel gratitude, and to work to preserve. History depends on conservatives to rediscover not only the virtue, but also the too-easily-forgotten political and social utility of gratitude.
More gratitude, less anger
"The only acceptable and effective response to their use of raw power is the counter-use of raw power."
This reminds me of Boromir insisting that the One Ring of power be used against the enemy instead of being destroyed.