The conservative ponders on what is ephemeral, and obsolete and unworthy; he ponders also on what is enduring and what is worthy to endure. He recognizes the power that links past and future; he recognizes the enduring element in the transitory present. His far-seeing eye ranges through space beyond the limits of the temporary horizon.
The liberal thinks on other lines. For him life is an end in itself. He demands liberty to enjoy life to the utmost, to procure the maximum of happiness for the individual. Provided one generation enjoys life and another follows and enjoys, man’s well-being—at any rate the liberal’s personal well-being, which is always his first consideration—is assured.
The liberal is, however, chary of using the word enjoyment; he prefers to talk of progress. Men are continually perfecting means to lighten the burden of life, and the path of liberty leads through progress to gradual perfection. Thus the liberal tries by generalities to divert attention from the egotism which liberalism invented so as not to be without some philosophy of its own.
The conservative sees through this humbug. The liberal must admit that everything which he as an individual undertakes is dependent on the conditions of life of the existing community. He must admit that, while repudiating all obligation, liberalism seeks to enjoy the fruits garnered by an earlier conservatism.
The revolutionary holds yet another opinion. He does not want to create. His immediate aim is to abolish. He renounces the past and swears devotion to the future. He talks of a millennium that will some day dawn—but it is the immaterial figment of an ever-receding future.
The revolutionary shares the liberal’s idea of progress; or rather he presupposes it, leaping from the real to the utopian. He shares the biological illusion—which dominated all our thought during the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century—that life is based on evolution, and consequently that the evolutionary possibilities of all human affairs are infinite.
The conservative recognizes no evolution, only genesis. He does not of course deny the phenomena of evolution. But he contends that nothing can evolve which was not primarily in existence; evolution is a secondary phenomenon; genesis is a primary phenomenon.
We can examine the history of all ages and of all peoples, we shall never discover progress. We see values created wherever men of strong will, or mighty popular movements, are in play. When we enquire how they came into being we find that Nature like history knows no progress, but only continuity, tradition.
Values are a matter of grace. They arise suddenly, spontaneously, demonically, when their time is fulfilled. When the rationalist deliberately sets out to "make" values—whether with reactionary or progressive intent—his creative power fails him. Since men invented the idea of progress there has been nothing but retrogression. The liberal century was upon us.
The conservative justifiably believes that our whole age has gone astray. The revolutionary believes that the world has always been astray until today, and that our only help can come from an entirely new organization of life. The liberal is as always unteachable. Even in the face of the catastrophe he contends there has been democratic progress, and would deny that it was his principles which our enemies were skilful enough to exploit in the War and of which we were the sacrifice.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1923). Germany's Third Empire.
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