The Romance of Conservatism | Front Porch Republic

In one of the great works of imagination, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton declared that faith is romantic, that materialism is not only dull but produces a boredom that leads to madness. Humans are born romantics and they can never fulfill their better natures without cultivating an imagination that accepts and embraces mystery.
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Order and liberty are distinct things and a philosopher might isolate them conceptually and tout one or the other or he might place them on some continuum from tyranny to freedom and seek the middle ground. But the romantic, the conservative, will see them bound together so tightly that any liberty that is not ordered liberty is just another word for slavery.

Spiritual slavery, which includes being enslaved to one’s most base desires, to be addicted to the satisfaction of easily attained earthly things, is a result of boredom. Boredom is the final and most enervating human disease. It can produce ideological madness, expressed in efforts to remake the world, to deify humans as the authors of their own reality, or it can result in an intense privatism, an indifference to all things public, to all beings outside of one’s pinched world.

A romantic is never bored, for he occupies a world full of mystery and surprise, a reality understood in complex forms, in traditions, in liturgies, in myths, in complex social fabrics that bind humans together in community and that bind communities together across time. To inhabit such a reality is to see in all simple things the wonder of the universe, to see patterns, to feel connections, to relish in the particular, because in the particular one witnesses, but does not possess, the universal.

But if boredom is the source of the problem, what produces boredom? Kirk argued that the lust for power or control disconnected reason from imagination and made reason a servant of the human desire to control. Such an abstracted reason focused on instrumental knowledge, on the power to alter the natural world and, in due course, to alter the human. In order for abstract reason to produce a new earth, a new civilization oriented around satisfying human desires, it has to be radically reductive.

The most obvious reductionists of our time, and probably the most dangerous, are the libertarians. Kirk emphasized their “metaphysical madness” because they have made such a god out of freedom that they have lost all contact with the ground of their existence and the metaphysical source of their freedom. They preach individualism and personal freedom, and while some libertarians might personally connect freedom with larger ends or purposes, their public concerns are to extend to as many humans as possible the maximum freedom of choice that doesn’t materially harm others.
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