Culture and Conservatism: How We Can Have Both

“For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” –The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis

To be an expert of art, literature, music, or theatre, and to also be a conservative, is in today’s society to be a living oxymoron.

At universities, professors from those departments are by and large liberal, teaching art that could be described by the words “modern” or “progressive”—words at which conservatives distastefully scoff.  Students of these professors grow to believe, due to the lack of conservative experts in the field, that conservatives must have no place in the world of arts and humanities. Cultural liberalism and cultural conservatism have been, and are, at odds—with conservatism desperately struggling.

What is the solution, then? Conservatives must grow more willing to unravel their ideas through the stories that can be told within these disciplines, and learn to value creativity, even when that creativity opposes their political views. They must not overlook these stories’ undeniable influences on culture.

Culture isn’t changed by appealing to the common citizen’s sense of logic through mystifying charts and graphs. Not only does no one want to read those, as Lewis tells us—no one understands them. “Imaginative persuasion,” Russell Kirk writes, “not blunt exhortation, commonly is the method of the literary champion of norms.”

On the cultivation of this moral imagination, Russell Kirk says, “‘Scientific’ truth, or what is popularly taken to be scientific truth, alters from year to year with accelerating speed in our day. But poetic and moral truth changes little with the lapse of the centuries.” In traditionalist conservatism, it is only natural that story-telling be cherished and utilized through the arts and humanities, but conservatives have grown lazy. The stories conservatives could tell are instead replaced with puzzling diagrams in The Wall Street Journal.

If conservatives ignore the opportunities we have, and that liberals are taking, to affect the culture, they lose the chance to cultivate moral imaginations, thus allowing descent of the general public into idyllic and diabolic imaginations. Seizing these opportunities to reach the moral imagination may be but a slow-moving shift of culture; nonetheless, it is a worthy cause in the name of “conservatism at its highest.”