My Take On Yoram Hazony's Book 'Conservatism, A Rediscovery'

I read a couple of reviews and saw an advert in the European Conservative Magazine, for Yoram Hazony's book 'Conservatism, A Rediscovery', so I ordered a copy from my local library and sat down to read it. I was very happy to find him say in his Introduction, that "It is possible for individuals to discover that they have been on the wrong course, repent, and set out on a new and better course. And this is possible, too, for families and congregations, tribes and nations." As this cuts across the modern woke cancel culture mentality of, "once a sinner, always a sinner." As a convert myself from paganism to Catholicism, I know there is hope for everyone.

He goes on in the Introduction to make me smile by saying, "My wife Yael and I have done everything together since we met a few weeks after starting college in 1983. The story of my coming to a conservative life is inseparable from whom she was and is. I have said a bit more about her in the personal recollections included in the last part of the book. Those who want to know more about Julie and me are welcome to skip to the end." This made me smile, because I have almost never skipped any part of a book once I have started to read it and both my wife and my son believe I read some really boring books!

And so on to chapter one, pages seven and eight where I found to my horror this,

"In the 1530s, King Henry VIII led his people in what became the first modern movement for national independence. Regarding themselves as restoring England's ancient freedom, Henry and his advisors cut the ties that bound the English government to the pan-European bureaucracy of the Pope and the German emperor, established the king as the head of the Church of England, translated the Bible into English, and dissolved the monasteries that were seen as hotbeds of papist sentiment. Henry's campaign for English independence was followed by aggressive Protestant reforms under the brief rule of his son Edward VI; and then by a desperate attempt to lead the country back into Europe's Catholic political and religious order by Henry's daughter Mary, whose husband Philip II of Spain, regarded himself as divinely appointed to return England to obedience.

The stability, strength, and cohesion of Britain as an independent, Protestant nation was secured during the forty-five-year reign of Henry's daughter Elizabeth, who ascended the throne in 1558. It was Elizabeth who eventually defeated Phillip’s Armada and attained a religious "settlement" that established the Anglican church, while tolerating Catholics and Protestant dissenters as long as they remain discrete in their practices. Yet Elizabeth’s remarkable achievements were threatened by Protestant radicals, who chaffed at her willingness to offer Catholics a decree of accommodation and at her nationalist religious policies which stubbornly refused to conform the Church of England to international accepted standards for what reformation should look like."

I would need to write a book or two to point out how wrong everything he has written hereis. Such books have already been written, so I will merely observe, for example, that Henry VIII did not lead his people to freedom, but just led a string of women, most of whom he was not married to, to his bed-chamber! Henry dissolved the monasteries and gave their wealth to his poor....advisors! For a real understanding of Catholic life under ‘Good Queen Bess’, see John Gerards, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest.

And so taking up the author's excellent offer, I skipped the next 440 pages to really enjoy the final chapter and conclusion. 

Some Notes on Living a Conservative Life, Chapter IX, starts by talking about the founding of a student magazine called The Princeton Tory, the first issue came out in 1984 and it is still published to this day, I'm sure that many should thank Mr Hazony for starting this magazine with his wife Julie and their friends. Both he and his wife had come from broken families, in fact his father had married for the third time before his son graduated. "In fact, most of my friends in high school had been suffering through the breakup of their families. They handled these hardships badly. Most lost themselves in alcohol and drugs some had abortions. One took his own life. Few of them ended up married with children of their own. Where Julie grew up, her friends decided to have the babies rather than aborting them. But they were raising them without fathers." Although I was growing up in the 1980s on the other side of the world in Wales, I could have easily written this paragraph myself and I'm sure that many others in the West could do so as well. And like many of us, the Hazonys "longed for something we had seen and knew something about, although we didn't really understand it: that home in which the husband and wife remained faithful their entire lives, into which children were born and could grow strong, in which life was precious and God's blessings were tangible even in the face of tragedy and hardship."

As this young couple talked about the idea of a better life they considered what they knew of a better past. She talked about her grandparents strong presbyterian household, he talked about the solidarity and radiance of his Orthodox Jewish Uncle and Aunt's home. They could see the goodness in the traditional family and it's importance in the restoration of a nation.

Princeton University in those days was clearly in a state of moral decay, there were no responsible adults anywhere. "Here, 5,000 young men and women had been dumped into dormitories together and given as much access to alcohol and drugs, sex, and party music as they could consume and if they smashed the window in their dorm rooms, broke empty beer bottles in the stairwells, or bashed in the street lamp with their heads while they were drunk---all common occurrences---then nameless men in green uniforms would appear and repair the campus to its prior, Edenic beauty, with no questions asked."

Looking at economic conservatism and the free market it is noted that Adam Smith like the American founders, had considered that things in society would continue in such a way as to allow for free enterprise. "In particular they took for granted 'organized religion, traditional moral values, and the family'--- factors that had once been powerful enough to constrain the market and channel it into productive avenues. But now these things had become unsettled, controversial, artificial."

And the author says, looking at Kristol's "discussion of pornography and censorship, we come face to face with the religious foundation on which everything else in Kristol's politics was built: For him, there was a real difference between what is worthy of human beings and what is debased and corrupt. He was, in other words, invoking the biblical view that each of us is made in God's image. According to this view, pornography is wrong not only because it is built on enslavement and coercion. It is wrong because it reduces men and women to beasts. This is true of those who make pornography and it is true of those who consume it. And where it is allowed to spread, it swiftly reduces the entire society to one without constraint, a society of animals."

Thinking about a new generation of Conservatives, he says there are young men and women brilliant intellectually, they have a lot going for them, but they don't really understand the proper weight or significance of things. "Imagine a young man in his 30s, living with a woman year after year, deferring marriage and children, engaging in the life of no congregation, reading no scripture, and keeping no sabbaths. I won't go so far as to say that such a person is Godless and entirely without a moral compass, although one could make that argument. Rather, he is a man who has inherited no sense of what is to be honoured and in what degree. Because of this all things look good and fruitful to him, and no obligation seems especially pressing. He feels that no great harm would be done if he fails to commit to marriage and raising children, to join in a congregation and keeping the Sabbath for another 10 or 15 years. Here's the kind of man who is not overly troubled by the fact that he has in effect, left God sitting in the waiting room with a stack of Conservative magazines to look at. What does such a person know about conserving anything? He copies conservative words from others, but his life is that of a liberal. He thinks his influences over others are his words. But he doesn't have enough experience in life to know that his true influence is being exerted by his deeds. Everyone around him knows how he lives. And for this they understand what is weighty and significant in his eyes and what is not. To the extent that others honour and respect him, they learn from him that they should lead a liberal life, just as he does.

What would he do differently if he was determined to bring about a change in the order of the world around him?

He would begin living a conservative life---a life that is built around the restoration and conservation of things, not just in his fantasies, but in reality, this would require locating an actual conservative community in which the tradition still lives and is being handed down to new generations. It would require presenting himself to this community."

"And so, whenever we hear a conservative speaking warmly about the conservation of our national, religious, and moral inheritance, it is reasonable for those within earshot to ask what this particular person has done for the actual conservation of national and religious tradition where this is entirely within his power--- which is to say, in his private life. Has he taken the necessary steps to construct a conservative life for himself and his posterity? Is he yet another sorry example of the general dereliction that we face?"

I cannot possibly finish this without mentioning the third year of the publication of 'The Princeton Tory' magazine that had been handed over to a group of Protestant and Catholic students. "In February 1988, they published an issue at the magazine with the words 'Is God Dead? We Think Not' splashed across the cover. I was proud of them for doing it. That issue of the Tory made plenty of people angry. But it did something that needed to be done, directly taking on the implicit consensus everyone and everything at Princeton had to be moving towards overthrowing received ideas and traditions, no matter how important." I had to include this in my review because my own contribution to conserving the things that matter is making 'God's Not Dead' button badges.

I make no apology for the fact that this review contains more quotes from Mr Hazony’s book than it has of my views, as most of the bits of the book that I did read, were very good and well worth quoting at length. Should you wish to read the 440 pages that I skipped, please do so, with my blessing.

And do I feel at all guilty for having skipped the vast bulk of this book? Not really, as the author invited me to do so, and although Sir Roger Scruton said, "a teacher must repeatedly acquaint himself with books that he would rather eat than read." I am not a teacher and nor would I particularly like to eat this book. The book came from the library and needs to be returned, I have hundreds of other books around the house waiting to be read and I am in fact reading a number of them at this time. I felt slightly guilty in that I am reading some essays by Scruton at the moment and in one of them he says, "Now that [Thatcher] has gone from us, however, and no longer poses a threat to all the ambitions that her presence once obstructed, she will surely be acknowledged, even by those who conspired to remove her, as the greatest woman in British politics since Queen Elizabeth I." As it is a collection of essays and I own the book I will, in spite of this positive comment about the evil queen read on.