More Lessons From History

One of the key reasons why ours has, at least until very lately, remained so free a society is that a succession of rival traditions has eventually come to terms with the other’s permanent existence as an integral part of the national life and character: Catholic and Protestant, Conformist and Nonconformist, Tory and Whig, Conservative and Labour. But today, the neos (neo-Labour and the neo-Tories, with their neoliberal economics and their correspondingly neoconservative foreign policy) are determined to rout and destroy us paleos. That way lies tyranny.

And those (all of the neos, for a start) who at least broadly subscribe to “the Whig interpretation of history” should consider how often the ideas that prevailed, even within academic, cultural or political institutions defined by those of whom such subscribers approve and who seem most obviously to have won the battles in question, were in fact formulated within the apparently vanquished subcultures: Jacobitism, Legitimism, Carlism, Hapsburg monarchism, Tsarism, Catholic and Protestant resistance to German National Liberalism, those in eighteenth-century England or Germany who turned to Methodism or to Pietism rather than to rationalism, those in France who were Jansenist or Ultramontane, Russian intellectuals who converted to Catholicism or to Protestantism, and so forth. Someone, somewhere, should be putting together a startling symposium on the profound and long-term influence of all of these, and more. If it hasn’t already been done?

And if we paleos are to be the Jacobites in all of this, then where and what is to be our Diaspora? Far more Jacobites went into exile than, say, Huguenots sought refuge here. They made a very significant economic contribution to France and Spain, they founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great, they dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies, and they did very much more besides. Where might our paleo exiles go, what might they (we?) do, and why?

Alternatively, what if we succeed in bringing about the desperately needed Reformation in British politics? Unlike the Reformation itself, it will be bottom-up rather than top-down, it will be directed at collapsed rather than thriving institutions, and it will therefore be massively popular, entirely without any need for imposition by force.

But it will of course leave its recusants, notable for their tiny numbers, for their heavily intermarried families, for the social and cultural insulation provided by their fabulous wealth, for the lavishing of foreign honours on their most outspoken figures, for the fact that all their institutional manifestations are abroad, and yet also for the fact that almost no one abroad (nor even many people here) has any notion that they exist.

Any neo reading this (as I know that plenty of you do), don’t you want better than that for yourself, and for your house and lineage at least for the next three hundred years?