This is a stonkingly good book, well-written and funny. It’s also quite mad, but that’s what makes it so compelling.
There’s been a rash of recent publications arguing that modern conservatism doesn’t go far enough: rather than seeking to preserve a liberal status quo, Rod Dreher, Sohrab Ahmari, and Tim Stanley (yes, me) believe that we need to turn the clock back to an older order, to rediscover the benefits of traditions that are at-risk or extinct, re-rooting the individual in history and community. All of us have tried to pitch this experiment as being “in the world but not of it.” Michael Warren Davies just wants outta here. The traditionalists, he argues, should retreat—from technology, from the city, and from modernity, all the way back to the Middle Ages where honorable knights pursued “friendship and happiness, service and charity,” and serfs “paid their little taxes to their lairds and were otherwise left alone… There was very little for the king to do.”
Read Full Article »
