Some say that conservatives have a duty to preserve and defend Western culture, meaning for the purposes of this post the best of our civilization's literature, art, and music from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century. The dangers facing this high culture are twofold: erasure under an avalanche of vulgarity, and ideological attack from the Left ("classical music is racist", "English poetry is hideously white", etc.) The twofold danger calls forth the twofold response of preserving / carrying on and defending. Reasons for a conservative to care about Western culture are also twofold. First there are reasons of filial piety: part of honoring and maintaining connection with our ancestors is remembering their cultural lodestars and countering slander against them. Second, there are eudaimonic reasons: the best of our culture has a power to foster a deep understanding and appreciation for spiritual realities and the human condition. The two reasons speak to the two aspects of conservatism--the particularistic and the objective/universal. The conservative will acknowledge part of the accusation, that our culture is tied to a particular people and history, but will deny that this makes it an expression of "hate", but rather a particular expression of universal truths.
One problem with this is that Western high culture clearly does not have the promised spiritual effects most of the time. English professors, artists, actors, musicians, poets, and museum curators by-and-large hate Christianity and distinct European peoples much more even than average people do; there is an inverse correlation between immersion in the best of Western culture and what any conservative would recognize as wisdom; deeper exposure to Western culture seems to inspire only a greater hatred for it. Furthermore, a Christian is bound to admit that Western civilization is deeply, fundamentally evil. This hit me forcefully watching universal celebration from all French parties as France enshrined abortion rights. A culture with no resources to criticize the wanton killing of unborn children deserves to be erased from the world like the culture of Canaan. Like America, European core values are baby-murder, sodomy, usury, anti-white bigotry, contempt for ancestors, atheism, and totalitarian bureaucracy. The world would be better off if this blight of a culture were totally forgotten.
A lover of Europe might wish to say that although the culture has become evil, it was not always so. However, the hideous full flowering makes it easier to recognize the earlier development in retrospect, and we see that the poison was there all along, intermingled with all the greatness, in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, in ancient Greece and Rome: the philosopher's contempt for the traditional and inarticulate, the urbane sophisticate's for the countryside, the self-righteousness of the prophet and intellectual. It seems to me that the honor and loyalty due to our ancestors is to them as souls and not as bearers of a great culture. Indeed, we should hold that great culture in no higher regard than other worldly pomp.
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