Backing into modernity:

...If we are indifferent to those who went before us and actually existed, how can we expect to be concerned for the well-being of those who come after us and only potentially exist...

...But there are two possible attitudes toward the future...

...I'm not sure whether this tolerance is good or bad...

...One of the characteristics of the cultural conservative is an orientation toward the past, a prejudice in favor of tradition...

...This is not, I grant, a very illuminating self-description, but at least it is less unillumi-nating than calling myself either a simple liberal or a simple conservative...

...On the brighter side, it means we are custodians of an ancient tradition, not only in religion but in all the vast number of secular values and philosophies that have fed into Catholicism in the past two millennia...

...If the Renaissance and the Reformation led us into the modern world, which they certainly did, they did so by backing into it, not by marching toward it...

...Tradition can indeed be a dead hand...

...The men of the Renaissance rejected medievalism, not in the name of the future, but in the name of a past more remote than the Middle Ages...

...on Muriel Spark ers find it virtually impossible teach history to our children...

...Back to the Greeks...

...And the men of the Reformation certainly had no wish to innovate, no desire to modernize religion or anything else...

...After a few hundred years of modernity, we ought to know how to utilize it as a springboard.s a springboard...

...Let the dead bury the dead...

...Their battle cry was, "Back to the Romans...

...We stand in the midst of many generations...

...I am not going so far as to advocate Oriental-style ancestor worship, but the Chinese and Japanese have had a point...

...The two great cultural movements that wrote finis to the medieval world and opened the way to modernity-the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation- were both backward-looking events...

...they wanted to escape the medieval church by returning to the early church...

...This means we have to keep some pretty unsavory company: Torquemada, for example, was a Catholic cultural conservative...

...Oddly enough, except for some Protestant fundamentalists who are currently taking offense at the likes of Judy Blume, Christians have largely given up being offended by books...

...Judging by this standard, however, almost everyone in the world was a cultural conservative until two centuries ago...

...The Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance, would have to be classified as acultural conservative...

...Now, it is perfectly okay for Buchanan to make these points, just as it would be perfectly okay for him to make the same points regarding virtually every signifi-cant twentieth-century novelist, since they have nearly all given offense to one shade or other of religion...

...We are born into a world that we didn't make, and it is only fair that we should be grateful to those who did make it...

...Or if it is not quite bunk, it is at all events not very important-a sign of which is that history teachCOMING Robert E. Hosmer, Jr...

...In principle, of course, these attitudes are not incompatible, since only if the future is approached in a spirit of responsibility will it remain an ample reservoir of opportunities...

...This past-orientation can of course be overdone, and then the dead hand of dead ages weighs heavily on the present...

...We believe in tomorrow, not yes-terday...

...But by the late-twentieth century we have so far overcome our orientation to the past that we have largely lost our sense of tradition...

...But it can also be a springboard to the future...

...But good taste has never been Buchanan's strong point...

...The study of history, which in the nineteenth century was accessible to the average educated person, is now largely the preserve of specialists...

...Well, I'm not that kind of cultural conservative...

...But in practice, the two attitudes are often in conflict: take the battle between those who would protect the earth's environment and those who would exploit it without limit...

...For most of the rest of us history is, in the inspired word of Henry Ford, "bunk...

...Catholics, I should add, are cultural conservatives almost by definition...

...Nor am I the Pat Buchanan kind either...

...One of the problems with describing oneself as a cultural conservative is the company one has to keep...

...But it shows a certain want of good taste, to say the least, for Buchanan to raise these complaints at precisely the moment when the Imam has ordered Rushdie's assassination, If Pat really felt the urge to take a whack at poor Salman, couldn't he have done it last year...

...BACKING INTO MODERNITY CONFESSIONS OF A CULTURAL CONSERVATIVE When pressed to describe myself as either a liberal or a conserva-tive, I respond (stealing and then amending a remark first made by Daniel Bell) that I am a political liberal and a cultural conservative...

...So far indeed from wishing to modernize Christianity, they wanted to primitivize it...

...Ironically, the best way to develop an attitude of responsibility toward the future is to cultivate a sense of gratitude toward the past...

...Or perhaps next year...

...Such gratitude carries with it the imperative that we preserve and at least slightly improve the world that has been given us before passing it on to subsequent generations...

...or the battle between those who would pile up an enormous national debt for our children and grandchildren to pay, and those who would try to keep the debt to a reasonable size...

...for it wasn't until well into the eighteenth century that the thought occurred to anyone that the opposite attitude could be adopted-an orientation toward the future, a prejudice in favor of innovation...

...One can view the future as a land of opportunity, or one can view it as a region of responsibility...

...Buchanan has a number of debating points to make about Salman Rushdie's alleged insults to Muslim religious sensitivities...

...Our orientation is toward the future...