Author Archives: Kit Stolz

Ventura County, where I live in Southern California, has had a slew of natural disasters in the last couple of years. The White House declared a disaster for the floods of January 2005, after several months, and the state has declared a disaster as well, and also for the Day Fire of last September, andContinue reading “The Fifth Bad Thing: Drought”

In an "Advisory Readings" post that meanders through all sorts of fascinating topics, James Wolcott alerts us to a fiercely concise little essay by a professor much loved at Dartmouth, Jeffrey Hart, on the true nature of Burkean conservative thought, which does not overlook that quality forgotten to so many capitalists–Beauty.

I’ll post it in its entirety below, but here’s the crux of the matter for us:

Free-market economics. American conservatism emerged during a period when socialism in various forms had become a tacit orthodoxy. The thought of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman informed its understanding of economic questions. At length, the free market triumphed through much of the world, and today there are very few socialists in major university economics departments, an almost total transformation since 1953. But the utopian temptation can turn such free-market thought into a utopianism of its own — that is, free markets to be effected even while excluding every other value and purpose …

… such as Beauty, broadly defined. The desire for Beauty may be natural to human beings, like other natural desires. It appeared early, in prehistoric cave murals. In literature (for example, Dante) and in other forms of representation — painting, sculpture, music, architecture — Heaven is always beautiful, Hell ugly. Plato taught that the love of Beauty led to the Good. Among the needs of civilization is what Burke called the "unbought grace of life."

The word "unbought" should be pondered. Beauty has been clamorously present in the American Conservative Mind through its almost total absence. The tradition of regard for woodland and wildlife was present from the beginnings of the nation and continued through conservative exemplars such as the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who established the National Parks. Embarrassingly for conservatives (at least one hopes it is embarrassing), stewardship of the environment is now left mostly to liberal Democrats.

Not all ideas and initiatives by liberals are bad ones. Burke’s unbought beauties are part of civilized life, and therefore ought to occupy much of the Conservative Mind. The absence of this consideration remains a mark of yahooism and is prominent in Republicanism today. As if by an intrinsic law, when the free market becomes a kind of utopianism it maximizes ordinary human imperfection — here, greed, short views and the resulting barbarism.

[From "The Burke Habit," one in a series of commentaries in the Wall Street Journal under the rubric ‘American Conservatism," published 12/27/2005. At another point in the essay Hart specifically excoriates the idealistic "Wilsonianism" that leads to foreign wars as soft-headed, "a snare and a delusion" and "far from conservative." Gee, who could he be thinking of?]

I should state the point clearly: Caring for the planet is true conservatism.

Here’s Mr. Hart:

Here’s a post that took me quite a while to put together for Grist, but which I forgot to include on my own site! Sometimes I’m so thick. Take a look… Jenny Price is a nature writer, but unlike most of the species, she insists on writing about nature as it really exists in ourContinue reading “What’s Wrong with a Plastic Pink Flamingo? A Q & A with Jennifer Price”