Sunday, February 10, 2008

Survival of the Stablest?

A letter of mine is printed in the new, not yet online, issue of The New Individualist. My letter is a reply to an article Roger Donway wrote about that free-wheeling, free-loving Romantic, Percy Shelley. My letter mentions that Roger's viewpoint reminded me of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke's essay is often considered to be the founding document of modern conservatism.

Roger's latest column, in this new issue, looks a bit like a reply to my letter. He titles it "Reflections of a Tory Individualist," and makes a case that a free society will embrace a stable form of virtue:
If ever we get a free society, I believe, the morality of its citizens will most closely resemble the morality of the freest societies we have so far known: the morality of mid-nineteenth-century England and America, which is to say, Victorian morality.
Roger writes a good essay, but even I am not quite convinced, despite the fact that my current mode of life would stand up pretty well under those standards.

I'm trying but failing to work up euphoria
For morality under Victoria.

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