Remember President Ahmadinejad’s preposterous visit to Columbia University last September? (I wrote about that little escapade here.) Well, it has just been reported by an Iranian news agency that–the headline says it all–”Columbia professors plan to visit Iran to apologize to Ahmadinejad.” Yes, that’s right folks, some of those tenured radicals we pay to educate the next generation of citizens at one of our premier universities will be embarking for Tehran to apologize “officially” to the beaming dictator (see “Ahmadinejad’s Grin.”)

An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported.

Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad.

What can I say? Back in October, I wrote a piece for National Review on the subject of “How to Fix the Universities” (here’s the link, but I believe registration is required). I had this and that to say–the usual list of prescriptions about tenure and free speech and academic rigor–but I incline more and more to the solution offered me some while back when I wrote about a similar subject for The New Criterion: “I just can’t,” the sound fellow wrote, “see meaningful change of the academic monstrosity our universities have become issuing from faculties, parents, alumni, and trustees.” OK, but what was his alternative? In a word, tanks. He called his plan Operation Academic Freedom, and I think you will agree that it has that virtue of simplicity which William of Occam famously recommended. Here’s the plan:

We round up every tank we can find that isn’t actually being used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Next, we conduct a nationwide Internet poll to determine which institutions need to be retaken first . . .

The actual battle plan is pretty simple. We drive our tanks up to the front doors of the universities and start shooting. Timing is important. We’ll have to wait till 11 a.m. or so, or else there won’t be anyone in class. Ammunition is important. We’ll need lots and lots of it. The firing plan is to keep blasting until there’s nothing left but smoldering ruins. Then we go on to the next on the list. If the first target is Harvard, for example, we would move on from there to, say, Yale. So fuel will be important too. There’s going to be some long-distance driving involved between engagements.

In my piece for National Review, I called this Plan B, to be resorted to in the end when all the reformist measures had been exhausted. I think more and more it should be promoted to Plan A and should begin at Columbia before wending its weary way up Route 95 to Cambridge.

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Who says Islam and technology don’t mix? When it comes to divorce, anyway, they are ostentatiously au courant. Tom Gross, writing at National Review Online, reports on the latest innovation, citing this story from al-Akhbar, a government run newspaper in Cairo:

A woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband’s declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid.

After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him which read: “I divorce you because you didn’t answer your husband.”

Gross comments:

In line with Sharia law, Egyptian men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage. Mrs. Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, received three such text messages from her husband, says the newspaper.

If a family court declares the couple divorced, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS text message in Egypt.

Query: is this story ironical, an exaggeration, a total fabrication? Who is brave enough to hazard a conjecture, given what we know about the career of Sharia-inspired behavior in the modern world?

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When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, make change like a child. I remember, for example, a carnival at my summer camp. It was an educational as well as a entertaining exercise. Everyone was given a small stack of funny money to spend on the concessions. Under certain circumstances, however, you could increase your pile by sidling up to a fellow camper and asking him for change:

“May I have two tens for a five?”

And he had to fork over the specie if he had it. Many a naive youngster was ruined that afternoon, ending the day sadder but wiser about the perfidy of human nature. Why, even the counsellors were not above indulging in that three-for-one flutter.

I thought of those far off days while contemplating Mrs. Clinton’s recitation yesterday of her long, long experiencing “making change.” “I’m running,” quoth she, “on 35 years of change.” Who knew? In New Hampshire 7231 toddlers have booties (or maybe it is health insurance) because of the way Mrs. Clinton “made change,” while there were “1713.5 National Guard members who, because I, Hillary Rodham Clinton stab the air with my finger and took on the Pentagon, had free change, no, I mean free mind-numbing statistics of dubious provenance because of special interests change vetoed President Bush making change vote for me please. . .”

I can’t vouch for the total accuracy of that transcription. But I am struck by the prominence of the word “change” in this campaign. Mrs. Clinton deploys it like a hammer, Mr. Obama offers it up as a sort of sweetmeat. But for most of the candidates change is the holy grail, the unending mantra, the cynosure of their hearts.

Isn’t it time we offered a cautionary word or two about change? I am perfectly willing to admit that the Duke of Cambridge may have overstated things slightly when he announced that he was opposed to “all change, at any time, for whatever reason.” But readers of Roger’s Rules know that I am fond of Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.”

Why? One reason is that lasting cultural accomplishments are hard-won achievements that are easy to lose but difficult to recoup. Another reason is that the rhetoric of change encourages us to discount present blessings that are real for future promises that are uncertain at best.

The heat and velocity of a Presidential election campaign are not exactly conducive to patient deliberation. But it is worth stepping back for a moment to contemplate the paternity of the liberal obsession with change.

One important progenitor is the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill was an extraordinary and multifaceted figure, but for the catechism of modern liberalism the Mill that matters is the Mill of On Liberty (1859). The first thing to be said about On Liberty is that it is a masterpiece of liberal polemic. Its core ideas are as the air we breathe: unnoticed because ubiquitous.

Mill’s arguments and pronouncements about man as a “progressive being,” the extent of individual autonomy, the limits of acceptable moral and legal censure, the importance of innovation and (perhaps his most famous phrase) “experiments in living” are all familiar to the point of invisibility. Likewise his corollary insistence on the poverty of custom, prejudice, and tradition. Mill’s contentions on these subjects are nowadays less objects of debate than of reverence: moral principles that discussion is expected to presuppose, not challenge. As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, “What Mill proposed as a bold new doctrine has come down to us as an obvious, axiomatic truth.”

But the success of Mill’s teaching in the court of public sentiment says nothing about the cogency of his arguments. In fact, Mill’s central arguments are open to–and have from the beginning been subjected to–serious criticism. Yet they have raged like wildfire through the Western world, consuming everything that stands in their path. Which means, among other things, that they exert an appeal quite distinct from any intellectual merit they may possess. (And which in turn may suggest something about the potential liability of being thought “intelligent” by Millians–as well as the possible advantages of what Mill castigated as “stupidity.”)

Throughout history, Mill argues, the authors of such innovations have been objects of ridicule, persecution, and oppression; they have been ignored, silenced, exiled, imprisoned, even killed. But (Mill continues) we owe every step of progress, intellectual as well as moral, to the daring of innovators. “Without them,” he writes, “human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist.” Ergo, innovators–”developed human beings” is one phrase Mill uses for such paragons–should not merely be tolerated but positively be encouraged as beacons of future improvement.

The philosopher David Stove called this the “They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus” argument. Stove noted that “the Columbus argument” (as he called it for short) “has swept the world.”

With every day that has passed since Mill published it, it has been more influential than it was the day before. In the intellectual and moral dissolution of the West in the twentieth century, every step has depended on conservatives being disarmed, at some critical point, by the Columbus argument; by revolutionaries claiming that any resistance made to them is only another instance of that undeserved hostility which beneficial innovators have so regularly met with in the past.

The amazing thing about the success of the Columbus argument is that it depends on premises that are so obviously faulty. Indeed, as Stove observes, a moment’s reflection reveals that the Columbus argument is undermined by a downright glaring weakness. Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove writes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which “were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better.” Which means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organization of society.

The triumph of Millian liberalism shows that such objections have fallen on deaf ears. But why? Why have “change,” “innovation,” “originality,” etc., become mesmerizing charms that neutralize criticism before it even gets started when so much that is produced in their name is obviously a change for the worse? An inventory of the fearsome social, political, and moral innovations made in this century alone should have made every thinking person wary of unchaperoned innovation. One reason that innovation has survived with its reputation intact, Stove notes, is that Mill and his heirs have been careful to supply a “one-sided diet of examples.” It is a technique as simple as it is effective:

Mention no past innovators except those who were innovators-for-the-better. Harp away endlessly on the examples of Columbus and Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno, Socrates and (if you think the traffic will bear it) Jesus. Conceal the fact that there must have been at least one innovator-for-the-worse for every one of these (very overworked) good guys. Never mention Lenin or Pol Pot, Marx or Hegel, Robespierre or the Marquis de Sade, or those forgotten innovators of genius to whom humanity has been indebted for any of the countless insane theories which have ever acquired a following in astronomy, geology, or biology.

Mill, like our present-day politicians, never missed an opportunity to expatiate on the value of “originality,” “eccentricity,” “change,” and the like. “The amount of eccentricity in a society,” he wrote, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.” But you never caught Mill dilating on the “improvement on established practice” inaugurated by Robespierre and St. Just, or the “experiments in living” conducted by the Marquis de Sade. (It is hardly surprising that, today, the phrase “experiments in living” is redolent of the fatuous lifestyle “experiments” of the 1960s; whatever else can be said about the phrase, Stove is surely right that it represented “a sickeningly dishonest attempt to capture some of the deserved prestige of science for things that had not the remotest connection with science”–principally “certain sexual and domestic arrangements of a then-novel kind.”)

Gird up your loins, friends! We are going to hear a lot more about “making change” before November 7, 2008 rolls around. It will be the one unchanging thing about the campaign. When you hear the word “change,” ask yourself whether the change proposed would really be a change for the better. And consider, as you do, these two things:

* Many of the changes Hillary Clinton is proposing depend upon certain confiscatory transactions similar to those indulged in at my summer camp: you’ll find yourself confronting Bob, the taxman, asking “May I have two tens for a five?” (Just ask yourself how Hillary proposes to pay for all those “holiday”–we mustn’t say “Christmas”–presents she proposed to distribute.)

* What St. Paul really said was “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.” The question is, are we adults yet?

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Here’s a headline that speaks for itself:

Bhutto’s Husband Calls for UN Probe

Ask ‘em in Darfur about UN probes. [Thanks to an energetic reader for noticing the missing "in."] As Mark Steyn observed (in response to some moronic comment by George Cloony, an actor) “The problem is, by the time you’ve gone through the UN, everyone’s dead.”

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Remember Ripley’s Believe it or Not? (The odd, the unusual, the bizarre . . .) That amusing concession has been documenting strange phenomena for 90 years. Bill Gertz at the Washington Times has an item that qualifies for the Ripley treatment. Believe it or not,

Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military’s Joint Staff. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England.

And why was Mr. Coughlin’s contract with the Department of Defense not renewed? Believe it or not,

He had run afoul of a key aide to Mr. England, Hasham Islam, who confronted Mr. Coughlin during a meeting several weeks ago when Mr. Islam sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamist extremism.

It gets worse:

Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.

Let’s see: Mr. Coughlin works for the US military, i.e., the chaps we pay to protect us from other chaps doing things like borrowing airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers, to say nothing of Mr. Coughlin’s own (soon-to-be-former) place of employment. Mr. Coughlin, an expert on said chaps, is fired because he runs afoul of “an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups.”

Hat tip to Andrew Bostom, who has more here. Andrew McCarthy weighs in here.

Jihad Watch reports this sobering assessment from LTC Joseph C. Myers, Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, noted:

What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” that is meticulously documented and powerfully argued.

In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process and intelligence preparation of the battlefield process, the critical step 3-”evaluate the threat.” Strategically we have failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.

We began on September 12, 2001 with “Islam is a religion of peace,” which soothed ideological sentiments of many but has failed us strategically, short-stopped the objective, sytstemic evaluation of the threat doctrine.

“Islam is a religion of peace” is fine for public policy statements, but is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis…it is in fact a logical flaw under any professional research methodology…you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.

If one has studied the implication of the Holy Land Foundation trial discovery documents as I have, as a former DIA senior military analyst, and understanding as even Bill Gertz has written in his book Enemies[: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets--and How We Let It Happen] about the dismal record of our counter-intelligence one has to wonder and question the extent we are in fact penetrated in government and academia by foreign agents of influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamists and those who truly in essence do not share our social compact.

The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice.

Believe it or not. I believe it.

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Amateur psephologists need strong stomachs. The GNOHO–the Gross National Output of Hyperbole and Obfuscation–spikes dangerously at this point in the election cycle, and many delicate souls have been utterly overwhelmed by the resulting rhetorical effluvia.

Hyperbole is the simplest, most easily recognized, and therefore perhaps the least noxious of the phenomena with which the the election observer must contend. A typical example, in a story about Hillary Clinton’s dismal showing in the Iowa Caucus Thursday night, from today’s New York Times: “Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton,” write Patrick Healy and John M. Broder “have been in career-threatening scrapes before, but never quite like the one they face in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, when nothing less than their would-be dynasty will be on the line.”

Really? How do you spell “Vince Foster“? What do you suppose Monica Lewinsky would have to say about that? Take your time. Have a cup of coffee and–assuming Michael Bloomberg is not around to police you–a soothing cigar. While enjoying those mediative puffs, ask yourself how popular the name “Whitewater” is in the Clinton household or how you would turn a $1000 investment in cattle futures into $100,000 in a mere ten months, as Hillary did back in the late 1970s. (She managed that impressive feat, she said, after “reading The Wall Street Journal,” an edifying exercise that I heartily recommend, though it is with sorrow that I report I’ve yet to experience anything like such spectacular results.

Hillary Clinton’s experience in Iowa on Thrusday may have been “a career-threatening scrape.” Then again, maybe it was just business as usual for a seasoned political trouper who, whatever else can be said about her, by now surely has tough callouses in all the relevant spots.

But as I say, hyperbole, though common, is in many ways the least noxious of the rhetorical gambits with which one must contend. Far more vertiginous is the profligate deployment of VacCon–the Vacuous Conditional. “For Mitt Romney,” writes Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, “it may be one and done.”

Unless something happens this weekend–and debates have not been Mitt’s strong suit this year–he could be going down in the record books as the John Connolly, the Phil Gramm, the Steve Forbes of the 2008 race.

It may may be, Howie; Mitt could be; then again, maybe it won’t and, even though he could have, he didn’t.

Not of course, that Howie has a monopoly on this unfortuante concession: John F. Harries, writing for Politico, usefully assures readers that “Both Clintons’ legacies may rest on N.H.” Thanks for that, John! It’s not even in writing about politics that VacCon is at its worst. Even more egregious is that way it is employed in financial writing. An online investment service warns that “This mistake could cost you a fortune.” Yes, it could; but what if it made you a fortune instead? Dilating on the current credit crunch in the London Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offer these dire words: “Crisis may make 1929 look a ‘walk in the park’.”

When a credit system implodes, it can feed on itself with lightning speed. Current rates in America (4.25 per cent), Britain (5.5 per cent), and the eurozone (4 per cent) have scope to fall a long way, but this may prove less of a panacea than often assumed.

It can feed; this may prove.

The problem with the Vacuous Conditional is that (as the name suggests) it is absolutely without substance. Hillary Clinton’s defeat in Iowa might mean X; then again it might mean the opposite of X. The stock market just plummeted more than 200 points. That might mean we’re headed for a depression; but it might mean that the economy is taking a short breather before embarking on yet another robust period of growth.

The habitual use of VacCon rhetoric sometimes betokens laudable caution on the part of a writer. Often, however, it indicates a penchant for obfuscatory evasion. You can understand the temptation. Until recently, Hillary was the “inevitable” candidate. Thursday confirmed what many had known for weeks: that notwithstanding her formidable machine she was deeply evitable. How easily a dollop of VacCon rhetoric could have softened the blow: “Hillary might or may be inevitable.” Either way, you win! The moral? That possibility is cheap. Or perhaps I should say: a cheap trick. This is something that Karl Marx knew and exploited. In an 1857 letter to Engels about one of his own election predictions, Marx slyly acknowledged that “It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.” How many journalists have, wittingly or not, taken a page from the playbook of that intellectual blackguard.

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The January 2008 issue of The New Criterion is winging its way to subscribers. Parts of it are available for free online, including my introduction to a special section on The Future of Conservatism. (The whole issue can be accessed by registering.) With essays by Kenneth Minogue, Daniel Johnson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Jeremy Black, and John O’Sullivan, this chrestomathy–a sort of digest of a conference we organized with London’s Social Affairs Unit last autumn–is certain to be of lively interest to anyone concerned about the fate of Western civilization. One caveat: The New Criterion‘s web site is undergoing a total makeover. For the moment, however, only the most basic functions are operable, and even those, like Pooh’s spelling, can be wobbly. Please bear with us.

In case you are one of the unlikely people who are unable to access the site, I repost my introduction herewith. I called the piece “Saving Remnants,” taking the phrase from Matthew Arnold. But perhaps a better title would have been “The Proper Conservative View of Gloominess,” Truth, and Change”:

Introduction: saving remnants

“Precautions are always blamed. When they are successful, they are declared to be unnecessary.”

—Benjamin Jowett

It is useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism.

—Dean Inge on the League of Nations

In a recent essay about the war in Iraq, Victor Davis Hanson noted that the world of Washington was an “echo chamber.” One creditable—or at least listened to—pundit or politician opines in a way the media likes and, presto, a new bit of conventional “wisdom” is born—or at least reinforced. A mere opinion, often ill-informed, frequently at wide variance with the truth, is repeated often enough, and it suddenly acquires the carapace of general currency that, at a distance, can easily be mistaken for fact. As Hanson shows, what has happened with the war in Iraq provides a sterling example of the genre: how many times have you heard it uttered, in tones of somber certainty, that “There is no military solution to Iraq”? That “We can’t impose democracy on anyone”? That—well, readers can complete the list for themselves. Contrary evidence seems incapable of penetrating the hard shell of such conventional fancy. If it could, then the fact that democracy was successfully imposed, after a military solution, on such nasty regimes as Hitler’s Germany, Hirohito’s Japan, Mussolini’s Italy, not to mention more recent examples in the Balkans and Argentina, would act as a powerful damper in the echo-chamber Hanson describes. But it doesn’t.

Of course, the war in Iraq is not the only phenomenon susceptible to the echo chamber. Any controversial datum or movement is prey to its distorting simplifications. One conspicuous example, I believe, is the fate of conservatism. More than two decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan ruefully noted that Republicans had become “the party of ideas.” He was right about that, as recent American political history amply attests on issues from welfare and taxes to free markets and national security. But in the last couple of years, conservatives, especially conservatives in America and Europe, have seen their prospects fed into the echo chamber. Everywhere one looks, it seems, the fortunes of conservatism are—or are said to be—on the ebb. You can hardly open a newspaper or tune into a television news show without being warned (or, more often, without hearing celebratory shouts) that now, finally, at last, the forces of enlightenment and progress are once again on the ascendant, that conservative ideas and the people promulgating them are in rout. One saw this, for example, in recent months in the aura of supposed inevitability—now conspicuously tarnished—that attended the campaign of Hillary Clinton. People from every political persuasion simply took it for granted that the Presidency was hers for the asking. Why?

It was partly in order to probe behind the echo-producing organs of opinion that The New Criterion and London’s Social Affairs Unit convened a conference last autumn on the present state and near-term prospects of conservatism in the United States and Britain. We recognized that the subject was not only enormous but also in many respects imponderable. Nevertheless, out of our discussions certain patterns and leitmotifs emerged, above all, perhaps, a concern with the illiberal results of liberal attacks on the traditions, policies, and institutions of conservatism—what Kenneth Minogue diagnoses below as the “drift in modern states towards despotism.”

This “drift towards despotism” has been a recognized liability of modern liberal society at least since Tocqueville warned about the “tutelary” forms of despotism to which democracy was peculiarly susceptible. Democracies, he noted, do not so much tyrannize over their minions as they infantilize them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one of the more exquisite modern forms of tyranny is infantilization—a situation in which enervation and apathy replace the more brutal tinctures of oppression. What primarily concern us now are the bureaucratization and institutionalization of those imperatives, and it was part of our task in this conference to begin an anatomy of those forces and ask how conservatism might provide an alternative or at least an energizing resistance to them. The issue, Minogue notes, is not just this or that public policy but “our way of life as a free people. Individual self-control is an indispensable condition of freedom. Without it, we become the puppets of governments.”

Taken together, the papers below make a good start on showing how that descent into puppetry can best be resisted. They touch, and touch eloquently, on a wide range of issues, from education to partisan politics to the law. By way of introduction, I would like simply to say a few words about three issues that are often in the air when the topic of conservatism arises: I mean gloominess, truth, and change.

First the gloominess. I have recently begun keeping a folder marked “Conservative Gloominess.” It is full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be, harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives, despairing portraits of U.S. or European society. What’s odd, or at least uncharacteristic about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance—to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there—but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation. From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land, or, to take a more recent example from one of our participants, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. I think I am right in recollecting that when Robert Bork once delivered himself of a withering account of some aspect of our society, a member of the audience remarked on how depressing his paper was. In response he suggested that he might call his next essay “Little Mary Sunshine,” to which a fellow panelist said, “Oh yes, ‘Little Mary Sunshine Gets Skin Cancer.’”

Well, that’s all in a day’s work for a conservative. But I’ve noticed a troubling disruption of late. By habit and disposition, I submit, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than—than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called—perhaps John Fonte’s marvellous coinage “transnational progressives” is best—they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quota of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I for one hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent access of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess—the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on—much more difficult and less satisfying.

This brings me to the issue of truth. Conservatives are realists. They like to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, unless it is explicitly outlawed, just as they prefer to call “affirmative action” “discrimination according to race or sex,” taxation “government-mandated income redistribution,” and “Islamophobia” a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible “multiculturalists” colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists. This is a theme that arises in several essays below, but I’d like to flag for special attention Daniel Johnson’s peroration to his thoughts on “The Conservative Response to Islam.” “Relativism,” Johnson writes,

is the tribute paid by reason to toleration. But relativism, whether moral or epistemological, can never be the basis of politics. Skepticism, being quietist, can never prevail against belief. The only answer to atavism is activism. It is better to obviate the need for radical solutions to pseudo-problems by offering conservative solutions to real problems. If Islam is the solution to the decadence of the West, then we have been asking the wrong questions. If Islam is now the problem, however, then the solution can only be a conservative one. Islam will not overwhelm a society that draws its morality from biblical and its rationality from classical sources. The West does not need an Islamic revolution, but a Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman renaissance.

Radical Islam is among the most pressing external threats to Western society today, but we also face a host of internal threats. Among the most dangerous of internal threats, I think, is what we might call creeping multiculturalism—the accommodationist spirit that, for example, is more saddened than outraged when calling a Teddy Bear “Muhammad” lands a school teacher in a Sudanese jail.

Creeping multiculturalism intersects in poignant ways with a subject that is always at the center of concern for conservatism: change. Towards the end of his thoughtful new book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, David Frum gently takes issue with Russell Kirk’s invocation of “the permanent things.” “How few of those there really are!” Frum writes. “The fact of change is the great fact of human life,” he says, pleading with conservatives to “adapt” to change and retake the intellectual and political initiative. Some such rhetoric might be required on the hustings. But I confess to having mixed feelings about that exhortation, if for no other reason than that I believe change to be not the but a great fact of human life. An equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one “adapts” more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”

I recognize that “change,” like its conceptual cousin “innovation,” is one of the great watchwords of the modern age. But William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of National Review in November 1955, that a large part of the magazine’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” It’s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile, the smile meaning “he wasn’t against change, innovation, etc., etc.” But I believe Mr. Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made National Review unzeitgemässe, “untimely” in the highest sense of the word. The Review, Mr. Buckley wrote, “is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and The New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.”

The Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In “Why You Should Be a Conservative,” which deserves to be better known than it is, he rehearses the familiar scenario:

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, “reform.”

Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed. The great Victorian Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating “remnant” of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them—but so did that enabling remnant. Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a “saving remnant” large and vital enough to become “an actual” power that could stem the tide of anarchy. I hope that he was right.

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