One can hardly go wrong with a Chesterton quote, so here is one that gets to the point concerning the phenomenon discussed in my previous post:
It is a negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be a negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.
And it would be a negation of self-government if all decisions of moment were rendered at some far remove from a community affected by them. Centralization, particularly the dreary admixture of political and economic concentration that we now witness, would leave to the little platoons of society the relatively trivial questions of who shall collar the stray dogs, and who shall pretend to maintain the roads, while reserving the momentous questions for powers as distant from the community as an emperor is from a slave.
Comments (3)
But for the past century the old, stable estates like that of the Duke of Sutherland are themselves the little platoons that are threatened by government and avarice.
Posted by Andrew Cusack | August 20, 2007 10:00 PM
Laying aside the historical and philosophical questions of whether the Duke of Sutherland's estate should have been assembled, no one will ever say of New Labour's Britain, the global economy, or hedge fund operators and derivatives traders, that here are the things to which a patriot's soul cleaves. Whereas I can well imagine someone feeling an instinctive loyalty to the remnants of the aristocracy and the House of Lords, which Blair gutted.
Posted by Maximos | August 20, 2007 10:33 PM
It is precisely because something is old that it must be ignored, deprecated, or destroyed, unless it's an antique shop in Vermont.
Age, the past, is a constraint, a discipline. Not even as a consideration must it be allowed, it will serve only to hamper the reshaping of society along the lines of a chaotic and dissolute modernity.
A modernity where the only thing regal is the fluidity of whim, and power the machinery of change.
Posted by johnt | August 21, 2007 10:54 AM