For whatever reason, I was unable to log in to post this at Human Events. I wrote it, and have no desire to spend all day screwing around with buggy or damaged software.
Here is the original article: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=47086
I would say that the need to preserve the NOTION of place and time is what should motivate us. Against this stands the pervasive call for a muddling and generalized moral and political mediocrity, imposed the world over, without time, without place, without name.
It is not always necessary to be able to see far into the mists of the future. If you keep moving, and keep some faith, things reveal themselves. Plainly, the long term task is to invent something which never has been, and conserve that. Progressives arrogate to themselves that “duty”, but it would seem to me that conservatism has never opposed progress, merely collective lunacy masquerading as progress. It is for that reason that I prefer to call myself a Liberal. In his own way, Burke was a Liberal, too, who if memory serves was largely supportive of the American Revolution, absent excesses like the Boston Tea Party.
What is the important essence of a religion, or social tradition? Goodness. Goodness as an identity. Goodness is pluralistic, and can take countless forms. This should be our goal, and for the foreseeable future Goodness should be built within whatever structures remain, in churches, and cultural habits, and even within Science.
My principle website is dedicated to providing both general philosophical guidelines that make no demands on anyone’s credulity that support Goodness, and which also offers up plans for moving into the future. Specifically, I think given TIME on their hands, so many social problems of meaning would solve themselves. As I grow and learn, it seems to me the most important question is not how problems get solved, but what prevents them from being solved. We were born to build.
In any event, this is the main page here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com
My financial treatise is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html