CONSERVATISM RECRUDESCENT
515
However, the non-conservatives who are demolished by con–
servative polemics are not the non-conservatives of real political life
but merely phantasms; the mythical tendencies of conservative thought
transform observation into fantasy. As perceived by Mr. Kirk, for
example, the dialectic of social thought takes on the sharp contrasts
of the morality play without some of its subtleties. The stage is a
realm of darkness and light, of evil and good, of vice and virtue. The
characters are either conserv.atives or anti-conservatives; the former
are knights and the latter are dragons. The conservative knight,
armored with decorum in his world of terror, would have us believe
that the dragons which menace him-hideous, "many-headed, fire–
breathing" and belching "Tartarean smoke"-are mainly of the
species Sophister, Calculator, and Reformer. But if we are to avoid
being drawn into his dream world we must remember that it is the
ordinary sophister (not to be confused with the Great Horned Soph–
ister of his imagination), the vulgar calculator (not the Saber–
toothed Calculator), and the garden-variety reformer (not at all the
Razor-back Reformer) who have kept bright in the minds of men the
image of the good society.
The phantasms that lurk in the shadows of the conservative
mind recall the words of monster Tom Paine who said of Edmund
Burke (the patriarch of dragon-killers) that "In the rhapsody of his
imagination [he] discovered
.a
world of windmills, and his sorrows
are that there are no Quixotes to attack them." But today, a century
and a half later, there has grown up a great race of Quixotes, sired
by the seed of Burke.
We need not be insensitive to the beauty and power of mythical
thought to oppose its domination of political life.
As
Cassirer observes,
Plato, one of the greatest mythmakers, became the professed enemy
of myth in the political realm.
1
Plato's solution to the problem of
justice should not be confused with his formulation of the question.
The Republic itself was intensely conservative, but his dialectics
were revolutionary. He demanded that the state be, first of all,
understood
and developed a method to search systematically for
unifying principles. Then, he declared, a choice must be made be–
tween the ethical and the mythical conception of the state. The legal
state, the state of justice, excludes mythological
constructions.
1 The Myth of the State,
p.
72
ff.
