'The Brilliant, Impressive Fabric It Had Raised'

“Sense of the past & the importance of continuity: preservation of identity in change.

“Respect for the other man’s personality; the sense of the improbability of any rigid doctrine being ‘right.’ The refusal to see the political world in simple black & white.

“Pursuit of the good that can be seen and grasped, not of the ‘highest good.’”

I’m probably not the target audience for the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990). I have little interest in politics. I tend to think of him first as a writer, then as a thinker. His best-known essay, and certainly the most influential in my reading, is “On Being Conservative,” in which he commonsensically snubs politics in the conventional sense: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” This makes sharp, intuitive sense. One distrusts those who are ungrateful and pathologically discontented.

The passage quoted at the top is from Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014). I thought of them and other things in that book while rereading Henry James’ novel The Princess Casamassima (1886). Here he is on the evolving thought of his protagonist Hyacinth Robinson:

“What was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of how the society that surrounded him should be destroyed; it was, much more, the sense of the wonderful, precious things it had produced, of the brilliant, impressive fabric it had raised. That destruction was waiting for it there was forcible evidence, known to himself and others, to show; but since this truth had risen before him, in its magnitude he had become conscious of a transfer, partial if not complete, of his sympathies.”