Where is the Wise?
Conservatism, Maturity & the Demonic
Winston Churchill is often quoted as having said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” As an admirer both of Churchill and of the comment in question, I regret to inform our readers that we have no record of Churchill uttering this statement.
Please indulge me and allow me nonetheless to refer to the statement above as the “Churchill quote.” Let’s subject it to some reflection, for I think it contains profound wisdom. (And yes, I self-identify as over 35, conservative, and having a brain.)
The Churchill quote appears to suggest that young people’s idealism attracts them to liberal or progressivist agendas, while more in-depth reflection among older people makes them conservative. Though this observation is by no means universally valid, I think it often holds true, in Western society at least, in the areas of religion, politics, and economics.
Adulthood, according to the Churchill quote, has to do with the brain. To be sure, this is a somewhat coarse or crude way of putting things, for I suspect that it is not just the brain (rational, discursive thought) but especially the intellect (wisdom) that is in view here. It is wisdom that renders one conservative.
This last statement is so obvious as to be tautologous. H. Richard Niebuhr, in his classic 1951 Christ and Culture, notes five characteristics of any given culture: (1) it is social; (2) it is the result of human achievement; (3) it is a world of values that aims at certain ends or purposes; (4) it tries to realize these values in concrete temporal and material ways; and (5) it is diverse or pluralist in its endeavors.
I am interested in the fourth characteristic. Niebuhr suggests that our efforts to give shape to our values by way of buildings, laws, songs, and innumerable other accomplishments mean that we want to preserve these values. We try to conserve them in the particular forms that we have given to them. “Culture,” writes Niebuhr, “is a social tradition which must be conserved by painful struggle not so much against nonhuman natural forces as against revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason.” A culture that fails to conserve its basic accomplishments fails to conserve its values and thus dissolves.
Niebuhr is not being prescriptive; he is not trying to convince us that we should be conservative and try to preserve our accomplishments. Rather, he is simply descriptive. Anyone with a bit of a brain will be conservative for the simple reason that he loves the culture whose accomplishments he celebrates with thankfulness. For Niebuhr (and I think he is spot-on) wisdom renders one a conservative. To be a progressive is to be childish, immature, not fully grown—and, crucially, lacking in gratitude.
A Spiritual Category
We tend to think of maturation as something biological—it just happens, like it or not. I would suggest, however, that adulthood is as much a spiritual as it is a biological category. St. Irenaeus famously talked about Adam and Eve as immature children, which is why he didn’t attribute much blame to them for eating the apple. They were like naughty kids raiding their mother’s kitchen cupboard. Sadly, the unfortunate incident did condemn them and their posterity to immaturity. Maturity or perfection—the Greek teleiotēs carries both meanings—had to wait till the coming of Christ. He, the true man, realized maturity or perfection, the very purpose of Adamic existence.
Irenaeus, I suspect, took his theological cue regarding the Adamic journey to maturity from St. Paul, who identifies the human aim as attaining
to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood (andra teleion), to the measure of the stature (hēlikias) of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children (nēpioi), tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. (Eph. 4:13–14)
For Paul, we must leave behind childish ways and reach mature or perfect manhood—which is to say, Christ. Put differently, our problem is our spiritually small stature, while we are supposed to grow tall in Christ. Maturation is far more than a biological category.
Adulthood, in the Pauline and Irenaean sense of the term, implies grateful recognition of God’s good gifts. Put differently, true adults are conservative because they are thankful. They receive with grateful hearts the accomplishments of those who have gone before. By contrast, immature children tend to be selfish, incapable of recognizing and celebrating God’s good gifts that have reached them through the cultural accomplishments of their ancestors.
Stunted in Our Growth
I am afraid the Churchill quote has outlived its cultural applicability in the West, for it assumes that, perhaps with some exceptions, maturation occurs somewhere between the ages of 25 and 35, at which point one becomes an adult. This is no longer the case. Both individually and culturally, we are stunted in our growth; maturity is hard to come by.
Cultural immaturity has taken on alarming proportions. Rather than taking a stance of receptive gratitude, our primary posture toward our own culture and its history is one of disdainful and supercilious condescension. Listing examples seems superfluous. The spiteful repudiation of our Western and Christian legacy has rapidly intensified over the past few decades. We indulge in cultural apologies not because we are ashamed of our offenses but to signal our progressivist stance. We vandalize and burn down churches (68 in Canada in 2021) not because we are offended by unmarked graves at Indian residential schools but to show our disgust with the Christian faith that continues to flourish among indigenous communities. We insist on mutilating the bodies of children not out pity for their mental suffering but to negate and destroy our culture’s acceptance of philosophical realism.
Each and every one of these destructive acts signals immaturity. Which is to say, as a culture, we have lost the ability to be thankful for what we have received. We have lost our conservatism.
The Safest Road to Hell
You wonder how come? You wonder why the cultural drift seems to be draped in the aura of inevitability? Of course, our cultural elites—particularly our movie industry, global corporations, and social media tycoons—have by and large embraced progressivist, woke agendas with which they attempt to seduce an increasingly immature and hence credulous populace.
But most of us are not elites. Why is it that we allow ourselves to be seduced by them? C. S. Lewis rightly points in the direction of demonology. Screwtape commends his nephew Wormwood for the progress he is making in leading his victim to damnation. Screwtape expresses, however, some apprehension about the situation: “My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position.” Wormwood’s victim remains a churchgoer. He doesn’t commit any obvious sins. And he hasn’t openly betrayed the faith. In fact, he doesn’t even know that Wormwood is assailing him. “Our policy, for the moment,” insists Screwtape, “is to conceal ourselves. All this makes him blissfully unaware of the danger he is in.” Screwtape recommends that Wormwood proceed cautiously:
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Some slippery slopes are fallacies; others, however, have been carefully paved by Wormwood and his cobelligerents.
We have become a childish culture, which manifests itself in self-centeredness, entitlement, and ingratitude. To the extent that we have become immature, we are the hapless victims of demonic attack. Demons hate maturity and perfection; of course they do, which is why the Devil himself showed up to tempt Christ, the very fullness of maturity and perfection (teleiotēs).
Not Inevitable
The perpetuation of our culture’s self-destructive progressivism is not, however, as inevitable as it often seems. After all, demonic forces are not the only ones in play. St. Michael and his angels have a mandate to protect individuals, cities, and entire cultures. We should pray for their protection, far more powerful than the evil of demonic forces.
In fact, I suspect the battle may not be going Wormwood’s way. Why not? He is beginning to ignore the lesson Screwtape taught him, and he overplays his cards. The denial of biological and stable sexual identity is so obviously demonic that even feminists and homosexuals cry foul. Perhaps conservatism has a future yet.
—Hans Boersma, for the Touchstone editors
Originally posted at Touchstone Magazine.