Why conservatives should heart NYC, too.
I recommend reading this short essay imploring conservatives to care about cities.
“In Rome,” wrote the philosopher George Santayana, who spent his final years in the Eternal City, “I feel nearer to my own past, and to the whole past and future of the world, than I should in any cemetery or in any museum of relics.”
Rome is, of course, unique—the conservator of an almost unfathomably vast portion of human history. But every great city does something like the same thing and can engender something like the same experience: an experience forming the core of any authentic conservatism. For conservatism cannot be merely an attachment to certain abstract principles. It is also an attachment to real and tangible things, and to the past out of which those things, not to mention we ourselves, have emerged. Cities are, and remain, the chief places where these meanings are conserved and cultivated.
If you're new to Tightgrid, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
2 Comments