In the beginning of the 2004 film Troy, loosely based on the Homeric narrative, we hear these lines: “Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?”

This brief reflection on life, death, and memory, points to the central place of mortality in the great works of the West. The Iliad and the Odyssey, on which the film was loosely based, are two of the three literary foundation stones of our civilisation. The third and most important is the Bible. The Iliad focuses on the central place of memory, while the Odyssey centres on our need for home. The Bible expresses the way to eternal life through Jesus Christ and the love that surpasses all understanding. All of these point to a part of the conservative view of our mortality. The need to be remembered, to feel at home during our time on earth, and to live on the path of grace-enabled virtue towards our redemption. Yet conservatism is a dying force, and the conservative view of death has itself dead. 

The most immediate morbid symptom of this death was the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. After progressively distancing ourselves from the reality of our mortality, we were confronted with a crisis of existence. For many, the encounter with what at first appeared to be a virus that would rip through the whole population was extremely frightening. It was apocalyptic, in the original sense of an unveiling. Death, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote, “is a mocking fate which awaits us all, a trauma of human helplessness which disturbs our existential serenity. It is an absurdity which undoes all of man’s rational planning, his dreams and hopes.” The sudden removal of the illusion of control over our lives seemed to dissolve the ground on which many based their sense of stability and identity. Far from placing myself at a cool and detached distance from this reaction, I also felt concerned at the beginning, especially given my genetic fragile skin condition.  

However, even when the evidence started to pile up about the reality of the virus’s overwhelming propensity to kill the very old, or those with multiple other comorbidities, many people remained in a state of shock about this reminder of the fact of death. It does not take away from the grief and desperation of those who died and lost loved ones to note that our collective response to Covid-19 was very different to the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, a far deadlier disease. The miasma of fear and paranoia was used in service to society-changing non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns, social distancing, mass-masking. Looking back, this fear spoke to a deeper collective denial of the fragility of life, and the atrophying of the collective cultural ways of coming to terms and living with this. 

The dispelling of the illusion of control over our lives that Covid-19 points to another morbid symptom. The debate over physician assisted suicide and euthanasia touches on many of society’s most sensitive nerves. The wish to prevent unnecessary suffering is noble on its face and has been the driving force behind our medical advances, many of which enable me to live a decent life. However, the same virtue of compassion can become a vice when it is divorced from other considerations around what makes a good life and a good death. 

Apart from the arguments around the morality of the act, assisted suicide and euthanasia seem to have gained support during the same period when our view of death has changed. No longer the final, ultimate limit in a life of constraints, it is now something to manage, to control, and to choose. Only in a society that has forgotten the rituals and traditions rooted in Christianity that comprise the “art of dying” and which cultivate some kind of acceptance of our finitude and which provide a way to cope with the tragic and often painful end of life, could euthanasia gain such support. 

… life itself has become more vital, more worth wringing the joy from

I’ve had to come to terms with the stark fact of mortality in my own life with my condition. Yet this memento mori has also meant that life itself has become more vital, more worth wringing the joy from. This acceptance has gone along with a reconciliation with my other limits, lifting the fog of bitterness and resentment that lay heavy in my adolescence and early twenties. Such an acceptance has a great deal to do with my delving into conservative philosophy, especially the work of Roger Scruton. Such a conservative worldview made much more intuitive sense when it came to my greater reliance on others and the delusion of liberal independence. The insight dawned that my own existence was simply a heightened and concentrated form of the human condition. 

As Scruton writes, we “enter a world marked by the joys and sufferings of those who are making room for us”. We are not self-creating selves. We are born into a web of relationships, in which we “enjoy protection in our early years and opportunities in our maturity,” and from which our sense of self is forged through our interconnection with our parents, wider family, community, and nation. Such an existence, and its intellectual expression through conservative philosophy, helps give some of the answers to the questions we all feel regarding “who are we, where are we, and what holds us together in a shared political order.”

The very idea of a conservative philosophy and politics sets the fact of our mortality at its heart. Yoram Hazony defines conservatism as “a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” The conservative is “a traditionalist, a person who works to recover, restore, and build up the traditions of his forefathers and to pass them on to future generations.” In Britain, conservatism “has placed an especial emphasis on national independence and on the loyalties that bind the nation’s constitutive factions to one another.”

As this makes clear, if you are conserving a way of life and the people that live it, their traditions, customs, and folkways, this means you are passing it down across the generations, across the barrier between life and death. This is why Edmund Burke wrote that society is “indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement … to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence [for] it is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” 

J.G. Fichte echoed Burke when he wrote that “The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is thus founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed, and on the characteristic of that people … This characteristic is the eternal thing to which he entrusts the eternity of himself and of his continuing influence, the eternal order of things in which he places his portion of eternity.”

From a Biblical perspective this quasi-idolatrous love for one’s nation sits uncomfortably. Love is at the heart of Christ’s message, and love for one’s people and nation is an inherent good. Those like Fichte had a point, with the proviso that any love for the things of this world must be a rightly ordered love. John Paul II wrote in his reflections Memory and Identity that “the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. Therefore, in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else.” He went further, writing that the Fourth Commandment “obliges us to honour our father and mother.… The spiritual patrimony which we acquire from our native land comes to us through our mother and father, and provides the basis for our corresponding duty. Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features.” 

Moreover, “The Latin word patria, or fatherland, is associated with the idea and the reality of “Father” (pater). The native land (or fatherland) can in some ways be identified with patrimony—that is, the totality of gifts bequeathed to us as by our forefathers.… Our native land is thus our heritage, and it is also the whole patrimony derived from that heritage. It refers to the land, the territory; but more importantly the concept of patria includes the values and the spiritual content that make up the culture of a given nation.” The threads of our lives are bound into the weave of time that stretches across the generations, our home in this world an icon that points to our true homeland as Christians the life of the world to come, for as Augustine proclaimed, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

Even so, we must still make a home in this world. Scruton writes in The Meaning of Conservatism that “conservatism arises directly from the sense that one belongs to some continuing, and pre-existing social order, and that this fact is all-important in determining what to do.” This sense of continuity with that which came before means that “the important thing is that the life of a social arrangement may become mingled with the lives of its members. They may feel in themselves the persistence of the will that surrounds them. The conservative instinct is founded in that feeling: it is the enactment of historical vitality, the individual’s sense of his society’s will to live.” 

This describes the intuition I had regarding my place in place and time. The description of a conservative view of life combined with learning the history of the place and people I came from, has made me feel part of a greater whole stretching across time. But this is not the case for many today, who exist in a state of seeking something they cannot name and do not know, but for which they long: home. We live in what American sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff called an anticulture of dispossession and displacement. We are left cut-off from any sense of a worthy inheritance and blind to our duty to leave a worthy legacy. How can one come to any acceptance of one’s mortality when we live in an eternal present, with no past or future?

The origin of the word religion is therefore illuminating: the Latin religare means “to bind”. Religion’s sociological result is that it binds its members into a community of the sacred. But as David P. Goldman writes, “at the heart of religion is the encounter with mortality. Secular political science reduces religion to a belief-structure. But to people of faith, religion is not an ideology, but a life-or-death commitment. The believer stakes his or her life on the hope of conquering death.” Members of a congregation are united as individuals into a greater whole, their individuality elevated by this unification in worship before God. This sense of the sacred is what gives Burke’s contract of the dead, living, and unborn its life force. 

Culture is a collective participation undergirded by the sense that our lives are given meaning in the present through the continuation of our patrimony, conserved and revitalised in the present and given on to the future. As Goldman puts it, “to speak of a ‘search for meaning’ is pointless unless that ‘meaning’ endures beyond our lifetime.” Any such culture is given life when it is undergirded by a shared sense of the sacred, and a belief in the transcendence of the meaning of our individual lives past our physical death as part of the collective tapestry of time. The sheer terror that can come with confrontation with the total nature of death is alleviated by this sense of spiritual survival and final redemption. 

Yet the death of Christian belief in Britain and across Europe, what Benedict XVI called a “desert of godlessness”, has snapped the threads of this tapestry of time. From the death of God comes the death of culture, out of which we raise what Phillip Rieff called “deathworks” of anticulture. Look no further than the recent opening ceremony to the Paris Olympics. Our civilisation no longer has an answer to the question of what our individual existence actually means: what are we doing here, and what is our life for? We used to look to the lessons of the past to provide some answers. 

But we can no longer do this under our New Moral Order, because as Joshua Mitchell argues, our society still yearns for a Christian-inflected vision of moral order as well as a division between the communities of the sacred and profane. The result is  a moral economy that “measures transgression and innocence” where “no balance of payment between them is possible,” but “all accounts must be settled.” Identity politics “is not about who we are as individuals; it is about the stain and purity associated with who we are as members of a group.” 

Mercy, forgiveness and redemption are nowhere to be seen for transgressors in the present. But special ire is reserved for the transgressions of the past, for “tradition is not an inheritance through which civilization is sustained; it is the tainted resume of transgressions perpetrated.” As a result, the past that we might look to for guidance is simply evidence of our ancestors’ writing history in the blood of innocents. Our inheritance is indelibly stained by ancestral sin and thereby worthy only of repudiation for its deformation of the present through its oppression of the marginalised. Identity politics is another morbid symptom: instead of worshipping the divine that elevates the individual and the collective, we worship our mortal selves and our politicised victimhood instead. For Goldman, “when we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed.” 

Such demoralisation is bad enough on an individual level, seen in the rising despair and anomie, of which “deaths of despair” are the bleakest example. It is one thing when an individual no longer has an answer to the questions of identity and purpose answered by his place in his culture. But these instances of individual loss scale up, over time, to encompass a collective tragedy. Here we come to the question of the continuation or death of peoples, the passing into the twilight and night of history of entire cultures and civilisations. Among other things, the crashed birthrates of the developed world are driven by a collective loss of any connection to the sacred, and the cultures that are given life by this connection. 

The morbid symptoms of a society where the conservative view of mortality has died are the signs of a dying people

The fertility shredder of modernity and liberalism mean that many peoples now face what the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig foresaw at the close of the carnage of WWI: “Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.” 

The morbid symptoms of a society where the conservative view of mortality has died are the signs of a dying people. As such, a politics of conservation is no longer equal to the task, as for us “there is only the fight to recover what has been lost/And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions/That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss/For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” 

Giving up in the face of our present circumstance is to despair, and despair is a sin. We are here because our ancestors had faith in the divine and in the culture that grew out of it. We need a politics and culture of cultural and national restoration, that individually and collectively chooses life.