Written by Bo Winegard.
Those who delight in epigrams might justly claim that conservatism is a response to one basic metaphysical problem: impermanence. Despite the caricature, conservatism does not deny change. Quite the contrary. It begins with the tragic inevitability of change. The question conservatism asks is not whether we can stop time, but whether we can preserve order. For order is not stasis; it is pattern. A melody remains ordered as it unfolds through time because its pattern endures.
Few cultural forms illustrate this more clearly than myth. Myths change from age to age, teller to teller, culture to culture, and audience to audience. Even identical performances of the same myth change in different contexts. Under foreign occupation, Sophocles’ Antigone might be about heroic resistance. In a philosophy classroom, it might be about irreconcilable goods.
Because conservatism values order, it also values tradition as a great gift to be revered and protected. Not just from radicals, but also from the young, who have yet to appreciate how precious is their cultural inheritance.
But the reverence of tradition is not without danger. It sometimes mutates from healthy veneration to unhealthy obsequiousness. The desire to preserve becomes the desire to fossilize. Tradition ceases to be a living order and becomes a museum display. One talks in whispers, fantasizing about a time when it actually mattered to people. The irony of course is that the stubborn attempt to conserve an immutable tradition ultimately kills it.
The tolerance of ordered change and experimentation in storytelling is not a modern phenomenon. The ancient Greeks, who gave us many of our greatest myths, understood that stories survive and change through continual retelling. They did not have a sacred canon; they did not have mythological correctness.1
Their greatest poets—Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides—all took material from a common reservoir but often changed it significantly.2 The Helen of Homer is not the Helen of Euripides. The Odysseus of Homer is not the Odysseus of Sophocles. In Euripides’ play, the real Helen was not abducted by Paris, but was taken to Egypt. Paris, instead, took a phantom.3