A Snowglobey Kind of Comment

Some dude who calls himself "An Cruinneog Sneachta" (which translates as "The Snow Globe", if I'm not wrong) left an interesting comment on this article "The Cause of Ireland is the Cause Against Labour", from the e-journal Meon.

I don't regularly read Meon. Someone sent me the link.

I think An Cruinneog Sneachta makes a good point. He also has a pretty cool name. I presume it's same guy (or gal?) who wrote this article, and this one.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Once again, I'm going to post Eamon De Valera's famous St. Patrick's Day speech of 1943. It has rather outlived its critics at this stage, since even liberals have got tired of bashing it. But it's certainly a counter-cultural vision for all that.

The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.

The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.

With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland – happy, vigorous, spiritual – that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.

Here's a good article by Conor Fitzgerald on the subject. (The previous sentence is a link, though it doesn't look like it on my screen.)

What's generally forgotten is that the speech was mostly about the Irish language; the famous part of it is just the beginning.

Happy St. Patrick's Day for all my readers. I spend a lot of time wondering why we have festivals. Almost everybody seems drawn to celebrate them, and they're inherently social; you need other people for them. Not just your family and friends, but strangers.

Some reasons I think we have festivals:

1) For fun and merry-making.

2) To emphasise community bonds, the existence of a community.

3) For continuity through time.

4) As landmarks in quotidian time; "I saw him last a little before St. Patrick's Day", etc.

5) For religious reasons, of course; to have sacred times and places.

Any other suggestions?

Some Thoughts on the End of History

I'm currently reading The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's one of those books that are frequently cited but (I imagine) much less frequently read. Certainly I've known about it for decades, and I've often name-dropped it. But I'd never actually picked it up and looked inside, until now.

The book became a standard reference because it captured a particular mood in a particular moment; that is, the end of the Cold War and the feeling that this was it, that history had more or less reached its natural stopping point. Of course, life would go on, and things would still happen, but the defeat of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy was the end of serious competition between ideologies. Capitalism and liberal democracy would eventually triumph all over the world, even if it took a long time.

As with most famous books that come to stand for a particular argument, The End of History has been rather unfairly treated. It's not at all a triumphalist book. Fukuyama is very well aware of the drawbacks of liberal democracy and modern capitalism. Nor is it as strident or definitive as it's been portrayed. The author is quite tentative in his predictions. At least, that's my impression so far.

But I can understand why Fukuyama became a name to bandy about. Although I can just about remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was very conscious of "an "end of history" atmosphere when I was growing up. I didn't particularly think of it in terms of the end of the Cold War, but it was still an atmosphere I absorbed through my pores. It was best conveyed by a top ten hit in 1990 that I can remember very vividly, and whose lyrics seemed entirely accurate to me. The song was "Nothing Ever Happens" by Del Amitri, and its lyrics began thus:

Post office clerks put up signs saying "Position Closed"
And secretaries turn off typewriters and put on their coats
And janitors padlock the gates for security guards to patrol
And bachelors phone up their friends for a drink while the married ones turn on a chat show
And they'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

"Gentlemen time please, you know we can't serve anymore".
Now the traffic lights change to stop, when there's nothing to go.
And by five o'clock everything's dead and every third car is a cab
And ignorant people sleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab.

This is exactly what the eighties in Ireland felt like to me. (Yes, the song was released in 1990-- in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union-- but I remembered it as an eighties song.) 

But what, in my young mind, was I comparing modern banality against? A few different things, I think. 

The Lord of the Rings was one of them. Tolkien captivated me with a vision of high romance, a pre-industrial idyll. I read the book at a very young age, and although I didn't quite understand everything that was happening in it, I certainly absorbed the atmosphere, the aesthetic.

Probably more importantly, I contrasted modern banality against the legacy of Irish cultural nationalism, which I imbibed through my family, my Irish language school, and various other sources. This offered me a whole different set of atmospheres and associations: the timeless world of mythology, thatched-roof cottages and rocky Western islands, country fairs and wandering bards and rollicking ceilidhs, and all that sort of thing. Very far from the society conjured by Del Amitri.

And this sense of banality wasn't confined to the eighties. All through my childhood, teens, and adulthood I was dogged by this sense of aftermath, or perhaps of anti-climax. In one poem, I complained that: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." (The sense that cultural history has come to a standstill is now very common. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and plenty of other sources that you can discover with a quick internet search.)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fukuyama's End of History wasn't just the victory of liberal democracy (which doesn't seem like a bad thing in itself). It was, rather, the victory of worldwide consumerism. And what's worse, consumerism itself seems to have stagnated at a certain point, regurgitating the styles and pop culture of the past.

Interestingly, Fukuyama doesn't think that consumerism (or a desire for a Western standard of living) is what drives the expansion of liberal democracy. A robust market economy, he argues, is perfectly compatible with authoritarian societies-- and this seems clear from the recent history of China.

No, Fukuyama argues that the rise of democracy relies on another motive, one which he draws from ancient Greek philosophy and calls "Thymos".

"Thymos" is often translated "spiritedness", and it encompasses various different emotions we can name in English: a sense of one's own dignity, or the dignity of one's own community; honour; a sense of outrage at injustices against oneself, one's community, or even other people; and so on. Thymos leads people to take risks and make sacrifices which would make no sense if we were entirely ruled by rational self-interest. "It is only thymotic man...who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers", says Fukuyama.

Fukuyama relates thymos to the desire for recognition-- the desire for recognition of oneself as a human being with rights and dignity, but also the desire for one's community to be recognized and respected.

And here I'll bring in a film that I watched recently-- I just finished watching it last night, actually.

The film is Hunger (2008). It's a dramatization of the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, a strike that led to the death of ten hunger strikers. As a caption at the end of the film informs us, there were considerably more prison officers murdered by the IRA in the same time period. (I should mention here that I have absolutely no sympathy for the IRA terrorist campaign. In fact, I regard it with utter revulsion. But Hunger strives to concentrate on the human element of the hunger strikes, and to avoid taking sides.)

Hunger is a gruelling film to watch. Not only are we shown the main character's physical deterioration as he starves himself to death, but the movie lingers on the grim details of the prisoners' lives: excrement-smeared walls (as they refused to "slop out"), cavity searches, beatings, and other horrific spectacles. (Incidentally, I can't imagine Patrick Pearse or Eamon De Valera smearing excrement on their cell walls under any kind of provocation.)

The 1981 hunger strikes were a classic case of what Fukuyama calls thymos, and indeed a classic case of the struggle for recognition. The hunger strikers were seeking recognition as political prisoners, while the British insisted on treating them as ordinary criminals. This struggled centred on apparently trivial matters such as the right to wear civilian clothes (rather than prison clothes) and the right not to do prison work.

And this, to me, illustrates very well the futility and pointlessness of the Northern Irish "Troubles", and indeed the futility and pointlessness of identity politics in the West today.

At their heart, the Northern Irish Troubles seemed like a conflict between two tribes who were barely distinguishable, and who were becoming more like each other all the time. They looked the same, spoke the same, and (for the most part) had the same way of life.

Hunger tends to emphasize this sameness, especially since it mostly minimizes dialogue and concentrates on the nitty-gritty of bodies, spaces, and procedures. 

Catholicism is shown as a negligible factor in the life of the prisoners. One scene shows the celebration of Mass in the prison, but only one prisoner pays any attention to the priest-- the others are loudly chatting and fraternizing. 

The dramatic centre of the entire film is an extended debate between the protagonist and a visiting priest on the ethics of the hunger strike. But the debate is conducted in entirely secular terms, and any reference to religion are more or less ironic. As for the Irish language, we hear one prisoner try to speak to another in Gaelic, but his cell-mate has no idea what he's talking about.

All of this very much fits with my own impression of Sinn Féin supporters and Northern Irish republicans, growing up. For all they invoked the 1916 Rising, they were a million miles from the Irish nationalism of Pearse and De Valera. They seemed determinedly anti-romantic and hard-headed. They wore jeans, cursed, told smutty jokes, immersed themselves in pop culture, and basically lived like any other member of Western consumer society. If they spoke some Gaelic or sang Irish folk ballads, it was only as a tribal badge. Cultural revival wasn't even an aspiration; "Brits Out" was the aspiration-- apparently an end in itself.

The same applied to Catholicism-- that, too, was a tribal badge, and almost certainly didn't extend to going to Mass or listening to the Church about divorce, abortion, or artificial contraception.

And that logic seems to have worked itself out fully today. Sinn Féin now support the European Union and globalization, are gung-ho for secularization, and have leaders who hardly even pretend to speak Irish anymore. 

These days, Northern Ireland has signage in Gaelic and Ulster Scots-- the product of long and bitter political battles-- while everybody carries on speaking in English. (Arlene Foster once claimed that more people speak Polish than Irish in Northern Ireland. I'm sure she was right. It's true of the Republic, as well.)

I think this is typical of identity politics everywhere. We have ever more demands for recognition from "communities" of every sort, while the great blender of consumer culture keeps crushing us all into one homogenous mush.

This is why I think nationalists (and groups of every sort) should stop fretting about recognition and representation, and start fretting about reality. Does it really matter if some Hollywood romantic comedy indulges in Paddywhackery or "stage Irishness"? Does it really matter if somebody calls Bono British? Does it, ultimately, really matter whether there is a United Ireland, if there's no real difference between Ireland and the rest of the world anyway?

I don't care about a nationalism focused on national prestige, or the respect of other people, or even independence as an end in itself. To me, nationalism is mostly about the preservation of distinctiveness. Why? Because it makes the world richer and more interesting. One's nation doesn't have to be any better than any other nation, from this point of view. In fact, it could be the crummiest nation in the world and it would still be worth preserving.

If thymos has a role in Ireland today, perhaps we should use it to resist a much more insidious foe than the Black and Tans or the B-Specials: consumer culture, globalization, and the loss of anything that made Ireland (or anywhere else) worth fighting for in the first place.

(I also believe that nationalism and liberal democracy are perfectly compatible, and I'm in favour of both. Here is an excellent critique of Fukuyama's rather sniffy attitude towards any nationalism other than the anoydne civic nationalism that progressives love to imagine but that barely seems to exist in the real world.)

Five Reasons I Hate Blog Posts That are Numbered Lists

1) They are blatant clickbait, which is lame and pathetic in itself.

2) Their pretensions to be definitive and authoritative are nearly always spurious.

3) Why five instead of four? Why ten instead of eleven? 

4) Most of the time they could just as well be written in the form of a non-list post.

5) I don't have a fifth reason.

Ash Wednesday is Serious Business

 

Willing the World

An Interesting Paragraph

"It was a melancholy time for my family, too, because my brother James was slowly dying from cancer and I remember, on referendum day, crying all the way in a bumpy bus from Galway to Clifden, in Connemara, thinking of his thin shoulders underneath his jacket as he turned to pour tea. He was an Irish Nationalist who did not care for either side in the abortion referendum. He disliked Holy Joes, or anyone he thought was parading virtue; he also disliked the secularising liberals and smart alecks who he thought were out to destroy Ireland's Gaelic and Catholic heritage. When I woke in Clifden the next morning and heard the result, I knew that James would be gratified; the referendum had been carried by two to one, though the turnout had not been spectacular. It would please James that the secularising liberals had been defeated and that Gaelic Catholic Ireland had spoken; and yet he would also be glad that it had not been too decisive a turnout and that the Holy Joes would have scent cause for triumphalism."

That's a paragraph from Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, a book I have read several time. This particular paragraph lodged in my memory, and provides a good entry-point to my theme in this blog post.

It seemed interesting to me that James (RIP) was about to depart from the world, and yet he cared about what kind of Ireland would exist after him. And not even a long view of what Ireland would be like, which somehow seems appropriate to the dying, but a strong preference for what would happen in the short term. He was pleased at the continuation of a very specific status quo.

We all seem to will certain things about the world. Obviously, we have self-interested desires. We want to be prosperous, free, healthy, and many other things. Most of us also have altruistic desires. We hear about people buried under rubble in the news and we want them to get out alive. We buy free range eggs because we don't want hens to suffer unnecessarily. And so on.

What interests me in this blog post is a third category of desires, desires which can't quite be categorised as either self-interested or altruistic. For instance, the desired outcome of Mary Kenny's brother for the referendum, as described above. If abortion was a straightforward moral issue to him, he would have presumably preferred a more emphatic pro-life victory. But he didn't. Even if he did in fact care about the substantive issue, he wanted Ireland to be a certain way; for it to preserve its Catholic Gaelic heritage, but not in such an emphatic way that the Holy Joes would be gloating.

Some Examples

I'm intrigued by this third category of desires, that are neither self-interested nor altruistic. I think we all have very many of them, and I've pondered a lot on their nature.

For instance: every now and again (often in UCD) I see people playing cards in public. This pleases me immensely. It's not that I want to join in. I have no intention of joining in. It's not that I'm altruistically pleased at the enjoyment of the card-players. They might enjoy watching bad television more. If their enjoyment was the point, there are probably thousands of activities that might give them more enjoyment. I'm pleased because I'm glad to see people still playing cards, even though there's nothing tremendously worthy or elevated about card-playing. (Why does it please me? Perhaps it's the aesthetic element of cards, perhaps it's nostalgia, perhaps it's that no electronics are involved, perhaps it's the sense of continuity with the past, perhaps all these things and more...)

Here's another example that just came to mind: trick or treaters. How disappointed would you be if there were no more trick-or-treaters, one Halloween? Even if you curse when the doorbell rings on Halloween night, even if you find the whole thing a nuisance, I think most people would feel some sense of loss if trick-or-treaters just weren't there either anymore, or if they dwindled away to nothing over five or ten years. The trick-or-treaters, in a way, are there as much for the sake of the people giving the sweets as they are for their own sake. Not that the trick-or-treaters themselves are taking this into consideration, but this is why the practice endures.

What kind of a world do you want? What kind of a society do you want? This question is thrown around rather nonchalantly, and responses tend to focus on ideals or principles: a world where everybody can develop their talents to the fullest, a world where nobody is discriminated against unjustly, and so on. I just googled the phrase and one of the first hits I got was: "I want a world where everything is welcome, everything is valid, everything is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted."

That's a noble vision (maybe), but I would suggest that the world that any of us really want is much more specific than this. It would be a long list of particulars which would be considerably bulkier than a telephone directory, most likely. And most of it would be things we haven't even thought about before, but-- if we did think about them-- we would agree they are part of the world as we would have it.

A Walk in the Park

These considerations bring me to this question: what do we will about the world? I could write this blog post without bringing up this phrase of "willing the world" (though I'd need a different title), and it might be easier, since I'm finding it hard to put it into words. But it's really the kernel of the matter, in my view.

I think we are all willing a particular version of the world all the time. The aggregation of all those ideals makes a composite, a collective ideal. This might not correspond to the actual concrete way things are, although surely it shapes it significantly. But it does become a reality of its own-- a sort of mental model of how the world should be, including contradictions and tensions.

But what do I mean by "willing"? Well, here's an example.

Imagine you are walking through a city park one weekday morning. You see an old man and his grandson (presumably) feeding the ducks. Seeing this pleases you. If you were to choose the world down to its smallest detail, you would make sure to find a place for people feeding ducks.

On one of the benches, a teenage Goth girl is reading some absurdly pretentious book, like Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. You think the whole Goth phenomenon is rather silly, but at the same time, you can't help feeling it adds something to the world. It seems fitting that a certain number of young people should become Goths. Besides, you're glad to see anybody reading a physical book and not just staring at their phone. And therefore, we can say that you will this young Goth's activity and current activity.

Then you look up, and you see a billboard just outside the park. It's for a washing powder. It's very gaudy and brash and vapid. The grinning faces on it are ludicrously happy about the whiteness of their whites. The triviality bothers you. You will it not to exist.

I could go on describing the various things in the park, but let's take a step back and look at the situation itself.

For instance, the weather. Let's say it's a bit colder than you would like and that it's beginning to drizzle a little. You wish the weather was a little nicer right now, but you don't will it. You don't will a world where the weather was always nice, because that seems to be a negation of the very concept of weather. (Although maybe some people would will this, or perhaps, just will that the country they live in would have a different climate to the one it does.)

But let's go even more basic. Let's look at the whole existence of public places. I think nearly everybody wills the existence of public places, common areas. I can find floods of articles online about this. So walking through the park you might be willing the existence of this park as a public space, if you come to think of it.

Going Deeper

Or you could go even more basic. Everybody is in the park because they want to be. "We live in a free society", as people like to say. (I love that phrase.) Everyone who is in the park might also, conceivably, be working as slave labour somewhere, or just imprisoned. Most of us will  be glad about this, presumably.

And you could get ever more basic, right down to the fabric of reality itself; time, space, embodiment, consciousness.

Ultimately we reach existence itself, the irreducible fact of existence.

How energetically do we will existence itself? I'm of the mind that we should all will it as energetically as G.K. Chesterton: "There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude."

Strangely enough, some people are enthusiastic (even passionate) about particular aspects of existence, but rather half-hearted or even averse to existence itself. This is baffling to me.

Willing and Social Philosophy

How does all this make a difference to anything? Well, first of all, I would say it makes a difference to one's own mental life. The more things in the world you can affirm, or will, the happier you're likely to be. (I'm not saying that people should will things just for the sake of being a Pollyanna. I'm just making the simple observation that if you are more at odds with your environment than otherwise, you're less likely to be happy. It might be the case that you should be at odds with your environment, nonetheless.)

I think it also makes a difference when it comes to social philosophy.

Since the Second World War, I'd imagine the most popular social philosophy has been "live and let live". There's a lot to be said for that philosophy, and it's especially attractive against a history of religious wars and totalitarian states.

But it's always seemed like a very cold philosophy to me, and I suspect it generates a great deal of alienation.

The philosophy of "you do you" has strengthened in Ireland with the ebbing of Catholicism and Irish nationalism. Today, most people would probably say that a person's choices are their own business, provided they don't hurt anybody else and that they are a good citizen.

And yet, personally, I prefer a world where everybody does have an opinion when it comes to everybody else's choices.

Take, for instance, the time between the foundation of the Irish Free State and the social revolution of the sixties and seventies.

What was expected of you? Well, I think it's fair to say that every baptized Catholic in Ireland was expected to go to Mass every Sunday, to pray, and to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. To do so was seen as admirable, and not to do so was seen as negligent.

It's easy (give our current dispositions) to see the downside of this. But isn't there any upside, too? What you did actually mattered, way beyond just being a good worker or a good citizen.

"I will not make windows into men's souls", said Queen Elizabeth I, when she wasn't persecuting Catholics. It's an admirable sentiment in many ways. But who wants to live in a windowless cell?

What I've already said about Catholicism also applies to Irish nationalism. Nationalism sees human being as an asset. They embody the life of the nation. Nationalist governments generally want to encourage baby-making.

When Irish nationalism was the governing social philosophy of Ireland, Irish people were called upon to learn the Irish language, to revive traditional Irish music and sports, to give their children Irish names, to holiday in Connemara, and so forth. Obviously, this wasn't a perpetual campaign being dinned into everybody's ears all the time, but it was always there in the background.

I sense this atmosphere most of all in evocations of the West of Ireland at this time. A painting or a photograph of the Aran Islands or the Burren wasn't just a picturesque image. It was an ideal, a symbol. The geography itself was willed.

Today, learning and using the Irish language is still seen as a good thing, but it's no longer seen as a duty. The same applies to all the other manifestation of Irish nationalism I mentioned.

But, but, but...

I can imagine someone arguing: "But this is all fine as long as you approve of the governing philosophy, as you approve of Catholicism and nationalism. But what if it's a social philosophy of which you disapprove? What if it's leftism and political correctness?

Even in that case, and without ever wanting to celebrate evil, my own preference is for a society that wants something from-- besides my taxes and my vote and my obedience.

This is what I wrote in a blog post from 2017: "I must acknowledge that I also like the whole idea of a paternalistic society. Despite having some libertarian leanings when it comes to free speech and other issues, I'm not at all in sympathy with the libertarian temperament, still less the anarchist temperament. I want society to have hierarchy, expectations, obligations, privileges, roles-- I don't want the shared life of society to consist simply of housekeeping. I want it to be much more than that. I want it to be more like the life of a family."

I push back against political correctness with all my strength, but I'd rather have something to push against than just nothing, a void.

I was very taken with a particular moment in the excellent German film The Lives of Others, when a dissident writer finds himself talking to an ex-Stasi officer after the fall of communism. The ex-Stasi officer says: "But what's this I hear? You've not written since the Wall fell? That's not good. After all our country invested in you. Although I understand you, Dreyman. What is there to write about in this new Germany? Nothing to believe in, nothing to rebel against...
Life was good in our little Republic. Many people only realize that now."

The Stasi officer is not a good guy in the film, but he has a point. Indeed, search for "end of history malaise" on the internet and you'll get quite a lot of hits. We'd won the Cold War, but what now?

An Image to Finish With

This has been such an unusual blog post, I'm not sure how to end it, just as I'm not sure if the reader has any idea what I'm talking about-- or even if I'm making any sense. (The Irish playwright Hugh Leonard recorded this saying of his father's: "What are you talking about, or do you know what you're talking about?")

But here's an image from my own life experience to finish up on.

It's of Ballymun Shopping Centre (since demolished), back in the early nineties. It was sometime near Halloween. There was a nip in the air and a gloom in the early evening, both of which I tend to find galvanising. I think I was about fourteen or fifteen.

I was looking in the window of Miss Mary's, one of the centre's newsagents. I was specifically looking at the boxes of AirFix model airplanes, a hobby I had recently developed (and which was very much a passing thing). I was also enjoying the Halloween display in the shop window.

Although I'm not musical, the best comparison for what I felt at that moment (or, more likely, when I remembered the moment) is a musical chord. Everything harmonised; the shop window, the time of year, the atmosphere of Halloween, my own presence. For perhaps the first time, I didn't feel at odds with my environment. My imagination, somehow, had absorbed it all and invested it with meaning. I willed it.

Who's for Western Values?

This commencement address by Konstantin Kisin came up on my YouTube feed. It's very funny and he makes a lot of good points, but once again I find myself lacking sympathy with the idea of "Western values".

Of course, the Western values that are defended, whenever anyone sets out to defend them, are generally things such as democracy, free speech, the rule of law, meritocracy, and individualism.

And I'm all in favour of those things (albeit some more than others). I have defended democracy time and time again, in the many online debates that arise between conservatives. I'm almost an absolutist when it comes to free speech (although not quite, because I do think it's legitimate to censor obscenity, extreme violence, and some other bad stuff in entertainment).

When it comes to meritocracy and individualism, I'm in favour of both but with much bigger reservations, especially as regards individualism-- which I won't go into here.

My problem with the idea of "Western values" can be summed up in two points:

1) As well as all the good stuff above, Western values surely include many things that are nowhere near as admirable; political correctness itself, consumerism, bureaucracy, desacralization,  hedonism, standardization, atomic individualism....you get the picture.

2) More importantly, I think conservatives should be more concerned with preserving cultures rather than values.

Values are abstractions. We need them, but the human spirit can't live on them. I would argue that the instinct gripping conservatives today (and not just conservatives) is that it's particular things that need to be preserved.

The conservative movement in America has realized that America is not an idea, as the neoconservatives assumed it to be. And the same applies elsewhere. Ideas are important to the life of a nation, but the nation can't be reduced to an abstraction.

What distinguishes a nation is not ideology but culture; language, festivals, food and drink, social customs, music, traditions, sports, dance, etc.

You could preserve your values while losing your culture. For instance, America could preserve its love of freedom while giving up baseball and basketball for soccer and cricket, fully adopting the metric system, becoming as secularized as Europe, having its last rodeo, and becoming drained of everything that makes it culturally American.

In our time, I believe that cultural distinctiveness is in much greater danger than any supposed Western value system.

I care about red lemonade and Jacob's Mikado biscuits more than I care for anything that could be labelled "Irish values". Even though I haven't consumed either of them in years.

"All cultures are not equal" is a bullish slogan that has been adopted by many on the right. It's always uttered as though it's a heresy, but I can't remember ever hearing anyone claiming the opposite. If you google the words "all cultures are equal", you'll get a lot of hits, but it's nearly always in the context of somebody pugnaciously denying it.

I don't think all cultures are equal (whatever that means), but I do think all cultures are precious and equally valid. At least in the sense I'm using "culture" here-- to mean cultural practices like language, music, sports, etc.

If we found a hitherto-uncontacted island where human sacrifice and cannibalism were being practiced, we would certainly want to bring these practices to an end. Does that mean we should want to suppress the language, dress, art, and dance of this people? Surely not.

To sum up...I think Western values are a mixed bag, and I don't think they should be the totem of conservatism. I think we should focus on defending national cultures instead. (As well as defending those rights which are a part of the universal natural law, like the right to life.)