Who I Am
The identity of the author being a closely guarded secret, a pseudonym will have to satisfy your curiosity. For our present purposes, the byline shall read Stewart Westry. Whether this nom de plume contains clues as to my true identity is left up to you, dear reader. If your real name is Stewart Westry, I can only apologise for the disservice I have done you.
What I Believe
Like Russell Kirk before me, my mind is a gothic mind; “variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful” are my watchwords. Sceptical of cold reason, convinced the ‘Enlightenment’ brought us to a benighted age, I cling to the old ways of prescription, prejudice, and ancestral wisdom. Like T.S. Eliot, I am a (Roman) Catholick in religion (albeit with Anglican sensibilities), a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics. With the late great Sir Roger Scruton, I affirm that our inheritance is more easily destroyed than created, nor is it our property to do with what we like. As a monarchist, I abhor the tyranny of the living, preferring to consult the deathless dead whose collective wisdom can never be surpassed by any individual. I seek their counsel in myth, tradition, art, word, and deed. This, Chesterton calls ‘democracy,’ by which he means a deep reverence for the things common to all men; in other words, a preference for the ‘folkish,’ the normal, the universal over and against top-down dictation, especially as manifested in the particularities of local and regional differences. Naturally, I prefer the Anglo-Saxon to the Norman, though I harbour a deep reverence for the true spirit of aristocracy. Ill-fated, quixotic, romantic struggles capture my sympathies, whether in Harold Godwinson at Hastings or Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden.
With Plato, I believe the Will is the captain of the ship, and with Aristotle I declare that the polis is prior to the individual and is the arena of virtue and eudaimonia. With De Maistre, I aver that society must rest upon foundations so inscrutable to reason, so impenetrable to analysis, that the very act of inquiry is rendered futile. For, when anything goes from being accepted as prior to reason, to being defended, however vigorously, by rational arguments, then it is only one step away from being censored irrationally. I see Truth and Goodness as inextricably bound up with Beauty, and aesthetical sensibility must be at the fore of architecture, art, and politics as a whole. Like Nicolás Gómez Dávila, I avoid the term ‘conservative,’ preferring instead ‘reactionary,’ for conservatism is simply last generation’s liberalism, and makes increasingly little sense in a time and place where there is increasingly little to conserve. In short, I am a High Tory of the old style — indeed, a Young Englander — with strongly localist, mildly anarchic, and stridently distributist impulses, and a deep debt to G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Œconomically, I am a Distributist in the Chester-Bellocian school, and a Solidarist after the manner of Pesch. As Chesterton rightly said, the problem with Capitalism is that it produces too few capitalists! And the solution to this problem is not, pace Communism, the abolition of private property, but rather the restoration of private property to as many families as possible.
I close with Burke, whose romantic, tragic assessment of modernity I wholeheartedly share, and which can hardly be surpassed by words my own:
“But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”
A Counterblaste 