Let’s look back in history and see why empires, such as the British Empire and the Soviet Union, or one of the greatest figures of antiquity, Alexander the Great, failed in Afghanistan.

Scruton traced back our classical understanding of beauty to the Enlightenment period, and argued that in our increasingly secular world beauty is a path back to the transcendent.

Boomers are commonly seen by more recent generations in a colder world as having lived lives of
perpetual indulgence—pampered as children by fond parents home from the war, indulged as rebellious students by liberal professors who praised them as ‘the most idealistic generation in history’, enabled to live a hippie lifestyle as employees, thanks to a tight US labour market in a world hungry for US goods.

Unlike the loud and bloody scandal of twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies, today the respect for tradition, continuity, and constancy is vanishing silently, while often attacked and put into the same box with dangerous, truly radical ideas.

In Afghanistan, people do not think in a frame of a state or a state army but family, tribe, ethnic group—genus—and then in the geographical area where they live.

Who was Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and what makes him so significant? Let us answer that question by noting three of Böckenförde’s own texts included in this volume.

‘Those who meet PM Orbán can only be radical and far-right, populist and alt-right actors according to the left.’

‘I’ve often said that if Donald Trump had had even half the intelligence and the focus of Viktor Orbán, America would be a very different place.’

Thousands of years of socio-cultural evolution has made us instinctively inhabit religious thinking patterns, and where actual church dogmas fail to be appealing enough, people start to look elsewhere.

Today’s “objective truth” is not what the majority of the scientific community accepts as such; rather it is what most people share on social media.

Nostalgia, so characteristic of conservatives, can
be understood not in
time but in space instead.
This nostalgia originates from Odysseus’s desire
to return home (νόστος) and means the suffering
of man away from his home that motivates his return.

Illiberal democracy
is a set-up, such as Hungary, in which democracy prevails, but without the stultifying carapace of liberal (or “liberal”) pieties and prejudices.

Modern societies that work well are conservative in that they have a strong sense of homeostasis. This is the sense of continually returning to a point of equilibrium. Upsets, changes, drives, and tensions occur along the way.

Those old days are gone: nowadays doctors and therapists, with a few exceptions, do not dare to contradict claims of transgenderism.

The film’s (The English Patient) main protagonist is the Hungarian desert explorer László Almásy. Who was this mysterious person looking for happiness so far from home, in the barren, sandy world of the Libyan Desert?

There is a drastic increase in the number of children confused by their gender identity in countries where propaganda to young people is widespread.

One of Scruton’s latest works entitled Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition was published in 2017 by All Points Book Publishers. Scruton embarks on a historical introduction of conservatism in six chapters, from its prehistory to the present day.

Today we witness a clash between two distinct views of liberty and sovereignty.

The imperative of transparency also implies a proliferation of information which, quite deliberately, does not establish the truth, but only serves to make the world more opaque.

This is Budapest: a big city that dreamed and then built for itself a colourful past during the last decades of the old world, in those final moments before the dawn of modernism.

As Live Not by Lies makes clear, we are facing the zealots of a new sect with its own dogmas, clergy, and easily uttered anathemas.

The revival and reinstatement of tradition, its restoration if you like, is by no means self-contradictory, and constancy is a more important element of tradition than change.