‘Prohászka have perceived that the blaring confidence of progressivist thought reflected only its inner emptiness, its blindness, its superficiality, its logical and philosophical inconsistency. What follows from these “new principles” is, above all, a tragedy of human existence, more serious than ever before. It is the denial of the immortality (or the possibility of immortality) of the soul.’
‘As Márton Molnár puts it, “Prohászka’s work covers three major—closely related—themes: educational science and the history of education…the theoretical issues of the philosophy of culture; and the problems of the modern cultural crisis.” In this paper, we focus on this last area: the modern cultural crisis.’
‘Strauss points away from the modern project of progressive enlightenment and toward an individual ascent out of modernity. Neither of the two premodern ways of life, biblical or philosophic, partakes of the modern hope in social progress, nor in the late modern historicism that would confine all thought to its time and place and obscure eternity. The fruitful antagonism of the two pre-modern ways of life stands in sharp contrast to the failed modern synthesis.’
‘Without culture, Eliot argues, there is no point at all in being human, and it is culture that justifies the content of our existence on Earth for the generations that follow us. “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living. And it is what justifies other peoples and other generations in saying…that it was worth while for that civilisation to have existed.”’
‘Whether through Scripture, the teachings of the Church, or life experience, Christians learn that no relationship or physical place makes them truly at home. For Christians, it has always been challenging to find the right balance between our hope in Jesus Christ and His coming kingdom and our vocations as citizens, spouses…In their articles in The European Conservative, Audrey Unverferth and Rod Dreher highlight important points about family, community and home.’
‘According to the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the year of the snake, which symbolizes change and transformation. It thus may not be a coincidence that Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise to bring about drastic changes in Washington, commenced his second term as President of the United States in this epochal year.’
‘By rediscovering fundamental needs and values, we will eventually rediscover the need and motivation for having more children. This is a collective project that involves, first of all, ordinary people, philosophers, the church, artists, psychologists, and the government.’
‘People generally agree that no human society is “without culture”. The concept has been defined in many different ways. The first appearance of the term culture is attributed to Cicero, who used the word in the sense of “cultivation of the soul”…only at the beginning of the 19th century did it acquire the meaning that can be described as “learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilization”.’
‘Here the problem of postmodern thinking returns. If there is no truth, since everything is relative and free (but if there is an absolute truth, Derrida calls it totalitarianism), then in the marketplace of ideas, truth—since it does not exist—cannot stand out. If there is no truth, thus no lie, and no set of values, then anything can be disseminated in the public discourse of democratic countries, because there is freedom of speech.’
‘Politically, however, it is not impossible for a state to decide that it would be better, both for children and for the country, to give schools freedom to develop educational approaches that follow liberal education principles, whether within the state system or outside it, especially if evidence can be gathered to show the beneficial effects it is having.’
‘Whereas in pre-modern Western culture pride and self-respect were derived from involvement in family, community, work and religion, individuals are nowadays left with nothing but their individualism and inner experiences…When this is insufficient, many people attempt to find their salvation…in materialism and consumption, which have become the primary culturally accepted forms of meaning.’
‘Christianity from its beginnings has presented something new with regard to political life: a certain indifference, if I may put it that way, to the political regime. That is, it enjoins rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, and hence obeying one’s rulers so long as they do not demand sin, especially idolatry. These injunctions are founded on the faith that the City of God rather than the City of Man is man’s ultimate destiny.’
‘Despite the different—and certainly debatable—approaches and priorities in specific policy areas, the fundamental objectives of conservative parties largely align. Public discourse and media representation in the West sometimes portray the self-determined policymaking of conservative governments in a polarized manner, focusing more on potentially divisive issues than on constructive dialogue.’
‘It is the metaphysical distinction between act and potency that brings depth to being, since it reveals to us that being is not just a fact that is or is not in a shallow binary fashion, but is something that hides in itself a treasure, potency namely, that can be increasingly brought to light through a process of actualization.’
‘As the assisted dying question turns once again into a contestation of intolerable pains and grotesque moral outrages, we should take a moment to think of a bigger picture. To recall that it is a man-made instrument. It is not designed to bring us harmony, closure, peace on earth, or salvation.’
‘As Christmas approaches, even the most steadfast conservative is faced with a profound seasonal dilemma: should one opt for an artificial tree or remain loyal to the natural variety? The question is more than a practical matter—it is imbued with philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural significance.’
‘With the Second Vatican Council a new kind of theology—the so called nouvelle théologie —stepped inside the Church and started to play a decisive role in it. Its main authors like Marie-Dominique Chenu and Henri De Lubac emphasized that the Aristotelian concept of nature was somehow alien to Christianity and that a more existential, a more historical approach to man (and to Revelation as well) would be more appropriate.’
‘A simple example of restraining evil, which works quite well, are the referees who manage athletic contests. They simply enforce the rules so that order is maintained. They do not help either team win, they do not help the injured, they are not partial, and they do not furnish refreshments. Even so, they are critical to the players, the fans, the coaches, the media, and everyone involved.’
‘Freedom, understood concretely, is a civilizational, not a natural, construct. This essentially conservative argument could provide the very basis for the continuation of a certain political tradition without which we, modern souls, would live in a much more cruel and inhumane world.’
‘Ortega’s image of what members of his ideal elite should be like derives from his wider philosophy. His spells at German universities made him initially a fervent neo-Kantian who, seeing the world through the lens of transcendental idealism, believed in the objective reality of the Platonic triad of truth, goodness, and beauty, and that this should form the basis of one’s life and education…’
‘The Third Budapest School strives to debate the one-sided, analytical, progressive, nihilistic aspirations that dominate American intellectual life, and to cultivate initiatives based on classical European philosophy. It does this by stimulating the formulation of important questions: in contrast to the activist Leninist “What is to be done?”, the Third Budapest School holds that the preeminent question is: “What is to be asked?” This means that the most important measure of all intellectual activity is reality. ’
‘There is one sense in which Aquinas certainly did not believe in worlds. This is the sense in which certain Greek philosophers held that there is an infinity of worlds…Aquinas asserts what he calls the “unity of the world”. He claims, too, that the very concept of world denotes a “unity of order”.’
Policies such as pro-family tax cuts, housing programmes, child benefits etc., all resulting in a kind of family income system that aims to reduce the harm inflicted on families by a Ricardian conception of the economy (which, obviously, cannot be completely overthrown, since we cannot go back to the lifestyle of preindustrial societies), should become a vital part of conservative policies, and should be seen as such in the modern conservative movement, as Allan Carlson pointed out in his Third ways.
‘On our part, we doubt that “history of ideas” as a methodologically coherent discipline existed in Hungary between the two world wars…Nevertheless, their work is undoubtedly a prime example of an attempt at the creation of a conservative-oriented social science. The history of ideas is, in fact, a philosophy of history that takes into account factors that transcend matter, and through a specific research methodology is able to grasp and evaluate the processes that take place “behind” the surface of purely material social phenomena.’
‘Linguistic–ethnic nationalism is the quintessential negative (in Joó’s parlance, “imperialist”) nationalism, a nationalism insensitive to qualitative differences or to more elevated spiritual concepts of the state, such as the unifying “Hungarus consciousness” of the nomadic empire’s supranationalism, which derives from the dynasty’s divinely-derived spiritual unifying power.’
‘The most important distinguishing feature of the Hungarian national ethos and Hungarian nationalism, according to Joó, is that the Hungarian nation’s leitmotif of Steppe origin survived the foundation of the Christian state, and even survived the Middle Ages, synthesizing it with Christianity. In Western Europe, however, a very different kind of nation-building took place. Charlemagne’s brief attempt at empire-building, i.e. his efforts to renew the Roman Empire on a Christian–Germanic basis, essentially quickly failed.’
Dr Jordan B Peterson has recently had a public discussion with evolutionary biologist Dr Richard Dawkins, one of the most prominent figures of the popular atheist movement of the early 2000s. The two philosophers touched on subjects such as Jesus Christ’s birth of a virgin mother and his resurrection, the philosophical foundation for the modern scientific enterprise, and many more intriguing questions.
‘As a committed Protestant, Joó emphasized the primacy of “spirit” over matter in almost all his writings, but he failed to take into account that religion and “spirit” do not always overlap, and religiosity itself simply becomes ineffective if so-called religious people view the world on the same premises as their atheistic and materialistic counterparts.’
‘As modern consumer society has made consumption the root of identity, man has become a prisoner of the constant renewal of consumer demands…Contrary to early capitalist societies, people have completely reduced themselves to the self-as-consumer. The short excitement that accompanies consumption is all that modern man has left.’
‘Coming up with an authoritative definition of conservatism is not an end in itself so much as a sort of ritualistic pursuit, which we perform expecting some change from it along the lines of a deeper understanding of our past, our present, and the mysteries of the human species and the world. There are any number of ways in which the history of conservative thought could be written, if only as a story of the attempts at grasping the very notion of conservatism.’