Daily Inspiration Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Conservatism, in Cohen's framing, is less a coherent ideology than a defensive reflex: the instinct to treat inherited beliefs as load-bearing walls. The line is engineered to expose a particular kind of fear logic. It doesn't argue that tradition is wrong; it argues that the conservative imagination often assumes tradition is fragile, that scrutiny itself is corrosive. Question one beam, and the whole moral house collapses.

That "once we begin" is the tell. Cohen is describing a slippery-slope narrative conservatives tell themselves to justify intellectual quarantine. Doubt is cast as a contaminant rather than a tool. The subtext is epistemological: people confuse the origin of values (their historical inheritance) with their justification (their ability to survive inquiry). Cohen, a philosopher steeped in pragmatism and scientific rationalism, is warning that a belief system that cannot tolerate examination is already hollow, propped up by intimidation rather than reasons.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Cohen watched modernity reorganize life at speed: mass immigration, industrial capitalism, World War I's moral wreckage, the rise of totalizing ideologies. In that atmosphere, "established" could mean anything from religious doctrine to social hierarchy to national myth. His point lands as a critique of the anxiety that fuels reactionary politics: the idea that stability requires silence. It's a sharp reversal of conservative self-image. Instead of guardians of value, conservatives become guardians of unasked questions, mistaking the preservation of inherited beliefs for the preservation of life itself.