"Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving"
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Davies lands the knife with that one-word tell: "secondhand". He is not attacking conservatism as a philosophy so much as conservatism as mimicry, a pose assembled from borrowed anxieties and inherited slogans. The line targets people who treat "tradition" like a thrift-store outfit: worn because it signals respectability, not because it fits, functions, or even comes from their own closet.
The intent is diagnostic. Davies is describing a cultural type common in mid-century Anglo-Canadian life (and hardly confined to it): the respectable skeptic of change who cannot name the thing at stake beyond a vague sense that change is vulgar, unsafe, or unseemly. "Their very conservatism" suggests the problem runs deeper than policy preferences; it is an identity performance. Conservatism becomes a social credential, a way to align with the right rooms and the right people, rather than a considered relationship to history.
The subtext is that conservation requires knowledge. To conserve something you must first apprehend it: its origins, its purpose, its failures, its hidden costs. Secondhand conservatism skips that work. It conserves not institutions but the sensation of being "the sort of person" who values institutions. Davies, a novelist attentive to class, manners, and the stories nations tell about themselves, is warning that unexamined reverence is as intellectually lazy as unexamined rebellion. If you cannot say what you are conserving, you are not protecting a culture; you are protecting your comfort.
The intent is diagnostic. Davies is describing a cultural type common in mid-century Anglo-Canadian life (and hardly confined to it): the respectable skeptic of change who cannot name the thing at stake beyond a vague sense that change is vulgar, unsafe, or unseemly. "Their very conservatism" suggests the problem runs deeper than policy preferences; it is an identity performance. Conservatism becomes a social credential, a way to align with the right rooms and the right people, rather than a considered relationship to history.
The subtext is that conservation requires knowledge. To conserve something you must first apprehend it: its origins, its purpose, its failures, its hidden costs. Secondhand conservatism skips that work. It conserves not institutions but the sensation of being "the sort of person" who values institutions. Davies, a novelist attentive to class, manners, and the stories nations tell about themselves, is warning that unexamined reverence is as intellectually lazy as unexamined rebellion. If you cannot say what you are conserving, you are not protecting a culture; you are protecting your comfort.
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| Topic | Sarcastic |
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