Conservatism and the Therapeutic Society
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/10/conservatism-and-therapeutic-society.html Gregory Wolfe Conservatives active in the business of influencing public policy have been giving increasing attention in recent years to the idea that politics is ultimately an epiphenomenon of culture. What these activists have recognized is that political mobilization and efficiently produced position papers by themselves will not effect lasting change in the way we are governed. The force of a policy proposal will be strengthened in proportion to the extent that it is consonant with the larger representation of our communal aspirations—that representation being what we understand as “culture.” However, the crisis of the West in the modern age has involved the very dissolution of those binding and shared elements that define a culture. Under the pressures of democratization, egalitarianism, and technological innovation, the religious and mythic roots of culture ...