The Romance of the Past; or How to be a Happy Conservative

Not that long ago, the ever-entertaining Ben Sixsmith had a piece in The Critic about the various groups that gather under the umbrella of "traditionalists". 

While having some fun along the way (e.g., accurately skewering a certain subculture of online trads whose philosophy appears to consist in "a passionate enthusiasm for uploading photographs of slim young women in regional dresses and arguing about whether civilisation fell in 1789 or before"), he makes the point that if we want to revive a vanished ritual or custom then it is not enough merely to say that it is charming or traditional, rather we must show that it serves some purpose for us now.

This made me think about the various ways of life known to antiquity that have not fallen by the wayside of modernity but survive to this day. My professional life provides various examples. Not only am I a lawyer - a profession long-established by the time of the Romans - but it is not unusual for one of my cases to be readily explicable, both to laymen of today and those of classical times, by telling a story about a Greek merchant who wanted to buy a ship to carry cargoes of oil. Various technical details of the story would seem like science fiction to the ancient Greeks, but they would have no more difficulty in understanding what it is essentially all about than you would have in understanding the frustration of a Flargle-trader from the planet Xargan who wanted to buy an interstellar space cruiser but found out that the hyperdrive wouldn't reach the Gamma Quadrant (allegedly). Indeed, any ancient Greeks listening to my story would not be terribly surprised to hear that the ship in question was designed to fit through the current Suez Canal, which is merely the latest in a series of canals built in the region since the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.

If you want another example of ways of life that happen today that would be perfectly comprehensible to those in Biblical times then I give you the entertaining recent case of Reeves v Drew, a dispute about a will featuring a number of colourful characters. You might want to read the whole thing, but to whet your appetite I will tell you that it includes passages such as "... [she] suffered an horrific injury during this period by being glassed in a pub by another woman in a random attack but the deceased responded to this by using the memorable but highly disturbing phrase “lay with dogs and you get fleas”" and "There were uncomfortable parts of Bill’s evidence. There were elements of racism and he, like most of the family, has engaged in drug use. He has not been immune from the family’s use of violence ... // I had a largely favourable impression of Bill ..." - you know your family is unusual when Bill is one of the good guys. 

You may well think that these ways of life - shipping goods, litigating, fighting in pubs - range from the merely mundane to the frankly unattractive. But, of course, almost anything that is in constant use today will be mundane and we will be well familiar with its unattractive aspects. The most glamorous film star, lived with day to day, will be a person who smells, moans and irritates. Those regional dresses are often dirty, cold or uncomfortable, or 'teamed with' (as the fashionistas perhaps say) a nice warm cardy and an anorak.

Here I think of John Masefield's poem "Cargoes". You know, the one that starts:

"Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine."

The epitome of the romance of the past! But the shipping lawyer in me has some questions. Have you ever wondered where Ophir is? I looked it up and it's probably east of Suez. So, to get there from Palestine by boat would have required a Red Sea port - or perhaps a Suez Canal of some kind. And if you think about it a little more, when the ship was making the voyage out from Palestine to pick up the cargo of ivory and so on, presumably the captain would not have wanted to make the voyage in ballast, so it would have been worth carrying a low value cargo out there, perhaps even firewood or cheap trays. And when the vessel unloaded the apes and peacocks at the discharge port, there must have been a tally clerk counting the live and dead ones off the boat, and perhaps litigation to follow if the numbers came out wrongly.

You will recall that the poem ends with the "dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack". Disgustingly quotidian, no doubt. But consider this. I was driving through a charming corner of the English countryside yesterday and crossed a railway line belonging to a heritage steam railway, lovingly run by a charity as a tourist attraction. Ah, the romance of steam trains! Surely there is no one who is immune to it. Yet isn't the British coaster with a smoke stack simply a magnificent steam train of the sea? Indeed, isn't it even more romantic, given the addition of the tang of sea-spray, the freedom from rigid train tracks and the danger of drowning to the glories of coal, fire and cast-iron solid British engineering that we love about steam trains?

This, I think, is one reason why conservatives seem to be perpetually disappointed. Either their society has successfully preserved some way of life, and so we all get to see it close-up, warts and all, and of course it's something awful like heavy industry or money-grubbing, or else that way of life has perished and we can see nothing but its glamour and romance, photographed in soft-focus by those who love it. 

There is an alternative. I once read a story set in the future in which aesthetes sigh over the elegance of power station cooling towers, created by a past culture whose glories they cannot reproduce. It will take a bit of effort, but I invite today's conservatives to take the chances that tomorrow's ones will envy us for: why not admire the graceful parabolic curves of cooling towers? Or wonder that the ancient and solemn tradition of consuming alcohol and fighting, one might almost say nobly, with nothing but one's body and the materials readily to hand still endures in these quiescent and risk-averse times? Or, at the very least, I invite you to rejoice that the classical custom of paying people money to argue in court, a strange and time-honoured custom, but one which serves a great deal of purpose (for me at least), is going strong when so many of the other rites and habits of antiquity are lost to us.