A Conservative Understanding of History and Man

In conservatism, you have to accept that this very moment, sitting here, you are at the furthest end of a line stretching from the past, and this is its furthest point for now. Meaning, you exist within history. You cannot step outside of history. Within this history, a few things matter greatly to us. That is, if we want to look at it philosophically, we return to the same question from the previous session, which is: exactly what is history?

What can we actually call history? In my view, when we approach social history, we need to elevate events, or a concept called the event, to a central place. Just as it is the same in individual history, meaning that elderly person who sits down and tells you about their past, their past is summarized in the significant events they experienced in life.

That is what it comes down to. Not in the things they went through every single day and repeated over and over. These events in an individual's life might include a love, a marriage, a child, an education, an emigration, a divorce, a love

This event, which takes place in one part of social life, moves toward the past and changes the past. It changes the past. This changing of the past may, on one level, be the result of a new consciousness that has emerged. Meaning, a new awareness arises in your era, and through that new awareness, the collective in your era decides again: let me go back and look at history from a fresh perspective and retell it.

Meaning, let me go back and ask whether Mirza Kuchak Khan Jangali is still my historical hero or not. Let me go back with this new collective historical awareness I have gained, and ask whether Mohammad Mosaddegh can still be my political hero or not. So one part of consciousness is shaped through these different narratives taking form.

But the death of a child darkens the wedding photos. It makes them dim and gloomy. Meaning when the parents go back and look at those photos from their wedding, they are now seen through the shadow of the child's death. The photos the mother had from her pregnancy with this child change their meaning.

Their meaning changes. They become an experience of pain. They become an experience of loss. The travel photos they had together. The videos they had together. The things they had bought together. The gift that had been given to the child as a birthday present, and the parent felt it was such a great gift.

It was a bicycle. It was a motorcycle, and that motorcycle remains, and the child is gone. Or, I bought this vehicle as a birthday gift, and he went out on it and had an accident. So it changes the past. It moves toward objects. It changes objects. It moves toward memory. And it moves toward recollection.

Why is this history important to us in the conservative tradition? Because we always worry that a rider is coming from history toward the future, and that through the ruptures we have made in history, or the paths we have closed off, this rider will not bring us a new message from history anymore. That is, in these events through which we become real, or in the new consciousness through which we become real, this new consciousness needs things from history to come and nourish and define that new consciousness anew.

Why does it have authenticity? Why does an antique actually matter? Because of its age. Why does age matter? I mean, you might ask why does age matter? Why, for example, in interpersonal relationships, does the length of the relationship matter? Not just the relationship itself. The fact that people have been friends for years.

That length of time matters. Not that we've been friends for six months and we're very close with each other. Age matters because it shows that you have, over this span of time together, across this range of many twists and turns, gone through it all and still, to this day, are by each other's side, passed through misunderstandings, gone through many events that could have driven you apart, and you made it through and are still together. together. So age matters from this perspective, really.

that reaches us owes its value to its age, it is showing you: look, I have survived countless eras. My idea was declared obsolete thousands of years ago. I, as a cultural artifact, had an idea above me that had created me, an idea that believed the cow was sacred, or the lion was sacred, an idea that believed Iran was sacred, and that turned it into a cultural artifact.

Eras passed and passed, that idea was defeated. People came who, for thousands of years, said Iran is not sacred at all. But this survived, to bring that message back from history again, so that if you ever wanted to return to something like what you had in the past, this could come to your aid, this idea could come to your aid.

Those who thought that we could use that mechanical reason found in positivist fields, and with it we are making sense of the world, and with that same approach we should go, meaning take that same magnifying glass and that same instrument in hand, and now turn to history, and then figure out where history has been false and where it has been true, without this

without acknowledging this importance, and without pointing out that social history is not simply what happened. It is what people narrate about those events, and the effect that those events and those narratives make possible for the future. Even at the individual level, even memory is not a neutral relationship. The relationship with the past is a dramatic one.

That dramatic relationship with the past helps shape how we understand ourselves. In the history of nations, it is not a flaw that you take certain things and pass them on, or that you pass others by, based on the understanding and knowledge your community has. That is simply how history works. History is bound up with story.

Which nation, even if it tried, could have a social history that exists outside the stories that nation tells about itself and about its past? So, there you have it.

there you have it. Remember, first: if someone tells you that this history of yours, viewed through a mythological lens, social history viewed through a mythological lens, meaning it is inseparable, because personal history works the same way. Each one of us, when we want to tell our own story, depending on what we intend to convey, we elevate certain parts and show them more brightly, and we hide other parts.

Whenever a person is able to be the speaker and the first-person narrator of a story, they will have, like God, this power, this will, and even this freedom to alter parts of the story as they see fit, or to hide them. That is what a first-person narrator is. The same applies in literary genres as well.

The omniscient narrator works the same way. The omniscient narrator in literature goes into the mind, goes behind all events and explains their reasons, but remains hidden. And this is the power that this narrator has regardless, and can make use of this power.

when you want to mention the second Pahlavi, and when in the final chapter you want to mention Ayatollah Khomeini, you keep calling him a charismatic leader, a powerful social leader of Iranian society. I can understand that you are, after all, caught up in ideological history. I can understand that, and I can also show you that this is the case.

But you cannot use the very same things that you yourself use to push your agenda, those techniques, those tricks, those methods that you use to advance your own ideological history, and then accuse your opponent, saying you are doing this, or that because you are using these tricks that I myself am using here in a hidden way, and you are using them too, therefore I can say you are unscientific.

If this method matters to you, meaning neutrality, meaning avoiding narrative and storytelling and all of that, then whenever you have actually observed this in your work, in your historiography, and have shown us that you have observed it, then go ahead and write the history of an entire country. They keep saying Iranians did not think because they have no reason. These are the same things these friends say, and then Mr. Shamlou

in the philosophy of religion, we have a concept called theodicy, which when you want to define it it goes back to something like, for example, the justice of God. The term theodicy is taken and used in the sense of God, in its modern form, roughly from the eighteenth century onward, taking shape with works like those of Leibniz, for example.

An earthquake struck Europe in 1755, known as the Lisbon earthquake. About one eighth of the city's population was killed, something like fifty thousand people perished in this earthquake. An important question came to the minds of those people who had been sleeping under the shelter of God and resting in the warm embrace of God.

And that question was: if God is just, if God is all-powerful, if God is merciful, then how can this earthquake be understood? How can natural evil, which is outside of God, and God is certainly all-powerful as we said, how can this evil be understood in the fact that fifty thousand people in our city die, children die, women are crushed under these boulders, what wisdom is hidden in this? The concept of theodicy was coined by Leibniz

Their argument was that you simply cannot understand society in this way. The attempt to rationally understand human beings and society is unscientific. Let me put it better, the attempt to understand society and human beings scientifically, and purely viewing human beings and society scientifically, is itself an unscientific endeavor. Yes, exactly. Because first of all, it ignores tradition, it reduces the human being to the present moment, and then reduces the human being to utility.

Now if you try to use this utilitarian framework to approach many human actions, they become incomprehensible, or they get translated as acts of madness. Meaning these actions appear irrational, because this action brings no benefit to this person, so why is this person doing it?

Let's keep this in mind: at least in my view, happiness and the feeling of being happy are the product of misunderstanding. If that misunderstanding did not exist between us and the situations in which we feel happy, then you would never encounter a happy person. Just as love, too, is the product of misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding matters.

What I want to say, in short, is that insisting on fully knowing a situation, or fully knowing a circumstance, or insisting on fully knowing the person you admire or are interested in, I don't think that insistence is particularly wise, sacred, or useful. To love someone, you have to encounter some misunderstanding, and both of you need to hold some misunderstandings about each other. Part of it is not knowing everything.

Tocqueville takes his ideas from Burke. He says that when a person becomes detached from groups like family and religion, meaning the intermediary groups that stand between himself and the state, two things happen at once. He becomes profoundly alone, facing the monster of the state. And second, he becomes part of the mass, because he has lost his group.

In the 19th century they debated the idea that a person's power came from his membership in these groups, which allowed him to push back against the state. But once he loses those groups and then surrenders his own freedom as well, what happens? He becomes part of the mass, and then through democracy the mass turns into tyranny. The oppression of the people by the people takes place. Now Tocqueville

He draws a distinction between arbitrariness and tyranny. He makes this distinction, and later Scruton, in that article about Iran, raises it. He has an article from 1984 about Iran in which he discusses the position of the Shah. He says the Shah was a dictator, but he was not a tyrant, and he distinguishes between the two.

He says it is possible for a political leader, in order to advance his own goals, which are modernity and welfare, to dictate certain things to society. But this dictating of things to society should not be equated or treated as synonymous with oppression or tyranny, because tyranny has a different meaning. He says

but in democratic republics, tyranny does not enter through that path. In democratic republics, tyranny, without paying any attention to the bodies of individuals, goes directly after their souls and minds. The language of power in a democratic society is this: either you must all think like me, or face death. Power says: you are free and you are at liberty to hold views that differ from mine.

No one will threaten your life or property. But from the day your way of thinking is no longer like mine, within this society you will find yourself living as a stranger. Of course, your privileges and civil rights will not be taken from you, but you will derive no benefit from those privileges and rights. Because if