At only one point do I find that Harvey Cox, the modish Harvard theologian, can command assent —his enthusiastic acceptance of modern technology and his sense of its genuine possibilities. He responds imaginatively to the world of the “switchboard” and the “cloverleaf,” by which he symbolizes, respectively, electronics and modern transportation.
Much of this technological culture is indeed good, and has its own grace and clean beauty. Conservatives, committed to values and doctrines inherited from the past, have sometimes translated this commitment into an affection for the archaic: I myself plead guilty. But a year of living in England has impressed upon me the fact that there is nothing at all conservative about stagnation and inefficiency, however quaint, and that a cathedral or a castle from which the vital spirit has departed is just a sort of souvenir. Conservatism is a matter of moral and intellectual continuity, and there is no reason to suppose that a man cannot operate a computer and travel in jet airliners and still embody that continuity. Some of our most profound and religiously most orthodox conservatives, such as T.S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner, have also possessed the most modern sensibilities, capable of accommodating Pound and Aquinas, Brancusi and Pascal.
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