For some time, I have believed that conservatism has had its head severed from its spleen.

Roger Scruton, although he never quite put it this way, used to impress upon his audiences that conservatism was the search for the reasons behind commitments we did not make by reasoning our way into them.

It is a young man’s mistake to assume that clear thinking happens only when we push our emotions aside. Instead, St. Augustine is right when he says that we should love that which we ought. The greatest professor I ever had gave his greatest lesson to me inadvertently at the end of a semester. He simply choked up and fought the urge to weep upon reading us a bit of Herodotus. It took me a minute to grasp it, but he had unwittingly demonstrated that to study something well is ultimately to love it.

So, my hope for myself and my peers is that we learn to think more clearly in this new year, whatever it costs us.