Yesterday, I was reading excerpts from Jim Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism, and I found this:
Public LifeI was saying the same thing when I wrote in my post: Reclaiming Beauty: Winning Back Our Civilization (which is the proposed title of my book):
Complementary efforts must extend beyond local communities into politics and public life generally. Those efforts would include practical measures to protect particular traditionalist interests from attack...
More fundamentally, traditionalist political efforts should promote changes in general principles, possibly small in immediate effect, that open a door out of liberalism and make a better world possible. We start where we are: immediate radical change is hard to bring about and never works as intended. Final objectives should nonetheless go to the root of the matter. What is needed is not a new system built to order, which will never come into being anyway, but new fundamental principles that can work out their implications over time just as liberalism did. It took three hundred years to progress from John Locke to John Rawls. Something similar may be needed for the renewal of tradition (p. 269).
Reclaiming beauty is not just an intellectual effort, but it is also an activist's endeavor. There are many activities I envision, such as: Setting up conferences for group discussions and meetings; Providing a forum for writers; Establishing definitions for words such as "beauty" and "reclaim"; Having a voice in political and cultural decisions that affect beauty in our environment (for example, objecting to the building of glass tower sky-scrapers in our neighborhoods); Providing guidelines for every-day beauty, such as dress, etiquette, language; Providing resources for people to learn about beauty's role in our civilization; Alerting people into the ways that beauty is being desecrated and maligned.