This Principle of Prescription is one of the most important things that Kirk stesses throughout his life. In '92 he is still stressing it in the Politics of Prudence:
"Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription ["that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary"]. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time."It took me some time before I began to appreciate what he was driving at by its prominance.
Presciption was NOT abstract rights!
Prescription IS not abstract rights.
Now why did he say that because from his essays condemning the Woodrow Wilsonian "human rights" clap-trap, we know that he sees rights as adhering only to individuals...almost libertarian (he would dred that) in his rigor.
He and Burke condemned the metaphysical construct. The Rationalist, the nominalist. Seeing the real foundation of society and even the begining of government in Prescriptive right to property, he was loath to subject it to philosophical underpinnings when it was the underpinning of all of civilization and not to be weighted and measured against other "rights",P> Sowell, in A Conflict of Visions explains as well how those of the Constrained Vision see rights as they find them capable of being exercised in a free society, not as abstracts seperated from Order.
Hayek, as well, condemned the Totalitarian Rationalist Democracies that set up Logical and Philisophical schemes to replace the steady, evolutionary order of the ages.
Old Whigs, All!
If I turn my back on my own rationality and my own judgement, my own ability to weigh the facts and the reasons, and subjugate it to a blind adherence to some ideology, then I am doing nothing but turning my back on both of these gifts. The former because an ideology does not require thought but acceptance, the latter because an ideology cannot think and does not learn from the experiences of life.
Yet despite a spurning of ideology, I find that consistency is easy to attain for the most part, for while there may not be a true conservative ideology, there is absolutely a conservative mindset or way of thinking.
Now where have I seen that metaphor exercised very recently ...?
Good to see ya, KC.