Question. Has there ever been an author, or artist in general who was both a conservative and has an imagination...

Question. Has there ever been an author, or artist in general who was both a conservative and has an imagination? I have this theory that conservatives don't have imagination, so they're unable to think outside of themselves and try to imagine what things must be like for other people, they're trapped in a world view where they can only imagine their own reality. I was thinking, I have always thought it was a bit ironic, to think of a conservative being involved in anything creative in the first place. You always see theater and art in general as being a place for progressive ideas, and especially home to a lot of queer acceptance, and conservative art always seemed a bit of an oxymoron to me.

Well I think it's a different type of imagination...One that respects power and ability

Rudyard Kipling

Now fuck off, not even conservative

Goethe, Conrad, Kafka, Bolaño (for some of his life), Milton, Dante. Some were controversial, but all were politically conservative for their time.

Kafka was a literal Communist

Nigga you gotta learn to read between the lines. Nigga you gotta learn how to do the erotericism tango.

...

esotericism*

(SEE WHAT I DID THERE)

Please tell me we got some Straussians up in this joint

Virgil, Dante, Pound, Eliot, Lewis Carrol, Stravinsky, Wallace Stevens, Augustine, Dostoevsky.

Please go away.

Yes, it's a different type of imagination. It's practical, structured and purposeful.
If by "imagination" you mean confusing, mystical, counter-intuitive and nonsensical or whatever else appeals to your postmodern tastes, then you wont find a lot of that. Conservatism accepts the existence of ideals and therefore does not see art as a sandbox of pleasure and ultimately pointless creation.
By the way, wasn't Bosch a conservative?

Was Dostoevsky actually a convservative?
He seemed to loathe authority and establishment values too much

Julia's Evola for both writing and painting

Yep, he wrote quite a bit of journalism espousism conservative/nationalistic views. And then there's the fact that he's incredibly religious.

That said, he did have a somewhat tortured relationship with authority. Just look at what he thought of Catholics.

Can you really say that after reading notes from underground about dostoyevsky?

*espousing

I hope this is bait

Do you think Dostoevsky means to hold up the Underground man as a *positive* figure?

Borges was, if not straight up buddy buddy, then certainly okay with Pinochet

Yeah he's a strange case. He certainly had no faith in humanity to be a sincere democrat in either case

Totally forgot about the visual arts--just look at the history of painting for God's sake.

>gets all their ideas from muh bible
>thinking that actually takes imagination

Yes, Virgil is well known for his deep reading of the Bible.

goethe was not conservative in his youth, remember he died in his 80's, he was not the same person the whole time

I don't know anything about Dostoevsky but since when does opposing authority or the Roman Catholic Church make you a progressive? What about republicans, capitalists and classical liberals? What about the reformers?

I meant dante and milton mostly. Idk how you think you know virgil was or would today be a conservative.

How about the guy who taught William Blake? I forget his name, but he was a massive conservative.

I'm not necessarily saying it does. I'm using Dostoevsky's critiques of Catholicism as evidence of his tortured relationship with authority. Ie, in the Grand Inquisitor sequence, the Catholics use "authority, miracle, and mystery" to hold people in check. At the same time, the Elders in the monastery are criticized for wielding too much spiritual authority, and he ends supporting them.

Read any secondary literature on Virgil and political thought. Any of it.

Virgil's style draws deeply in imitation of his predecessors (Homer), he takes a fairly religious line of Epicureanism, he openly glorifies the Emporer Augustus, he celebrates heroic masculine virtue, he denigrates an illicit sexual relationship...all that seems pretty 'conservative.'

But did he write Faust in his youth?

Nooope. Get the fuck out of here sissy sand pants motherfucker.

Faulkner, Hemingway, Proust. Off the top of my head.

...

I read somewhere a left-wing criticism of mysticism itself as being fundamentally conservative, because it encourages withdrawal from the material world through inward focus and therefore hampers efforts towards social justice. I can see the logic of this argument, but am fairly ambivalent towards it.

If mysticism is conservative, then I have to disagree that conservative authors lack imagination. Even besides mysticism, I think conservative authors have imagination, but maybe in a different way than left-leaning authors. Or maybe the imagination is the same, but what they imagine is different, hard to say. However, if you think something is "imaginative" because you deem it to be progressive, then you're probably just limiting your definitions to prove your theories.

Hemingway was a Communist you fool

Proust was a gay Jew who took the Jews side in the Dreyfus case.

Yeats was a snobby nationalist and Borges had some conservative tendencies

Tolkien, you moron

He was still a conservative. And so was Orwell. Communists were very different from nowadays. Hell, back in the fifties my country's communist party had views on immigration that would be considered extreme far right now.

For historical figures, their political views should be analysed based on the time they lived, not 2016, Orwell was a socialist Labout voter and not Conservative at all

Labour*

Sure. He was also Barrès dearest friend and very conservative. Even Emile Zola, the foremost defender of Dreyfus and defender of workers' right, was quite conservative, just not in the same way as the dominant Catholic royalists of his time.

Except modern progressive views also existed at the time. They just weren't dominant because economics, not societal issues, were the main focus of the political debate then.

Read Michéa.

Nonsensical retard, Conservative has no real meaning by your dumb person standards

Even if you identify a whole host of imaginative conservatives, your theory might still have some explanatory power concerning the majority.

Doubtful. I just don't see it being true. How would you even demonstrate it? Is there some standardized test to measure imagination? Even in my anecdotal experience it sounds bogus.

idiot

Nice bait.

Because conservatism finds so much material to work with in reality, conservatives rarely need resort to fiction/entertainment/etc. This lack of need is further exacerbated by the fact that the industries in question are, on the whole, wholly opposed to their views. Progressives, on the other hand, must: because their mad ideals are by definition ideals, and can only exist in an imaginary sphere.

Regarding your actual question, however, plenty have been listed ITT. What is more, one imaginative conservative is usually worth ten imaginative progressives: they beat you at your own game, every time.

To be fair, the thread failed to provide a definition of a conservative. For example, by European standards, many of your fiscal conservatives are hardly conservative at all.

A person who had Conservative values for their time and place, it's not difficult

But it is.

I'm just going to do what the other poster said and call you a nonsensical retard, now get lost

Doesnt need to be testable/falsifiable to be true.

I guess the point about having a stunted ability to empathise rings true with my anecdotal experience, if nothing else.

you're a fucking moron, kys

Milton wasn't politically conservative for his time. How is republicanism conservative?

Conservative in what sense? As in 'art should stay as it is and art traditions should be respected' or as in 'society should stay as it is'?