David Frum

But in the interval between their undergraduate days and 1938 when the essay was delivered as an after-dinner speech, in that interval, the world had passed through the First World War,

the communist revolution the bolshevik revolution the rise of fascism inflations depressions and net was now in 1938 on the edge very visibly of a second and even more terrible world war the age of security that keynes had grown up in was gone forever and a lot of keynes's thinking and work in his later years dealt with the shock to the sensibility of someone raised in that secure world of edwardian england

dealing with the new world of communism, fascism, wars, inflations, depressions.

And so I want to quote from the later part of the essay, a passage that I think resonates through the ages to our time now.

He's talking about this group of friends and their influence.

And he says of them, in short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men.

We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few.

and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.

We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom.

We lacked reverence for everyone and everything.

It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishments of our predecessors on the ordering of life, as it now seems to me to have been, or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order."

As I look back on my early beliefs and the beliefs Mona and I discussed, I realized that we came, Mona and I, our political evolution can be described by exactly the opposite direction.

We began as young conservatives, in my case, as early as the 1970s, very aware of, as Keynes put it, of that civilization was a thin and precarious crust.

What we were not enough aware of was the flip side of that.

Just as Keynes had to discover the power of order, I think Mona and I, I won't speak for her, I'll speak only for myself, that those of us who were conservatives then and are less conservative now, I don't think we were aware enough that it wasn't just order that was needed, but also the justice and fairness that caused that order to be something a little bit more than, to quote Keynes again, something a little bit more than the personality and the will of a very few.

That the order that we valued so much gained its power because of a broad consensus based on the personality and the will of a great many.

And the way to get that great many to back the order was through a sense in most people, of many people, that the order was just.

And that if the order was ever felt to be unjust, unfair, to favor only that very few whom Keynes described, then it would have to be maintained in ways that were harsher and more tyrannical.

than the order that we valued and that we remembered.

I think we all go through evolutions in life and that's one of the tragic blessings or one of the blessed tragedies of growing old is that you get this critical distance on what you thought before and what you think now.