The central goal of the conservative is to protect the cultural integrity of the nation he is a part of, without denying that change is necessary from time to time. Indeed, change is an essential part of conserving one’s cultural heritage, a claim that recently provoked much mockery from Australia’s left – and incident to be examined in the future.
Edmund Burke claimed in the Reflections that ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’ This is not difficult, is it? State and society are never static. New circumstances require adjustments. A country like Australia has to make adjustments to the migrant groups that are continually arriving. This is called making adjustments to a ‘multicultural Australia’. The problem is that there are different understandings of multiculturalism.
Clearly, Australia’s leftist establishment sees multiculturalism as a cultural sledgehammer to attack and tear apart Australia’s host culture.
The issue of cultural and political adjustment is one that Israel presently faces. Dr Joel Fishman, a resident of Israel and an admirer of Edmund Burke’s thought, wrote an interesting piece for the Jersusalem Center for Public Affairs in which he effectively draws on Burke and other conservatives to analyse the issues.
The Jewish Nation-State Bill: Is There a Contradiction between Judaism and Democracy?
Dr Joel Fishman
One of the reasons for the breakup of the Netanyahu government in December 2014 was a serious disagreement concerning the “Law of the Nation,” otherwise known as the Jewish Nation-State Bill. According to the prime minister’s fourteen principles for the drafting of the government bill, the purpose of this legislation was “defining the identity of the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people and anchoring the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the principles contained in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.” On November 19, 2014, the government approved this text as a starting-point for the Netanyahu-Weinstein version of the bill.1 Read on here