Without which conservatism is stillborn: culture is not something for which you can buy a ticket; it is cradle and crucible.

ALTHOUGH some who use Conservatism as an implement may not think so, Conservatism broadly speaking stems from an impulse of far greater import than politics alone. And in this regard, perhaps the most fundamental division between conservatives and modern liberals is a belief or disbelief in an ordered universe, the splendor of which is an invitation to man to try for his justice and works to approximate the constancy and balance of natural laws, and for his reticence in the command and direction of others to be appropriate to his limited powers.

To believe instead in accident and disorder is to refuse the evidence of a universe that hangs together rather well, in favor of the primacy of man, and therefore the legitimacy of pure power. The implications of this philosophical and temperamental difference--divine purpose for the conservative bent of mind and random disorder for the liberal--play themselves out in every conceivable situation.

Locked in struggle with its opposite, each tendency is continually presented not only with primarily intellectual propositions, but with problems arising from nature, the development of society, and the advance of knowledge, and with combinations arising from the interaction of all. Given this unceasing stream of problems, one must react either by propounding a new thesis or by arguing in antithesis. In static and traditional societies, such as the Islamic world, where belief is more settled than not, the antithesis--not as a challenge to orthodoxy but as a block on change--enjoys every advantage. In the West, where the mainspring has been newly arising ideas and initiatives, the advantage is almost always with the new thesis, with the offering rather than with the recoiling.

William F. Buckley's extraordinary strategical contribution to public life from mid-century onward has been that his energy and brilliance have allowed him and his collaborators to offer, while floating in a sea of liberal theses, not only a persistent flow of counterarguments but a sea of their own credible, viable, and intriguing propositions. Unlike many others, Buckley sensed that the doctrines of Liberalism had become sufficiently stale to allow a new tack. Their lethargy and recession would open wide avenues down which he would drive, and he did, when no one thought it safe to do so, even though, manifestly, it was.

This realization, which has changed history, was Reagan's hallmark as well. Although many focus on the positiveness of Reagan's temperament, his achievement lay in the positiveness of his ideas. Not only his temperament but his unjustly maligned intellect enabled him to concentrate upon assertion rather than defense. He was thereby able to capture the agenda and the imaginations of the Republican party, a majority of the American people, and a good part of the world, leaving his opponents in a reactive hissy fit to which he paid little heed not because he was deaf to their arguments but because he was traveling faster than the speed of their sound. So too with the success of modern evangelical Christianity, which, blissfully unaware of its detractors, harvests immense numbers of adherents fleeing from the failures and presumptions of orthodox disbelief.

Conservatives are instinctively aware that in politics as in religion success gravitates more readily to proposal than to disposal. They know that continuation of the enterprise requires more Buckleys, Reagans, and Thatchers with the talent and charisma to lead them from the chaotic skirmishes of the day into what Churchill called the broad sunlit uplands.

Conservatism awaits this, but in the waiting, despite frequent bravado, are intimations of stagnation, reversal, and loss. This is because conservatives, knowing the power of proposal rather than disposal, thesis rather than antithesis, truncate its application and limit it to politics and religion, with which they are comfortable and familiar, while the major part of the battle is fought elsewhere.

For any gains in politics, no matter how indelible they seem, can easily be washed away--in a generation, in a decade, year, month, or minute--by culture, the great Conservative terra incognita, ceded not merely to Conservatism's transient political opponents, which would be minor, but to its habitual philosophical opponents, which is not.

Even though frequently mistaken as something for which you can buy a ticket, culture is the cradle and crucible not only of all politics but of those things that politics serve and for which they exist in the first place. Fundamental politics are born not, as some insist, from conflicts of distribution, but from emotion, identity, love, and belief--all things that culture shapes and by which it is shaped--and to attempt to preserve the political work of decades without addressing culture (the word itself is insufficiently expressive) is to entrust water to a sieve. Even to perceive culture as the guardian of politics rather than the other way around is to entrust the same water to the same sieve.

Conservatives have yet to approach culture as William F. Buckley approached political philosophy half a century ago. The theses of our culture are almost universally propounded by the Left--in education at all levels; publishing of all types; film and television; what used to be the fine arts; music; and in the libraries and museums, where history can be altered with an unnoticed deaccession or the flick of a caption. Looking upon all this as if silent upon a peak in Darien, Connecticut, are armies of conservatives who mainly react. There below them, stretching to the horizon, is the Pacific, and because they hesitate to swim in it, they are reduced to criticizing it. What will prevail in man's life or imagination, the ocean or those who--even if rightly--take exception to it?

That the antitheses are usually just is irrelevant to the outcome, for here as almost everywhere the initiative rules. Consider the relative impacts of film and of film criticism; music and music criticism; education and criticism of educational fashion. Cultural abominations thrive not because they are insufficiently criticized but for lack of adequately supported competition.

Although not a few conservatives with a self-sacrificial bent are at work in the belles lettres and beaux arts, the conservative masses (what a delightful phrase) have largely ceded these fields or have been frozen in or out of them in the reactive position from which conservatives must be freed if their enterprise is to succeed and their principles are to thrive.

At the turn of the last century, the threads of modernism came together and produced a violent cataclysm--first in philosophy, art, and opinion, and then in the unrivaled destruction brought by total war, in the enslavement of nations, multiple genocides, and a vast and continuing human alienation. The core elements of the modernist proposal--that there is neither God nor absolute truth, the universe is accidental, and man, though he is merely a mechanism, is nonetheless the measure of all things--are the reigning postulates of the contemporary West. But, like most orthodoxies, modernism--its power having freed it from taking account of truth--stands habitually in contradiction to the realities it denies, and has entered the coercive stage in which nihilistic philosophies play out their last days. Triumphant as it is, its every move will add to the counter pressure that eventually will overturn it.

Because it is necessary not only to sink rival ships but to sail one's own, independent forces (in addition to and beyond the counter pressure) must come afresh over and above the battle. There are at least two. The first is science, which originally engendered the present orthodoxy by its mastery of temporal powers. Samuel Johnson said that just because a man can electrify a bottle does not mean that he is qualified to solve the problems of war and peace. And, today, the ability to describe a molecular or astrophysical process does not even touch the skirts of the deepest and most abiding questions. Nonetheless, science is directed at verifiable truth, and despite retrograde ideologies that cling to the scientific establishment, the more that science illumines the darkness, the more whatever is seen appears wonderfully coherent, even if not entirely predictable or comprehensible. Given that the driving force of science since its beginnings has been to discover coherence, though science in its first blush and infancy gave rise to the present nihilistic orthodoxy, science as it progresses may turn out to be one of the engines that overturn it.

The second element that can ride over and above the battle and leave inconstant policy questions behind, can and should be a resumption--in the writing of novels, the teaching of students, the making of films, the publishing of books, the painting of paintings--of the course civilization has followed naturally and universally, in which the postulates that animate art and culture are unity, symmetry, balance, beauty, justice, humility--those things that, although once taken for granted, a sickened culture rejects; those things that are the children of an ordered universe, which, even if should it prove not to have had an Author, is structured as if it did.

In the Sixties, the Left, having failed to make revolution, embarked upon a long march through the institutions. One can only admire its persistence, while at the same time rejecting its powerful tactics, which have brought ruin. The object for the Right must be neither to root out that which is "incorrect" (something at which the Left, fundamentally wedded to coercion, has excelled) nor to ravish institutions that are three-quarters dead from having been ravished over decades, but to make and keep alive the works and principles to which those institutions can turn in the crisis of their bankruptcy.

Many of these principles have been long enough in exile that to uphold them now, not in opposition but in assertion, would be like building a new city. Devotion to them is hardly without risk, but the universal truth that is their origin is also their strength. And, besides, whether one is successful or not, it is better to work in the light of civilization than to gather riches in the dark.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and a visiting fellow of Hillsdale College, is the author, most recently, of the novel Freddy and Fredericka. His website is www.MarkHelprin.com.