Van Agt chooses the last approach, as it already is apparent from the title of the already mentioned essay. Van Agt does not choose for left or right: he reflects and weighs issues on the basis of their merits. 
 
Hans Hillen also chooses this approach, and he describes ‘conservatism’ as:

“valuing attachments that already exist and weighing them against the latest developments. You must want to try to preserve that which has apparently contributed to a good ordering of society in the past.” (Cited by Albrecht & Schutte) 

“With you, I abhor ‘anything goes’ capitalism […] the exploitation of poor people and […] the destruction of nature and the environment. If the offences are ‘rightist’, then I do not rally under that flag.”
“Only what appears to be sustainable valuable under critical research deserves to remain respected.”

Dries van Agt, ‘Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good ‘, 5 October 2002, VN 
 

 Yoeri Albrecht & Xandra Schutte, ‘We need a real elite’, 5 October, VN

Livenstro, Von der Dunk en Van Hintum in 3 Augustus 2002, VN 

J.L. Heldring, ‘Man is a dangerous being’, 3 March 2001, NRC

Flip Vuijsje, ‘Not suitable for publication: the optimistic conservatism of Andrew Sullivan’, 23 November 2002, VN 

6. Discussing a number of topics 

It is apparent that the last approach, the critical one, is the most rational, and also best fits in our time and culture, in which there are now emancipated and autonomous individuals. This clock can not be simply turned back, however one would want this. 

a. The family 

Von der Dunk, a Dutch professor, takes the critical position where he comments that whoever chooses ‘the family’ as the highest and ‘classic’ value should consider that the family as we know it is at most only two centuries old. ( Thomas von der Dunk, ‘Conservatives lack spiritual principle’, 17 March 2001, NRC )

Whoever sees the royal families as the ideal example, should consider that the marriages which were concluded were generally done with very pragmatic motivations. 

b. The state 

Something similar applies to the state. The modern state is not all that old, in any case not older than the French Revolution, and some states are even much younger. Many states came into existence because one wanted to design a peace treaty, and therefore drew straight lines on a map, cutting across all sorts of tribes and peoples. The Netherlands came within an ace of being a German province, or Lithuania one of Russia. 

Moreover, states differ. The State of the Netherlands is quite different from that of Columbia, China, Iran or even the United Kingdom or Belgium. 

If there is one concept that is very relative, then it is the concept of ‘state’ or ‘nation’. If one then attributes such a central and powerful role to the state like many conservatives do, then one is taking great risks, or at the very least, being very ambiguous — if not short-sighted. 

c. Christianity and Islam 

What is most surprising, when you read about (neo)conservatism, is that there is almost blind trust in Christianity, and almost unanimous distrust of Islam. These religions are really not all that different.

"With a little bit of good will, you can even call the results of the last [Dutch] elections [May 2002] a reformed coup (and that we are only afraid of Islam).” 

Michel Zonneveld, Purple III, 5 oktober 2002, VN

d. Vision of man  

Thomas Hobbes was the man of homo homini lupes. Because this is simply the case, there must be a strong state to restrain the citizens and maintain peace in this way.

Thomas Hobbes, Levithian, 1651. 

It was mainly Immanuel Kant who emphasised, and even more or less ‘invented’, the free autonomy and rational will of man as his principal characteristic.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took this idea and further developed it. Where Kant believed in ‘an absolute rationality’ which is imbedded in man, Hegel pointed out that that rational will is not so absolute after all, but develops itself in the course of history through the social contacts between people. The free and rational will therefore has a social character, and not an absolute one.

Frits Bolkestein, ‘Was Will der Liberale?’, February 2002, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie

Emanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernuft [Critique of Pure Reason] 

Arthur Schopenhauer, Also sprach Zanustra 

Friedrich Nietzsche too stood by the somber side. Free human will is destructive and leads to decay, hopelessness and senselessness, to will-lessness and weakness of the will — to nihilism. The search for absolute truths leads inevitably to relativism and illusions, of which Christianity is one of.
No, we would be better off to give meaning to things ourselves, earthly meanings. Well, not exactly “we”, not all of us, since something like this may only be done by educated people who gain power: the Übermenschen. And we know what happened there…

Freud talked about “the discontent in culture”. Nietzsche and Weber also had an eye for this. The ‘Discontent’ School teaches that man was caged by the culture, the state and the bureaucracy.

Well, man has now emancipated himself, freed from his cage. Now the discontent breaks loose. 

“The new discontent, not through the oppression of human instincts, but through the liberation thereof.” (Yoram Stein). 

Contemporary philosopher  Peter Sloterdijk: 

“The ‘untamed’ man-beast comes into being like this: freed from his ‘iron cage’, in search of kicks, and no longer prepared to listen to the voice of ‘reason’.” 

This man-beast must be tamed again, if we want to continue to live in the people's park.
 

De Toqueville foresaw this already: people dislike any kind of authority, and precisely in a period after a crisis, when the governors loosen the restraints, do people regain their self-confidence and use the outlet to spew out their discontents.

Yoram Stein, ‘Culture critic: Discontent in people’s park’, 22 August 2002, Trouw 

Yoram Stein, ‘Values and virtues: the circle of authority and equality’, 31 August 2002, Trouw 

Peter Sloterdijk, Rules for the people’s park. 

  
Disposable income and De Toqueville can account for 90% of the rise of the rightist wave, Cees Banning says, as cited by,  among others, Jos de Beus and Professor Heertje

People are rich now, satisfied about what is private, dissatisfied about what is collective. About that which is collective we still need do discuss. 

e. Individual and collective 

Counter Balance wrote about this earlier already [in # 9, not translated]: 

“Values and virtues determine the culture of a society and the relationships between the individual and community. Some people complain about a lack of values and virtues in the current society, especially among the youth, but there are of course only other values and virtues that are on the rise.
What is changing in particular, is the relationship between individualism and communalism. The individualism is said to have been shot too far.” 

And elsewhere [in # 21, not translated]: Which values and virtues?

“Values and virtues are said to have disappeared — of was that changed? We […] look to our own cultural heritage for a while and place this era next to it. There appears to be a sense of pluriformity, but maybe also a communality.” 

Apparently there is a ‘waving’ development in the history of humanity. We have seen that the individual was liberated from the shackles of church and state, that he was enlightened after ‘the dark Middle Ages’, that he became autonomous. And what do we see now: the individual overshoots in this direction, and now again asks for the attention of the community, and the collective.

So, the question now is: How?

This is the reactionary-conservative opinion. For as far as we would like to listen to the conservatives, the ‘worldly’ and critical conservatives offer us something more.

There is another way

More attention toward the collective. OK, but then a modern collective of autonomous people, a community of free-thinking people who partake in dialogue with one another. A collective that you do not necessary have to distrust from the beginning, but one that you can trust. A collective in which one does not let go or loose one’s own identity, but preserves it — speaking of which, ‘conserving’ it.  

This does call for something 

A similar kind of positive collective, community of autonomous people, calls for dialogue as the form of communication. A dialogue cannot be conducted in crowd. Human capability is of a much smaller scale. People are demanding, it so appears from the Motivation [Dutch research company] research of 4 and 5 May 2001, more social connection. And also more respect — a condition for dialogue.

Such a dialogue  also demands that there is a certain degree of development, not of the elite alone, but of all.

“Let me mention another example of a modern, new misfortune: the gradual loss of the human dimension as the organising principle. […] Unbridled enlargement of scale—mammoth governments, schools as grand as factory floors, patients taken up in barrack-like environments—[…] has caused much alienation, a withering of community life, and even caused isolation.”

Dries van Agt, ‘Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good’, 5 October 2002, VN

Unfortunately, these conditions are currently not realizable in a number of Arabic countries. There, dialogue is impossible, and there is no good education system, and no freedom of knowledge.

But then in the US , it is not much different. The freedom of speech is more and more being constrained, as is the freedom of knowledge. Education there is notoriously poor, and a lot of people are spiritually hardly developed.

"[New] Conservative politics must therefore: take the needs of people who are tied to a situated community into consideration, and strengthen such feelings of loyalty." 

Paul Nolte, ‘New conservatism for a new century’, 2 November 2002, NRC

According to René Diekstra, societies of the right are not all that safe at all: in fact, suicides are more common under a rightist government than under a left one.

René Diekstra, ‘Does the danger then really come from the right?’, 22 October 2002, Wegener Dagbladen

Here in the Netherlands , we find ourselves in a unique position: living between East and West, with a relatively autonomous people, without really having a living conservative tradition — despite, of course, the fact that we have had our Abraham Kuyper [founder of the Anti-Revolutionary political party].

Rob Hartmans, ‘In defence of the order’, 23 November 2002, De Groene Amsterdammer

This offers us the chance to continue to realize some of the abovementioned conditions. We must of course also actually do that.

7. Provisional conclusion

It is only meaningful to listen to ‘the conservatives’, as far as these are critical, ‘worldly’ and conserving (and thus not reactionary).

The jump we must make is that we accept that man is emancipated and has become autonomous. We must not reverse this, but use it. Therefore it can be of no harm to at times look back to the valuable things that the history of our culture has delivered to date. That can very well compensate for the inadequacies in our current culture; the culture of the dissatisfied, spoiled, consuming and zapping citizen.  

We may compensate for the present individualism by looking more to the communal, by becoming a community of autonomous people who are in dialogue with one another. Who therefore listen to one another, who do not forcibly lay down their opinions, but lay it before a critical audience.

Autonomous and critical people developed themselves, and therefore have enjoyed a good education, and can sustain the freedom of knowledge.

We can then discover values, and come to an agreement with one another about virtues. Virtues, not ones borrowed from systems that have for centuries been seen as legitimate, but coming from dialogue with one another.  

8. Concrete conclusion

A lot of us have connections with a school and a number of associations. We can start there ourselves, we, the autonomous and critical citizens of Dutch society. 

Where everyone can start with, if one has not started already, is self-regulation. 
 

“The more politics sets boundaries and wishes to maintain them, the more futile its attempts appear to be. Let us gamble less on the government, and place our bets on the responsibility of the citizen,” says Gijs van Oenen, cited by Bodelier.

As example Van Oenen metions is a hash-café in Rotterdam, Nobody's Place:

”The café illustrates exactly how ‘grown-up citizens with a sense of responsibility’ operate in the gray area between the law and reality.”

“[…] The American idea of zero-tolerance. With it, violence is not really suppressed, but sent to the fringes of society. And they also pay a high price for this, in the form of overflowing prisons and police on every [street] corner. It is much more sensible to place trust on the self-regulating capability of the citizen.”

Gijs van Oenen, ‘The surplus of illegality: Open Podium Series’, May 2002, De Balie

Gijs van Oenen (ed.), Unregulated order: Toleration and intercourse with wild practice, Boom

Ralf Bodelier, ‘Away with the referee: Dutch policy of tolerance — between civilisation and failing politics’, May 20002, Filosofie Magazine 

S.W. Couwenberg, ‘Non-conformism must gain room’, 15 June 2002, NRC

Pascal Bruckner, Thou shalt be happy, Boom

The other side of this coin is: give room to non-conformism, and take the room to be non-conformist. This can only be better for dialogue. Denunciation of unimpressionable points of view do not belong in this.

"New life must be blown into dignity, obstinancy, passion, taste, style, talent, preference, and openness.”

It can do no harm to take the century-old saying as an instruction—thanks to Paul, and Dries van Agt unexpectedly as well, who says “For the motto of my life I have chosen the word of the Apostle:

‘Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good’ ”