What is Conservatism? Part III
What is Conservatism? Part II
What is Conservatism? Part I
Conservatism in the tradition of Burke, Johnson, Coleridge, and Newman is the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin, employed as an adjective of sentiment. Any general principle should always be tempered by experience, by prudence. And as circumstances vary, the products of human organization should observe its own traditions and historical experience, which take precedence over principals drawn up as a priori notions divorced from history and immediate necessities. A true and valuable principle is an idea derived from knowledge of human nature and of the past. These are necessary for the statesman, but they must be applied discreetly and with unceasing caution. Conservatives must remain restrained, chastened by the principle of imperfectability. To aim for utopia in the immovable face of imperfect nature and social order is to end in disaster or boredom. Those who live in tradition, as a poet tends to do, realize that a culture cannot long survive if starved from previous norms.
The problems of a culture or society are always existing. And at root, they are moral problems. Policies to address them tend to matter less than the quantity and quality of the population; and life is overwhelmed by the choices of trade-offs, particularly policy trade-offs. There is no final solution because sin is always present. A central concern of conservatism is the maintaining of social order, so that citizens may build frameworks in which they can live a good life. And political order must be built on an underlying reality, such as racial kinship (that is, extended, partly inbred families) or religion – two of the most powerful currents of history. An acceptable framework shares in the basic beliefs about values, traditions, and the human condition. And family ties last the longest and endure the farthest.
Thus stable governance is based on shared interests, where people have a palpable, concrete link to one another. This fosters cooperation and community, and is in constant danger by attractive yet dangerously abstract calls for universalism and human rights. Conservatism understands that politics works with humanity as it is, and as it behaves across time and environment, not as we might wish for it to be. Membership in the group often matters more than individuality, and this seems to be deeply engrained in human nature. Ours is a tribal species. There is no abstract, utopian City of God while humans remain on earth: smaller, local goods still fulfill the religious obligation to love mankind, as they are concrete and deeply important to family and local community. Order and prosperity are the result of long historical processes and long developed cultural and social values. These may disappear with new generations and with the unintended consequences of policy. Values are neither born nor remade in short order. Conservatives value order, and even an unjust order, to chaos. This notion does not benefit the status quo, as Burke the constant advocate for reform shows. But it does mean that the total upheaval of the temporal order is dangerously utopian and irresponsible.
The language Burke created for elaborating what came to be knows as the conservative sentiments was infused with contingency, locality, imagination, and the transcendent. When a generation ceases to link spiritually with another, he thought, civilization shrivels. The infection of modern social confusion onto the public consciousness is a consequence of confounding the sphere of private morality with the sphere of public activity. He argued that generational prejudice and prescription, due to their great age, are delicate growths, slow to rise, easy to injure, hardly possible to resuscitate. The abstract metaphysician and fanatic reformer, intending to cleanse society, may find he has scrubbed it clean away. His language is of a mood, cautious and respectful of human limitations. This “true conservatism” – Burke’s conservatism – is hostile to any hint of deification of the free market and individualism, which may give way to egotism in the placement of people as things.
Conservatism is an anti-ideological community of spirit set against the solitude and emptiness of rational man standing alone. The “canons of conservatism” are among Russell Kirk’s most well known pieces of writing; these were an attempt to codify a philosophic foundation for the conservative sentiments:
(1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. “Every Tory is a realist,” says Keith Feiling: “he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man’s philosophy cannot plumb or fathom.” True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. (2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. (3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.” With reason, conservatives often have been called “the party of order.” If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. (4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic leveling, they maintain, is not economic progress. (5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power. (6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.
Frameworks aimed at hindering evil, the product of original sin, are vulnerable to significant abuse by those who seek power. Conservatives must know and be concerned with the tragic historical record of the horrendous actions taken so as to “cleanse” and “purify” humanity. The aim is not to stop hindering evil, but to learn from history, to respect it, and to improve the current framework, primarily through families and the local community. There is no acceptable alternative to doing what a person may do so as to hinder evil – after recognition of limitations and a resistance to the glittering attractions of ego-boosting abstract sentimentality. Conservatism combines a non-ideological approach to problem solving, fidelity to the worthy and inherited values, and realism about the difficulty of improving the human condition.
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“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ~John Kenneth Galbraith
Thoughtful post…political conservatism is not ideology, but a politics that is rooted in unchangeable human nature and as you note might be called “the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin”.
I recently came across this quote from Fr. Schall which I think fits nicely with your post:
“Thus, if there is an abiding nature of man, such as that found in the Christian tradition, then all men will expect a much more finite and confined goal to politics which will restore it to tasks that are accomplishable in this world. The removal of all evil, greed suffering, and disorder is not one such goal. The gradual, careful, imperfect improvement of our condition, through a realistic awareness of sin and envy and greed together with an awareness of the great capacities of reason and technique and experience, is a generally feasible goal. And yet, this is to be always understood in the context of the human will, of the idea that things can always get worse.”"
Mr. Galbraith said several silly and false things about the intellectual foundations of conservatism, including that it could never rise to prominence. See the excellent George Nash:
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
Fidelity to the past; skepticism;sloth disguised as a recognition of human finitude; and a preference for order over justice: all these are characteristically conservative, all these are the fruit of despair. Conservatism is despair.
Sloth disguised as a recognition of human finitude? What do you mean? A preference for order over justice? Where do you get that? How is fidelity to the past a fruit of despair? Or the recognition of human finitude, for that matter?
But Catholics don’t call this the “vale of tears” for nothing. Our ultimate hope and destiny is not in this world. This is not despair, this is orthodox Christian hope.
Zach
Careful, “Our ultimate hope and destiny is not in this world” is not exactly right. This world is a part of eternity and is to be part of our eternal destiny.
Henry,
OK, this world, yes, but not in its present form.
I was trying to say our eternal destiny is either in Heaven or Hell.
It is generally recognized by social scientists across the ideological spectrum that the growth of capitalism has been the single most powerful force in undermining local, organic, contingent relationships and replacing them with the abstract, universal, mechanistic relationships as determined by the “market”. Now this can be a good thing or a bad thing, but it would seem by the lights of this (admittedly breezy) post, then, that conservatism’s chief enemy over the past few centuries has been the development of just this kind of market mentality, aided and abetted, of course, by the nation-states that first protected and then “developed” their own markets.
wj,
Capitalism and libertarianism are of the Right, in uneasy alliance with my biases of conservatism, given their common enemies – statism and collectivism / government-sponsored “meaning” (another uneasy alliance might – in some instances – be with the military, although Kirk, for example, wrote some pretty heavy words against the military and the draft).
This is different from conservatism since its founder, Edmund Burke, however. If that would stand alone, away from the trade-offs of everyday life, then industralization and Enlightenment-based liberalism are certainly its enemies.
Thanks for the response–though, to be honest, I am having a difficult time understanding it.
I take you to be saying, in part, that your vision of conservatism and “capitalism and libertarianism” share the common enemies of “statism and collectivism,” but that–here as in so many other instances–the enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. I certainly agree with this.
I do think that a cogent argument could be made, however, that the opposition between capitalism and statism is a false one, since–as a matter of historical fact– every capitalist society depended for its initial growth and success initially upon the state protection and control of its major industries. Once these industries compiled a sufficient amount of capital from such protection, then and only then could they rely upon the mechanisms of the “market” to ensure future growth.
I also think, however,–and here I’m sure we disagree–that Burke is not so acute an analyst of the Enlightenment as people often make him out to be, and that his thought often shares certain assumptions of Enlightenment discourse–the all too rigid distinction between Tradition (often construed in Burke (as in Coleridge) as a kind of organic phenomenon) and Reason–for example, that muddle rather than clarify matters.
as a matter of historical fact– every capitalist society depended for its initial growth and success initially upon the state protection and control of its major industries.
What were the major industries protected and controlled by the government of Hong Kong?
Hong Kong developed as it did because its laws and infrastructure were controlled by already existent British banking and finance interests. It was run, after all, as a mercantile colony. Also, the state owns all the land. For more on this see
Ming K Chan, “The Legacy of the British Administration of Hong Kong: A View from Hong Kong,” pp. 567-582, The China Quarterly, no. 151
and Robert Wade, Governing the Market (330 ff.) who concludes:
Not only is the economy [of Hong Kong] managed from outside the formal institutions of government by the informal coalition of peak private economic organisations, but government itself also has available some unusual instruments for influencing industrial activity. It owns all the land. . . It controls rents in part of the public housing market and supplies subsidised public housing to roughly half the population, thereby helping to keep down the cost of labour. And its ability to increase or decrease the flow of immigrants from China also gives it a way of affecting labour costs.”
How did Hong Kong and Singapore each rise economically in such a spectacular fashion? It can’t be all on the “system” or the “history” or the “infrastructure”, because each had its own model, and they were dramatically different. But what they shared and share in common is a population that behaves well and – by any measure – has an average population of high cognitive function. This was addressed somewhat in Part II.
I do think that a cogent argument could be made, however, that the opposition between capitalism and statism is a false one, since–as a matter of historical fact– every capitalist society depended for its initial growth and success initially upon the state protection and control of its major industries.
Big business, big labor, and government have been in bed together before (FDR). And capitalists (an awkward Marxist term, alas, but one we are stuck with) have been and are very happy to use the instruments of the state for their own competative advantage. Kirk and Viereck and many others were adamently opposed to this, but by the rise of the Soviet Union, there was seen to be a greater threat, collectivism, and Meyer’s (and Buckley’s) ideas of “fusionism” took off. It’s an uneasy alliance (traditionalism and non-localist market-orientations) that is cracking now (Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher are good to read on this point).
As for Burke, we might agree he was a product of the Enlightenment….his criticism was focused on the excesses of capital R Reason, divorced from more ancient wisdoms – not so much its existence.