On Conservatism

My political beliefs can be described as traditionalist or conservative. For a good time I toyed with libertarianism, but the country’s experience with my style of libertarianism has not gone well. (I don’t want to be cryptic: I used to believe that if it didn’t interfere with my liberty, it should be allowed. Drugs, of course, come to mind. The states who have liberalized their drug laws are having some problems that have caused me to change my mind. I have also changed my mind on the drinking age. It should not again be lowered to 18, but instead should be raised to 22 or 23, when frontal lobe development is complete.) 

I will use the term “conservative” because people are familiar with that term. However, there is very little difference in my mind between “conservative” and “traditional”.  We seek to conserve the worthy traditions. 

I was born into a conservative family in a conservative southern state. Southern conservatives tend to be “strict constructionists” when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution. The term today has been superseded by the term “Originalism”. It means, simply, that the document means what it says. Words have meanings that can be divined, and the Constitution should be interpreted as the Founding Fathers meant it to be interpreted, using the meanings of the words in the document as understood at the time of the founding. And that document is a profoundly conservative one.

There was a thread running through the southern conservative impulse, and that thread was tradition. The Constitution is probably best described as a codification of tradition, primarily that of the English Common Law, but with additions from other legal traditions. And what are some of those traditions? One is the belief that rights are not granted to a people by its government, but that these rights adhere to the people prior to the organization of a government. The Founding Fathers believed that these rights were granted by God, and not by man. This accounts for some of the language found in the Constitution. The second amendment to that text does not grant the right to keep and bear arms: it assumes that the right to keep and bear arms preceded the institution of the United States government. That is why it tells us that the right cannot “be infringed”: the right already existed; and the government cannot interfere with that right.

I have mentioned the English Common Law as a tradition, but the really important traditions precede even the English Common Law. These traditions are things we have learned, sometimes painfully, over the centuries. Why, for example, do we have the tradition of monogamous marriages? Because it is the model that works best for rearing children. The family unit, though much maligned and observed primarily in the breach these days, is the building block of a liberal society. A few hundred, if not thousand, years teach us this. We may be bright and thoroughly modern, but are we brighter than generations of those who came before us? Is our modernism often a cover for arrogance, the belief that we know better than the generations who have given us these traditions?

What is conservatism? What do I believe? My formal belief system has evolved over time, but began with a book by Senator Jesse Helms. I believe it was written for his re-election bid in 1978 or so, but for the first time, it gave me a framework for thinking about politics. It had the same effect on me that Senator Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative” had on the generation just ahead of me. From these two texts I eventually found Dr. Russell Kirk, and he really finalized my idea of conservatism. Thus we will go straight to Dr. Kirk, the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement.

Kirk published his doctoral dissertation (St. Andrews, Scotland, 1953) as The Conservative Mind. It is still in print, as far as I know. In that work, he discussed the six canons of conservative thought. Over time, he reworked these six canons, eventually growing them to a total of ten principles. What follows is from his book, The Politics of Prudence, published in 1993, one year before his death. He notes that as conservatism is neither a religion nor an ideology, but a body of opinion shared by people who call themselves conservatives, not all the principles may apply to everyone with conservative leanings. Conservatism is simply a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. Kirk believed, however, that most conservatives would subscribe to most of the principles that follow.

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. [H]uman nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. The word order signifies harmony. [My note: Here I am paraphrasing Kirk.  It binds the two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. This is from Plato, twenty-five centuries ago.] A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society - whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society - no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be. 

2. The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably, the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention . . . that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generations to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual . . . Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice . . . The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted . . . But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

3. Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription - that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity - including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

4. Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.  Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probably long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity . . . As  John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries . . . Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

5. Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality. [My note: The only place on Earth where true equality exists - people have the same housing, eat the same meals, wear the same clothes, get paid the same for their work - is prison. Equality and freedom are diametrically opposed to one another.]

6. Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults . . . Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created . . . To seek for utopia is to end in disaster . . . All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose . . . The idealogues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century into a terrestrial hell.

7. Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth . . . [private property] has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture . . . To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor . . . to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity . . . to have something that is really one’s own - these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

8. Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private association: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction - why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity. For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed.

9. The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long . . . To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy . . . The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise . . . In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands . . . Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite - these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty. [My note: This is part of the reason why Sir Henry Maine described the Constitution as one of the most successful conservative devices in all history.]

10. The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity, without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate. Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanency and the claims of Progression . . . Change is essential to the body social . . . A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism.

So that is the intellectual approach to the topic of conservatism. Dr. Kirk is one of my favorite authors on the subject. If you are ready for an intellectual feast, try his Roots of American Order, originally published in the 1970s, I think. He traces the development of American governance to five cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, London, and Philadelphia. It is a difficult read, but worth the effort.

And I find that I am in agreement with Dr. Kirk. Although we conservatives do not have a set of commandments or the equivalent of 95 theses, most conservatives you speak with will agree in large measure with Dr. Kirk’s description.