Canons of Conservatism

1. Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.  Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.  A narrow rationality, what Coleridge calls the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs....Politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature.

2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems....

3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes.  The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation.  Society longs for leadership, and if a people destroy natural distinctions among men, presently Buonaparte fills the vacuum.

4. Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress.  Separate property from private possession, and liberty is erased.  

5. Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters and calculators."  Man must put control upon his will and appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason.  Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

6. Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.  Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal....
     

     ~Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (BN Publishing, 2008: 7-8)

Oakeshott on the Conservative Temperament

This is taken verbatim from the Maverick Philosopher:

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his "On Being Conservative" (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schoen, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.

[. . .]

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means,to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.

[. . .]

Read the rest.

Liberal and Conservative Use of Words

According to a study of the use of words on Twitter, liberals tend to swear more and use words such as "I" and "me," whereas conservatives tend to use "we" and "our" more.  Conservatives tend to mention "Nancy Pelosi," "Barack Obama," and "Harry Reid," whereas liberals are more likely to mention "Dick Cheney" (as in, "Dick Cheney is a like totally a dick").

Other examples we might add:

"Republicans are f#$@ing fascists!"
"I hate Bush!"
"I want free college!"
"I want free health care!"
"I want someone else to pay for it!"
"Give me free condoms!"
"What's in it for me?"

Firewood and Philosopher in a Small Town

I have spent several days the past couple weeks with the family cutting, splitting, and hauling firewood.  There is not much more satisfying, raw, physical labor if you ask me.  Getting the kids involved is now half of the joy.  The other half is being in God's country practicing basic survival skills necessary for the animal half of the rational animal.

As a youth, part of me enjoyed this same labor in which my kids are now participating.  But the animal part hated it, since it was a diversion from doing what boys do when not being made to work, grow up, and be a man.

Alive and well doing good work.  And to think that I'm pitied by academics like this!

I'm tempted to return the pity in kind.  But it's Saturday, and there is football on TV in this small town.  And I'm dog tired as they say.

The Media Plague

The Plague:

"Two cuts with the scalpel in the form of a cross and the glands discharged a mixture of pus and blood.  The patients bled, in agony.  Dark patches appeared on the belly and the legs, a lymph node would cease to suppurate, then it swelled up again. More often than not, the patient died, with an appalling smell about him."
"The press, which had had so much to say about the business of the [plague of infected] rats, fell silent.  This is because rats die in the street and people in their bedrooms; and newspapers are only concerned with the street."

Camus is a careful observer here.  The press is concerned with the streets and not with the bedroom, or more literally, with the soul.  The press is generally concerned with the social and political.  The solutions to problems thus tend to be structural.  Hence (for example) the ubiquitous claims of structural racism (which is rarely defined).

On the conservative understanding, the problems start with the soul.  The main root of societal dysfunction stems from individual choice.  No doubt, structural changes (e.g. changes in law) can have a positive effect on the soul and thus society more generally, but the structural cause is secondary and not primary.  The primary cause of societal ills starts in the bedroom.  And so the press tends to focus our attention on surface solutions (such as changes in laws.)

If one wants to change society for the better, one needs to read more than the news and politics. Moreover, one needs to do more than read.  One needs to embark on soul formation.

Understanding the Myopic Psychology of Liberals

Progressives hate traditional institutions for they are an impediment to swift and unrelenting "progress," and for many, power. But there is more, if Jonathan Haidt is correct.  The left cannot even understand the right, though the right can partially understand the left.  (More below). Given such a state of affairs, where at least one side cannot even understand the other, what civil, political alternative is there to keep us from tearing each other apart other than a return to federalism?

How to Understand Both Liberals and Conservatives (excerpt):

But Haidt’s second major discovery is far more consequential:  the concept of “the conservative advantage.” Based on painstaking cross-cultural social-psychological experimentation, Haidt establishes that the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives are not just different, they are dramatically unequal. The liberal moral matrix rests essentially entirely on the left-most foundations [i.e. Care/Harm, to a lesser extent Fairness/Cheating]; the conservative moral foundation—though slanted to the right—rests upon all six [value categories, i.e. Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating; Liberty/Oppression; Loyalty/Betrayal; Authority/Subversion; Sanctity/Degradation].

This is a stunning finding with enormous implications. The first is that conservatives can relate to the moral thinking of liberals, but the converse is not true at all. Haidt, who is liberal himself, elegantly explains how and why conservatives will view liberals as merely misguided while liberals tend to view conservatives as incomprehensible, insane, immoral, etc.

Another implication is that liberal prescriptions tend to be incredibly single-minded as compared to those of conservatives. Haidt uses the metaphor of a bee hive to illustrate. A liberal, finding a bee in the hive suffering from injustice, is motivated more or less exclusively by the desire to get justice for the bee. A conservative, being partially driven by the Care/Harm foundation, also desires to alleviate the injustice, but tries to find a solution that also contemplates the survival of the hive itself.

Liberals seek to create justice and equity; whether doing so harms core institutions simply doesn’t enter into their moral reasoning. Conservatives, in contrast to their typical caricature, do care about justice and fairness, they merely cherish vital institutions relatively more. If there’s a conflict, conservatives will err toward protecting institutions. [This is somewhat simplistic insofar as many conservatives will also think that destroying such institutions is unfair and unjust.]

Sadly, “The Righteous Mind” proves irrefutably that trying to explain to liberals that their solutions might undermine vital institutions is fruitless. They cannot and will not relate, or even concede that such concerns fall into the realm of moral reasoning. The good news is that a coalition can be built among the rest of us who understand that destroying the hive to benefit the lone bee results inescapably in suffering for all.

Read all of it.

Same-Sex Marriage: No Surprise Conservatives Lost

Philosopher Bill Vallicella has three excellent posts on the recent same-sex "marriage" issue.  I was going to put them all together in one post, but in case anyone wants to comment here or on Facebook I will separate all three.

Excerpt:

Four reasons off the top of my head.

1. Conservatives don't know how to argue and persuade.  In the main, conservatives are not at home on the plane of ideas and abstractions where one must do battle with leftist obfuscation.   Conservatives are often non-intellectual when they are not anti-intellectual.  I am talking about conservatives 'in the trenches' of ordinary life, politics, and the mass media, the ones with some clout; I am not referring to conservative intellectuals who are intellectual enough but whose influence is limited.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders, not scribblers.  They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction.  They know in their dumb inarticulate way that  there is something deeply wrong with same-sex 'marriage,' but they cannot explain what it is in a manner to command the respect of their opponents.  George W. Bush, a well-meaning, earnest fellow whose countenance puts me in mind of that of Alfred E. Neuman, could only get the length of such flat-footed asseverations as: "Marriage is between a man and a woman." 

[...]

2. Conservatives muddy the waters with religion, when the topic ought to be approached in a secular way. After all, we need to convince secularists and that will be impossible if we rely on religious traditions and doctrines.  You may believe that traditional marriage is an institution with divine sanction.  But that will cut no ice with an atheist!  Sorry to say something so bloody obvious, but it needs to be said.

[...]

3. Liberalism is Emotion-Driven.  Just as one cannot hope to persuade people using premises they adamantly reject, one cannot get through to people whose skulls are full of emotional mush.  To the emotion-driven, the obviously discriminatory exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage ends the discussion.  They won't stay to listen to an explanation as to why some forms of discrimination are justified. 

4. The Conservative Disadvantage.

Read it all.

The Root Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

From Keith-Burgess Jackson: 

Barry M. Goldwater (1909-1998) on Conservatism

I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives. These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.

The same judgment, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. “We liberals,” they say, “are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.” Take them a step further, and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the “malefactors of great wealth.”

Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material wellbeing. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel “progress.” In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.

(Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, ed. CC Goldwater, The James Madison Library in American Politics, ed. Sean Wilentz [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 (first published in 1960)], 1-3 [footnote omitted; italics in original])

Note from KBJ: This is a great book by a great (though, like all of us, imperfect) man. I'm ashamed to say that it took me 58 years to read it. Better late than never.

Are There More "Extreme" Conservatives Moving Further to the Right?

I get the impression from news outlets (the one I listen to most being NPR) that the answer to this question is most definitely, "yes."  It seems to me, however, that the answer is only "yes," on a subtle disambiguation of the word "change," one which most listeners or readers of the media will not recognize.  Thus, I suggest that such media outlets are either yet again displaying their blind ignorance (likely) or engaged in more leftist sophistry (possible, but less likely I'd wager).

Distinguo between a so-called Cambridge change and (for lack of a better term) a real change.  To a rough approximation a Cambridge change for some x occurs when x changes though nothing intrinsic to x changes.  Example: I am to the right of the building.  I run to the left of the building.  The building changes from being to the left of me to being to the right of me, though, of course, the building does nothing nor has anything done to its structure.  If the building has changed by my movement, it's undergone a mere Cambridge change.

If there are more and more conservatives moving further and further to the right, I suggest that is true, but only if we take "moving" to be expressing a Cambridge change.  As progressives (who by nature are progressing) move further to the left, conservatives (who by nature resist change) are "moving" further to the right.  But while progressives are trying to foist upon states that gay "marriage" be recognized and sanctified, that suicide and euthanasia are Constitutional rights, that there is a right to free day care and a duty to pay for it, that it's the job of the government and not parents to feed children during summer vacations, that we should all agree that our ladies should be sent to military front lines on pain of being sexist...conservatives are plodding along with their old beliefs and political positions, ones with which Democrats not more than a decade or two ago would have agreed.

A Conservative Primer

Every conservative and liberal should read this by University of Texas professor, Robert Koons.  It's an excellent summary of the conservative position.  So if you you think you're a conservative or think the position is evil or stupid and not for you, here's a good summary of conservative ideology:

Conservatism encompasses the accumulation of experience and wisdom over many generations, enlightened and guided by Divine Revelation. Much of the knowledge embodied in conservatism cannot be put into words but consists rather in certain dispositions and habits of the mind and heart. However, there are certain fundamental truths that have been articulated within this tradition with increasing clarity and certainty. To many Americans, these truths may seem mere truisms or platitudes ("self-evident", as Jefferson put it), yet it is vitally important to remind ourselves periodically of what we know, to ensure that this body of wisdom can be passed on without loss to a new generation.

Conservatism does not produce a mere laundry list of policy recommendations, nor does it represent the interests of this or that class or special interest. Nor is conservatism grounded in a reflexive reaction to change, nor in a nostalgic attachment to the past. Rather, it begins by rejecting what C. S. Lewis called "chronological bigotry": the foolish notion that contemporary thinkers have a monopoly on the truth, simply because they are alive today and not in an earlier, "less enlightened" era. Conservatives draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past to form a comprehensive and coherent view of the world, from which we derive certain principles essential to the promotion of the common good.

FOUR POSTULATES  
Every philosophy has certain basic propositions upon which everything else is based. These propositions are called postulates.