A Conservative Narrative

In the Old Days men lived by unreflective tradition, The Way of the gods and the ancestors. There was a good reason for such rigid conservatism. Life was close to subsistence; errors were punishable by death.

But then came modernity, the French Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. No longer would mankind live by the superstition of tradition; now humans would advance by the light of reason. In Germany, land of poets and thinkers, they had another idea, and invented an expressive Romanticism of emotion and instinct. “Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns…” Well, it was a Frenchman who said that. But you get the idea.

Some people thought all this was overwrought. The cult of reason had led to an age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” complained Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Think about what was being lost, he warned.

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life... are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason... On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings... laws are to be supported only by their terrors... In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

OK, so Burke made a tiny mistake. It turned out that the gallows wouldn’t be at the end of every vista. It would the guillotine, the firing squad, the gas chamber, or just plain old famine. But how could he know? The guillotine wasn’t invented until 1791, one year after he published his Reflections.

It was also rather obtuse of Burke to suggest the plundering and piratical warrior lords of medieval and Reformation Europe had ever made “power gentle, and obedience liberal.” But he inseminated the modern conservative movement, a dream of a world founded on self-conscious tradition. It was not a mindless return to The Way but a practical search for a balance between reason and tradition, between hard experience and an optimistic faith.

The need for balance became obvious when the militant cults of reason and Romanticism combined in the 20th century into a murdering cocktail. Romantic revolutionaries, conjuring geniuses like Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, arose to implement the rational program of communism and realize the gallows vista—just as Burke had prophesied in the interregnum between the fall of the Bastille and the Reign of Terror.

How do you make power gentle, yet defend against enemies foreign and domestic? How do you harmonize interests, encouraging generosity , limiting greed, and dissipating the force of explosive secular creeds?

Conservative thinkers have returned again and again to these themes, and conservative practitioners have labored long and hard to bring them to reality. Yet, for the past century the conservative movement has mostly struggled against a totalizing liberal tide. Was there a problem? Then increased government power was the answer. Were economic interests in discord? Then differences between businessmen and workers could be exploited for political gain. Were people even mildly unresponsive to the will of the elite? Then laws must be passed to criminalize harmless delinquencies in smoking, drinking, and eating.

The conservative vision is simple: a small government and a large people, a government limited by an in-depth defense against power, and a people empowered to perform the worthy day-to-day tasks for a society that lives by service not power, and compassion not mechanism.

Conservative compassion is needed for good reason. The movement of the progressive societies is from status to contract, as Sir Henry Maine wrote. Yet contract is not enough. The best contract in the world cannot anticipate all the possible scenarios that may occur in a business relationship. Therefore something more than the dry words of a contract is needed. It was Shakespeare’s amateur lawyer Portia in The Merchant of Venice who taught us what this something more must be. Never mind your pound of flesh. Practice mercy, that falleth like the gentle rain from heaven.

But our liberal friends hanker after power. They believe in reactionary status, not progressive contract, in government compulsion, not voluntary association. As Rahm Emanuel has said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Not when you there’s government power to be had.

And mercy? Certainly not for Bush, Cheney, the “Christianists,” businessmen, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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