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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