Anglo-American conservatism, founded by Burke, Johnson, Coleridge, and Newman, is an anti-utopian, anti-ideological sentiment favoring cautious reform. Eliot’s observation that there is no such thing as a gained cause because there is no such thing as a lost cause illuminates other conservative insights: political problems are, at root, moral problems; specific policies tend to matter less than the quantity and quality of the population; and life is overwhelmed by the choices of trade-offs. The Enlightenment and the monumental crisis provoked by the horrors of the Great War has given us a conservatism in constant civil war: an efficient modernism and cash-nexus selfishness, dominated by the cognitively gifted; and a more inefficient medievalism, dominated by those who yearn for a more organic, local existence removed from centralization, militarism, and cultural decay.
It is the second generalization which is more authentically conservative, according to Russell Kirk, the intellectual grandfather of American conservatism and popularizer of Edmund Burke. The order which holds all things in place is made for us, and we for it. Endeavors to ascertain and conform to its eternal nature are the most accessible source of the “permanent things” which endure and guide in any circumstance. Followers of the “Saint of Rationalism,” as Gladstone described Mill, are alienated from tradition, from flesh, from soil, from spirit.
The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives laws. Absolute tolerance is the end of society because its inhabitants have, essentially, become indifferent to one another within a community. What follows is the “inverted religion” of ideology. A “democracy of the dead,” by contrast, recognizes the judgments of those who have proceeded as well as the opinions of those in the moment. This kind of order is founded upon the practical experience of humans over many centuries, and upon the judgments of vision and intellect of predecessors. Against this, Kirk wrote, is an age of various ideologies – fanatic political creeds, advanced by violence. By definition, “ideology” means servitude to political dogmas, abstract ideas not founded upon historical experience. No order, abstract or otherwise, is perfect because humans are imperfect. A people can never make their way to utopia. Even so, the roots of an order can be made healthier; they can be reinvigorated and improved. Similar to Burke’s calls for measured reform, Kirk believed that permanence and progression could be complimentary, but only if the foundation is solid, and only if the foundation is continuously renewed. The suitable past of generational prejudice and prudence is fragile.
The traditions organically passed forward in time partake of societal invention naturally. Through these, in no small measure, humans may participate in the natural rights. An embrace of feeling, affection, and sentiment is an appreciation for human dynamism and continuation in all its messiness. Kirk abhorred a more rationalist mode of thought writ large, such as one capable of supporting giant public-works policies prepared by leaders for their people (he had in mind Franklin Roosevelt), complete with military rhetoric and organization and stimulating public commitment to national service in the emergency. He recognized that ideology was a motivation for government action (in troubled times especially). He saw these to be falsely founded upon claims of a systematic uncovering of certain “facts” of human nature. And these were not the unique or sole properties of early Enlightenment era liberalism. Socialism could assert itself to be a truer adaptation than liberalism to the equality of humanity. Marxist revolutionaries understood themselves as upholding a “natural science” of the movements of human history. These movements, of the “right” or of the “left,” were preceded by a rationalist reduction of actual human beings to an ideological construction of an abstract human nature. This construct was then brought together, disastrously from Kirk’s perspective, with various institutions deemed appropriate to the abstraction. He responded with the claim that conservatism, as the negation of ideology, was a genuine and necessary alternative to the modern age. People, he taught, were not things. They could not be ordered as things could be ordered.
Of noteworthy absence in Kirk’s writings, and in the canons that serve as a useful summation, is an expression of market values. He saw no contradiction in a loathing of both socialism and of the free market money economy that complimented mass culture, disloyalty to place, and suburbanization. Conservatives after Kirk tended to disagree with him about the social consequences of unconstrained markets. (To generalize, the older generation viewed the market as an atomizing force of community; the newer as a path to prosperity and the building of newer, better communities.) An objective moral order is, for Kirk, above the fluxes of history. That all societies are grounded in such orders, and that every society does and ought to adhere to fundamental truths, was a view in strong opposition to liberal notions of an open society made freer by market forces. Necessary to perceive and generalize about the moral order, Kirk thought, was the “moral imagination.” Coined by Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France, it refers to the intuitive power to perceive ethical truths and abiding law in the midst of chaotic experience. This imagination, and not calculating reason, is what separates man from beasts.
Further, the principle conflict of the modern age was, according to Kirk, not between competing programs for the material betterment of mankind, but between opposing types of imagination. Thus opposition to utilitarian market values would be due to a failure to acknowledge the existence of an ethical standard beyond mere self-interest. Industrialization and urbanization, potent expressions of the market economy, were a primary cause for the decline of tradition. He concluded the impulse to radical, quick change comes largely from cities, as people are uprooted and detached from community and the fellowship of those with whom they share bonds of kinship and common community experience. Conservatism best prospers in smaller, more stable, places where humans are slow to break the ways that bind them to past generations. The moral imagination of a conservative aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.
In its fidelity to the past, at the core of Kirk’s thought was an apprehension about rootlessness. Following Burke, he thought a system of government organized for the living only disallows generations to link together. Indeed, such a partnership is necessary to caution against the fancies of the moment. The higher order, a shelter for freedom and justice, declares the intrinsic dignity of man, not the contracts of secular authorities. This moral order works upon the various political orders, as religious concepts of justice, charity, community, and duty transform a society without the abrupt alteration of governmental framework. It is, therefore, loyalty to persons as opposed to allegiance to the nexus of economic and political payments that constitute the good society.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In