Conservatism On Paper

I’m almost ready to be a conservative. It’s just such a reasonable philosophy. All conservatism means is a preference for the familiar and tested over the untried and untested, an awareness of human fallibility, a belief that culture and tradition are valuable, and a skepticism of grand social engineering schemes. How could anyone, unless they were a hysterically irrational postmodern neo-Marxist identitarian idealogue, possibly consider these notions outrageous? I actually think this is a question worth dealing with, because it’s very easy for conservatism to seem appealing as an intellectual abstraction, and it’s only when we actually look at that abstraction’s real-world consequences that we see why conservatism is indefensible.

To show how reasonable conservatism seems, I’d like to have a look at two recent Wall Street Journal articles, each of which makes a case for the importance of conservative ideas. In “Holding On To The Good Things,” Richard Aldous reviews the new book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition by the philosopher Roger Scruton. And in “Jordan Peterson and Conservatism’s Rebirth,” Yoram Hazony, author of an upcoming book called (ugh) The Virtue of Nationalism, makes the case that Jordan Peterson’s work is valuable as a re-articulation of fundamental principles of conservative thought. By examining what Hazony and Aldous say about what conservatism is and why it’s good, and then comparing their arguments with The World That People Actually Live In, it’s possible to get a good sense for both why these ideas can be so tempting and why they’re actually harmful. (I may ultimately review Scruton’s full book, but in looking at articles in a major newspaper, I think we can get a good sense for the basics of the idea being defended and how it is popularly portrayed.) I’ve already talked far too much about Peterson’s “ideas” in previous articles, so what I want to do here is see how Aldous and Hazony interpret conservatism through their reading of Peterson and Scruton. I’m going to mash together quotes from all four men into a summary of what “conservatism” seems to mean to them.

According to Aldous, conservatism is about, as his title suggests, holding on to the things that are valuable in our tradition. It is about thoughtfully treasuring the intellectual and cultural assets our ancestors bequeathed us, because “reflection on our way of life [is the] real thing that we value [and the thing] that we wish to preserve from the philistines, the utilitarians, and the progressives, whose empty materialism threatens to turn us away from our true spiritual inheritance.” It carries “the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created, and the determination to hold on to those good things in the face of politically engineered change.” It rejects “the uncritical sense that we know best and that what has ‘gone out of date’ is on that account discredited.” It does not reject change, but “favors organic over politically engineered change” and has a certain “melancholy” and “sense of things slipping away.” It follows Edmund Burke’s view that “society is an association, between the dead, the living, and the unborn,” aspiring to “ideal order–a state of spiritual fulfillment, and an artistic tradition,” and seeing “custom and tradition” as “part of the accumulated social capital held in trust by each generation to be passed on to the next.” Its “ultimate foundation” is “friendship.” This about fully sums up Aldous’ take on Scruton’s conservatism. (Also, apparently Scruton claims that George Orwell, a lifelong socialist, belongs in the conservative tradition.)

Hazony’s summary of Petersonian conservatism is pretty similar. It’s a belief in “tried and tested ideas,” a set of “elevated arguments for the importance of order.” It involves “an appreciation of the weakness of the individual’s capacity for reason.” We have to “rediscover the values of our culture,” like “the flag of the nation,” and a respect for “tribe, religion, hearth, home, and country.” The Bible is the “foundational document of Western civilization” and the “ultimate source of our understanding of good and evil.” Of course, there’s also the particular Peterson stuff about hierarchy. The “hierarchical structure of society is hard-wired into human nature and therefore inevitable,” “young men and women tend to be healthy and productive only when they have found their place working their way up a hierarchy they respect,” and “the suffering involved in conforming to tradition may be worth it” because it turns you into a “properly-disciplined person” and a “well-forged tool.” (Nobody would dispute that reading 12 Rules for Life is a good way to become a tool.) Hierarchies are just because “high status often is a reward conferred for doing things that actually need to be done and done well,” and suffering is okay because “although life is suffering, sacrificing ourselves, as if on the cross, is pleasing to God.” Hazony says that this is “perfectly good Old Testament-style reasoning,” and he hopes it will fill the “gaping hollow” of modern intellectual discourse: “as the long-awaited revival of conservative political thought finally gets underway, there may be much more of this to come.” (There’s also some familiar stuff about how utopianism is killing Western civilization and the Holocaust and the gulags were caused by the death of God.)

I think I’ve done a fair job summarizing Aldous and Hazony, and I’d like to note a couple of things: First, almost none of what they say is supported with any actual argumentation or evidence, it’s just asserted. So we get remarks like “conservatism is about friendship,” or “suffering pleases God,” or “there is an ideal order,” but these are mostly just phrases. You might think that if these writers wanted people to believe what they’re saying, they might offer some reasons we should accept it. But they don’t. Of course, it could be that there are justifications in the underlying works, but I’ve read 12 Rules for Life and there is nothing there either to justify grandiose claims like human beings are only healthy when they are in a hierarchy or the structure of society is inevitable. A lot of times, conservative principles sound very reasonable, but if you examine them closely they often seem to be appealing to little more than “common sense.” Common sense, though, is often just “our pre-existing biases.” Is the Bible the source of all our morality? Well, possibly, but anthropologists would probably strongly disagree, and that sounds like a statement that requires testing rather than assertion. Is suffering healthy? Well, maybe, but you can’t just say it.

The second point here, though, is that these aren’t just unproved phrases, but vacuous unproved phrases. Everything depends on what we’re actually talking about, beneath these pleasant-sounding abstractions. Suffering can be useful. Okay, but what do we mean? Are we saying that it’s rewarding to do something hard? Or are we saying that unsafe working conditions are somehow better than safe working conditions? Hierarchy is good. Are we saying that it’s useful when meetings have facilitators, or are we saying that autocracy is acceptable? We should “preserve” things we have “inherited.” Are we talking about classical music or residential segregation?

When you actually try to apply these appealing conservative notions about “a preference for familiar things over new things” or “a skepticism of political change and a belief in order” actually mean, you realize just how unhelpful they are. Order seems good. I like order. I certainly don’t like disorder. Is that saying that mass incarceration is good? Is it telling us that police officers should be immune from prosecution? Is it saying anything at all? Sometimes I feel as if these ideas mostly sound reasonable if you’re sipping port in the armchair of an old gentleman’s club. Ah yes, yes, tradition and the hearth. Young people today don’t understand the importance of the hearth. But the hearth is a fireplace, and I am not sure what it tells us about campaign finance, health care, foreign policy, or school funding. Conservatives like Aldous and Hazony talk about The Rule of Law, or The Strength of Our Institutions, or Respecting Existing Practices, but avoid dealing with the on-the-ground human realities that the laws, institutions, and practices are creating. A black man in handcuffs is mauled by a police dog. A Honduran immigrant mother sobs uncontrollably as she is told her child will not be returned to her, and will be put up for adoption. A diabetic man dies while trying to raise enough money on GoFundMe to keep himself supplied with insulin for another month. This is what the consequences of “politics” are like in the real world, and it makes me angry when I hear phrases like “society is an association, between the dead, the living, and the unborn,” or “[there is an] ideal order–a state of spiritual fulfillment, and an artistic tradition,” used as a “political philosophy” that counsels against trying to do anything to prevent these easily-preventable crimes.

Notice something in these Wall Street Journal discussions of conservative philosophy: The authors seem to live on a totally different planet. For example, in the United States, 40,000 people per year kill themselves. What does conservative philosophy tell us about our policy response? Well, it’s skeptical of “politically engineered” change and believes in “organic” change? What’s that supposed to mean? Does it mean you shouldn’t fund new mental health services for the poor? What’s “organic” and what’s “engineered”? Was the Civil Rights Act organic change, or engineered change? When I think about political problems, I think about how there are refugees being held in cages, or how the Detroit fire department is underfunded, or how children can’t talk to their jailed parents because the parent can’t afford a phone call. I think about moms working multiple jobs and then getting evicted because they needed to pay for a car repair and couldn’t afford the rent. I think about transgender kids being bullied, or about women being harassed by their bosses or customers but having to smile because they can’t afford to lose the job. I think about Palestinian moms learning their children were just shot, or Yemeni wedding attendees watching the bride die before their eyes. And I think how detached from reality can you possibly get? Again, I know I dwell too much on Peterson (though he has been christened the most important conservative intellectual in the world!), but I return over and over again to the time he dismissed the Civil Rights / Vietnam War protesters as an angry rabble holding “paper on sticks.” I feel like exponents of this worldview have almost no understanding of the world they live in or what it’s like for people who are different from themselves.

Yes, I’m plenty critical of out-of-touch academic leftists, too, and I realize that a page of Althusser can be just as cloudy and irrelevant as a page of Roger Scruton. Conservative writing can actually be a model of clarity compared with some of the worst leftist examples. But the failure of empathy and self-awareness is remarkable. In my cynical moments, I suspect that all conservative philosophy is just an attempt to come up with pleasant-sounding rationalizations for not caring about what happens to other people, and not lifting a finger to help them. How else to explain the Republican Party’s total failure to oppose Donald Trump’s most inhumane policies? I mean, I, too, am skeptical of hasty and irrational political changes. I, too, like traditions (like Mardi Gras!) and don’t like it when they’re eroded. (Although since the Free Market, with its “creative destruction,” is a more effective weapon against traditional culture than any other system ever devised, I’m not sure why the conservatives don’t spend all of their time agitating against capitalism.) But I also think words should have meaning, and I know that a morally decent human being can’t live in a world of highfalutin abstractions when there are actual people living actual lives who are being affected by Republican Party policies. The unwillingness to do anything, in the name of “pragmatic caution” and “skepticism of utopian engineering projects,” is not a healthy attachment to our intellectual inheritance, but a justification for watching other people suffer and refusing to care. After all, suffering is pleasing to God.

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