A chain of Google searches, initiated, as such journeys so often are, by distantly related curiosities, led me to the following article at www.theamericanview.com, by Claes G. Ryn.
Read carefully, this article offers a good definition of American Conservatism (and exposes the uselessness of the label). Like many conservative articles/blogs these days, this one primarily defines conservatism by pointing out the flaws and failings of the “neo-con” movement (started, depending on who you talk to, during the Reagan or W. Bush administrations–the above article picks Reagan as the culprit), and also, more interestingly, by contrasting Burke (the accepted godfather of the Anglo/American/individualist/liberal conservative movement) and Locke. This method of definition is not effective. Knowing that something is not a few things, does not explain what something is, unless one lives in a world of very few variables. Unlike those many articles, however, in this one Mr. Ryn does provide enough to come up with a workable starting definition:
“As the ideology of freedom wholly misunderstands the origins of freedom, it comes as no surprise to a Burkean conservative that such ideas should produce disastrous practical consequences. Real freedom grows out of historically evolved character traits and institutions. It cannot strike roots in inhospitable soil. This is as true in the market place as in politics. You want maximum economic freedom? Then make sure that there is morality and culture that foster a maximum of individual responsibility. In an economy manned increasingly by gamblers and crooks and dominated by greed and short-sightedness the line between honesty and crime dissolves, and the misuse of economic freedom invites the imposition of external controls.”
The quoted paragraph essentially defines Conservatism as simply the recognition that values are born of cultural history, and they are not/can not be intentionally created where they do not exist by historical accident. That is, according to the article, “Conservatives” recognize this truth, and “Neo-cons,” and “Progressives,” believe that human kind has some sort of true nature that is revealed by dismantling unnatural institutions, and/or imposing institutions that encourage human nature (whatever that may be). A couple of paragraphs contrasting Burke and Locke illustrate this point well:
“Unlike Burke, Locke has little or no awareness of what ordered liberty owes to history. He explains the existence of freedom in the state of nature by conveniently reading back into that state personality traits and ideas that could have evolved only in an advanced society. Locke is a liberal dreamer, an ideologue. He takes his bearings not from actual, historical experience but from purely hypothetical theorizing, naive theorizing at that. His ideas could be interpreted more charitably, but a fondness for Locke is not indicative of conservative leanings.
Locke has been a major source for the idea that freedom will flourish if only external impediments to it are removed. Just get rid of bad government! As combined with American nationalistic conceit, this kind of romantic dreaming formed what I call the new Jacobinism. This ideology assigned to America the task of ushering in freedom and democracy everywhere. In the words of one conservative hero: “The American dream lives—not only in the hearts and minds of our own countrymen but in the hearts and minds of millions of the world’s people in both free and oppressed societies who look to us for leadership.” “Human freedom is on the march.” The ideology of freedom does not ask whether the preconditions for freedom are present in a society. It simply assumes that freedom will blossom once the dictators have been kicked out. This kind of utopianism used to be a monopoly of the left. In recent decades it has been the stock-in-trade of putative “conservatives.””
Mr. Ryn then points out that the last quote is from President Ronald Reagan, and condemns his speeches as “filled with the romantic rhetoric of freedom” and his admirers as people whose “wishful thinking and lack of intellectual discernment made them swallow the sentimental dreaming.”
(An aside: a term that we can use to describe “Conservatives,” as understood by Mr. Ryn, is “cultural relativists.” Cultural relativism is distinguishable from “moral relativism.” The distinction is well worth exploring, perhaps even necessary in a broader discussion, but I don’t think it is necessary to do so now. That will be for another post.)
Earlier in the article, Mr. Ryn talks of perhaps another “lack of intellectual discernment.” He says:
“To understand the predicament of the so-called conservative movement, it is important to realize that it originated as a largely political alliance. It was cobbled together out of diverse intellectual currents. Some of these were philosophically remote from each other, but could agree on a limited range of political objectives, particularly opposing communism and defending limited government. But not even those objectives were understood in the same way by all. With the fall of communism the lack of intellectual coherence became more glaring than ever.”
Basically, the article is making the claim that the threat of Communism kept Conservatives together, and, even though Reagan was a “wishful thinker,” “[o]peration global freedom was constrained in Reagan’s case by the Cold War.” If I understand him correctly, what he means is that the Soviet Union, and other Communists limited the machinations of Reagan and his cohorts. Essentially, the Communists were so prevalent and powerful that they provided a world with very few variables, and a negative definition (a definition of the type discussed at the beginning of this post), was sufficient.
I don’t want to comment on this interpretation of recent history. It is not what interests me here. Rather, what interests me are the problems inherent in a recognition of cultural history in a liberal, individualistic society. We can understand liberal individualism as “not Communism” (as apparently the Reagan era Conservatives did). Neither are Monarchy, or Anarchy (however defined), Liberalism. In order to understand what liberal individualism is we have to look at its history. I think Mr. Ryn would agree with that.
(The story of liberal thought is best told in Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Any understanding of history requires quite a lot of study, and I suggest reading the entirety of this work, because, amongst other reasons, I can not repeat it here. However, understanding what liberalism is is not the purpose of this post.)
If we are to understand liberal thought, we must trace the history of liberal thinkers. The first person to set down in writing, and therefore institutionalize, what would come to be known as liberal philosophy, was John Locke. Though Locke’s application of liberal philosophy to society may have been different than Burke’s, Locke’s epistemology, his conception of human action, is the foundation of all liberal moral value. Conservatives can claim that one must be British (or strongly influenced by the English), as Burke did, to be liberal. The exact definition of what constitutes “English” in this case is pretty hard to grasp. One can say that the primary reason that one must be English is that it is England’s history that birthed the philosophy. This history includes Shakespeare, the King James Bible (which is not to say Christianity, but rather an English translation/reconstruction of Christianity), and Queen Elizabeth, amongst others. The philosophy was defined and promoted by English writers, starting with Locke. To use Mr. Ryn’s language, Locke is a liberal institution, he is part of the hospitable soil from which liberalism grows. The claim that Conservatism both recognizes this history, and rejects the principles of its primary member, is hard for me to comprehend. Locke, and Progressives, as products of liberal history, are as liberal as Conservatives. They must be, as creators/products of the same history.
The Burkian argument basically goes like this: There are traditions or institutions that promote certain values (for example God, Family and Republic, as espoused by The American View), and ignoring those institutions will cause the destruction of liberal society. However, a primary tenet of Liberalism, is “freedom of choice.” That is, in a liberal society, people are allowed, or even encouraged, to choose what they believe. This provides a slippery slope (one of many; “ordered liberty” is another significant example) for any liberal, Conservative or Progressive. If, as Ryn says, Conservatism “was cobbled together out of diverse intellectual currents . . . philosophically remote from each other,” then we can assume that Conservatives could find themselves at different points along the slippery slope. Much as Mr. Ryn compares Neo-cons to Progressives as a whole, one could, I believe, define any diverse number of “conservatives” and “progressives” as identical depending on where one draws/conceives of the line(s) of demarcation. At some point one has to decide exactly what “morality and culture” is necessary for liberal society to exist. Mr. Ryn describes this slippery slope thusly: “[h]uman nature being torn between higher and lower potentialities, the latter have to be reined in. Without this self-restraint, no freedom. To the extent that order does not come from within, it has to be imposed externally. This was the moral-spiritual ethos of the American constitutional republic.” Progressives do this as much as Conservatives do. There is no inherent difference.
I don’t think he, or most people in general (conservative or progressive), recognize these inconsistencies. They are content to define their views as against the views of others. The contradictions and inconsistencies were always there, but they were only revealed to contemporary Conservatives (for instance) when the imagined threat of Communism became more difficult to imagine.
The confusion in this discourse between “Conservative” and “Progressive” and whatever else, is well illustrated in this recent article by well known Libertarian David Boaz. The article discusses how many Conservatives complain about deteriorating freedoms. According to Mr. Boaz, however, when one looks at the history of law in the United States, it is hard to argue that freedoms as a whole have deteriorated. Rather, just the opposite has occurred, at least in sum. Libertarians should arguably be happy, therefore, with the progress this country has made (even if imperfect, and filled with inconsistency). The United States has “progressed” towards, that is to say it has imposed on itself, increased “freedom” in many ways, contrary to the wishes/proclivities/traditions of many of its members.
In politics and law, Conservatives are no less “progressive” than Progressives. At the very least, Conservatism, as I have defined it here (using Mr. Ryn’s work as a foundation), does not provide adequate motivation for any sort 0f action. Recognizing an empirical fact does not tell you what to do about it. “Conservative” and “Progressive,” as labels of political choice/action, are just political fiction, useful only to politicians wishing to capitalize on emotional sentiment (the good ol’ days, or the bad ol’ days, depending), or to gain political advantage by siding with more well established members of the label (“the enemy of my enemy will at least help me out a little,” so to speak, as I think Libertarians try to do when they call themselves Conservative). To suggest that a political idea or a moral value is one or the other creates division where there may be none at all (for example, there is much common ground between contemporary Democrats and Libertarians).
One must define what one believes first, and then contrast it with other beliefs. One will always end up disappointed with ones allies if the alliance is understood by what one is not. The enemy of my enemy may also be my enemy. I think that is the point Mr. Ryn is making, but in sticking to the Conservative label he is doing nothing more than excluding Neo-cons from it, and perpetuating the problem.
It seems Ryn attributes to our constitutional heroes a sensitivity to the inconsistencies between Burke and Locke that could only really be articulated after the fact. I would certainly agree that a particular set of principles/form of government can’t take just take root any old place, and the failure to recognize this fact often results in disastrous foreign policy moves. But Ryn, like other groups tagged “conservative,” seems to base his ideas about what we should do now on his idea of what the founding fathers were “really saying.” (For example, I grew up attending Christian schools where I was taught that America was founded as a Christian nation). As you suggest, “progressives” are engaged in very much of the same type of historicist reasoning.
As the Boaz article suggests, slavery seems like the gigantic wildcard – though it obviously isn’t the only example of an institutional violation of freedom, it is the most glaring. The historicist view either focuses on the fact that America had from the very first advanced its professed principles farther than any other place on the planet and conveniently neglects the contradictions, or it focuses on the nation’s shortcomings at the expense of recognizing what was undoubtedly a monumental achievement. History is a whole lot messier than most ideologues would have us believe. In my own commentary on the health care debate, (http://www.mindofmodernity.com/health-care-reform-and-impossible-american-ideals) I use Greenfeld’s American chapter from ‘Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity’ to look at the contradictions between the values of liberty and equality. As you point out, principles and values don’t belong to one political group or another. In fact, the recognition that these principles have potentially contradictory interpretations and confounding effects calls everyone involved to drop the rhetoric and think about the particular twists and turns that have led us to where we are so we can make the necessarily subtle moves to improve upon the past.