Confession about conservatism

I guess I should confess that I have a sort of hidden agenda in my many previous comments on conservatism.  People have been trying to define conservatism in terms of ideas. I don’t think you can do that.  As Feiling points out, the ideas vary so much from era to era.  Like many past and present observers of conservatism, I think that you can only define conservatism psychologically.  I do think that a conservative psychology tends to lead to preference for individual liberty rather regularly but I don’t think that such a preference DEFINES what a conservative is.  There are many overlapping and interlocking accounts of conservative psychology but the extract from Joseph Sobran below should give you an idea of what I (with many others) am talking about:

“More and more I find myself thinking that a conservative is someone who regards this world with a basic affection, and wants to appreciate it as it is before he goes on to the always necessary work of making some rearrangements. Richard Weaver says we have no right to reform the world unless we cherish some aspects of it; and that is the attitude of many of the best conservative thinkers. Burke says that a constitution ought to be the subject of enjoyment rather than altercation. (I wish the American Civil Liberties Union would take his words to heart.)

I find a certain music in conservative writing that I never find in that of liberals. Michael Oakeshott speaks of “affection,” “attachment,” “familiarity,” “happiness”; and my point is not the iname one that these are very nice things, but that Oakeshott thinks of them as considerations pertinent to political thinking. He knows what normal life is, what normal activities are, and his first thought is that politics should not disturb them….

“He who is unaware of his ignorance,” writes Richard Whately, “will only be misled by his knowledge.” And that is the trouble with the liberal, the socialist, the Communist, and a dozen other species of political cranks who have achieved respectability in our time: they disregard so much of what is constant and latent in life. They fail to notice; they fail to appreciate.

For some reason, we have allowed the malcontent to assume moral prestige. We praise as “ideals” what are nothing more than fantasies—a world of perpetual peace, brotherhood, justice, or any other will-o’-the-wisp that has lured men toward the Gulag.  The malcontent can be spotted in his little habits of speech: He calls language and nationality “barriers” when the conservative, more appreciatively, recognizes them as cohesives that make social life possible. He damns as “apathy” an ordinary indifference to politics that may really be a healthy contentment. He praises as “compassion” what the conservative earthily sees as a program of collectivization. He may even assert as “rights” what tradition has regarded as wrongs”.

More (much more) here. It might be noted that it is a common finding from survey research that conservatives are happier.  See e.g. here.  One might perhaps ask how conservatives could be both wary and happier but I think that to ask that question is almost to answer it.  Wary people are more likely to avoid the heartbreaks and disappointments that overconfident people experience.  And who is more overconfident than a Leftist with his insouciant prescriptions about how the whole world should be re-organized?  Because they tend to be better at dealing with the world realistically, conservatives are happier with the same world that deeply dissatisfies the Leftist—who blames the world for his own failures at comprehending and dealing with it. 

And here is anotrher view of conservative psychology from Jonah Goldberg.  Goldberg sees “comfort with contradiction” as fundamental to conservatism:

“I mean this in the broadest metaphysical sense and the narrowest practical way. Think of any leftish ideology and at its core you will find a faith that circles can be closed, conflicts resolved. Marxism held that in a truly socialist society, contradictions would be destroyed. Freudianism led the Left to the idea that the conflicts between the inner and outer self were the cause of unnecessary repressions. Dewey believed that society could be made whole if we jettisoned dogma and embraced a natural, organic understanding of the society where everyone worked together….  Liberals and leftists are constantly denouncing “false choices” of one kind or another. In our debate, Jonathan Chait kept hinting, hoping, and haranguing that - one day - we could have a socialized healthcare system without any tradeoffs of any kind. Environmentalists loathe the introduction of free-market principles into the policy-making debate because, as Steven Landsburg puts it, economics is the science of competing preferences. Pursuing some good things might cost us other good things. But environmentalists reject the very idea. They believe that all good things can go together and that anything suggesting otherwise is a false choice….

Now look at the arguments of conservatives. They are almost invariably arguments about trade-offs, costs, “the downside” of a measure. As I’ve written before, the first obligation of the conservative is to explain why nine out of ten new ideas are probably bad ones. When feminists pound the table with the heels of their sensible shoes that it is unfair that there are any conflicts between motherhood and career, the inevitable response from conservatives boils down to “You’re right, but life isn’t fair.”

Any ideology or outlook that tries to explain what government should do at all times and in all circumstances is un-conservative. Any ideology that sees itself as the answer to any question is un-conservative…. Contrary to all the bloviating jackassery about how conservatives are more dogmatic than liberals we hear these days, the simple fact is that conservatives don’t have a settled dogma….  we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction and conflict in life. Christians and Jews understand it because that’s how God set things up. Libertarians understand it because the market is, by definition, a mechanism for amicably reconciling competing preferences. Agnostic, rain-sodden British pessimists understand it because they’ve learned that’s always the way to bet. Conservatism isn’t inherently pessimistic, it is merely pessimistic about the possibility of changing the permanent things and downright melancholy about those who try.”

So Goldberg is very much in accord with those English Conservatives such as Feiling who see conservatism as an adaptive, pragmatic, “trimming” approach to the problems of the world—i.e. conservatism as balance or the true “middle way”.

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, May 20, 2005 at 09:39 AM in Conservatism
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