Why Conservatism?

What conservatism is and why we need it.

Our politics is not very thoughtful. 

With the recent presidential debate fresh in our minds, this shouldn’t be a controversial claim. One example of this is the way we bandy about labels that stand for political philosophies — like liberalism and conservatism — but don’t often explore what these terms mean and the reasons for adopting one of them (or some other) as a way to bring coherence to our political positions.

What, indeed, is conservatism? If you feel somewhat unsure, you’re not alone. The header image for this post is AI’s attempt to render the concept in graphical form. I have no idea what is supposed to be going on in this image.

I’ve been thinking a lot about conservatism in recent months, prompted by reading Russel Kirk’s classic study, The Conservative Mind. I suppose I’ve always considered myself a conservative, but this text has spurred me to ponder afresh the reasons I’m drawn to this particular stance. I think it’s a political philosophy whose influence is desperately needed in our time but little felt. 

Perhaps you’re thinking: Oh no. Here comes an argument in favor of the Republican party and maybe even Trump. You needn’t worry. In truth, there is very little of conservatism in the contemporary Republican party and even less of it in Trump. Associating them is one of the liabilities of our shallow politics that substitutes labels for understanding. 

Besides, this isn’t an essay about politics — understood as the noisy public contest over elected offices and specific policies. Rather, it’s an exploration of political philosophy — conceptions of how to pursue our common life together in such a way that we can best thrive as human beings.  

So, keep reading if you’re interested in exploring the questions: What is conservatism, anyway? And What can be said in favor of this view?  

The Origins of Modern Political Thought

Lying behind contemporary political debates are four basic streams of thought that have their origins in the French Revolution and the ideas connected with it.¹ 

The causes of the revolution were complex, of course. But part of what fueled the revolutionary spirit was the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason. The successful example of the scientists suggested the possibility of rationally engineering society to bring about a better world. This required, of course, tearing down what was presently in place and supplanting the traditional authorities, especially the religious ones, that stood in the way of progress. 

The conservative take on this was articulated by the English statesman Edmund Burke. He thought the confidence in human reason was misplaced and the wholesale reconstruction of political and social arrangements most unwise. Those with similar sympathies gathered into the first of the four streams — conservatism. 

Those who embraced the project of rebuilding society from the ground up in the light of reason to achieve a shared vision of human happiness represent stream two — radicalism.  

The third stream is liberalism. This approach shares with the radicals an endorsement of human reason (and skepticism about religion and tradition) but differs in important respects. For one thing, if the radical tends toward collectivism (we’re all going toward a shared vision together), the liberal tends to be individualistic (let each person flourish in the way that seems best to him). For another, the liberal sees the state as a threat to the project of individual flourishing and prizes personal freedom and autonomy — hence the term liberal, from the same root as liberty. 

The fourth stream emerges later than these three and from within the third. Different writers use different terms here, but neoliberalism will serve. Those adopting this position share with liberalism a commitment to individual autonomy as a central priority. However, whereas liberals conceive of private property as one of the most important aspects and safeguards of personal freedom, neoliberals see it as one of the key threats to such freedom as unequal distributions of wealth lead to unequal opportunities. This is partly because neoliberals see positive freedom (the ability to live as one wants) as the goal, rather than negative freedom (the absence of external constraints). Finally, neoliberals are optimistic about the use of state power to arrange resources in a way that promotes individual freedom.²

Why Conservatism?

So far, I’ve given very little in the way of a definition of conservatism. To remedy that, this section will give a fuller picture of what the position entails while providing reasons to think it a sensible one.  

Conservatives tend to share five key convictions that guide their thinking about politics (understood in the broadest sense). We’ll consider each in turn.³

Human Limits

The most important part of conservatism is a vivid sense of human limitations. This is true concerning knowledge (we know much less than we think) as well as virtue (people are inherently corrupt). From this conviction flows skepticism about any grand schemes of collective action to bring about a better world. 

This means conservatives tend to be wary of giving the state any more power than it absolutely requires. They also tend to favor more localized forms of government since they are both more limited in scope and much closer to the people they govern, helping to alleviate the problem of limited knowledge. They favor reforms that are cautious, slow, and develop from below rather than being imposed from above.

Is this stance reasonable or are conservatives unduly skeptical about human potential? History certainly seems to endorse the conservative position. 

Burke, for instance, was right about the French Revolution. He correctly foresaw that it would descend into violence and chaos. 

More recently, the Soviet Union was a paradigm case of the effort to rationally design and run an entire society, erasing all that had come before. It was a tragic failure, resulting in unimaginable violence and oppression for generations, the legacy of which continues to exact costs from the Russian people. 

In the Soviet example, we can see clearly the twin limits of human beings. The planners didn’t know as much as they thought. They imagined they could plan and control an entire economy and make it rational and efficient. Instead, they struggled to keep the people supplied with even the most basic goods. Conservatives at the time pointed out that organically developed and decentralized markets were vastly superior. Moreover, the Soviet era highlighted human corruptibility. Those who began a revolution to end injustice became the perpetrators of some of history’s more appalling examples of it. 

Yet we needn’t focus exclusively on such glaring examples. In some ways, they can make it harder to see the same problems in our context. 

For instance, generations of American schoolchildren have had their education significantly impaired by ineffective methods of teaching reading. This happened as the traditionally used phonics-based instruction (in which students first learn the sounds of letters and sound out words by working from their parts) was replaced by the whole-word method (in which students are taught to recognize whole words as the basic unit).⁴ Why did this happen? In essence, the new way of reading was developed by experts at prestigious teacher’s colleges and imposed over large swaths of the country.⁵ 

The consequences of this folly, especially for the least advantaged students, have been grave. The conservative, observing the situation, would point out that this is exactly why we should be wary of novel arrangements, developed through confident human reason, being imposed top-down across wide areas. We don’t know as much as we think we do and running what amount to massive experiments on other people is hubristic and asking for trouble. 

The Wisdom of Tradition

The example of reading methodologies is a nice illustration of a second conservative conviction: there is wisdom in tradition. Traditions of all kinds are, by definition, ways of doing things that have developed organically, often over a long period of time, and in specific settings. They represent collective solutions to problems of action and are, as such, the opposite of a solution invented by a few experts and deployed suddenly. 

I don’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing that when the New England Primer was published in the colonies in the late 1600s, it included phonics instruction not because this was the latest fad promulgated by the teachers’ colleges (which didn’t yet exist in modern form), but because that was just “the way things were done.” That was, in fact, the way things had always been done, since at least the time of the Romans.  

Our political system is another such tradition. Yes, the drafters of the Constitution brought something novel into existence in 1787. But it was not wholly so. Instead, it was in deep continuity with a tradition and culture of governance that stretched back hundreds of years into colonial and British history. 

The modern market economy also represents a tradition, whose mind-boggling complexity has slowly evolved over centuries. 

The conservative isn’t committed to the view that all traditions are equally useful or that they leave no room for reforms — even quite substantial ones. Instead, the conservative insistence is that tradition contains a collective wisdom that we ignore at our peril. Reforms should always proceed slowly, cautiously, and with due regard for the limits of our knowledge. 

It is very difficult to build good things. The culture and institutions that enable the sort of free, democratic, and prosperous society we inhabit are the fruit of generations of labor. And yet it is very easy to break things. As the Soviet example shows, an entire society can be destroyed almost overnight.  

The Desirability of Pluralism

The confidence in human reason characteristic of the modern age encourages us to think in terms of universal solutions. It seems natural to ask questions like, “What is the best form of primary education?” And once we have identified the best approach, it further seems natural to think it ought to be applied everywhere. Why, after all, should an inferior approach be allowed to continue in some areas?

Conservatives are doubtful about the underlying assumption here — that there is one uniquely best way to do things for all people in all places. More likely, one approach to schooling is best suited to one culture and another to a different culture. If the central government planner emphasizes the universal and sees individuals and more-or-less interchangeable units, conservatives would argue that the differences between individuals, cultures, and settings must be taken into account. 

This is, again, a reason to favor local and organically developed arrangements over centrally planned and imposed ones. They are sensitive to realities on the ground and more likely, for that reason, to work. 

Consider, as an example, the invasion of Iraq under president Bush. Many within his administration (and others who supported U.S. actions at the time) had the vision of liberating the country from its dictatorial ruler, Sadam Hussein, and helping the country establish a constitutional, democratic system of government. 

That hasn’t gone well, to say the least. A key problem was the idea that there is some ideal form of government, based on reason and universal principles, proper to all times and places. The conservative would point out that Western forms of democratic government have a history, developing slowly in a cultural context that is very different from the context in Iraq. They cannot simply be transplanted into foreign soil and expected to take root and thrive.⁶ 

There is a deeper point here, though, than the practical matter of what is likely to work. Maintaining a diversity of local forms in itself adds richness and beauty to life, giving space for a fuller expression of human creativity. In our increasingly global uniformity, there is great loss (even if there are compensating gains in some areas). 

One area that illustrates this is architecture. In the early to mid-20th century, figures like Le Corbusier helped to develop a vocabulary of building that came to be called the International Style. The idea was to have a modern, rational style that could be applied anywhere. The movement's leaders were impatient with the inefficiencies and idiosyncrasies of locally developed and traditional architectural styles and were eager to sweep them away to make room for progress. 

The result is that the newer parts of cities now look the same everywhere. Standing among modern buildings, you don’t know if you are in Hong Kong or Vancouver until your eyes can find the language appearing on signage. It is a wasteland of soulless monotony. It is instructive that tourists are drawn by the millions to spend time in the built environments remaining from eras in which architecture was still rooted in local culture and tradition. There is something alive in such places that modern architecture and the assumptions contained within it have killed.⁷     

What We Need to Thrive

The ebbing away of local and traditional forms in architecture doesn’t just make our environment less interesting, it also makes it less life giving. Far from being a neutral and unimportant background against which we live our lives, the built environment shapes us and grounds us, inspiring (or depressing us), facilitating community (or making it more difficult), and conveying a sense of home (or a feeling of homelessness). 

Noticing the importance of our physical surroundings is one part of what we might call a thick conception of what humans need to flourish. To clarify what this means, let’s start by describing a thin conception. The modern tendency is to embrace just such a view, reducing what is needed for humans to thrive to basic factors centered on economics and freedom. Specifically, implicit within much of contemporary politics and policy (to say nothing of popular culture) is the thought that the basic needs of human beings are enough autonomy and enough money to identify and pursue their desires. 

These things may be desirable, but, conservatives would argue, this thin picture leaves out some of the most important factors that contribute to good human lives.

Like what?

Relationships, for one. Family, friendship, and a sense of community are central to truly happy lives.

Culture is also important. The myriad assumptions, norms, expectations, forms, and habits of a particular people and place give us a sense of belonging, guide us, and promote social trust. The elements of a culture make a certain kind of life together possible while excluding other sorts of lives — as the example above about democracy in Iraq illustrates. 

Place matters, too. Partly this is a matter of the built environment, touched on above. More broadly, however, the concern here is about the way our connections with a particular landscape and its structures help to ground a shared sense of home in the world. 

Taking these things together, the conservative argues for the need for rootedness and connectedness as part of local communities as foundations for thriving human lives. This view is in tension with central tendencies of modern society, which embraces an autonomy and mobility that weakens connection along with a cosmopolitanism that disparages the local and particular in favor of the abstraction of “global citizens.” Rootedness and connection are also threatened by the twin forces of capitalism and bureaucratic centralization that are inexorably imposing uniformity across the world.⁸  

The Foundation of Everything Else

At the time of the French Revolution, one of the key matters dividing the radicals yearning for a new world order from conservatives like Burke was the matter of religion. A prominent thread of Enlightenment thought was a growing skepticism about faith and, in many cases, a confident atheism. 

The spirit of the times was captured by a quote supposedly uttered by one of the most important French mathematicians and scientists of the era, Laplace, in reply to Napoleon’s question of where God fit into his complex account of physical reality:

“Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.”

This attitude continues to be characteristic of scientists, social scientists, and the various experts who apply themselves to the problems of human life, both individual and collective. If there is no God, no transcendent reality, then this life is all there is. Having no higher end, the basic concern of human beings is to maximize their happiness. And given that all of reality is just matter in motion, the basic problem is always technological; Through greater knowledge and more advanced science, we can advance indefinitely towards utopia. 

The conservative, in contrast, insists on the existence and centrality of the transcendent. Physical reality is not the sum of all that is. We have a higher end than mere desire satisfaction. There is a God, and the basic problems of human life are spiritual and moral in nature. 

Surely our era provides compelling evidence for the conservative position. Though we live in a time during which knowledge and technology have expanded at a breathtaking rate along with an extensive network of experts and bureaucrats charged with the scientific management of social issues, the basic problems of human life seem relatively untouched. Indeed, while our material well-being creeps ever higher, the well-being of our souls seems to yearly reach new lows. 

Faith has been effectively pushed out of public life and is steadily receding from private life as well. We have collectively embraced an empty universe and a technologically-driven quest for human fulfillment through desire satisfaction. As depression, anxiety, drug overdoses, and loneliness all trend ever upward, it’s worth considering whether these are all symptoms of an orientation that leaves out of consideration the most important things.  

The Problem with Conservatives

The conservative position is a modest one, emphasizing human limits and respect for the complexity and mystery of social life, including its transcendent foundations. Those who embrace it are acutely aware of the good things we have and their fragility, urging a cautious stewardship in order that we might pass them along to those who come after us.

This is a stance, for reasons described above, that makes good sense. Would it be a good thing, then, if all were conservatives?

Perhaps surprisingly, I would say no. The reason springs from the convictions of conservatism itself: we are limited in our understanding and virtue. If conservatives are honest, we can observe that a desire to preserve good things sometimes serves as an excuse to ignore things that need to change. Tradition can be a mask for injustice. Modesty can turn into resignation. The desire to preserve the local and organic can lead to hostility toward the outsider and non-conforming. 

So we need the liberals who push to make space for the individual in the midst of community. We need neoliberals who are optimistic about our ability to take coordinated actions to secure a more just society and who ask tough questions about our traditional practices. There is even a place for the radicals who dream utopian dreams and spur us to think creatively about what is possible. 

The trick, from a conservative point of view, is to encourage robust political discussions and debates in which people from all these perspectives play an active role while maintaining in practice a conservative governance that proceeds slowly and cautiously. 

Such a governance was characteristic of our country’s past, though it is much less so of the present. This is one of the most significant issues being contested in the present day, though it lies in the background. Will we continue to expand the reach and power of the state, giving scope to the experts to engineer our lives? Or will we withdraw that reach and power to more modest limits, recognizing the limitations of our understanding and virtue?

Given the limits of human wisdom and virtue, I’m afraid the latter course is unlikely.   

1. This is going to move quickly and broadly. There are lots of important details and distinctions I’m going to have to just pass over. Hopefully, however, I’m doing justice to the main ideas. If you’re interested in going deeper, I recommend Kirk’s book plus entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on liberalism and conservatism.

2. How do these four streams map onto contemporary American politics? That’s an interesting question worth exploring in an essay of its own. My sense, briefly, is this. The Republican party is influenced by conservatism but is probably dominated by liberalism. The Democratic party, in recent decades, has been dominated by neoliberalism with a significant influence of both liberalism and radicalism. The Woke left is radical and quite explicitly anti-liberal (in both its classical and neo forms). What about progressive, another term often used to describe those on the left? It seems to me this term isn’t used very consistently. Sometimes it is synonymous with neoliberalism; sometimes it seems to be used to label those whose stance is closer to radicalism.

3. Not all define conservatism the same way and there is more than one version. If there is something like a core conviction that all properly called conservatives would share in common, it would be the first of these.

4. Traditionally used…as in the standard method of reading instruction from at least the time of the Romans, and for good reason. The whole brilliance of the invention of the alphabet was in the insight that learning a small number of symbols representing sounds was vastly superior to memorizing large numbers of symbols representing words.

5. One critic writes, referring to an important early proponent of the whole-word method, Horace Mann, “Incidentally, despite his role as the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and eventually the outsized role he played in shaping American public education, Mann was not actually a teacher himself. So while he fought valiantly for public education, he also fell into that great American tradition of non- or failed educators-turned-reformers who seek to impose their ideas about education on the public at large bluntly and without fully grasping the real-world implications or consequences of their beliefs.”

6. But wait…I thought Bush was a conservative? This is just another instance of how we don’t use these labels very thoughtfully. This whole incident is a good example of how the modern Republican party isn’t very conservative if we consider what that term has historically meant. Undertaking foreign adventures in nation building is definitely not a conservative impulse. It fits much better with a neoliberal perspective.

7. The problems of modern architecture and urban design are many; the desire to replace the traditionally developed with rationally planned and universally applied is just one of them. Le Corbusier, perhaps the most important modern architect, also had an impoverished view of the human person. He defined the house as “a machine for living in,” which speaks volumes. You won’t be surprised to learn that he sat firmly within the radical stream described above.

8.  Wait…aren’t conservatives big supporters of capitalism? Traditionally, no. They have always believed in the importance of private property rights and markets, but the forms of globalized capitalism we currently have are perhaps the most effective means yet devised for destroying the foundations of human flourishing. The fact that the Republican party has been, in recent decades, most strongly associated with big business and free markets, is another demonstration of the fact that it is not a consistently conservative party.