Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 1

I've begun reading Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony. As I'd hoped, it is proving an excellent book for stimulating thinking on some important issues. I'm not far in enough to give an overall assessment, but there are already some points I think are worth making.

First, Hazony deplores the way that conservatism is confused with classical liberalism (he calls it Enlightenment liberalism). He wants the two clearly demarcated:

Which brings us to the second remarkable fact about contemporary conservatism: the extraordinary confusion over what distinguishes Anglo-American conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism (or "classical liberalism" or "libertarianism" or, for that matter, from the philosophy of Ayn Rand). Indeed, for decades now, many prominent "conservatives" have had little interest in political ideas other than those that can be used to justify free trade and lower taxes, and, more generally, to advance the supposition that what is always needed and helpful is a greater measure of personal liberty. And if anyone has tried to point out that these are well-known liberal views, and that they have no power to conserve anything at all, he has been met with the glib rejoinder that What we are conserving is liberalism or that Conservatism is a branch or species within liberalism, or that Liberalism is the new conservatism. (p.xvii)

I think he is right. Where I might disagree is that this has gone back further in time than he perhaps realises. But to illustrate his point, take a look at the following comment on social media:

She defines conservatism as "our freedom to be who we want and do as we wish". This is the underlying principle of liberalism. Professor John Kekes defines liberalism as follows:

the true core of liberalism, the inner citadel for whose protection all the liberal battles are waged [is] autonomy … Autonomy is what the basic political principles of liberalism are intended to foster and protect.

And what do liberals mean by the term autonomy? According to Professor Raz,  "Autonomy is an ideal of self-creation, or self-authorship"; similarly, Professor Sumner writes of the "conception of the person as self-determining and self-making".

Does it make sense to think of a "freedom to be who we want and do as we wish" as conservative? No, because, as Hazony points out, this formula "has no power to conserve anything at all". In fact, there is a dissolving logic to it. If the point is to make me as an individual as autonomous as possible, so that I can choose in any direction without negative consequence or judgement, then anything that is not open to individual choice has to be rejected as an oppressive limit on the self that the individual has to be "liberated" from or that needs to be socially "deconstructed".

And so, unsurprisingly, the woman quoted above has some very radical views on family life. She sees the unchosen biological role of women as limiting and oppressive and so looks forward to technology making the family redundant:

This is an admittedly extreme example, but it illustrates my point that people who hold to the formula of maximising a freedom to be who we want and do what we wish are likely to end up with a mindset that is dissolving of society - despite claiming to be conservatives. Rebecca is even willing to dissolve motherhood itself.

If you do not see the good in things, including things given as part of the nature of reality, and therefore wish to conserve them, but only see the good in the act of choice itself, and therefore are focused on removing any constraints on choice, regardless of the consequences, then you are a liberal and not a conservative. And a large majority of politicians in the right-wing parties are liberals and have been for many decades.

I'll finish with one last example of what Yazony is referring to when he deplores the confusion between conservatism and liberalism. Jeremy Boreing is the co-founder of the media company The Daily Wire: