Conservatism: A Rediscovery Part 3

I'm still only a little way into Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Already, though, some of the strengths, and a possible weakness, of the book have emerged, which I think are worth covering.

The strengths are easier to describe, so I'll start there. Hazony identifies conservatism with a Burkean political philosophy. He presents a case, persuasively in my view, that this Burkean conservatism not only has a long pedigree, but also was influential for a long time in Anglo cultures. Conservatism, therefore, has not always been the philosophy that always loses.

Some of the key figures in this tradition are new to me. Sir John Fortescue, born in the fourteenth century, is described by Hazony as the "first truly outstanding expositor" of Anglo conservatism. Richard Hooker, who I was already familiar with, is mentioned as the next great figure, followed by "the greatest conservative", John Selden, who lived in the early seventeenth century and who was described by John Milton as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land". Only then does Hazony get to Edmund Burke, the famous critic of the French Revolution in the later 1700s.

Sir John Fortescue

Hazony delineates the difference between these conservative men and their opponents as a difference between those who are empirically minded, i.e., who take seriously what has been learned through long experience, and those who are rationalists, i.e., who think that society can be remade from scratch through abstract reason. 

Richard Hooker

There is much to be said for making this distinction. For instance, the conservatives in this tradition noted that it was difficult for those wanting to start from abstract principles to really know the longer term consequences of what they were proposing. As Hazony summarises Burke:

The more general and abstract the principle proposed, the more certain one may be that its consequences will not be confined to what has been discussed and foreseen. (p.28)

Burke has been proven right on this score over and over. For instance, it has been a constant theme of my own writing, that those who proposed to make individual autonomy the ruling principle did not understand where this principle would ultimately lead. 

The Burkean conservatives are also on strong ground when they express scepticism that the reason of one person is sufficient for rejecting an entire tradition and starting over (as the French revolutionaries did, deciding that 1792 would become Year 1). In Burke's own words,

The science of government being therefore...a matter which requires experience and even more experience than any one person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society. (p.26)

So why then am I still a little uneasy in wholeheartedly embracing this tradition? It is not because I believe that anything it represents is false - in fact, I think it has much to teach us - but that it leaves too much out. It is too limited in what it seeks to conserve, and in what it is willing to positively describe and adhere to.

I think this comes out a little in a section of the book detailing the historical empiricism of John Selden. Hazony quotes Selden as follows:

The way to find out the Truth is by others' mistakings: For if I [wish] to go to such [and such] a place, and one had gone before me on the right-hand, and he was out, [while] another had gone on the left-hand, and he was out, this would direct me to keep the middle way that peradventure would bring me to the place I desired to go. (p.17)

 Hazony follows up the quote by adding:

Selden thus turns to a form of pragmatism to explain what is meant when statesmen and jurists speak of truth.

The problem that immediately struck me on reading this is that although this might instruct you in how to get to a certain place the best way, it has little to say in where you should be going. For instance, if what you want is to secure the rule of a political elite, and to keep wages and conditions low for the workers, then a policy of divide and rule may well be, at a pragmatic level, a time-tested way of achieving this aim. It would then represent a "truth" of politics.

Yazony seems to be aware of this problem because he then states,

Selden recognised that in making these selections from the traditions of the past, we tacitly rely upon a higher criterion for selection, a natural law established by God, which prescribes "what is truly best" for mankind in the most elementary terms. 

So we now have a "higher criterion for selection" than historical empiricism, which is natural law. I have no issue with this approach, i.e. of using natural law to decide "what is truly best" and then historical empiricism to determine what works over time, but there is a further problem.

Yazony states that when we make selections we tacitly rely on natural law, and that we do so in the most elementary terms. I don't think this works out well in practice. The forces of liberal modernity are so great, that you need to declare what you are defending explicitly and in some detail.

You can see this from the work of Selden himself. Hazony describes Selden's approach to natural law in the following passage:

In his Natural and National Law, he explains that this natural law has been discovered over long generations since biblical times and has come down to us in various versions. Of these, the most reliable is that of the Talmud, which describes the seven laws of the children of Noah prohibiting murder, theft, sexual perversity, cruelty to beasts, idolatry and defaming God, and requiring courts of law to enforce justice. The experience of thousands of years has taught us that these laws frame the peace and prosperity that is the aim of all nations, and that they are the unseen root from which the diverse laws of all the nations ultimately derive. (p.17)

This is simply too elementary to have much force. Most liberals could accept most of this (except perhaps the prohibition of sexual perversity). And it still doesn't give clear guidance on what exactly is being conserved. If the ultimate aims are peace and prosperity, then does this justify the "Economic Man" approach to national policy, in which what matters ultimately is GDP growth? 

There is another problem with leaving the goods you are seeking to conserve only tacitly understood in elementary form. The critical issue for a period of time may have been the one outlined by Hazony, namely that of historical empiricists defending existing national institutions versus abstract rationalists seeking to completely remake society on the basis of universal rights. But it is not the only dividing line. 

One aspect of liberalism is its radical individualism. Many liberals do not recognise objectively existing values that a community can orient itself toward. Instead, they emphasise the idea of individuals autonomously choosing their own goods and allowing others to do the same. This then leads to a certain kind of permissive society that at the same time intrusively enforces a political moral code centred on non-interference, i.e., on non-discrimination, tolerance, openness and diversity.

There are different ways that liberals ground this approach to politics. It can be done via something similar to an historical empiricism, namely on the grounds that privatising concepts of the good is necessary to avoid conflict, as occurred at times in European history. But it also reflects certain metaphysical beliefs, such as that there are no objective values embedded in reality, with value coming instead either from acts of will or perhaps from having individual desires or pleasures satisfied. 

The point is that it is not clear that Burkean conservatism directly confronts these aspects of liberal modernity. The task for those who wish to conserve becomes more complicated. Conservatives have to make a multi-faceted assertion, namely that objective values do exist, that they can be discerned and rationally justified, that they can be held in common within a society, and that without a notion of a common good, there is considerable detriment to the good of individuals.

In making these assertions, it is necessary for conservatives to be very open in identifying the goods they wish to uphold within a community, and to go beyond broad concepts like "peace" or "prosperity" and instead to think through and describe a workable framework that takes into account different aspects of nature and reality, as well as to order the different kinds of goods (i.e., what is higher, what is lower) that are present to us.