Humbug conservatism
I’m currently re-reading Edmund Fawcett’s recent book on conservatism in advance of reading John Keke’s new book ‘Moderate Conservatism: Reclaiming the Centre’. Fawcett has something to say about the suitability of Keke’s conservatism for our times bu that will be for later. In Fawcett’s opening chapter he discusses Maistre and Burke’s place as pre-conservatives before the movement really gets going in the late19th Century. In a section on Burke he highlight’s an important problem not just for modern conservative appropriation of Burke but for conservatism in general:
Readers who to come Burke’s works for the first time are struck by their rhetorical power, fertility of metaphor, and subtlety of argumentative suggestion. They are also struck that many or most of the contemporary traditions that Burke was defending as essential to the well-being of society — a dominant landed interest, limited suffrage, an authoritative national church — are long gone.
Conservatives often criticise other political ideologies for pushing transformative social and political ideas because the consequences with respect to the stability and well-being of social order are unknown. This argument can easily be reversed to take aim at the things already existing that conservatives insist are essential to this end. The demise of Burke’s essential traditions has so far proven them to not be essential to it. Things may change of course but the heaps under heaps of traditions on which we live and move and have our being may mean that drawing any plausible inference from one to the other is now, would then be, impossible.
In other words the scepticism with which we should look on the promises of any future oriented political ideology as essential to societal well-being is equally warranted towards a speculative conservative insistence that certain things present are.
It is this that is the difference between Burke and Hume’s conservatism. It is what lies behind Oakeshott’s famous image of politics: ‘In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel…’
All is not lost for the ‘essentials’ however. The problem is treating them under the idiom of conservatism which produces the humbug argument that without them we are doomed. Actually, it is better to be honest and say it is because we like them or, as Sir Roger Scruton would have put it, it is because we love them. Or, if that is too mawkish, as Cowling put it in a reply to Bernard Williams, ‘argument is not what it seems to me suitable to do with opinions. What one does with opinions – all one needs to do with them, having found that one has them – is to enjoy them, display them, use them, develop them, in order to cajole, press, bully, soothe and sneer other people into sharing (or being affronted by) them.’