Sunday Night Journal — February 7, 2010

In the first post of this series I argued that conservatism is not a religion, and therefore not, at least conceptually, a rival to the faith, and that a Catholic who describes himself as conservative does not thereby make himself less of a Catholic. In the second I argued against the idea that there is a single Catholic approach to politics and social issues. Now I want to discuss what conservatism is, and why I am willing to describe myself as a conservative (though, as I said in a comment on one of the other posts, I wear the label pretty lightly). And my intention is for this to be the last installment.

Unavoidably, because conservatism does not have a very precise definition, I will have to engage in something close to the True Scotsman gambit:

(a) All Scotsmen like haggis.

(b) Tom is a Scotsman, but he doesn’t like haggis.

(c) All true Scotsmen like haggis.

I think this is normally called a fallacy; I’m calling it a gambit, because I’m not saying “true conservative” but “my sort of conservative.” Anyone familiar with the internal debates of conservatism knows that in fact there is a never-ending discussion about who is and is not a conservative, with frequent instances of  “if you think that, you aren’t a true conservative.” That gets pretty tiresome. There is something broadly identifiable as conservatism, but, unlike Scotland, it does not have clearly defined borders. So when I speak of conservatism, I have in mind primarily principled and thoughtful conservatives, not mere right-wingers whose conservatism is mostly capitalism and nationalism. I should note, while I’m at it, that I’m using the terms “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably.

I can’t find the remark now, but long ago I read an observation by Fr. Henri de Lubac, S.J., that went something like this: “Insofar as the terms liberal and conservative refer to anything more than personality types, they are political terms that have no place in the life of the Church.” I like those words—or perhaps I should say that idea, since I’m not sure how accurately I’m recalling the quotation. And I think anyone who wants to be a faithful Catholic should do his best to be, simply, Catholic, and to avoid looking at the life of the Church through the distorting lens of a liberal-conservative opposition. I do not describe myself as a conservative Catholic, and if someone insists on using that terminology I can just as accurately describe myself as a liberal Catholic.

Yet as appealing as it is to want to go beyond those terms, they persist, not only in politics but even in the Church, precisely because they are based on personality types which are perennial. They may harden into ideologies, but they are rooted in personal attitudes and temperaments. In almost any human enterprise, including the Church in its humanity, there are people who press urgently for change because they see the problems of the present condition, and people who think the present condition worth preserving in spite of its problems (or else think the solution recommended by the progressive will actually be a change for the worse).

Whether one finds oneself in an objectively conservative or progressive position—resisting change or calling for it—depends greatly on the circumstances. If you’re in a car going 60 miles an hour, it is, strictly speaking, the conservative position to continue going 60 miles an hour. And if you’re rolling down an open highway where the speed limit is 60, it’s the correct position. On the other hand, if an 18-wheeler going 75 miles an hour is coming up behind you, you should consider adopting more progressive views.

Similarly, what we call conservatism is fundamentally a concrete response to a specific moment in history, and it’s fundamentally the response of a certain temperament and attitude: a sort of resignation to the fact that human life is always going to be something of a mess, that things could always be worse, and that it is very easy to do more harm than good by making large and sudden changes in the name of reform. Some maddeningly literal-minded (and occasionally malicious) people insist that the word “conservative” be defined as “always and everywhere opposed to any change whatsoever.” They seem to think they’ve scored a grand rhetorical coup when they catch a conservative saying, for instance, that a Supreme Court decision should be reversed. “You want to change something! You’re not a conservative!” This is sophomoric, and really not worth arguing against. No serious conservative denies the need for a constant reform of human institutions, and the reality of continuing change in human affairs whether we want it or not.

That brings me somewhere close to my final point, which is a response to the challenge Daniel issued in that Caelum et Terra exchange, quoting my own words from a 1991 Caelum et Terra book review:

“When someone tells me he is a conservative, I want to know what it is he wishes to conserve. And I ask the question with a certain intention to harass, for I have always had trouble understanding how the beliefs which most Americans understand to be implied by the word “conservative” could reasonably merit that term.

“….what does it mean to believe oneself a conservative in a society which grows daily more attached…to practices and principles utterly irreconcilable with those one wishes to conserve?….how many of society’s assumptions may one reject before one becomes, intellectually at least, a revolutionary?”

(The complete review is here.)

I do in fact have answers to those questions, though I didn’t care to present them then and there. When someone asks me in this context what it is that I wish to conserve, the answer is: the cultural and political traditions of America and Europe. And one is a conservative and not a revolutionary in relation to one’s society as long as one believes that there is within it still some essential foundation worth preserving. And I do believe that.

For several decades now I’ve pondered, as I was doing in that book review, the question of whether our society is really worth preserving, or whether it’s so corrupt that it can’t and shouldn’t stand. I’ve very often been tempted to answer, respectively, no and yes to those questions. But in the end I come back to the many good things that still persist in our tradition, especially in the U.S., where religion apparently flourishes more vigorously than in most of Europe. For all the very grave faults of this Euro-American culture, it still represents much which I would not wish to see lost. I’ll go further and say much that the human race cannot afford to lose. In the practical realm, a reasonably stable, reasonably free, and perhaps too prosperous society is not something to be cast away lightly. The culture of the West is still far from dead, though it may be dying. And it’s one of the essential insights of conservatism that it is much, much easier to destroy than to build. If you help your enemies destroy the last of what others have built and you have inherited, you will most likely find yourself living not with what you wanted, but what those enemies wanted.

And I think the Western tradition has a real, conscious, dedicated enemy in what I might call secular progressivism. Assuming that both conservatives and progressives have similar views of how things ought to be, the quarrel between them ought to be, and often is, only one of means, not ends, and a question of emphasis. But the quarrel between conservatism and secular progressivism is now also one of ends. What I mean by secular progressivism is not the push for a certain sort of government-heavy solution to specific practical problems like health care. I mean the deep cultural revolution of which the beginning is conveniently marked by the French Revolution, the revolution of materialism which seeks to deny God, deny the existence of the soul, and make the whole being of man subservient to, on the one hand, his own appetites, and, on the other, the state, which promises to help him satisfy his appetites at the cost of his soul.

To say that I want to preserve the Western tradition is not the same as saying that I want to preserve the Catholic faith. (I don’t want so much to preserve the Catholic faith as to spread it, but that’s another, though related, topic.) The tradition could not exist without the faith, but the faith is not the only thing which gives the tradition its particular character. I also want to preserve the elements of truth and genuine progress which have appeared since the Enlightenment, and so I am willing to be part of an alliance that includes people with views pretty substantially different from my own. They are among the not necessarily Catholic, not necessarily Christian, “men of good will” to whom the Second Vatican Council wished to appeal.

American conservatism is a big and chaotic movement, and far from pure or united in its defense of what Russell Kirk referred to as the permanent things. But the battle to preserve those things from the materialist revolution is, in my view, the great and crucial fact of our times, and the conservative movement, for all its flaws and inconsistencies, is, in general, on the right side of that battle. I don’t apologize for allying myself with it.

One last thing needs mentioning: I want to preserve the U.S.A. because I love it. Sometimes I hate it, too, and in my youth I hated it more than I loved it. And often I despair of it. But I still love it, not only as I wish it were but as it is.

Now, with all that said, I want to emphasize that “liberal,” “progressive,” and “conservative” are provisional and relative terms that do not in themselves contain solid principles. To that end:

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

—G. K. Chesterton, in The Illustrated London News, 1924

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary