In a horrible turn of cliché, it is loudly thought of as an early death, a step into fear, sweat, and meek surrender; a betrayal of youth, and of life. Just as loudly, it is also thought to be appropriate, an unhappy but inevitable part of the ageing process, along with dentures, walking sticks, and bingo.
Conservatism has a strange place within our culture, within our primal selves. A philosophy that – unlike so many others – can easily go unspoken and yet understood, without contradiction or confusion. It is also the philosophy that burns on the scrawniest of emotions, sitting alone and lonely, playing a very different game to all the others: an unusual entity whose champions and enemies alike largely agree on what it is!
So before we begin tearing it down, perhaps it is best to first ask the question, why be a conservative? What could tempt someone into such a – seemingly – boring bed? Answer: the poor behaviour of its enemies. “Most movements that are thought to be progressive”, writes Friedrich von Hayek, in fact “advocate further encroachments on individual liberty.”
But even if voting against a party or a policy is a perfectly admirable and rational thing to do, it still doesn’t bode well for the default choice; supported only as a half-way house between worst and least-worst options. So beyond the awful behaviour of leftist movements and misunderstandings about the use of terms like liberal today (mostly through political appropriation, and odd turns of history such as in America where “it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long established institutions”), who are the people who actually fall in love with conservatism, and remain so?
They are people who fear (often rightly so) “widespread” and “drastic” change. Liberalism always “wants to go somewhere else” and naturally this restlessness worries everyone who already likes what they see, feels safe within what they know, or at least worries that change will only make things worse. There are – after all – countless many more ways to be wrong about something, than there are to be right! All around us, error is the natural state of things.
There is a parable (Chesterton’s) about conservatism that people like to throw about, as a sort of defence of their overall tentativeness and allergy to change. It is clumsily written, so I’ll paraphrase: there you are walking in a field and suddenly you come across a fence. You don’t know who put it there, why it was put there, or what its purpose is, but because you are a liberal-minded fool, you immediately decide to tear it down, and only discover these answers later on when the problems arrive, and you could really do with a fence.
The point being, if you don’t know why something exists in the way that it does, then you have no right to destroy it without first finding this out. A fairly prudent and fairly uncontroversial argument. But why should the onus be only upon the liberal to do his research, and not upon the conservative to actually defend the thing that he insists be defended? If you want something to remain as it is, why should you not have to explain why that something is important? This is how scales are weighted in favour of an outcome and an ideology.
It also opens things up to the two ugly – and much harder to love – cousins of conservative thought: “its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces.” This second relative might appear out of place in the modern world, as conservatives are never far away from a chance to lavish praise upon economic growth, with all its wonderful achievements. But as Hayek shows, this admiration “generally applies only to the past”, with those people lacking the “courage to welcome the same un-designed change from which new tools of human endeavour will emerge.”
And where courage matters, science is affected. Confronted on a daily basis by our infinite ignorance, we nevertheless have reason to hope, as well as a choice of attitude. As liberals are forced to do, you can face this ignorance head-on, admit to how little you know, and then go searching for new knowledge to fill-in some of that space. Or as a conservative, you can play footsie with your ignorance (admitting its existence only within those people who are wanting to change things), reject and distrust any of that new knowledge, castrate your imagination, and surrender the battle of ideas before a gun has even been fired.
Having well and truly turned the corner here, let’s push further into negative territory and talk about that other little monster from the family tree: fondness for authority. If someone doesn’t like change, then they must like, or at least prefer, things the way they are. This creates an unpleasant attitude toward established power structures and leaders, something that is hard “to reconcile with the preservation of liberty.”
The conservative puts his faith in “wise” and “good” people, those who are entrusted to rule over the rest of us, and so he tends to be “less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them.” And there is your obligatory, hard overlap with the work of Karl Popper; here’s some softer ones:
The conservative does not have a problem with arbitrary power, just so long as it is used for the “right purposes”. The conservative is faithful only to certain political outcomes, not to the political process itself. The conservative believes that coercion is an acceptable tool (the reason why it is “so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal”). The conservative looks upon differences of opinion as proof of “his mission to ‘civilize’”. The conservative, nostalgic of the past, cannot properly look forward and so cannot properly embrace freedom. The conservative…
There is little doubt that Hayek wrote this – in part – to exonerate his character. Many conservatives erroneously believe that, in the pages of Hayek’s economic work, they have found a fellow traveller – misunderstanding that talk of human witlessness in the face of endless complexity, is not the equivalent of saying ‘don’t change anything’, nor is it the equivalent of ‘only ever change things slowly’. It is simply a caution: ‘beware of what you don’t know!’
Lounging happily in the benefits of change and progress, while simultaneously wanting it all to stop, is a hypocrisy and a superstitious fear which makes conservativism hard to stomach. But the real reason to not be a conservative, is a question of content. On any new issue, the liberal is free to creatively dream-up any, and every, possible solution, and then hopefully settle upon the best option. The conservative only has the one, default, position: don’t change things! Always a handbrake, and never a steering wheel.
This is why they are always seen to be losing the culture wars: when the liberals and the progressives win, it means that an old institution or structure or belief is destroyed and replaced; when the conservatives win, it means only that a new policy or idea doesn’t get born/adopted, which is often less noticeable.
It is also why Hayek is comfortable stepping out onto the ledge, and “doubt[ing] whether there can [even] be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.”