Conservatism

Kieron O'Hara

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781861899835
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The term "conservative, " when employed today in reference to politicians and beliefs, can denote groups as diverse and incompatible as the religious right, libertarians, and opponents of large, centralized government. Yet the original conservative philosophy, first developed in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, was most concerned with managing change. This kind of genuine conservatism has a renewed relevance in a complex world where change is rapid, pervasive, and dislocating.

In Conservatism, Kieron O'Hara presents a thought-provoking revision of the traditional conservative philosophy, here crafted for the modern age. As O'Hara argues, conservatism transcends traditional politics and has surprising applications—not least as the most appropriate and practical response to climate change. He shows what a properly conservative ideology looks like today, and draws on such great conservative thinkers as Burke and Adam Smith, philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein, and contemporary social commentators such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ulrich Beck, and Jared Diamond, in order to outline how conservative philosophy lays bare our failure to understand our own society. O'Hara proves as well that conservatism is distinct from neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and the extreme positions of many of today's most outspoken commentators.

In this comprehensive and detailed description of a philosophy of change and innovation, O'Hara shows how conservatism can be an ideology sensitive to cultural differencesamong the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. As well, he highlights key issues of technology, trust, and privacy. Conservatism is a provocative read and a level-headed guide to cutting through the many voices of policy makers andpundits claiming to represent conservative points of view.

1

First Principles

To say conservatism is about change is, perhaps surprisingly, a controversial suggestion. Pundits and commentators still wrangle over the characterization of this most venerable of political philosophies. I don’t want to get hung up on semantics, but in this opening chapter I will flesh out my basic view of conservatism as a negative view of change, together with a description of what constraints my, or any, definition will have to meet in the twenty-first century.

Ideology

I will describe conservatism as an ideology, of the same type as such examples as liberalism, socialism and feminism. ‘Ideology’ is a very loaded term, often pejorative, meaning different things to different schools of thought. In Marxism it is a kind of justification of action in a narrow class interest that reflects alienated social practices, as opposed to the true consciousness of the person with a correct understanding of their interests. In ordinary speech ‘ideological’ often means ‘dogmatic’. I don’t wish to use the term in a pejorative way – groups and organizations often have ideologies driving their collective and collaborative actions, helping to coordinate activity, and providing them with a distinctive purpose, without ever being dogmatic or adversely affecting the political consciousness of their members. There is no particular reason why ideology needs to be restricted to the political sphere, although that is the usual use of the term.

An ideology, as I use the term, sits between two levels of political discourse. Above it is political philosophy: the world of Marx and Rawls, Aristotle and Hobbes, pure thought about how societies work, what values should be transmitted and protected, what roles the state and other institutions should play. Below ideology is the world of political action: how to organize a demonstration, how to administer an entitlement programme to make sure beneficiaries receive what they are due, what terms of reference a committee should be given. It is notoriously hard to bridge the gap between these two levels. One could ponder the deep meaning of Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will for years without receiving an iota of guidance about whether or not to resign one’s seat on the local council because one disapproves of its tendering practices. Philosophy is extremely indeterminate, open-ended and concerned with understanding or defining a range of possible intellectual or moral ideas; action, on the other hand, is definite and of necessity involves making fixed and sometimes irrevocable choices on the basis of imperfect information. As the Duke of Omnium sardonically explains in Trollope’s The Prime Minister, ‘When a man has to be on the alert to keep Ireland quiet, or to prevent peculation in the dockyards, or to raise the revenue while he lowers the taxes, he feels himself to be saved from the necessity of investigating principles.’¹

An ideology mediates between philosophy and action. It is an easily communicable, therefore rather sloganistic type of philosophy which serves as a rough guide to action. It brings groups together; they can cluster around it, internalize and simplify the more high-falutin’ concepts. It provides a group with an identity and a message. Some finer philosophical points will need to be glossed over as part of the simplification process, and of course action still has to be individually tailored for specific circumstances. Nevertheless, ideologies are vital tools.²

Conservatism as an ideology

Already I am being controversial. It is often argued by conservatives that they are not ideologues, and that their politics are deliberately practical and pragmatic. Conservative theorist Russell Kirk wrote that ‘strictly speaking, conservatism is not a political system, and certainly not an ideology’. Historian H. Stuart Hughes went so far as to say that ‘conservatism is the negation of ideology’,³ while Kenneth Minogue demonizes ideology as an alien way of thinking.⁴ This line of thought has a long pedigree; the second president of the United States, John Adams, dismissed ideology as ‘the science of Idiocy’.⁵

These protestations I shall ignore. The point Kirk was making was that conservatism offers no universal prescriptions; that may be true, but it does not disqualify conservatism from being an ideology – ideologies can differ in detail and application from society to society and through time. Minogue’s worry was that ideologies are speculative notions which aim at improving the social order, but surely an ideology can be grounded rather than speculative, and can focus on adaptation rather than improvement. It is best to accept the harsh diagnosis of political scientist Robert Eccleshall that ‘this insistence that conservatism is not an ideology is itself an ideological ploy by those sympathetic to the doctrine, part of the rough-and-tumble of political argument rather than an analytical exercise’.⁶

Defining an ideology

The characteristics of an ideology can be outlined along a number of dimensions. When we ask what two conservatives, two liberals, two socialists or two greens have in common, answers can vary wildly. Let me briefly entertain and reject a number of potential methods of characterizing conservatism.

If we go right back to the basics of human psychology and interaction, it turns out that there are a number of regularities between the personalities of those who make similar political choices. One experiment has shown that Americans who assessed themselves as conservatives are more likely to stick to habitual responses to experimental stimuli than self-assessed liberals.⁷ Surveys have shown linkages between non-political opinions and political affiliation;⁸ for example, people who fear death are more likely to be conservative, while conservatives are also likelier to prefer unambiguous paintings and songs.⁹ Personality traits which have a high genetic component are also correlated, with conservatives being more conscientious and less open to new influences than liberals, for instance.

These are interesting results, and yet unappealing as a basis for the discussion of ideology. In the first place self-selection in terms of party affiliation, or reaction to a crudely drawn set of policy issues, does not necessarily reflect a person’s deeper political outlook, or determine a coherent grouping. Second, there are so many variables in the political sphere that determinism about political views in relation to genetic or social inheritance is going too far even if broad tendencies can be uncovered. We are not yet at the stage when an fMRI scan of the brain can tell you what your political allegiances are, and I strongly suspect we never will be.

Ideas are not the same as instincts and there must be a place for reason and argument in politics – even if they have to share the stage with social and economic drivers. There has to be a dimension to politics that goes beyond crude classification of the individual personality.

A second, institutional measure is that of party – people share an ideology when they work together in, or support, particular coordinated political institutions. This chimes, for example, with historian John Charmley’s ironic comment in the context of Thatcherism that ‘if Conservatism had always been “what Conservative leaders do”, then it is more than usually necessary to concentrate on the Prime Minister rather than the ‘ism’ which bears her name’.¹⁰ The relevant parties are fairly easy to identify – the Republican Party in the US, the Conservative Party in Britain, the Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union in Germany, the People’s Party in Spain, the various Gaullist organizations in France, and so on.¹¹

Yet this is still unsatisfactory. Parties are unwieldy organizations which at their best contain large numbers of diverse people. Quite often they find greatest coherence when they can unite against some dangerous opponent; it is no coincidence that the Republican Party’s greatest moments in recent years, in 1994 and 2010, came when an activist Democratic president threatened to increase the state’s ability to interfere in Americans’ lives – the biggest taboo for Republicans of all stripes. That does not mean that in those years the Republicans were in agreement about much else; when called upon to do more than oppose Clinton, Newt Gingrich’s Congress seemed happier to close down the Federal Government, while the new intake seemed as keen to bring home the pork from Washington as the Democrats they had replaced. Clinton retained the presidency in 1996, and the Republicans had an electoral disaster in 1998, prompting Gingrich’s resignation. Only the welfare reform of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 stands as a positive monument of his achievement. At the time of writing, it is too early to judge the success of the anti-Obama intake of 2010.

Further, we surely reserve the right to make judgements about people’s suitability for a particular party. For example, do we have to count Arlen Specter as a conservative (because he ran for the Republican Party) only between 1965, when he parted company with the Democrats, and 2009, when he rejoined them? What do we make of his run for District Attorney of Philadelphia in 1965 on the Republican ticket as a registered Democrat? Indeed, in the twenty-first century, disaffected Republicans turned against long-standing representatives such as Specter, calling them by the suggestive name RINOs – Republicans in Name Only. We often want to make judgements about parties’ politics, such as philosopher Ted Honderich’s claim that Tony Blair’s New Labour is ‘really’ a conservative force in disguise,¹² and we should also have a non-circular basis for arguing whether, say, conservatives have anything in common with far-right groups such as the British National Party, the Ku Klux Klan or Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National.

Third, we can look at ‘policy’, to see if we can identify particular types of legislation that conservatives push for – perhaps rejection of immigration, the shrinking of the state or promotion of free markets. This is nearer the mark, but even so there is a great deal of variation from nation to nation. If the definition of conservatism is to be properly general, then it may end up being meaningless because policies vary widely, even among professed conservatives. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party is in favour of free markets, while most Continental Europeans, even those on the political right, are deeply suspicious of them. The reason, of course, is one of political culture and history, not ideology. A left-wing British party is likely to be more sympathetic to markets than a right-wing European one. Similarly, a British conservative believes wholeheartedly that a written constitution is the first step on the road to tyranny, while an American conservative believes just as whole-heartedly that it is the most important bulwark against tyranny. Each has good reasons rooted in tradition and experience.

Then again, many conservatives do surprising things. It was Republican Richard Nixon who improved American relations with the Soviet Union and China, famously visiting the latter in 1972. Benjamin Disraeli brought in the second Reform Act after the Liberal prime minister Russell had failed, while in the 1950s British Conservatives successfully administered a planned economy that the previous Labour government had taken into public ownership. Right-wingers Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel argued for European regulation of the banking sector against British Labour prime minister Gordon Brown. As Conservative Party opposition leader, David Cameron can be credited with giving green policies a higher profile than ever before in Britain.

It is clear that conservatives are influenced not only by their ideology, but also by the political context – no surprise there – but contexts vary and so, therefore, do conservatives. Particular policy prescriptions will not do as a means for characterizing conservatism.

Fourth, we can look at the history of ideas and define conservatism as the ideology set out by the great conservative thinkers: Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet and so on. I certainly wish to define conservatism in this book so that it is recognizable, and will often refer to the great thinkers of the conservative past.¹³ Yet even this method is flawed.

How can we judge whether someone fits into the tradition? Surely there must be some independent connection between their work and that of Hume (say)? Someone can agree with Hume on many things (for instance, he might think, with Hume, that we cannot perceive causal connections, or that the principle of induction is flawed) without being a conservative. How can we judge the claims of thinkers with no place in the Burkean tradition because they preceded him or never read him? What about Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Montaigne, Shakespeare or Montesquieu? And who puts a thinker into a tradition? Is it a self-assessment, or do we take a popular vote amongst critics and commentators? This is not a frivolous question; many cite Hayek as a paradigm case of a conservative, yet he once wrote an essay titled ‘Why I am not a conservative’. Do we believe the commentators or take him at his word instead?

The perils of definition by enumeration

All these methods of defining an ideology like conservatism rely basically on enumerating a series of canonical cases and then matching others against the paradigm. Unfortunately, any such method will tend towards incoherence because people, policies or personality types are under little or no pressure to be consistent with each other. The enumerator surveys his enumerated list, quickly shrugs his shoulders and despairs of discovering any underlying coherence. That leads some commentators to reject out of hand the idea that ideologies have any internal unity at all. For instance, political scientist W. H. Greenleaf wrote:

There remains the continuing assertion that there must be common characteristics in Conservatism (or any other ideology) of a meaningful and distinguishing kind. But, whatever its superficial appeal, this claim must be denied, and the counter-question asked: What are the aims, arguments and assumptions that are shared by Stafford Northcote and R. A. Butler, Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell, Mallock and Macmillan, a Central Office pamphlet issued in (say) 1927 and the notions of Sir Keith Joseph? They do not even necessarily oppose the same things.¹⁴

This assumes that everyone in their enumerated list is a conservative – in other words, the list is paramount and if any common characteristics of conservatism happen to suggest themselves, they mustn’t disturb the list. If I define conservatism in such a way as to exclude, say, W. H. Mallock, then my definition is too bold and will be rejected. Since Greenleaf’s list has been deliberately put together to emphasize diversity and paired to demonstrate mutual exclusivity, then, of necessity, if the list is beyond criticism we will get incoherence.¹⁵

One effect of this is to allow the enemies of conservatism to choose their own unflattering definition, because even if conservatives or neutrals see nothing in common within a list like Greenleaf’s, opponents of conservatism will certainly detect error and evil. For instance, Honderich uses the enumeration approach in his book Conservatism. Chapter by chapter, he looks at particular definitions or characterizations of conservatism and inevitably finds counterexamples to them. This allows him to postulate that the only thing that conservatives have in common is what he, Honderich, has spotted (and doesn’t like).

The conclusion to which we come is not that conservatives are selfish. It is that they are nothing else. Their organized selfishness is the rationale of their politics, and they have no other rationale. They stand without the suppo...