I think people are often confused when they hear me come down on Bork and criticize conservatives generally. “I’m a conservative,” some people say, “and I don’t believe in censorship and persecution, and I think it’s just fine if women want to start businesses rather than staying in the kitchen with the kids….”
The reason they feel that way is because in America, the terminology of “conservative” and “liberal” has gotten so confusing, and when you add the fact that in recent years, the two groups have been converging, as Virginia Postrel and Dinesh D’Souza have documented, then it gets even more confusing. It is especially confusing when a person uses the terms to refer simply to the political conclusions a person makes, rather than the reasoning behind those conclusions. People do this a lot, but it would be wrong to say that Thomas Szasz, for instance, is a conservative, or William F. Buckley a libertarian, on the grounds that they both believe in ending the Drug War. Their reasons for their positions are different, and it is the reasoning behind their views that ought to be described by the words we use here.
I have studied conservatism at close range for more than a decade now, at Hillsdale College under people like Robert Eden and the unlamented George Roche; with Claremont Institute scholars like Harry Jaffa and Thomas West, and on my own; I have concluded that the following (while obviously there are many people who would not agree with me) is the most accurate way to understand the terminology:
Conservatism, rightly understood, is a political philosophy characterized by the writings of, e.g., Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, and Robert Bork. It holds that the individual is essentially a communal being—a part of an organic social whole, whose personality is molded by the society in which he is born. He does not belong to himself, but rather belongs to society. His proper role is as an unselfish partner with his neighbors, and his family, and in service to his God and his society. Individualism, capitalism, atheism, science, are all disruptive tendencies, because they break the historical, traditional, predictable bonds that connect people to one another. The free market entices a woman to leave her family role, for instance, and go into the workplace. Individualism leads people to challenge the authority of the church or other social figures. In Richard Weaver’s words, “capitalism cannot be conservative in the true sense as long as its reliance is upon industrialism, whose very nature is to unsettle any establishment and initiate the endless innovation of technological ‘progress.’” Quoted in Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver: A Life of The Mind 47 (1995). Science leads people astray from the church, and, as Leon Kass and his followers put it, makes man violate those traditional limits which define us as human. It is for this reason that conservatives have described themselves as “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”
Conservatism is hostile to social-compact political theories as well. Social compact theories assume that individuals exist before society, that they take primacy over society. The idea of compact—which James Madison said was the essence of all free government—is important because it says that people come together to create government and therefore can give government no rights that they don’t already have. The compact theories therefore limit the power of the state by saying that people cannot use the state to do things which they, individually, have no right to do. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.”
But to a conservative, this is a dangerous notion (Nisbet called it “rationalism”), because it is too individualistic. I have no personal right to stop my neighbor’s wife from getting a job, or to stop my neighbor from having a sexual affair with another man in the privacy of his own home, so social compact theory would not permit me to interfere if they chose to do these things, which are disruptive to social traditions. That’s why Russell Kirk said that “Locke’s emphasis upon private freedom endangers that spiritual continuity which we call human society…. Locke has nothing to say about the Christian view of society as a bond between God and man, and among the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. There is no warmth in Locke, and no sense of consecration…. Utility, not love, is the motive of Locke’s individualism.” The Roots of American Order 287 (1991). For the conservative, society is an organic entity, whose roots are veiled by obscure poetic terms like “consecration” which do not enable us to know precisely what the limits of the state are. (And conservatives label the attempts to be more precise as “dismal rationalism.”) Likewise, many moderate conservatives sometimes speak of “balancing” society and the individual, never coming down to precise terms as to what an individual may do, without having his neighbors interfere. Conservatives are therefore likewise hostile to the concept of natural rights. To them, rights are granted through social tradition, not out of some innate individualistic notion. Thus Weaver, Kirk, Bork, and others, have been unremittingly hostile to the idea that you have rights beyond those specified in the Constitution.
The American Revolution, of course, was founded on Lockean individualistic concepts. The founders held that the Creator endowed man with certain inalienable rights, including the right to pursue happiness, and that government was created only to secure these rights—not to violate or interfere with them. (Obviously, this view does not hold that society or family obligations are unimportant; indeed they give color to our lives. But they are not the essence of life; they are chosen obligations, which serve our pursuit of happiness; they are philosophically secondary, not primary.) This is why real conservatives are hostile to the Declaration of Independence; the whole thesis of Bork’s Slouching is that the Declaration is responsible for all the bad things in society since the 1960s, and Russell Kirk said it wasn’t important, and wasn’t “particularly American.” Harry Jaffa’s finest work has been to demolish these conservative pretensions.
But because the American founding was in the social compact, classical liberal, or libertarian mode, the terms have become confusing. Many people refer to themselves as “conservative” because they believe in the American political tradition—even though that tradition is actually a classical liberal, or libertarian one.
Classical liberalism, or libertarianism, holds two fundamental principles: 1) the individual owns himself, and 2) Society is nothing more than a group of individuals, and therefore has no “rights.” If you believe these things, you are not a conservative, you are a libertarian. You may be a moderate libertarian, you may have some confused beliefs that contradict your other beliefs, you may be a Christian libertarian, you may be any number of things, but you are not a conservative.
In the last analysis, the conflict between conservatism on one hand and liberalism (in its classical as well as modern varieties) comes down to what Friedrich Nietzsche called the conflict between free spirits and bound spirits:
A man is called a free spirit if he thinks otherwise than would be expected, based on his origin, environment, class and position, or based on prevailing contemporary views. He is the exception: bound spirits are the rule…. Incidentally, it is not part of the nature of the free spirit that his views are more correct, but rather that he has released himself from tradition, be it successfully or unsuccessfully. Usually, however, he has the truth, or at least the spirit of the search for truth, on his side: he demands reasons, while others demand faith.
The bound spirit assumes a position, not for reasons, but out of habit; he is a Christian for example, not because he had insight into the various religions and chose among them; he is an Englishman not because he decided for England; but rather, Christianity and England were givens, and he accepted them without having reasons, as someone who was born in wine country becomes a wine drinker. Later, when he was a Christian and an Englishman, he may also have devised some reasons in favor of his habit; even if these reasons are overthrown, he, in his whole position, is not. Ask a bound spirit for his reasons against bigamy, for example, and you will learn whether his holy zeal for monogamy is based on reasons or habit. The habit of intellectual principles without reasons is called faith….
Bound spirits say that four sorts of things are in the right: first, all things having permanence are in the right; second, all things that are no burden to us are in the right; third, all things that benefit us are in the right; fourth, all things for which we have made sacrifices are in the right…. Free spirits, pleading their cause before the tribunal of bound spirits, have to prove that there have always been free spirits and that freethinking therefore has permanence; then, that they do not want to be a burden; and finally, that on the whole they are beneficial to bound sprits. But because they cannot convince the bound spirits of this last point, it does not help them to have proved the first and second.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §§ 225-229 (M. Faber & S. Lehmann, trans., University of Nebraska Press 1996) (1878). I love that last part. Does it not perfectly describe the entreaties of libertarians to conservatives?
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