Presentable Conservatives

Jacob Levy responds to my "I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!" by saying:

Jacob T. Levy: [F]eh. Scoring points is fun and all, but the point being scored here is entirely beside the, well, point. Brad has no difficulty finding classic teaching texts for views he considers unattarctive--say, Marxism....

John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights and Robert George's Making Men Moral are major, intellectually serious statements of a social conservatism I find deeply unattractive. But for current purposes my problem is not that they're unattractive, it's that they're unteachable--pitched at too high a level, too drenched in literatures undergraduates in political theory courses won't have read, too Raz-ishly dense (and Raz is hardly teachable to undergraduatess in the first place).

Schmitt's Concept of the Political and Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [also] provide teachable, cogent, serious statements for a position I trust Brad finds "unattractive." So does Maistre. Why is it easier to find enduring reactionary texts than enduring texts that state the basic position of conservatives in liberal democracies? That's the puzzle.

I think Jacob has already solved his own puzzle higher up in his post, where he writes:

One of the problems is that history keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader.... This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... This is a special case of Tyler [Cowen]'s depravity point--but in the context of 20th c American conservatism, an important special case. And note that Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...

Levy is happy assigning de Maistre and Schmitt because he doesn't mind that they convict themselves out of their own mouths of being Monster Raving Loonies. His problem with Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and, indeed, Oakeshott's "Rationalism and Politics" (and, indeed, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Letters on a Regicide Peace cto the extent that one reads them not as expressions of a mood but as a call to crown the Comte de Paris at Reims next Easter) is that they too have acquired the tinge of looniness with the passage of time.

I wager that Robert George and John Finnis will seem similarly tinged with looniness in another half a generation. Had they been writing a century ago one of the "powerfully seductive and corrupting vices" that they think should be suppressed by the state with dungeon and manacle would be the idea that women have a role to play in the public sphere; had he been writing half a century ago one of the PSaCVttTSBSbtSwDaM would have been miscegenation, and votes for Negroes; but they are writing today and so they concentrate their fire on heterosexual sex outside of marriage, on--indeed--heterosexual sex "not of the reproductive kind" inside of marriage, and on homosexuals:

Source: David Paul Morris/Getty Images.

But in all likelihood history will continue to progress toward the light, homosexuality wiill become more broadly accepted, some Pope will endorse artificial birth control, and some future Jacob Levy will complain that George and Finnis are unacceptable not just becuase they are rarified but because what they claimed would cause the sky to fall came to pass, and the sky did not fall.

Comments

[Robert Waldmann]

You slander and calumnify the esteemed Screaming Lord Such by suggesting that The Raving Loony party is reactionary. Lord Such would have no truck with de Maistre or Schmitt (if he knew who they were).

Lest you think you can insult small parties, I remind you that the Raving Loony/Green Chicken alliance once received more votes than the Social Democrat/Liberal alliance lead by the very serious Dr David Owen.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

"But in all likelihood history will continue to progress, homosexuality wiill become more broadly accepted"

I hope you're right professor, but so far the acceptence of homosexuality has seemed to wax and wane over time with the rise and fall of different cultures. Even today the increased persecution of gays is a sign of progress for some. Why think there won't be a time in the future where gay sex is a crime again even in the region of the world that both of us currently call our home?

What's true about the ephemerality of the tolerance of homosexuality is true of all that is held near and dear to the hearts of us modern liberals. I see no reason why the history of the future will be so different than our current history. In any given place, there will be periods of tolerance and periods of persecution. There will be periods of sexual freedom and periods of sexual repression. The will be free and open societies and there will be dictatorships. What is so special about today that all will now converge forever and ever to something we modern liberals would both like to see?

[Robert Waldmann]

Seriously though, I think part of the problem with dated conservatives is that they tend to stand athwart history and shout. If they stood athwart history and spoke in a calm tone, they might not age so badly. The point (I forget if it is yours or Levy's) is that we are not in hell in a handbasket.
Conservatives who warn of the coming collapse of civilization will not be widely read in 50 years. If civilization collapses, we won't have books. If it doesn't they will look silly.

Now conservatives could just note that some changes are for the worse. I'd say that if they stuck to discussing how high rates of divorce contribute to poverty, I would agree with them.

Actually, I think the problem is that reasonable conservatives don't count as conservatives for Levy's purposes. That is, if one wants a ideal type to illustrate the phenomenon to students, one wants something which goes poorly with conservativism. It is reasonable to say that we should have some respect for some traditions whose logic we don't understand and should be careful about change because consequences can be unpredictable. However, if you want "change nothing or you will go to hell in a handbasket" you're going to have to renew your conservative icon every ten years.

[Joe S.]

I have finally read Russell Kirk. At least he deals in good faith, but is otherwise not very prepossessing. However, he did make me go back to Burke. I think that I had (and Brad does) read Burke too--uh, Whiggishly. Yes, much of Burke is a simple plea for intellectual humility, and reluctance to disturb institutions that work well enough. And Burke was quite happy to destroy institutions that did not work well enough--although with a very careful eye to the overall legitimacy of the status quo.

But Burke is far more than an advocate of intellectual humility and legitimacy. He is a conservative--maybe the only one who has raised himself from cultural critic to serious political theorist. Let's go to the source.

"Many of our [English]men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them."

"But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion."

"When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honor, and the honor of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle."

"The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold a generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, achieved defensive nations, the nurse of the manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

I don't like this. But it is not loony. And Burke--remember again and again--called the French Revolution correctly.

[jerry]

"What's true about the ephemerality of the tolerance of homosexuality is true of all that is held near and dear to the hearts of us modern liberals. I see no reason why the history of the future will be so different than our current history. In any given place, there will be periods of tolerance and periods of persecution. There will be periods of sexual freedom and periods of sexual repression. The will be free and open societies and there will be dictatorships. What is so special about today that all will now converge forever and ever to something we modern liberals would both like to see?"

Who would have ever thought we would see a day when The United States did away with Habeas Corpus, tortured people, or instituted free speech zones?

[reason]

I'm conservative by temperament and liberal by conviction. I know others like that. My father was a scientist, I was brought to think that the truth, and what I feel to be the truth are two different things. Your shouting conservatives are people who don't know that.

Otherwise, what Robert Waldmann said - great comment.

[Doug]

Conservatism is not the solution. Conservatism is the problem.

[Scott Martens]

In the Great White North, we used to have a group of people called the "Red Tories". On the whole, these were conservatives (and generally capital-C Conservatives) who believed in God and King and (sometimes) Empire, who were broadly religious and generally supportive of conservative, entrenched faiths, and who would have gladly stood for many (but not all of the) things near and dear to the religious right in America. However, at the same time, they tended to rail against the corruption of the private sector, against the inequality of weath distribution, and against the common man getting shafted by the social machinery he was stuck in. And - in contrast to all other brands of conservative I'm aware of - they expected the *government* to do something about it.

A lot of serious Canadian political scientists consider the existence and power of this branch of conservative thought as one of a small number of fundamental reasons why the political and social development of Canada is so radically different from that of the United States.

It's not clear to me that the likes of George Grant have aged so badly. But, I should note that Grant's nephew - for example - is Deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. Red Toryism has largely been assimilated into the centrist Liberal Party since the collapse of the old Progressive Conservative Party after the 1993 election fiasco, and nowadays wouldn't even be considered a conservative movement even in Canada.

If your conservativism consists of the defense of historically conditioned privileges or the maintenance of an inevitably temporary status quo, time will never be on your side. But it seems clear to me that there is a different kind of conservativism, just that its advocates seem to have lost control of the word somehow.

That leftists don't age so poorly is as much a byproduct of the nature of change than the nature of leftist thought. Those who rail against institutions that disappear are remembered as prophets and liberators, even when they and their works had little to with that disappearance. The inevitablity of change means that if you advocate some change, you always have a chance that history will prove you right. And if not, then you can simply be taken off everyone's reading lists. If you rail against change, you are near certain to end up proven wrong or irrelevant.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

jerry wrote: "Who would have ever thought we would see a day when The United States did away with Habeas Corpus, tortured people, or instituted free speech zones?"

Here's a quote that sheds some light on human progress...

"If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

Yes, not only Chekhov's heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century -- in a society based on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films had already appeared -- not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims."

-- From The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Human progress goes around in circles. Nevertheless, let's hope the first steps of the recent past towards torture, repression, and an all-powerful executive and away from the rule of law here in America are the only steps. Let's hope that some future American Solzhenitsyn won't be needed for a very long time.

[Michael Carroll]

"But in all likelihood history will continue to progress toward the light, homosexuality wiill become more broadly accepted, some Pope will endorse artificial birth control, and some future Jacob Levy will complain that George and Finnis are unacceptable not just becuase they are rarified but because what they claimed would cause the sky to fall came to pass, and the sky did not fall."

The word TELEOLOGICAL pops into my head - as in TELEOLOGICAL FALLACY.

[When you predict that water running downhill will keep running downhill, it's not a fallacy.]

[Barbara]

Regarding, in particular, homosexuality and the marriage debate, one reason why conservatives are so unpersuasive is that they refuse to admit the lack of evidence for one of their core convictions (gay marriage = destruction of other marriage and the end of civilization) and refuse to admit the overwhelming evidence that conflicts with other pet convictions (unbridled capitalism undermines family units and is thus a clear contributing factor in weakening the institution of marriage). They have already conceived the rightness of their convictions (unbridled capitalism, strong marriage) and their discourse is essentially dishonest because they can't or won't admit of the tensions inherent in these convictions, or even why they hold them to be such worthy goals given those inherent tensions. Instead, the essence of conservative thought on these issues is to look for the deus ex machina of the liberal bogeyman to blame for social breakdown, and claim to have found it even in the absence of any evidence at all. Maggie Gallagher's quest for evidence on the impact of gay acceptance on marriage is a particular triumph of wishful thinking in the social sciences.

At a minimum, it seems to me that you can't be great or even lucid if you are essentially dishonest.

[Adam Foley]

"But in all likelihood history will continue to progress toward the light..."

Just curious as to how many of the commenters agree with this sentiment. Are we inexorably moving towards the light or are we just in a "sweet spot" for tolerance that will fade away due to unforseeable reasons?

My instinct is that moral progress is usually temporary but I'd be happy to hear if and why others disagree. Thanks.

[Charles]

Adam, consider that three millenia ago, slavery was the norm, women and children were property, and genocide was an accepted means of conducting war. Now these are the exceptions, condemned by almost all.

There is progress. It is simply too slow for the human mind to grasp.

[Roger Albin]

Finnis and George are representatives of a distinguished tradition, the Thomistic Natural Law school, and substantial intellectuals. Their theistic assumptions and teleological approach are questionable, but they work hard at being rigorous thinkers. Like Marx, they propose serious, albeit wrong, alternative models. While Marx was wrong about many things, few serious people regard him as a loon. Serious Catholic intellectuals like Finnis and George should be put in the same category of wrong but worthy of study.

[I dunno.

Marx never reached the stage of: "Because a guy in Rome who wears a funny hat says so, the use of condoms is offensive to The One Who Is." Sounds pretty loony to me.]

[Obnoxious twit]

Just who the heck are these Finnis and George that they are supposedly too darn hard for undergraduates? I had to plow through Hegel in translation, and Derrida, Foucault and Barthes in the original. Admittedly that was in the 80's but I doubt people have all really become dumber.

I did drop math after the first year. We had to construct the real numbers from scratch, starting with only the principle that 1 and 0 are known to exist. That was too hard for me, but a lot of other people were able to do it.

Oh, this was all while also reading the Iliad and learning Russian. And my workload was not unusual, nor did I graduate first in my class. I'd like to think my school is special, but I'm sure there's plenty of smart, curious people anywhere. Probably some of the people chiming in on this thread are undergrads.

Paraphrasing, are these texts really so "unteachable," or is Mr. Levy just unwilling to answer the questions the texts ask of him? (This is an allusion, which is why it may sound pompous.)

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

Charles wrote: "Adam, consider that three millenia ago, slavery was the norm, women and children were property, and genocide was an accepted means of conducting war. Now these are the exceptions, condemned by almost all."

Slavery existed on a mass scale less than a century ago in the Stalinist USSR and under the Nazis. Go back a mere 150 years and it was here in the good old U.S. of A. Genocide never went away. Only recently the sanctions policies of the 'West' in Iraq resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

It's easy to condemn, not so easy to not commit atrocities. But there is progress. We've seen incredible progress in technology and in our ability to sell unpalatable atrocities as fine cuisine.

[Matt]

Brad said, "Marx never reached the stage of: "Because a guy in Rome who wears a funny hat says so, the use of condoms is offensive to The One Who Is." Sounds pretty loony to me"

Have you read Finnis or George, Brad? Honestly, have you? Because they don't make arguments like this at all.

[But they do. They try to disguise it, but that is what yh
Yhey are saying.]

Now, I find their arguments completely unconvincing, and I tend to think that unless one believed the sorts of things that a Catholic believes one won't find them at all convincing. But, there isn't an appeal to authority like this in them _at all_. You don't need to be committed to any dogma of the Catholic church to accept their arguments. I find the presumptions of their arguments to be completely unconvincing, but that's a different problem all together from what you suggest. This sort of thing makes me doubt you've really read anything serious by either one. If so, you should try to give a minimally charitable interpritation of their views. If you've not read them, you shouldn't act like you have. It makes you look silly and dishonest.

[Michael Carroll]

[When you predict that water running downhill will keep running downhill, it's not a fallacy.]

I bet a lot of people in Germany in 1925 thought their kids would grow up in a liberal or social democracy, too. Never assume that people automatically get more open minded just because the calendar keeps changing. Once you get outside of Berkeley you realize there are a fair number of people in this country who want to turn the clock back on a long list of social norms. Consider the odds abortion remains legal in all 50 states over the next 25 years. I'd say the water isn't necessarily running down hill just because your head is cocked to the left.

[Matt Lister]

Well Brad, I have to say that I think you're being pretty seriously unfair in your reading here.

[How so? If Paul VI had accepted the advice he was offered b the experts, Robert George would today be constructing elegant arguments about how non-procreative heterosexual sex within marriage is completely in accord with natural law.

That fact about that counterfactual world tells us something very important about George and his arguments, doesn't it?]

[jamie_2002]

[When you predict that water running downhill will keep running downhill, it's not a fallacy.]

Water keeps running downhill until you get to the bottom of the hill.

When you predict the hill runs on forever, that's a fallacy

[Roger Albin]

As pointed out by the severe and very knowledgeable Kolakowski, underlying Marx's work is a teleological model of history and human experience derived ultimately from the Christian neo-Platonic tradition. Marx's model of history begins with idealized primitive communism, a secular form of the primitive state of grace, followed by historical development of society that results in alienation with the development of primitive capitalism, a secularized version of the fall from grace, then the inevitable historical return to communism and the end of alienation, a secular form of millenarianism. As MacIntyre wrote a number of years ago, a good way to think of Marxism is as a heretical Christian movement.
Lets try something else; Marx's concept of surplus value makes sense?

So, Marx is not looney and the Natural Law tradition based on some of the most impressive thinkers in Western history is looney?

[Gareth Morley]

I haven't read George, but I have read Finnis, and in Natural Law and Natural Rights he hardly talks about sex at all. There is probably more on bankruptcy.

Scott Martens,

I doubt that George Grant would have much good to say about the politics of his nephew, Michael Ignatieff. He and Sheila cut off ties personally when Ignatieff published a memoir about his mother that they thought violated her privacy. But politically, what would grumpy old Grant have to do with someone who so perfectly represents transnational cosmopolitanism at its most imperialist?

[Seth Edenbaum]

"Convention" or "Desire" ?
There are people from what you would call the Left and Right in both camps. It's the division between social conservatives and the economic "liberals" who make up the republican party. It's what separates conservative Brad DeLong from leftist Tony Judt. It's what separates those who celebrate the so called Enlightenment and Age of Reason as founding pillars of secularism from those who recognize that the Renaissance was far more important in that regard: far less preoccupied with faith. It separates ideological optimists from reasoning pessimists.
The Enlightenment begat the Age of Exceptionalism (an age we're finally leaving behind) and the distaste for such ideas is what old Burkean conservatives share with the post war ethnographically inclined "post modern" left. Capitalism after all is radical: it calls for permanent revolution. And the resultant alienation from the present and self-justifying instrumentalism of desire and progress ["The truth is just over the next hill!!] is what much of the intellectual left has been bemoaning for 50 years.

If conservatism hasn't given us much of value over the last century (and it hasn't) it's because "capitalist conservatism" is oxymoronic, and those who call themselves by that name have never gotten the joke.

[Gareth Morley]

But Seth, most intellectual conservatives like George Grant or Alasdir McIntyre or John Finnis *do* get that there is a tension between capitalism and conservatism. Strauss agreed, but thought that democratic capitalism was still better for the existence of philosophy and the perennial virtues than communism.

[Nathan Morton]

So the south should not remain the south, but we should have all the immigrants come here and remain 'true' to their indigenous cultures? Sounds like Third World imperialist sympathy to me.