My thoughts have been straying towards conservatism lately….
Hold on! It’s not what you think.
Before we get into it, I have to tell you what I don’t mean by conservative. What I am talking about almost doesn’t exist anymore. It was killed off by:
Fiscal Conservatism, also known as classical liberalism or libertarianism: The belief that small government is better, that people should fend for themselves, that the individual is primary, and that property rights are basically the only rights. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman. Think Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom: political freedom is economic freedom. And vice versa. Closely related to…
Political Conservatism: Basically oligarchy. The top should rule and the rest fall in a hierarchy. The State holds absolute power and requires absolute obedience. Nationalism. Militarism. It is interesting that fiscal and political conservatism run together, because the first demands a smaller government, but the second says as long as we don’t cut the police or the military.
Social Conservatism: Woman shouldn’t have control of their bodies. Drug users should be locked up forever. No sex, no alcohol. No fun. Censorship.
Religious Conservatism: Jesus is coming home. Soon. Better clean this place up a bit.
All of these have banded together, but it is easy to see that they don’t really belong together. They have a common enemy. It is sincerely hard to reconcile conservatives who think the government should do nothing and those who think it should enforce the Ten Commandments.
Clearly I am not any of these. Let’s just skip over Religious and Social Conservatism. In terms of politics my general philosophy is anarchistic, which means I believe decision making power should always move from centralized to decentralized forms.
I think libertarianism turns on a philosophical falsehood: that we all should be considered as individual and rational actors. It uses a false state of nature argument, from Hobbes to Nozick. Human beings cannot exist without the supports of society, and the idea that anyone with money is “self-made man” is a fallacy (the “self-attribution” fallacy). This will be expanded at a later date.
What is missing is a kind of conservatism that we don’t see much anymore. I am going to tentatively call it “Toryism,” although Toryism doesn’t exactly cover it. Toryism includes a lot of hierarchism and monarchism which is outdated. You could also call it “traditionalist conservatism,” but again I think it is a concept from another time.
You also have “communitarianism,” which is closer to the mark. Communitarianism is
an ideology that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. That community may be the family unit, but it can also be understood in a far wider sense of personal interaction, of geographical location, or of shared history.
My thoughts started coalescing on these lines when I found Grant’s Lament for a Nation in a book store and finally got around to reading it. His argument, in summary, is that the fall of Diefenbaker was the fall of a kind of conservatism that put the collective of Canada first, and a decent into the politics of money and self-interest, tied to the fortunes of America.
It harkens back to a kind of Canadian conservatism that used to be called Red Toryism. Most of the time we think of this now as simply moderate conservatives, but it historically was more than that. As Gad Horowitz argues, in the past, in Canada, it was often easier to move from being a socialist to a Red Tory, and vice versa. The difference being that Red Tories believed in the noblesse oblige that comes from being in a higher strata of society, the idea that it was the job of the higher classes to extend their munificence for the greater good.
In short, both believe in the importance of taking care of the collective, except from different ends of the spectrum. This is most sorrily lacking in current conservative politics. The current dominance of “I got mine so go fuck yourself” neoliberalism is actually a blight on the moral core of society. Part of the death and rebirth of the Canadian Conservative Party was the eradication of the classical Red Tory stance towards an adoption of the American Republican/libertarian position. A world-wide phenomenon I guess.
I have a lot more to say about this, about morality (the importance of virtue ethics and the failure of Enlightenment morality), about the importance of history (the Whiggish failure that sees everything “new” as “best”—again the antagonism between Tories and Whigs), and about technology. But what struck me today is the beginning part of Simone Weil‘s The Need for Roots, which I read on the subway this morning on the way to work.
This first part itself could stand as a counter-argument to libertarianism. Far from the materialist conception, that we only need property and society is there to protect it, Weil notes that we have a number of needs, without which our soul will be sick. In an Aristotelian manner these needs are balanced off of one another, so an excess of one often results in the lack of another. Later in the book she talks how the sick soul leads to uprootedness, and how that leads to things like Nazism.
The needs of the soul are:
Order
Liberty
Obedience
Responsibility
Equality
Hierarchism
Honour
Punishment
Freedom of Opinion
Security
Risk
Private Property
Collective Property
Truth
And the first sentence is itself a blow to modernism, the Enlightenment, and goddamn libertarianism:
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him.
This is Toryism or Communitarianism, and it is missing from our political discussion today.