How are Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Ron Paul all defined as “conservatives”? In niche British terms, how are Dehenna Davison and Sir Edward Leigh in the same “Conservative and Unionist Party”? Of course any successful movement or party is a broad tent, coaxing together a coalition of overlapping interests. Yet there is something strange about the enormous elasticity of the word “conservative”. It is, marvellously, somehow more prone to stretching and warping than the word “socialism”, that most gymnastic of ideologies!
This is because the word “conservative” indicates a disposition – to conserve – rather than a single project – socialism. But are you in favour of conserving private liberties, or human life? That will determine what “conservatism” means for you regarding abortion. Are you in favour of conserving your nation’s constitutional heritage, or its modern governing institutions? The examples can be easily multiplied. Conservatives want to keep something valuable intact, preserve it, maybe even strengthen it – but that is prone to relativistic or historicist confusion, as different “conservatives” want to conserve contradictory institutions or values. This leads to conservatives particularly suffering from accusations of hypocrisy. Pertinently in recent times, it is asked: How can any conservative support a disruptive candidate or project – that doesn’t conserve the status quo!
Let me suggest, then, that we consciously divide “conservatives” into two groups. Not policy-preference groups, because we have made those divisions and seen them feed into the confusion about “conservatism”. If “classical liberalism”, “neoconservatism”, and “traditionalism” are just preference groups within conservatism, then conservatism is so broad a tent the light of the sun cannot pierce to the centre.
The two groups define specifically what the conservative involved wishes to conserve. These groups are: Political Conservatives (PolCons) and Philosophical Conservatives (PhilCons). These terms have the great benefit of meaning what they say.
The Political Conservative is precisely that – someone politically aligned with “conservative” groups or parties. Their conservation desires centre around the status quo: present political institutions, present social forms (marriage, for instance), economic stability. Of course this means the institutions the PolCon desires to conserve will differ by era and setting – the same fellow might morally abhor slavery in 1852 and abortion clinics in 2002, but seek to preserve their existence whilst mitigating their use. Someone might oppose joining the European Union in the 1960s, and oppose leaving it in 2016.
Now, the PolCon is open to Chesterton’s jibe that conservatives exist to conserve the ruins the progressives have left behind, but it must be said that understanding Political Conservatism this way allows these PolCons to present a coherent view. They prefer the devil they know, and generally oppose change (“Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?” as Salisbury apocryphally asked). The PolCon is the instinctive and inveterate supporter of the Permanent Bureaucracy (even if they believe in trimming bureaucracy!) and the stable Constitution – not out of any love for either, but for expedience.
The Philosophical Conservative (PhilCon) approaches matters from a different direction. The PhilCon is not, first and foremost, a conserver of what happens to be reified into the social and political order at any one time. The PhilCon desires to conserve and nourish good and healthy things, those quite real norms which govern the human experience through all ages. Where do these norms come from? Some PhilCons may be chary of giving an answer – they have a simple givenness and no further certainty can be had – but most will say: from God, or the Eternal, or the Numinous. They are the Permanent Things, in Eliot’s phrase (really popularised by Kirk): they are what makes existence “reasonable tolerable”, and which provides mankind with dignity and purpose. They do so reliably and universally, even when denied and effaced by popular trends, because they are rooted in Permanence, Eternity – Heaven. The PhilCon believes value and truth comes from outside transient human experience and opinion, and instead defines the human experience – in this sense, the PhilCon is ultimately the Realist to the PolCon Nominalist. The PhilCon will never reject a natural good simply because it is unpopular, or tolerate a natural evil because it is accepted. Nor will the PhilCon ever despair in the face of That Hideous Strength; there is always a sweet haven in the soul from the City of the World for the one who serves Permanence.
The PhilCon knows that societies are big ships, slow to turn, with hulls that need protecting from reefs – they will prefer caution and adaptation to destruction in hope of new growth. To put it differently – the PhilCon prefers to recycle and not waste good material than to burn the old chairs and cut down yet more trees for new ones. The PhilCon, knowing all too personally the scope of human limitation, will never claim too high a wisdom in system design, preferring rather to espalier the tree than cut it down and plant a new one.
Yet the PhilCon has a rather dangerous streak in him. When a situation is plainly intolerable – when ultimate values are violated in the coliseum of public opinion, when the abundant decencies of life are consumed like scraps for pigs, when enormities are perpetuated daily in plantations and camps and clinics – then the Philosophical Conservative leaves the cosy armchair and magazine rack with its copy of The New Criterion (or the home prayer room with its icon of St Barnabas, or the allotment shed), and heads off to battle, an unlikely Don John of Austria. The Hobbits left home farther and farther behind, quite against their preference, but because there was a higher calling to preserve what is good in the world; they returned home to find ruin, and cleansed the lanes and fields with sword and justice. I am afraid the typical Permanent Bureaucrat has too little taste for the Permanent Things to do any such thing. No respectable Chief of Staff has ever seen his vanquished forerunners “in a sheet of flame” and yet still declared “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set”.
No, the Permanent Bureaucrat is quite different from the Lover of the Permanent Things. Now often they make alliance – PhilCons historically prefer conservative parties, and so do PolCons – but this is no more important definitionally than it is that Liberals often find their way into conservative parties because conservative parties are sceptical of human virtue with centralised power. The PolCon conserves institutions as a matter of primary conviction for the purpose of expedience; the PhilCon conserves principles for the purpose of humane values. Those principles, never being abstractable, inhere in sensible institutions and persons – but if an institution is void of said principles, the institution is fit only to be burned.
If you say you are a conservative, then, which type are you? What do you find worth conserving? Why? A conservative movement with clear answers to these questions may find surprising traction in the coming days.
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