Two Types of Conservatism: PolCons and PhilCons

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.

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things V: The Night School

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

VII.      The Smallholding

A reader considering the last two numbers in this series – on the Schoolroom and the University, respectively – may mutter at me: “This is all very well, Edwards; we shall educate our children into the tradition, and we shall redeem higher education with collegiate bodies and seminary-farms educating Guardians of the Permanent Things. But I’m past all that now; I can’t benefit. I am alone in my little battle, and armed, metaphorically, with a pitchfork and nothing else.”

 

The problem is this: that we are ill-equipped to build the Citadel we desire and our cause requires. We have no knowledge of masonry, nor building cranes to lift the great sandstone blocks into place. We don’t know our merlons from our mullions. We have scant tools in the shed – a rusted leaf-rake and a rubber mallet. How are we supposed to begin building and cultivating the future?

 

Some means of remedial education is necessary. We are as the first penal-colonists in Australia, cast upon some fatal shore by the whim of the prevailing culture, a gaggle of shoemakers and labourers with no wisdom with which to tame the soil.

 

Of course a person minded to serve the Permanent Things might study on their own, set themselves reading lists, do all in their power to gain the knowledge necessary to teach and guide and build for their great-grandchildren. Yet not all are capable of this, given the whirlwind of their life, or the exact set of their character, or prior educational limitations.

 

We look for will, not wit, when it comes to those who would drag the great blocks up the hill to the building site. Wit is admirable, and useful, but there are already many mayfly men out there with more than enough wit to sink our own civilisation. Will is what lacks – will to build and endure, to take a sunny view of the dismal weather predicted, to build soil year by year with little yield in the short term. Traditionalists, of all people, have lost their will – defeatism or presentism or apocalypticism have infected them. Will is the well from which we water our cattle; without water, the whole herd dies, no matter how well we brush their coats. So with will – our pious presentation means nothing without will.

 

So the remedial student – and so are we all! – who has will, has much. What they need is a guide, or an institution, or a fellowship, to aid them in their intellectual and cultural growth. How might we provide such aid? Well, by the Night School.

 

What do I mean?

 

The previous number posited the creation of the University of the Permanent Things, perhaps with constituent Colleges. Scholars band together and accumulate apprentices. This is a traditional mode of higher education. The collegiate lifestyle involved, the life of reflection aimed at, the preparation of young people for leadership in their homes and in the nation – they require a full-time commitment from most of those involved.

 

If you are 30 with a job (whether at home or in the office!)  and two children and another on the way, this isn’t an option. You have – quite properly – committed yourself to a field of work and your family. Yet you know you lack; you have not the tools to build the Citadel. Some of that missing knowledge is likely of a practical nature, and can be learned as you make compost and make decent scrambled eggs. Some, however, serves the cultivation of the intellective self, and requires energy and focus.

 

I have observed above that not everyone can marry energy, focus, and native ability – but will can suffice where wit lacks. Will is what drives a partisan of Permanence to seek out like minds in the hidden valleys of culture – whether physical or electronic. Such a partisan, whether an accountant or stay-at-home mother or council clerk, seeks mentors and comrades to talk to at 11pm; to message with brief impressions of politics and culture; to learn from, and offer to.

 

This could become a formal or semi-formal activity. This could become a reading circle – or a Night School. Those who have learning can offer it in the smaller hours, or at weekends, to those who have not the time or vocation to go to the University. It may be a corporate effort, or solo – an Institute, or a Socrates. Either way, the essential thing is that this body serve the willing with primers in culture, history, literature, and philosophy. If you like, they are the “political education” wing of the coming Permanence Revolution! They slip amongst the populace, meeting in dingy pub barrooms, or connecting to dissidents on Twitter. They do not subvert the workplace, as the covert Communist does – but they do cultivate the revolutionary vanguard.

 

This concept – of a formal or semi-formal educational body aiming at part-time cultivation for those committed to the moral imagination and civilisation building – can take any number of forms. I have discussed some possible archetypes in the second number of this series, “The Shadow Society”, but I will offer one possible form – one I intend to pursue myself – that may offer inspiration.

 

Could we not create a “Slack Channel Club” with the express purpose of studying small reading lists together? There could be a new reading list every six months, and each reading list could consist of only one or two longer books, with the rest short books or long essays. One member could take the particular duty of leading conversation – preferably whoever has the widest reading and the most experience in the life of reflection.

 

Of course, if some Man of Letters should emerge from the jungle, bedecked in three-piece tweeds, carrying a copy of Milton in one hand and Donoso Cortes in the other – well, then, recruit him to tutor you all! But we must cope in the lack – like half-savage survivors in the wake of the fall of empires, we must scratch through the ruins and accumulate, speculate, and then articulate the meaning of things. The Baptistry at Poitiers is a haphazard, almost ugly pastiche – and more than a pastiche, a literal recycling, as the biggest stones were Roman! What did those half-pagans clad in stinking wool know of architectural principles? Yet without the faith in civilization that led to its rebuilding by the Merovings – no Charlemagne, no Alcuin, no Carolingian Renaissance, no Iron Crown – no Italy, no France, no Germany – no Goethe, no Arthuriana, no Dante! The faith to step into the ruins and lift one worn block on top of another is the sacred flame of civilisation in the breast – of peace, and friendliness, of good things – without which we are condemned to at the best a dissatisfied wandering, carving our dragon prows and seeing only despair in the stars.

 

Any of us can take our handcart to the ruined villa and gather stones – any of us can gather a few friends, or be so gathered, and read together. Even reading English, we will struggle in translation – what on earth are these dead men and women saying? What world do they hail from? What is this strange idea? Even where we have some grounding, we will often feel lost in a wide rereading of the classics – but that is as it should be. The Night School is a journey of rediscovery. It is the careful collation of the living fragments of a world – occluded, perhaps, by our present darkness, but ready to be reforged, like some fell fae sword from a faerytale.

 

What might we read together, then, in our Affirming Flame Club? Take this as a sample “semester reading list”, to be read and discussed over 6 months:

• Plato, "Euthyphro"
• Shakespeare, “Richard II”
• Macaulay, “Horatius at the Bridge”
• Runciman, “Constantinople 1453”
• Kirk, “Politics of Prudence”

Three booklet-length works, one shorter history book, and something a little longer. This is beyond the capabilities of barely anyone – it is will that lacks. Perhaps there is some prospective embarrassment – bumbling men and women trying to decode Shakespeare, reading it out loud on Zoom and laughing at each other’s pronunciation; one fellow reading about the legendary background to Horatius on Wikipedia, half-bemused. Who would volunteer for such a task? Only explorers and monks and gardeners, and the world has dearth of all three – but perhaps we might aspire to such an honour.

 

But what is the point? Are we aiming at mere intellectual satisfaction, knowing just how much better we are than those dreadful progressives, sitting happily in the sewage? We, after all, have ascended to a standing position; thank God we are not such as these.

 

No, this shared study in the Night School does not aim at partisan superiority. It is the founding of a new Cavendish Laboratory, or Round Table, or Citeaux – there is a Quest involved. The first aim, as in all things, is the cultivation of the self – a turning away from the mayfly world of social media, of the news cycle, of the endless churn of Prestige Dramas – a turn towards ancient wells waiting to be redug, brimming with Wisdom’s waters. The order of the soul must be attended before the order of the city can be considered. Providence uses men of blood, but the wise civilisation knows in which barracks to keep them. The Traditiologue, desperately seeking to balance their own ill-wrought edifice upon pillars of public discourse, ever seeking public superiority to hide private roil, is merely a cassocked Jacobin, and his fall shall be the shame, or worse. The traditionalist gives to his neighbour from a private plenitude – a storehouse of soul and mind. So turn inward if you desire to turn outward. Build yourself before worrying about building the world.

 

The second goal of the Quest requires patience, and the historical view. We gather the stone today; we plant the small apple seeds. You embarrass yourself now on the Zoom Athenaeum because you want your great-granddaughter to sit with her grandchildren in front of an Aga in a brick-floored farmhouse kitchen, reading the Bible and Longfellow and the Narniad. You train yourself to be a Meroving so that they might be Carolings. You build your haphazard little chapel so they might build the Palatine Chapel at Aix, fit as the resting place of Emperors. The Night School is, in our grand concept, the humble theatre of action for regulation consultants and Environmental Services assistant managers – it is where we groundlings feed the flame, and sear into the wood of our wandering longship blackened words of promise: “We shall rebuild.”