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What It Means to Be Conservative comment What It Means To Be Conservative Owen Harries t is not altogether easy to write on conservatism. For one thing, if your readership is at all a representative sample of the educated middle class, chances are that it Iwill be hostile to your topic, or at least sceptical of its claim to deserve serious intellectual attention. A long time ago, John Stuart Mill famously dubbed the Conservative Party the ‘stupid party’. Mill was, of course, a liberal—but then so are most intellectuals (small ‘l’, naturally). The English conservative, Roger Scruton, has recently written of his own experience growing up in the middle of the 20th century: ‘. [A]lmost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse . [it was] to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation . spontaneity and life.’ Owen Harries is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This is an edited version of a talk given to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum in March 2003. 28 Vol. 19 No. 2 • Winter 2003 • Policy Policy • Vol. 19 No. 2 • Winter 2003 29 What It Means To Be Conservative comment As far as Australia is concerned, things don’t seem to have changed much if a recent review of R. J. White defensively (or perhaps several new books on Don Bradman is anything to smugly and archly) claims that,‘To put go by. At one point the author (Graeme Blundell) conservatism in a bottle with a label listed Bradman’s alleged failings: he couldn’t cope with sticky wickets, he was shaky against short- is like trying to liquify the atmosphere pitched balls—and he was (shudder) a ‘social or give an accurate description of the conservative’! beliefs of a member of the Anglican As well as hostility, there is likely to be ignorance. This is partly the fault of conservatism Church. The difficulty arises from the and conservatives themselves; it arises from the nature of the thing.’ nature of the beast. For conservatism does not lend itself easily to schematic, didactic exposition, widely accepted, both by conservatives and others, and conservatives do not readily engage in it. The as the ablest and most influential statement of best conservative writers tend to approach the conservative views—Edmund Burke’s Reflections subject partially or obliquely, in scattered essays, on the Revolution in France—is not a systematic or by anthologising examples, or in the course of statement of a position but an inspired polemic controversy over a particular issue. In introducing reacting to a particular political situation: a huge, Owen Harries his anthology, The Conservative Tradition, R. J. unprecedented upheaval in the most illustrious White defensively (or perhaps smugly and archly) and powerful country in Europe. In that polemic claims that, ‘To put conservatism in a bottle with a is embedded, in unsystematic fashion, the tenets of label is like trying to liquify the atmosphere or give a political philosophy. The reader has to do his own an accurate description of the beliefs of a member work in abstracting the latter from the former. My of the Anglican Church. The difficulty arises from abstraction will be very selective and will not do the nature of the thing. For conservatism is less a anything like justice to the richness of the complete political doctrine than a habit of mind, a mode of work. feeling, a way of living’. Again, Michael Oakeshott—perhaps the most The limits of politics influential conservative thinker of the last century— Two initial points about Burke’s Reflections: First, begins his essay ‘On Being Conservative’ by it was published in 1790, that is before the most acknowledging that, ‘It may be true that conservative violent manifestations of the Revolution—before conduct does not readily provoke articulation in the terror, the regicide, the Revolution devouring the idiom of general ideas, and that consequently its own children, and the emergence of a military there has been a certain reluctance to undertake this dictatorship. Thus, Burke was writing with foresight, kind of elucidation’.1 And he immediately goes on not hindsight. to make it clear that he is not concerned to correct Second, at the time it was published, the this deficiency, but rather to describe the disposition Revolution was still hugely popular in England, seen to be conservative—to discuss, that is, a cast of as an immense liberating step forward for mankind character rather than a set of ideas. by the enlightened opinion of the day. Most of us At the local level, I consulted the anthology of are familiar with Wordsworth’s ‘Bliss was it then to Quadrant articles, drawn from 25 years of publication. be alive’ reaction, and with that of Charles James Quadrant is Australia’s leading conservative journal. Fox: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever But the anthology does not contain a single article happened in the world! And how much the best!’. In that attempts to set out the tenets of the conservative launching his denunciation of the Revolution, then, position systematically; plenty of articles that use Burke, was not expressing a popular opinion among conservative arguments in an ad hoc way, but not thinking Englishmen, but rather going against the one that tried to give a coherent answer to the tide. Among other things it was to cost him his close question: What is Conservatism? friendship with Fox. Bearing this resistance to formal treatment Central to Burke’s reaction to the Revolution was in mind, it is perfectly in character that what is a profound hostility toward what he called variously 28 Vol. 19 No. 2 • Winter 2003 • Policy Policy • Vol. 19 No. 2 • Winter 2003 29 What It Means To Be Conservative ‘speculation’, ‘metaphysics’ or ‘theoretical reasoning’ The latter has only the general view of as applied to social and political questions, and his society; the former, the statesman, has conviction of the danger of such applications. a number of circumstances to combine He was writing, remember, at a time when the with those general ideas, and to take revolutionaries in France seriously believed that into his consideration. Circumstances they could reconstruct the world from scratch by are infinite, and infinitely combined; the application of general, abstract principles—even are variable and transient; he who to the point of introducing a new calendar to mark does not take them into consideration the beginning of that new, enlightened world. And is not erroneous but stark mad—he is in holding this belief they were not exceptional but metaphysically mad. representative of the most sophisticated opinion of In other words, discrimination in terms of their time, putting into action belief about the power circumstances trumps consistency in terms of of reason that had been energetically propagated by principle and logic, and insistence on consistency representatives of the Enlightenment in preceding regardless of circumstances and consequences is decades. likely to be disastrous. If stated in these terms this Burke rejected that belief for two reasons, the first seems obvious, think of it the next time someone having to do with the nature of society and politics, insists that because we act in one way toward the second with the nature of human beings and country X (say with respect to human rights) it their rational faculties. would be hypocritical and wrong not to act in the same way to country Y, regardless of the difference Burke was writing at a time between the two countries or of the difference in when the revolutionaries in France our relationships with the two. As Dean Acheson, one of America’s greatest Secretaries of State, once seriously believed that they could put it, ‘I am not in the slightest bit worried because reconstruct the world from somebody can say, “Well, you said so and so about scratch by the application of Greece, why isn’t all this true about China?” I will general, abstract principles even be polite. I will be patient, and I will try to explain — why Greece is not China. But my heart will not be to the point of introducing a new in the battle.’ calendar to mark the beginning of The sociologist Max Weber was making the same that new, enlightened world. point in more general terms when, in his essay on ‘Politics as a Vocation’,2 he distinguished between two fundamentally different maxims concerning When he wrote Reflections, Burke had been ethical conduct. There is, first, what he terms ‘the intimately engaged in politics at a high level for ethic of ultimate ends’, which decrees absolute and three decades. He saw that activity as an infinitely unconditional fidelity to principle (in religious complex, difficult and delicate one. The number terms, ‘The Christian does right and leaves the of factors at work were many and the ways they result with the Lord’; in secular terms, ‘One must interrelated were complex. Politicians had to act be faithful to the principles dictated by reason and in concrete, discrete situations, not in general or morality, regardless of consequences’). And there is, abstract areas: second, ‘the ethic of responsibility’, which decrees The science of constructing a that one has a responsibility to take into account, Commonwealth, or renovating it, as best one can, the foreseeable circumstances and or reforming it, is, like every other consequences of one’s actions. The second, Weber experimental science, not to be taught a believed, is the approach appropriate to political life. priori. It is a matter of the most delicate The responsibility of a political leader is to the well- and complicated skill.
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