defining conservatism

1 W. D. S. Pennington Outline for a Definition of Conservatism 03.00.21 Today, the routing of classical conservatism is rampant—yet its essential promise remains unconquered. Starved of an intellectual center, of a focal point for thoughtful deliberation, classical conservatism is confused, unsure, self-condemned to cycles of debasement.

Conservatism does not know itself, it cannot speak for itself, does not recognize its own oncefamiliar, once-principled motivations. It lacks confidence; it lacks creativity; it lacks definition.

The following is an attempt to designate such a definition. Insofar as we lack a robust definition and working understanding of conservatism’s true identity, so too does our capacity to exist as time-bound creatures in this world diminish; we become less, the depth of our being made shallow. Without a proper conservative discourse, we do not know how to say “yes” or “no” to time; we do not know how to award permanence or avoid decay, when to wait and when to intervene, how to judge, decide or choose.

Conservatism’s promise rests in its capacity to respond to this existential deficit. Conservatism is: the deliberate use of human choice to challenge the arrogance of time. It is to use time, to use experience, in the service of human community; to arrest rather than resist, to pull from the everflow the most essential, the most human, the most home-building technologies of politicking and world-building yet developed.

The exaltation of choice and decision is here paramount, and prudence becomes the conservative battle-standard. This prudence is informed by history, and seeks to either “yes-say” or “no-say” toward the time-bound conditions from which it springs: prescription of custom, the accumulated knowledge-bank of history, is central to the exercise of prudence, and is seen as local, contingent and historical. To this end, elements of classical conservatism dovetail with theoretical pragmatism, insofar as both are concerned and begin with the reality of organisms in their actual ecosystems, with the prioritization of the empirical assessment of the “facts on the ground,” on with the rejection of monistic abstractions and a focus on the real, rooted, embodied interests involved. Both systems of thought are fundamentally “bottom-up” pluralistic philosophies that promote human growth, development and flourishing—different in the details, but bound in a similar rejection of the ultimate “perfectibility” of man and the positive liberties that so often manifest in violent fascisms and all-devouring totalitarianisms. Contingency, adaptability, novelty: the great ebb and flow of raw experience is both the moral and political concern of classical conservatism.

Below, I outline the five key philosophical commitments of an updated establishment conservatism. Taken individually, these principles are not unique to conservatism: as mentioned, the focus on experience and plurality conservatism shares with philosophical pragmatism; with liberalism, including the Lockean variant, it shares the idea that politics is a secondary phenomenon responding to primary human needs and desires; the analysis of the dynamic interactions between agent and environment links conservatism to strands of Hegelianism and even, at its limit-break, Marxism; and the relationship between freedom and homeness recalls

2 deeper aspects of continental phenomenology. Yet conservatism cannot be reduced to any of these systems of thought, and sets itself apart in the interrelation it forges between the major elements in question. In this way, conservatism is not fully represented by any given principle, but through the way the total constellation of ideas “hangs together” and reinforces itself both theoretically and practically. Conservatism is, simply, a belief in the value of this constellation and a commitment to this constellation of values.

What, then, are the philosophical principles of an evolved conservatism?

1. Pillar number one: we believe that politics begins and ends in experience. We mean by this that we must acknowledge that a people, a person, is bound to a given time and place, and that the customs, history, and lived experience of that time and place will determine the nature and necessity of political action and institutions. We aim here to reject “abstraction” and Utopianism in its various forms, and acknowledge that politics is a responsive means that begins with real people facing real problems; the solutions to these problems arise from the resources available in the environments themselves, and usually involve a skepticism toward “planning” in its various guises. i. We reject, in turn, the idea of a closed, ultimate political authority: there is no “view from nowhere,” but the diverse, pluralistic, often competing “views” rooted in various “somewheres.” We are committed to a politics of the “ground-up” rather than “top-down”, and privilege the local over the universal.

1. We celebrate the variegated forms of human existence in their uniqueness, diversity, and right to exist. Equally, we celebrate the individual not as an abstract entity, but as an “embodied”, robust agent who is “rooted” in the world and whose agency is in part determined by the unique characteristics of their given environments. This also makes the individual agent contingent: different aspects of the human condition are privileged and grow in different contexts. Both acknowledging and celebrating this fact is part of the core program of a conservatism that grounds itself in experience. ii. Related to this focus on the local and contingent is a corresponding politics of the “present,” which aims to avoid dramatic command over the future. Rather, we concentrate our resources and efforts as reactions to the needs of the moment. This is not to discount or ignore the future, but to subject its potential prospects to the real, pressing needs of the immediate present. Another way to declare this is through the old Jeffersonian adage, “the world is run by the living.”

1. Our focus on the present commits us to programs of careful, prudent reform over brazen innovation or revolution; political action is to be educated, deliberate, informed and highlyspecialized. We believe political action is best when it is most selflimiting.

2. Pillar number two: we derive from the priority of experience the idea that politics is a means to a greater end; that there exist pre-political loyalties and forms of friendship

3 from which politics emerge and against which politics plays out. As a result, politics as a phenomenon is always of a secondary value, while the realization of principles such as social membership, individual attachment to community, and the cultivation of networks and bonds of trust remain the paramount endgame of political action. We do not see society as a single, pre-given, organic structure, but as a dynamic community of rational, free, voluntaristic associations. As a result, preserving the health and encouraging the vitality of this dynamism is a daily task. We acknowledge that individuals are born into the world “burdened by obligations,” obligations that spring naturally from their given environments, and obligations whose authority is inextricably linked to a greater and higher sense of what it means to live with values, to live with principles, and to live with meaning. In short, we hold that politics justifies itself on the grounds that is able to draw individuals and communities into greater proximity to the question of what it means to “live well” in the fullest and most robust sense. a. We uphold and interlink a politics of the hearth, a politics of neighborly friendship and participatory citizenry, and a politics of the family. We celebrate the values instilled over the dinner table, taken classically as piety, respect, duty, and responsibility. We maintain a corresponding focus on the status and health of our “culture” as the principle mediating factor between civic society and the state, and we acknowledge culture as the mortar that binds law, as a cold, abstract set of axioms, to lived, animated human feeling. Access to culture through educational and extra-educational means is thus of paramount concern. We ultimately seek to “stack” or coordinate the levels of family, culture, law and the state into a cohesive matrix and coherent narrative. In other words, our institutions, sympathies, networks, values and commitments ought to all interrelate, overlap and support one another. The question of the community—“who are we? what values define us?”—is an open question to be celebrated and recalibrated daily.

Part of this daily effort is the responsibility of the individual to participate in the maintenance of the social order—to inhabit the role of a robust “citizen” who assumes an active relationship to the public and its problems. b. We believe that a society of free individuals is grounded in ties and associations of mutual recognition, understanding and sympathy—not in the receipts and bank-ledgers of cold rationality. As politics is secondary to human needs and lived realities, so too are political reason and calculation secondary to emotive ties and affective supports. In this manner, we trace the health of our political order to the strength and vitality of our social and civic institutions and practices. We do not deny the value of reason and calculation to politics—we seek merely to situate them properly in the grand economy of our lived affairs. In short, we acknowledge that the foundation of politics is itself not political. c. We maintain that a shared belief in a transcendent order—organized religion—is a primary technology of social and political integration, that religion helps bind generations to societies and societies to themselves. Equally, we place great value on the role of art and literature in the overall expression of a people and the flow of their historical continuity; more generally, we prioritize the aesthetic as a privileged relation to the good and true. i. We hold that it is a shared appreciation for a deep aesthetic sensibility which animates human action and imbues it with visible significance. First

4 must come a politics of beauty—a robust, thick sense of the spiritual value of aesthetics—before a beautiful politics may arise. We define the “aesthetics of politics” as a function of the good manners, learned gestures, and acquired habits that halo our waking lives with recognition and respect.

3. Pillar number three: we believe that the truest and highest expression of human freedom lies in the feeling of homeness. “Freedom” does not involve and is not based upon a hard set of enshrined principles, but is rather a dynamic consensus that evolves and transforms itself over time; it emerges from the experience of the free associations of individuals encountering and engaging one another in and through a way of life. We believe that when the full expression of the individual parallels the full expression of the community, both are in supportive agreement that fosters a true sense of “place”; “civil-war” is negated at the levels of self and society, and the world is made to feel a “home” for those who inhabit it. a. Conservative jurisprudence has traditionally defined freedom as the outcome of order rather than its cause. In terms of law, this notion of freedom is grounded in a defense of limited government, constitutional legal limits, basic rights of citizens, a separation of powers, representative institutions, and a general skepticism and resistance to top-down, unilateral authorities. All these technologies have been special and privileged friends of conservatism—though none prove essential. b. Conservative economic thought celebrates competition as a force of social good and a source of political stability. We believe that human activity flourishes when we are encouraged to freely compete under the more general limits of a “moral economy”: though the economy is not to be planned or directed, though competition is to remain free and open, all economic activity, like its political counterpart, is to be subsumed under higher spiritual and moral priorities. i. Our belief in the natural value of competition necessitates a view of society that requires distinctions, classes, orders; the celebration of difference at the individual level means a corresponding celebration of different social, economic and political groups and associations. Like the legal principles enumerated above, this traditional rendering of fiscal conservatism and its consequences is a highly-compatible but nonessential technology. What is essential is that any given economy grows as a healthy extension of a unique community and contributes directly to the well-being of the citizens therein.

1. Our existential interest in difference binds itself to a defense of material reality by linking the actuality of property to the principle of freedom. What is significant here is less the identification of an intrinsic relation between property and freedom and more the existential redemption of materiality as a core aspect of lived reality. In terms of the expression of human freedom, materiality is not to be discredited or ignored, not to be subjugated to ideational or abstract models of liberty. We begin, as we end, in the soil.

4. Pillar number four: we define “the political” as an open arena pregnant with the novel and the new; hence it is the duty of those involved in its maintenance to constantly negotiate, adapt and readjust. To this end, conservatism draws a specific relationship to

5 time itself: it is the capacity of a people to collectively say “yes” or “no” to what perishes, to draw judgment and place valuation upon the dying things of this world. We ask the question: if all must pass—what is it we ought to save? What shall follow us into the future? We believe this question is salient to the extent that it leads a people toward a more fundamental understanding and expression of their own unique character, and disavow the question to the extent that it leads to abstract and untethered standards. We believe, in short, in the presence and importance of the canon. a. Relatedly, the conservative has a profound respect for history. We believe in the significance of continuity made through custom, that it is the maintenance of unique customs which permits social inheritance, and that it is this social inheritance that in turn informs political stability and ensures social order. We believe that there is a special pride and sense of honor in taking part in inheriting, choosing and passing on the values, ideas and things of this world. We believe that this intergenerational project occurs outside the realm of mere calculation and self-interest; we see knowledge as the great accumulated reservoir of human experience, compiled over time and proving itself through longevity; and we believe in the priority of tradition, the significance of tradition’s interaction with law and the overall self-narrative of a society, and the importance of tradition in the education of the individual.

5. Finally, pillar number five: we believe in the priority of the “we” over the “I,” to the extent that the full expression of human freedom can only occur within and through the presence of others. Together, we flourish and are remembered; alone, we wither and fade.

It is ultimately the conjunction of these five philosophical pillars—that politics begins and ends in experience; that politics is a secondary phenomenon; that politics defines freedom as a function of homeness; that politics involves saying “yes” and “no” to time; and that politics prioritize the “we” over the “I”—that define an updated conservatism and set the stage for a new political program to emerge in full.