Thursday, July 9, 2009

Refuting the Canons of Conservatism, Part I

When I go to the Politics section of my local bookstore, I find a major difference between the books aimed at liberals and those aimed at conservatives. The liberal books typically focus on critiquing conservative politicians or critiquing the results of this or that conservative policy. The conservative books, on the other hand, often focus on critiquing liberalism as a whole: Michael Savage's Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, etc. etc. Although I view most of these conservative books as a blight on public discourse, they highlight the effectiveness of critiquing your opponents' entire ideological system of beliefs, instead of engaging in ad hoc criticism of this or that policy. In this spirit, I have decided to look at the philosophical core of what conservatism really is and focus on how to refute conservatism as a system, instead of merely a random collection of policies and personalities.

The best and most succinct summation I could find of traditionalist conservative views is found in Russell Kirk's book, The Conservative Mind. In the introduction to this book, Kirk lays out what may be called the Six Canons of Conservatism, a series of six short statements explaining the core of traditionalist conservative ideology. By focusing on these six canons, I aim to refute the fallacies of conservatism, explain why conservative leads to negative consequences, and illustrate what liberals can learn by taking conservative ideology seriously.

In this blog post, I begin by critiquing the first of Russell Kirk's six canons of conservatism. Subsequent blog posts in series will be devoted to refuting the other five canons.

Russell Kirk identifies the first canon of conservatism as follows:

Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. ‘Every Tory is a realist,’ says Keith Feiling: ‘he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man’s philosophy cannot plumb or fathom.’ True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.


Conservative rhetorical strategy often uses complex, flowery, and high-flown rhetoric to mask the nature of the real world and intimidate potential ideological opponents. To make Russell Kirk's first canon of conservatism less intimidating to the reader, I will critique the canon one sentence at a time.

Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.

The references to "transcendent order" and "natural law" are typical of secular conservatives who want to appeal to a higher supernatural authority, but who personally don't have much comfort with "God talk" themselves. Belief in God doesn't necessarily make somebody a conservative, but what kind of God do conservatives believe in? If Kirk is correct, then conservatives not only believe in God (or some other similarly "transcendent" being), but they assume that God has a role in establishing "law" and "order" over the world. (In this view, the conservative God becomes akin to a sheriff of the cosmos.) The order created by God does not merely influence humanity on the level of individual conscience, but "rules society as well as conscience."

But if God rules society, how do we know who should rule on God's behalf? In the history of all the major world religions, God moves farther and farther away from the people who worship him. In Judaism, Yahweh has always been distant, and the Messiah is yet to come. In Christianity, Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, then ascended into heaven in the 1st century AD. In Islam, Muhammad ascended into heaven in the 7th century AD. Believers guide themselves according to the Talmud, the Bible, or the Koran, but in many situations, believers cannot agree on the basic question, "What does God want?" And if God is not issuing any clarifications about his desires, then the potential for demagogues claiming to speak on God's behalf becomes much too great.

Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.

What does it mean to say that all political problems are religious problems? The previous sentence emphasizes that God creates order in the universe. If all political problems are religious problems, then challenges to the political order must be viewed as challenges to the order created by God. According to this version of conservatism, anyone who challenges any aspect of the current political order is not merely impractical or wrongheaded, but evil for committing disobedience against God.

By linking the political order with the supernatural order created by God, conservatives promote both dualism and demonization. Eventually, conservatives begin to believe that they are on the side of the angels, and everybody else is in league with the devil. (For some conservatives, this belief is metaphorical rather than literal, but the consequences are often the same.)

One consequence of this dualistic view of humanity is an increased level of violence in society. According to the sociologist Gary Jensen, in the article Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates Among Nations, nations with high percentages of people who adhere to dualistic religious beliefs have higher rates of homicide than nations where the population has more non-dualistic beliefs. To be specific, if a nation had a high percentage of people who believed strongly in the existence of both God and the Devil, then the nation also tended to have a high rate of homicide. By contrast, societies with non-dualistic religious beliefs (i.e., nations with a high percentage of people believing in God, but only weak belief in the devil) had low homicide rates. By characterizing political problems as religious problems, conservatives thereby encourage people to go out hunting for metaphorical devils and demons, thus making it more acceptable to settle political problems through violence.

In addition, Kirk's canon of conservatism suggests that conservatives have a problem reconciling the existence of a God-ordained social order with the presence of evil in the world. If God is intimately involved with how our society structures its political order, then why is there so much evil in the world? Doesn't the existence of evil imply that the world that God created is "disordered" rather than "ordered," as the conservatives believe it to be? Perhaps God left the political sphere of humanity in disorder on purpose, just to test how humans would exercise their free will on the political system. If that is the case, then conservatism will lead to nothing more than the demonization and persecution of people for violating order where no order exists. We know conservatives accept the existence of evil, because otherwise they would not have such a dualistic conception of the world. But if evil is all around us, how can we be so sure that there is order? And even if we had no doubt that God has created an order for us, how can we be so sure how God wants us to punish those who violate it?

A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs.

Here's where Russell Kirk gets into the conservative rhetorical strategy of using intimidating high culture literary allusions (a strategy mastered by William F. Buckley) to scare off potential ideological opponents. The reference to "what Coleridge called Understanding" is a reference to Aids to Reflection, an 1839 philosophical work by the 19th century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In this work, Coleridge distinguishes between two modes of thought he calls "the Reason" and "the Understanding." Coleridge defined the Understanding as "faculty judging by the senses". In other words, the Understanding refers to the human ability to think and learn by gathering information through the five senses. But if that's how Coleridge defines Understanding, how did he define Reason? According to Coleridge, the Reason is rooted in "eternal truth", while the Understanding is "a mere conclusion from a generalization of a great number of facts." As an example of an "eternal truth," Coleridge cited
the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are greater than the third. This demonstrated of one triangle is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is the truth perceived at once by the reason, wholly independently of experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may.


At this point, Coleridge and Kirk's distinction between the Reason and the Understanding can get hazy. Evidently, the conservative upholds "the Reason," which is rooted in "eternal truth," whereas the liberal upholds a more limited, "narrowly rational" Understanding. But is "eternal truth" merely limited to logical truisms (such as geometrical laws about triangles), or is "eternal truth" something more religious and metaphysical?

Clearly, human beings engage in many different modes of thinking and reasoning. Humans do not limit themselves to "the Understanding" that their five senses can give them. Humans must also deal with abstract concepts and beliefs and hopes and ideals and figments of their imagination, which you can view as proof of the existence of a higher metaphysical "Reason" if you like. On the other hand, the existence of a metaphysical force of "Reason" as part of human thought holds no implications for how society should be designed or ordered. You can have abstract logical laws of mathematics and science that humans can't see, but that doesn't mean that God has mathematical or scientific laws for designing how society should be ordered. Narrow rationality might not satisfy all of humanity's needs, but conservatives trying to implement a nonexistent Godly order on earth won't accomplish that goal either.

‘Every Tory is a realist,’ says Keith Feiling: ‘he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man’s philosophy cannot plumb or fathom.’

Conservatives correctly understand that humanity's capacity for reasoning is finite and limited, but that does not mean that those limitations should be celebrated. (It is in this respect that conservatism can fall down a slippery slope into the celebration of willful ignorance.) Yes, there may be "great forces in heaven and earth" that humans cannot understand, but that does not mean those forces should be treated equally. Even if we assume "great forces in heaven" cannot be understood by humanity, we cannot make the same assumption about "great forces" here on Earth.

As Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents, the process of civilization is a process where humanity uses its collective brainpower to extend the reach of its five senses. We use the microscope and the telescope to see where the naked eye cannot. We use the microphone and the tape recorder to hear what the human ear cannot. We use the computer to transcend the storage capacity limitations of our own brains. Don't celebrate humanity's limitations for placing humanity closer to God. Celebrate the ability of humanity to find new limitations to transcend. Yes, there are "great forces" on Earth, but that does not mean we shouldn't try to understand them.

True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

What does Russell Kirk mean by a "community of souls"? According to Kirk's statement of Ten Conservative Principles from his book, The Politics of Prudence, "the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls." The obvious objection here is that Kirk's comparison of society to a "community of souls" or a "spiritual corporation" has theocratic overtones that threaten the exercise of religious freedom, but additional objections also remain. If it is the purpose of politics to "apprehend" God's justice, how can we do any "apprehending" if we are supposed to assume that man's reason is unable to comprehend the "great forces of heaven and earth"?

It is here that the core beliefs of conservatism run into major epistemological problems. On the one hand, human beings must "apprehend" the God-ordained design for society. Yet somehow on the other hand, human beings are too dumb as a species to understand either the universe or its Creator. Unless, that is, some people are more able to comprehend "the great forces of heaven and earth" than others. It is the consequences of this belief that I will examine later in this blog series.

11 comments:

  1. Are my eyes deceiving me? A leftist who can offer a critique of conservatism without leveling cynical accusations of bigotry? I disagree with you, but this is refreshing. Time to read a little closer!

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  2. "Conservative rhetorical strategy often uses complex, flowery, and high-flown rhetoric to mask the nature of the real world and intimidate potential ideological opponents."

    It’s a bit cynical to call Kirk’s personal writing style a conservative rhetorical strategy. If anything, he’s probably one of the most dense writers I’ve read, regardless of ideology or subject matter. And he’s full of obscure references. Reading Kirk is a bit like reading an encyclopedia written by Dennis Miller.

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  3. The belief in a transcendent moral order is the belief that there are such things as right and wrong, which are not changed by how well humans understand them. We may argue about what that order entails, but morality exists on a plane untouched by human reason. This doesn’t imply that one belief system should be shoved down everyone’s throats, but that just like the laws governing physical properties and mathematics, morality is something to be studied and understood as is, not invented out of the blue by clever human beings. Also, this gives credence to the notion of inalienable rights, such as the ones outlined in The Declaration of Independence.

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  4. "What does it mean to say that all political problems are religious problems? The previous sentence emphasizes that God creates order in the universe. If all political problems are religious problems, then challenges to the political order must be viewed as challenges to the order created by God. According to this version of conservatism, anyone who challenges any aspect of the current political order is not merely impractical or wrongheaded, but evil for committing disobedience against God."

    Again, you’re being a bit cynical here. You’ve misunderstood this to be a blind appeal to religious authority. What Kirk means is that political problems cannot truly be understood unless we take the religious, moral, and (I would add) cultural aspects of it into account. For example, in todays' world, problems such as poor education and homelessness stem from something far more important than a lack of resources.

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  5. As a close reading of Kirk’s canons should have brought to light, conservatives have no problem coming to terms with human evil. The idea that morality (a transcendent order) exists does not suggest that human beings will adhere to that order, nor does it contradict the idea of a more or less libertarian God who allows humans to live in an imperfect world.

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  6. "Here's where Russell Kirk gets into the conservative rhetorical strategy of using intimidating high culture literary allusions (a strategy mastered by William F. Buckley) to scare off potential ideological opponents".

    Have you considered that Kirk was a well-read, classically educated historian? It doesn’t make sense to condemn someone for making obscure literary references. This is the weakest part of your otherwise intellectual argument.

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  7. I’ve read a lot of conservative books, but have never encountered a celebration of willful ignorance.

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  8. "Don't celebrate humanity's limitations for placing humanity closer to God. Celebrate the ability of humanity to find new limitations to transcend. Yes, there are "great forces" on Earth, but that does not mean we shouldn't try to understand them."

    None of that contradicts conservatism. If anything, our more religious authors generally celebrate the idea of drawing closer to God through science.

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  9. "True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls."

    Let’s reword this: “True politics is the art of taking our limited understanding of the moral order and putting into practical action to benefit our community.” Humanity’s capacity for understanding morality is limited, which means our actions shouldn’t be rash (more on that in the fifth and sixth canons) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act on them at all. If you read Kirk’s Second Conservative Principle in the link you provided again, you will see that Kirk is talking about culture, the shared beliefs that hold communities together. When Kirk says that Order, Justice, and Freedom are artificial constructs, he means that they only exist because the "body social" more or less accepts the prevailing order which sustains them, thus any change to the prevailing order must be carefully undertaken, lest it undermine wonderful, but fragile things such as justice and freedom. Thus, the body social is not a religious concept as much as it is an alternative way of describing shared culture.

    Think of classical conservatives as cultural environmentalists.

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  10. I suspect my disagreements with your opinion all throughout you critique of the first canon stem from our different understanding of conservative morality. You act as if it’s rigid and unforgiving, but as one can see through Kirk’s very words, it rests on the assumption that human beings cannot fully grasp it, which suggests that we do not have the authority to lord our concept of morality over others. This will probably come up again as I read your critique of the second canon, which all but states (among other things) that differences between human beings should be celebrated.

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