“To be deceived about the truth of things and so to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.”
— Plato, The Republic
Let me start with the genus. What is conservatism? The answer? It is cheerful allegiance to the truth. This is especially true of conservatism’s American variant. Conservatism in America has some distinctive features, traceable mostly to two things: the Founders’ vision of limited government supporting individual liberty and the historical accidents of newness, on the one hand, and geographical amplitude and separateness on the other.
Although it may sometimes seem that conservatives are constitutionally averse to cheerfulness, writing works with titles such as Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by habit and disposition, I submit, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than—than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since the people and policies that are called “liberal” are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works.
Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal, that is, a partisan of ordered liberty and the habits and institutions that nurture it. (Is that another definition of conservatism?) In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called—perhaps John Fonte’s marvelous coinage “transnational progressives” is best, though the old standby “Leftists” will do—they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.
Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor than leftists. Has anyone ever accused Elizabeth Warren of having a sense of humor? How about Rachel Maddow? Or Jamie Raskin?
The nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quantity of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine.
On the contrary, conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a moral affront. Being soberly realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings.
Conservatives, that is to say, are realists. Like Plato, they recoil from the prospect of being fundamentally out of touch with reality.
In a word, conservatives are not “woke.” They strive to call things by their proper names. Like Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, they call a spade a spade, just as they prefer to call “affirmative action” what it really is: “discrimination according to race or sex.” Ditto about taxation, which they describe, accurately, as “government-mandated income redistribution,” and “Islamophobia,” which is a piece of Orwellian Newspeak foisted upon an unsuspecting public by irresponsible “multiculturalists” colluding more or less openly with Islamofascists.
At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation. Thus, one follower of the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida declared that “unproblematic prose” and “clarity” were “the conceptual tools of conservatism.”
Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as an unacceptable challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.
Creeping multiculturalism intersects in poignant ways with a subject that is always at the center of concern for conservatism: change. Granted, change is a great fact of life.
But an equally great fact is continuity, and it may well be that one adapts more successfully to certain realities by resisting them than by capitulating to them. “When it is not necessary to change,” Lord Falkland said some centuries ago, “it is necessary not to change.”
I recognize that “change,” like its conceptual cousin “innovation,” is one of the primary watchwords of the modern age. But the great conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. was on to something important when he wrote, in the inaugural issue of National Review in November 1955, that a large part of the magazine’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.”
It’s rare that you hear someone quote that famous line without a smile—the smile meaning “he wasn’t really against change, innovation, etc., etc.” But I believe Buckley was in earnest. It was one of the things that made National Review, in its first decades at least, unzeitgemässe, “untimely” in the highest sense of the word.
Back then, National Review, as Buckley wrote, “is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and The New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place.”
The late Australian philosopher David Stove saw deeply into this aspect of the metabolism of conservatism. In an essay called “Why You Should Be a Conservative,” he rehearses the familiar scenario:
A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. . . .
This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, ‘reform.’
Progressives cannot wrap their minds (or, more to the point, their hearts) around this irony: that “reform” so regularly exacerbates either the evil it was meant to cure or another evil it had hardly glimpsed.
The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold was no enemy of reform. But he understood that what he described as “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith had left culture dangerously exposed and unprotected. In cultures of the past, Arnold thought, the invigorating “remnant” of those willing and able to energize culture was often too small to succeed. As societies grew, so did the forces of anarchy that threatened them—but then so did that enabling remnant.
Arnold believed modern societies possessed within themselves a “saving remnant” large and vital enough to become “an actual power” that could stem the tide of anarchy. As I look around at our present discontents, I hope more than ever that he was right.
As usual, another thoughtfully, wonderful essay from Mr. Kimball. I was especially taken by his emphasis on the word cheerful. As a group, conservatives are an unusually cheerful bunch. Though we face the same kind of hardships that the Left constantly rails against, we take the good with the bad as being part of life as a whole. We don’t kid ourselves that some new law will suddenly take all of the bad away. We realize, the bad comes with the good. More than that, we know that without the bad, good has no recognition, no substance, no chance of offering redemption.
I think another defining quality of conservatism is the knowledge that we are NOT in control. To a certain extent, that knowledge is freeing. I think one of the major contributing factors of the Left’s general rage and unhappiness is that, though they seek control as the foundation of the ideology, control can never be attained—and that realization always seems to elude them.
If one thinks much about it, a careful reading of Lenin and Alinsky, is that the thrust of each man is coming up with a system of steps that undermines any other system that has its own controls in place (using the systems own levers) to impose new controls of their own devising guaranteed to make life better for everyone by imposing newer, even greater controls. To me, that is delusion at its finest.
Too, conservatives seem to know innately that any Utopian scheme proposed by whatever is the current socialism de jour is doomed to failure. History provides its own record. We also realize that the implementation of the current scheme will only bring about new levels of misery.
The difference between us and them, we see the misery as the product, they see it as the cost. They truly believe that by paying that cost, the product will be happiness, union, and newfound universal brotherhood. Sadly, trying to show them their folly only makes them more adamant to prove us wrong.
What impressed me most (and yes, pleased me, too) about Mr. Kimball’s excellent article was his emphasis on the acceptance of reality by conservatives, and of course, the opposite being leftists’ vain pursuit of the unobtainable.
This is an important distinction because it not only brings welcome sunshine to a critical difference between conservatism and leftism / progressivism / communism (all the isms), but also illuminates an equally critical difference–the relative mental health of conservatives vs. mentally unwell leftists.
Calling attention to the absurdity of leftist beliefs, and in the process questioning their mental stability, is not Lysenkoism in reverse. It is in fact, simply calling a “spade a spade”, or to borrow from Ayn Rand’s famous quote, refusing to ignore reality in order to call out that which must not be ignored. Consequences vary by mileage.
I’ve read countless essays like this over the years. What has always struck me while reading them is that conservatism requires a fair degree of intelligence - not just academic intelligence, but worldly intelligence – and more important, intellectual integrity. The former of these is in short supply in today’s America, the latter at crisis levels.
Wonderful article. Mr Kimball is not only a profound intellect, but a great cultural critic as well. I’m going to take a different approach to what was written. My response will be related to politics, or, as it has often been called, the conservative political movement.
I don’t have even one quibble at all with the article above, if it is written as a guide for general principles a person can live by in the modern United States. However, if we are really talking about the conservative political movement (something I acknowledge Mr Kimball did not speak to) I’d like to know what the goals of this movement are. What concrete agenda will the principles of conservative drive with the possibility of ever becoming policy. Because let’s face it, politics IS policy. Standing up (or being run over) whilst yelling STOP! hasn’t really worked. The left marches the country more to the left almost every single day, while The Right, which Conservatives in America believe they are, not only don’t push back to the right, they have no viable plan for doing so. That has been the case for the last 50 years at least. The answer to this I sometimes hear from conservatives is that winning at all costs is not what they are about. Well ok, Since there really are no last policy victories for conservatives to celebrate, what exactly is the cost you are willing to spend for ANY actual policy win? What I’m saying is by pretending to be a political movement, all conservatism accomplishes is ( I better not get into conservative inc punching right to save their own influence) to block any real force on the right from political success.
One can’t help but understand the conspiracy theorists believing conservatism is controlled opposition. You may be happy warriors, but you don’t have any success against the left, but do succeed in blocking the right. Why should we on The Right respect you?
Politics generally follows culture and I think your remarks imply that Constitutional conservatism did not push back which it should have for a very germane reason. Neither the article or the comments really addressed that point you touched upon.
The Founders responsible for the Constitution were literate in Latin and Greek at an early age. There was a phrase that went something like – “Latin at 3 and without out any play in between they learned Greek by 7”. They were all well versed in history and could go head to head with Victor Davis Hanson without attending Stanford or Pepperdine which, of course, never existed during their time.
Conservatism, in the minds of our Constitutional Founders, refers to what works politically to insure individual liberty based on mankind’s innate biological nature. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. That phrase, from the Declaration, says it all.
I am more liberal than almost any conservatives which I personally know and its not that I’m really liberal in the minds of today’s liberals but because the word “liberal” is what conservatism is about. The author said a lot when he quoted Russell Kirk who observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. The word “liberal” was stolen by progressives. They are everything except liberal. If you read pre WWII political European literature you become aware that that word referred to individual liberty… in a mostly economic sense. It was what de Tocqueville wrote about in his two part work titled “Democracy in America”. It all has to do with the pursuit of happiness which we, as conservatives, attempt to do without impeding our fellow travelers, in their own trip through life, from doing the same.
Essentially your observation regarding political pushback was probably the most important thing that needs to be understood. Each year “original intentions” are allowed to erode by the Party elected to restore them. And now Donald Trump arrives on the scene who is characterized as a dictator by the Press yet when truth is put to power he is exactly the type of leader the Framers had in mind.