Further thoughts on conservatism

earth_wizard responded to my previous post with a much more complete and discursive piece on what conservatism is, and it has provoked some thoughts, as his comments usually do.

He defined the basic principles of conservatism briefly as follows:

1. Belief in natural law
2. Belief in established institutions
3. Preference for liberty over equality
4. Suspicion of power—and of human nature
5. Belief in exceptionalism
6. Belief in the individual rights

Put this way they all sound perfectly reasonable, and in fact they must be, or reasonable people could not be conservatives. However, this puts a further onus on me to define what it is I disagree with about them that makes me a liberal, without inadvertently admitting that in fact *I* am being unreasonable.

Let's take 1, belief in natural law, for starters, because that is the one I had most trouble with. The expanded definition talks of "a higher order of things. Good and evil, justice and injustice, rights and responsibilities are not subjective concepts to conservatives. Human beings do not make the laws of morality, nor are rights conferred upon us by governments but rather by a higher power."

I definitely don't believe that good and evil are subjective concepts, in that everyone should decide for themselves what they are. Believing this shows a degree of trust in human nature which conflicts with principle number four as briefly stated; more on this later. But I also don't think I believe that God or somebody gave us the rules by which we live, especially not the ones about stoning disobedient children or not touching pigs.

Let's make a differentiation here. As I understand and use the terms, "ethics" describes the principles by which the individual relates to the collective, and "morality" the rules by which the collective relates to the individual. (If I'm misusing the terms, sorry, but that's what works for me.) "Ethics" are subjective but are usually based, one way or another, on the morality one has been taught. "Morality" is objective but is formed by a sort of involuntary consensus of people's ethical principles. Thus, when a generation in forming their ethical systems rejects a particular moral principle of the previous generation, that in turn shapes the morality on which the next generation bases their own ethical systems. *cringes in advance knowledge of the volley of learned texts earth_wizard is even now preparing in response which he knows smallship1 has not read*

Thus, morality is in a sense formed by a higher power, if only mathematically; and thus, it wobbles backwards and forwards over time rather than steadily progressing towards a defined goal. Where the society is more stringent in its moral teaching it wobbles less, and this is I think the preferred state for some conservatives, harking back to the original meaning of the word. Those who think the prevailing morality deficient in some ways, either too lax or too restrictive, identify either as liberals or as that other sort of conservative for whom there isn't a satisfactory word except possibly "puritan."

Do I think there is an absolute Platonic ideal of morality? Yes, I do, or at least I think there could be if we choose to acknowledge it. Do I think it was handed down by God and we fell away from it? I do not. I think we're working towards it, or we could be if we wanted to. But all societies have priorities which conflict with it, and all new generations want to decide some things for themselves and can't be relied upon to decide the way I'd like them to, and in the end your subjective idea of the Platonic ideal of morality may differ from mine. Mine might be wrong. In any case, as a species, we're not really cut out for Platonic ideals.

But no-one is going to make it better for us; there is no higher power guarding our morals. So I disagree with principle number one, and remain a liberal, for the moment.

More later, unless there's a huge public outcry.

Conservatism, continued

Let's move on to principle two, which according to earth_wizard is "a belief in established institutions. American conservatives, for example, believe passionately that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are works of profound genius, and that they provide the best system of law and government possible. More broadly, conservatives believe in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of rule of law and good government." (That last, I think, is a little too broad to be called an institution in itself. Anyone who believes in government at all wants it to be good. So with your kind indulgence, I'll keep to specific institutions for the moment.)

This highlights, if nothing else, the deep, deep abyss that yawns (and rudely fails to cover its mouth) between conservatives as such and the people currently running America, as bedlamhouse pointed out in the comment thread of my original post. But what do I think? Well, let's ask me.

I believe in the intent behind established institutions at the time they are established. The people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were doing something that had never been done before, and they were serious, intelligent people who wanted to do it right, not only for themselves but for the future. That said, they were human like most of us, and their work was flawed, as shown by most of the subsequent amendments that have been brought in (and some that haven't). The world is a different place now, and will be a different place in another two hundred and some years, and to expect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to be as effective then as they were in the last years of the eighteenth century ("No-one could have believed..." erm, sorry) is perhaps a bit more naïve than even I could be.

But there is a need for stability in our lives, and it's foolish to deny it. The collapse, over the last few decades, of things that had previously been reckoned eternal, has caused a growth of insecurity and anxiety in people, and to say that this is a good thing and people should just get used to it is, I think, not helpful. Stability gives us breathing space, something less to worry about, room to think; and whether this ought to be important to us or not, it is. Hence my metaphor of the struggle and the raft in the other post.

So do I think we should cling backwards, to the Established Church and the Constitution and every man in his proper station? I do not. Established institutions of the past have shown themselves unsuitable for life as we live it now: the church's doctrine continues to be barnacled with stupid, cruel and unnecessary rules, the constitution continues to require regular updates (though it has not yet been necessary to reboot the system to complete the updating process...not yet) and the social hierarchies of old, while very stable as they stood, were too prone to abuse and tended to lead to a small percentage of the population possessing the vast majority of the wealth. (Thank goodness we've grown beyond that, eh?)

No, I believe in the potential of the established institutions of the future, the ones we haven't even thought of yet. I believe we should be focussing not on the Camelots of the past, or on the Camelot that is currently starting to fall about our ears, but on the next Camelot, and the one after that, and the one after that; focussing on them, and trying to make them better and more equitable. And with that, I think we should move on to principle number three. After a tea break. This thinking is thirsty work.

Builds in weekly parts into a complete pile of gibberish, part 3

earth_wizard's third principle of conservatism states that "the preference for liberty over equality is the most difficult part of the definition of conservative for most people to understand, particularly since liberty and equality are almost used as synonyms in our times. Put simply, all societies face a fundamental choice between emphasizing freedom or emphasizing equality."

I commented a little on this in my response in the earlier thread. Basically, I don't see liberty and equality as either synonymous or antonymous (or even hieronymous). Rather, I see them on different axes of what I shall probably conceive as a three-dimensional continuum of politics. I once tried to work out 3D continua for space, time, mass, energy, life and mind as part of the thinking around a song I once wrote. I got as far as time and part of mass and then broke down, partly because I was trying to make the continua mutually interdependent. Such are the things my mind does to me when I'm trying to vegetate peacefully. Woe et cetera.

Anyway...liberty occupies one end of one axis, and on the other I place security. I think this is a reasonable opposition: at one end you have a "society" where anyone can do what they like and therefore nobody is safe: on the other you have the ant-world of T H White where "everything not compulsory is forbidden" and vice versa, but where as long as the laws are adhered to nobody has anything to fear. Absolute chaos versus absolute order. Clearly the ideal is somewhere between the two extremes, and here I think conservatives occupy a sizeable spread, because there are some who incline more towards liberty and others who incline more towards law. (Also there are some things which some people think should be freer and some that some people think should be less free. Nothing is as simple as I am making it sound.)

So, on to equality, and here I am talking about equal status under the law, not any other kind. I will cover the other kind when I come to talk about exceptionalism. What would be the opposite pole of that axis? Well, presumably a society in which nobody was equal to anyone else, a hierarchy in which each level consisted of one person. So, absolute equality versus absolute hierarchy. Here I think I am well towards the equality end, if not actually at it. I certainly don't believe that being part of the government should confer any extra status on anyone, and here I differ from just about every society that to my knowledge there's ever been, including the allegedly "socialist" societies of Russia and China. We like to set our leaders above us, and exalt the person as well as the office, and the leaders themselves aren't going to be modest about it, especially when it means they can vote themselves salary increases.

I think conservatives are more prone to this hierarchical thinking than liberals, though, so yes, they do on the whole value liberty more than equality. But it isn't because they're mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I think that if everyone were equal under the law it might well lead to an increase in liberty.

So, still liberal so far, and halfway through. Go me.

Part four of Why I Am Not A Conservative

"The fourth principle that defines conservatives," says earth_wizard, " is their suspicion of power and their hatred of big government. In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared:

'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?'"

("All of us together!" cry the massed voices of small-d democrats everywhere. Democracy is, after all, based on the principle that a million men are smarter than one man, as Heinlein pointed out in his Lazarus Long persona. Personally, I think that's a deliberate misstatement of the true principle of democracy, but that may just be me. Anyway.)

This speech raises questions, such as "if you think government is the problem, why are you in it?" But that is just being facetious, and while I'm all for a good facete, I'm trying to be serious here. Thomas Paine said that government was a necessary evil, and John L O'Sullivan said that government is best that governs least, so they're with old Ron there. But are they right?


Well, yes, if we want them to be. It is possible to look at government that way if you choose to. As you drive along the roads you can curse the authority that maintains them. When the policeman arrests the thugs who have tried to rob your shop you can call him a tool and a running-dog lackey of the imperialist military-industrial complex; though that sort of thing always sounds a bit odd coming from a conservative. You can, if you want to, close your eyes to all the good that government does for every single person in the land, and only see a necessary evil. Or you can see a thing, made by human beings with good intentions (cue road to hell joke, but good intentions are not always a bad thing), neutral in itself, both good and evil in its consequences, and most of the evil born of correctable flaws in its execution.

Government is not the problem; the problem is that we go about it in such a half-baked way. We allow vast overmanning and overbudgeting one week, and then we suddenly wake up and strip everything down to the bone till it can hardly function. I've seen it happen. We rebrand, relaunch and reorganise, and come up with new and even more confusing procedures rather than making the old procedures less confusing by doing them properly. And worst of all, we assume that because democracy means government by everyone, that means that anyone is qualified to govern in our name. Anyone, that is, who wants the job. And what person of sense would, knowing that we don't want them for any merit they possess, that barely more than half of us who bother to express an opinion want them at all, and that once they're in the job they'll get the blame for everything from a shower of rain to nuclear testing in the South Pacific?

It's obvious that government will never be perfect, no matter how much we improve it. But it's equally obvious that government will never get any closer to perfection if we're constantly trying to get rid of it, or to diminish it, or to restrict its function. There are ways in which it could do to be smaller, certainly, but there are also ways in which it could do to be much larger. One of those ways is in placing restrictions on the power of the individually wealthy.

Conservatives are said to be suspicious of power, and of human nature, which is why they don't like big government. And yet they have no objection at all to individual human beings having power and resources far in excess of those enjoyed by any government in history. Somehow their suspicion of power doesn't extend that far. I say one of the most important functions of government is as a curb on human nature, a limit to the power of one person to affect and rule the lives of others. America was born because its people had done with kings; and yet its industrialists and its media tycoons enjoy greater power than many kings of the past or the present, and they are trusted with this vast power, and the government bows before them when they send their lobbyists round. Something is wrong here.

To deal with this problem, government should be big, should be wealthy, should be powerful, because it has (if it's run properly) a responsibility to all its citizens to be more than human, to be above human nature and its flaws. It needs to be able to dictate to any human, no matter how rich or how influential. It needs to be inviolably proof against being bribed or bought, so that it can be absolutely impartial. And if that makes people suspicious, well, that's just tough.

But big government doesn't have to be bad government. It's a cliché about liberals that they want the government to control everything, but I don't believe that's true; it certainly isn't true of me. I see my ideal of government as huge power applied with surgical precision, where it's needed and nowhere else. What we have at the moment is small power misapplied, and the conservative solution is to make the power even smaller. I believe that's wrong; and with that, on to the next part, though probably tomorrow.