Conservatism isn’t an ideology

Edmund Burke

This article is a reply to a reader’s question, and it’s a good question indeed: “Why do you not consider conservatism to be an ideology?”

Yesterday I defined an ideology as a “politically aggressive secular creed springing from a corrupt, or corrupted, idea.” None of these features applies to conservatism, which I’ll try to show by looking at them one by one.

Conservatism isn’t always, and never merely, political. Political views may be part of a conservative outlook on life, but they never define it.

A conservative may have no interest in politics at all. In fact, I know quite a few conservatives who wince with disdain whenever politics comes up in conversation.

Conservatism is a character or temperament trait, one that predisposes a man to favour certain ideas, including political ones, over others. In extreme cases, a man’s character may even lead him to develop a philosophy of life.

But conservatives don’t have to be philosophers; few are. However, when exposed to various philosophies, all of them intuitively accept conservative ones and reject others.

The same character traits prevent a conservative from being aggressive in asserting his views. Show me a man ranting from a soapbox, and I’ll show you the opposite of a conservative – this irrespective of his pet subject. Moderation and good manners are more important to a conservative than self-assertion.

Neither can a conservative be ideologically secular. That doesn’t mean a conservative necessarily has to be a believer, although many are. What no conservative can ever be is an atheist, someone who vigorously denies God.

That would be tantamount to dismissing in one fell swoop not just Christianity, but our whole civilisation with its history, morality, aesthetics, culture, law – even political heritage. By definition, conservatives are out to conserve, not repudiate, our civilisation.

Hence a conservative may be an agnostic, but never an atheist. Though a conservative agnostic is denied the gift of faith, something he may or may not rue, he acknowledges our civilisational debt to Christianity and hence refrains from holding extreme views about it.

Another aspect of conservatism is that it isn’t a creed. It may be an intricately interlaced system of many creeds, but never a single one. Hence, unlike just about any ideology, conservatism can’t be defined with a slogan.

That puts it at a political disadvantage when it comes to rallying the masses by rabble rousing. As any adman will tell you, the masses don’t respond to complex, nuanced ideas. Give them liberté, égalité, fraternité, and they’ll jump up and salute. Try to explain to them that liberté and égalité are mutually exclusive, and their eyes will glaze over.

Even as conservatism isn’t based on a single belief, neither can it be reduced to a single idea. It’s more a matter of temperamental and intellectual predisposition that may or may not be encapsulated in specific ideas.

So far I have proceeded apophatically, by arguing what things conservatism is not. All those things can be described with one word: ideology. Having thus defined conservatism negatively, let’s try to define it positively by showing not what it isn’t but what it is.

Here it’s difficult to look beyond Edmund Burke, whose seminal book Reflections on the Revolution in France should (though never will) be required reading at every school.

The great Whig, who towards the end of his life abandoned Whiggery, reduced the complexity of the conservative temperament to one dominant feature: prudence, caution in advocating novelties.

Burke specifically talked about political prudence, not acting emotionally on the spur of the moment, thinking a thousand times before introducing one irreversible change. That doesn’t mean resistance to change as such. In fact, Burke wrote that: A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

Some change is thus both inevitable and desirable. But what are the guiding principles of introducing it?

In answering that question, Burke came as close as it’s possible to get to identifying the key beacons lighting up the conservative mind: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

Burkean four Ps, Prudence, Prejudice, Prescription and Presumption, obviate the need for the other 25 letters to describe the conservative mind. Those four Ps manifestly have nothing to do with any ideology, in my definition or anyone else’s.

They can, however, act as the building blocks of ideas, including political ones. However, a political idea thus constructed mustn’t be allowed to degenerate into an ideology. If it does, it loses its conservative underpinnings to become something else, such as, say, libertarianism or even anarchism.

This can be illustrated by any number of examples. Free markets versus nationalised ones is an obvious one, closely related as it is to the issue of small versus big government.

Like everything else in our civilisation, this dichotomy can be traced back to a Christian idea, in this case that of individual responsibility for one’s own destiny. The notion of personal integrity and autonomy precludes meek submission to secular authority in matters beyond its just reach.

The same applies to the complex interaction between the state and the individual. The Christian believes his life is eternal. He also knows from history books that the life of a state is not: even extremely successful ones only ever lasted between 1,000 and 1,500 years.

Compared to eternity, this stretch seems tinier than a speck of dust would appear next to the universe. The individual will therefore perceive himself as more significant than the state and for that reason alone will never accept its tyranny.

Etched into a Christian’s soul is the innate conviction that he is transcendent but the state is transient. Hence in everything that matters he can only regard the state not as his master but as his servant.

If the state’s actions suggest that it is assuming the role of master, then the believer may either resist it or pretend to be going along to protect himself from persecution. But inwardly he will never acquiesce. 

Against that civilisational background, a conservative, even if he himself is an agnostic, will be a champion of free, as opposed to nationalised, markets.

First, he will know from empirical evidence that free markets make more people less poor. And the four Ps I mentioned earlier demand attaching a great value to empirical experience accumulated over history.

Second, and more important, a conservative also knows that nationalised markets make the central state so strong that it will inevitably start encroaching on areas beyond its natural remit, laying claims on individual integrity traditionally held sacrosanct.

That is an impeccably conservative attitude, one based on an idea, not an ideology. Yet when thinkers who aren’t themselves natural, intuitive conservatives get hold of that idea, they can drag it into the quagmire of ideology.

I’ve met many people who call themselves conservatives but who are, in fact, what I call ‘totalitarian economists’. They converge with Marxists in preaching the primacy of economics, the be all and end all of public virtue.

Nationalise the means of production, insist Marxists, and everything else will follow, universal bliss will arrive. Free up the markets, insist totalitarian economists, and everything else will follow, universal bliss will arrive. Like Orwell’s animals, both species reduce everything to a single issue. They just can’t agree on the number of legs.

That’s why I never regard ‘totalitarian economists’ like Mises, Hayek and Friedman – or especially their less brilliant followers – as fellow conservatives. They teeter on the verge beyond which an idea ends and an ideology begins. No room for conservatism there.

There we go, the surface of the non-ideological nature of conservatism thoroughly scratched. Delving deeper would require a different format, that of a weighty tome. Still, I must apologise to my reader by paraphrasing Mark Twain: “Sorry about such a long response – I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

P.S. For even a longer response, you may want to look up some of my books in which I talk about such subjects at greater, but still manageable, length, especially How the West Was Lost, The Crisis Behind Our Crisis and Democracy as a Neocon Trick.

4 thoughts on “Conservatism isn’t an ideology”

  1. I’m surprised that you don’t mention the Fall of Man. Even non-Christian conservatives who don’t know about the Fall know that all men and women in this world are weak, foolish and (to a greater or lesser degree) bad. Ideologues can largely be distinguished from conservatives by their failure to understand this truth. So Nazis think that some men are strong; feminists think that all women are good; Plato thinks that philosophers who agree with Plato are wise.

    Once one accepts that we’re all pretty poor specimens and capable of little, if any, improvement by merely human means, one has no choice but to be a conservative. (The King of Laputa was an ideologue; the King of Brobdingnag was the conservative of conservatives.)

    For compulsory reading in schools I’d pick Swift over Burke, perhaps Johnson over both, and I’d like all of them to be sweetened by Chaucer and Malory. But few if any schoolchildren or university graduates nowadays have even heard of any of them.

    Footnote: On the one hand, I object to the use of the ultra-technical theological word “apophatic” as an elegant variant of “negative”. On the other hand, I’m enormously grateful for the pregnant concept of “apophatic anthopology”. I’ll now be thinking for weeks if not years about the ways in which what cannot be said about God can also not be said about God’s image and likeness.

    And I remain enormously grateful to you for the nearest thing to a perfectly conservative Web site that can be hoped for in a Fallen world.

    1. Thank you for your kind words. But, when I suggested that Burke should be compulsory reading in schools, I certainly didn’t mean it should be only Burke. Chaucer and Swift, definitely. Johnson too – in fact, I often cite his stand on the American Revolution as an exemplar of true conservatism. Burke, in my view, went terribly wrong there, though not in much of anything else. But if I were to compile a compulsory reading list, it would be long. For example, Coleridge, Collingwood, Eliot and Chesterton would definitely be there. That’s assuming, against all evidence, that today’s pupils know how to read.

      As to ‘apaphatic’, I didn’t use because it’s more elegant than ‘negative’, but because it’s less liable to be misconstrued. ‘Negative’ has all sorts of connotations, while ‘apaphatic’ is precise. But you are right, it is indeed a theological term, which is another reason I sometimes use it. Theology is the primary science, with philosophy a distant second and everything else strictly derivative. (Maritain writes on this subject well.) That being the case, I see no harm in slipping a theological term into a secular context. That sort of signposts the general path of my thinking.

      1. I like your use of the word “apophatic” outside the theological context, and I hope that this usage becomes more widespread. To my knowledge, there is no other term in the English language that means to describe something by what it is not, and this concept is an important one. Interestingly, the related word “apophasis” in rhetoric means to mention something, often of a pejorative nature, while pretending not to mention it. Trump uses this rhetorical device frequently (e.g., “I would never call Kim Jong Un short and fat”).

  2. Correct me if I am mistaken, but the Burkean concept of prescription is essentially a general (though not limitless) respect for and deference to tradition — in law, governance, culture and social relations. Ernest Gellner, a thinker I respect, had a more rounded view of tradition. In a critique of the form of conservatism embraced by his then LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott, Gellner once pithily observed that “tradition may be elegance, competence, courage, modesty and realism,” but it may also be “bullshit, servility, vested interest, arbitrariness, empty ritual.” The Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made a similar, if more hyperbolic, observation about the role of tradition in the formulation of law. As Holmes put it, “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.”

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