Several times recently, in posts on this blog discussing the
vagaries of current American politics, I’ve had occasion to reference my own
political philosophy by name. This has caused a certain amount of confusion and
curiosity, because the moniker I mentioned—“moderate Burkean
conservative”—falls nowhere on the narrow range of political opinions allowed
into our collective discourse these days.
Now of course a good part of the confusion arises because
the word “conservative” no longer means what it once meant—that is to say, a
person who wants to conserve something. In today’s America, conservatives who
actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to
liberate. The once-significant language
of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to
serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both
establishment parties participate with equal abandon. Putting meaning back into
the words can be a risky proposition, in turn, because so many Americans are
used to waving them about as arbitrary noises linked to an assortment of vague
emotions, the common currency of what passes for thought in so much of modern
American life.
Nonetheless, I think the risk is worth taking, if only
because a genuine conservatism—that is, a point of view oriented toward finding
things worth conserving, and then doing something to conserve them—is one of
the few options that offer any workable strategies for the future as the United
States accelerates along the overfamiliar trajectory of a democracy in terminal
crisis.
Let’s start with the least familiar of the terms I mentioned
above, “Burkean.” The reference is to the Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and
politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797), generally considered the founder of the
Anglo-American conservative tradition. This is all the more interesting in that
Burke himself was none of the things that gets labeled “conservative” in
today’s America. For example, while he was himself an Anglican Christian, he
defended the rights of Catholics to freedom of worship at a time when this was
a very unpopular stance—roughly on a par with defending the rights of Satanists
in today’s America—and lent his own home to a group of Hindus traveling in Britain
who had been refused any other place to celebrate one of their religious
holidays.
He was also an outspoken supporter of the American colonists
in their attempts to seek redress against the British government’s predatory
and punitive trade policies, and maintained his support even when all peaceful
options had been exhausted and the colonists rose in rebellion. Yet this was
the man who, toward the end of his life, penned Reflections on the
Revolution in France, which critiqued the French revolutionaries in
incisive terms, and which has much the same place in the history of
Anglo-American conservatism that The Communist Manifesto has in the
history of the modern radical left.
This doesn’t mean, by the way, that Burkean conservatives
quote Burke’s writings the way Marxists quote Marx or Objectivists quote Ayn
Rand. Like other human beings, Burke was a blend of strengths and weaknesses,
principles and pragmatism, and the political culture of his time and place
accepted behavior that most people nowadays consider very dubious indeed. Those of my readers who want to hear what
Burke had to say can find Reflections on the Revolution in France
online, or in any decent used book store; those who want to engage in ad
hominem argument can find plenty of ammunition in any biography of Burke they
care to consult. What I propose to do here is something a bit different—to take
Burke’s core ideas and set them out in a frame many of my readers will
recognize at once.
The foundation of Burkean conservatism is the recognition
that human beings aren’t half as smart as they like to think they are. One
implication of this recognition is that when human beings insist that the
tangled realities of politics and history can be reduced to some set of
abstract principles simple enough for the human mind to understand, they’re
wrong. Another is that when human beings try to set up a system of government
based on abstract principles, rather than allowing it to take shape organically
out of historical experience, the results will pretty reliably be disastrous.
What these imply, in turn, is that social change is not
necessarily a good thing. It’s always possible that a given change, however
well-intentioned, will result in consequences that are worse than the problems
that the change is supposed to fix. In fact, if social change is pursued in a
sufficiently clueless fashion, the consequences can cascade out of control,
plunging a nation into failed-state conditions, handing it over to a tyrant, or
having some other equally unwanted result. What’s more, the more firmly the
eyes of would-be reformers are fixed on appealing abstractions, and the less
attention they pay to the lessons of history, the more catastrophic the outcome
will generally be.
That, in Burke’s view, was what went wrong in the French
Revolution. His thinking differed sharply from continental European
conservatives, in that he saw no reason to object to the right of the French
people to change a system of government that was as incompetent as it was
despotic. It was, the way they went about it—tearing down the existing system
of government root and branch, and replacing it with a shiny new system based
on fashionable abstractions—that was problematic. What made that problematic,
in turn, was that it simply didn’t work
Instead of establishing an ideal republic of liberty, equality, and
fraternity, the wholesale reforms pushed through by the National Assembly
plunged France into chaos, handed the nation over to a pack of homicidal
fanatics, and then dropped it into the waiting hands of an egomaniacal warlord
named Napoleon Bonaparte.
Two specific bad ideas founded in abstractions helped feed
the collapse of revolutionary France into chaos, massacre, tyranny, and
pan-European war. The first was the conviction, all but universal among the philosophes
whose ideas guided the revolution, that human nature is entirely a product of
the social order. According to this belief, the only reason people don’t act
like angels is that they live in an unjust society, and once that is replaced
by a just society, why, everybody would behave the way the moral notions of the
philosophes insisted they should. Because they held this belief, in
turn, the National Assembly did nothing to protect their shiny up-to-date
system against such old-fashioned vices as lust for power and partisan hatred,
with results that made the streets of Paris run with blood.
The second bad idea had the same effect as the first. This
was the conviction, also all but universal among the philosophes, that
history moved inevitably in the direction they wanted: from superstition to
reason, from tyranny to liberty, from privilege to equality, and so on.
According to this belief, all the revolution had to do to bring liberty,
equality, and fraternity was to get rid of the old order, and voila—liberty,
equality, and fraternity would pop up on cue. Once again, things didn’t work
that way. Where the philosophes insisted that history moves ever upward
toward a golden age in the future, and the European conservatives who opposed
them argued that history slides ever downward from a golden age in the past,
Burke’s thesis—and the evidence of history—implies that history has no
direction at all.
The existing laws and institutions of a society, Burke
proposed, grow organically out of that society’s history and experience, and
embody a great deal of practical wisdom. They also have one feature that the
abstraction-laden fantasies of world-reformers don’t have, which is that they
have been proven to work. Any proposed change in laws and institutions thus
needs to start by showing, first, that there’s a need for change; second, that
the proposed change will solve the problem it claims to solve; and third, that
the benefits of the change will outweigh its costs. Far more often than not, when
these questions are asked, the best way to redress any problem with the
existing order of things turns out to be the option that causes as little
disruption as possible, so that what works can keep on working.
That is to say, Burkean conservatism can be summed up simply
as the application of the precautionary principle to the political sphere.
The precautionary principle? That’s the common-sense rule
that before you do anything, you need to figure out whether it’s going to do
more good than harm. We don’t do things that way in the modern industrial
world. We dump pesticides into the biosphere, carbon dioxide into the air, and
inadequately tested drugs into our bodies, and then figure out from the results
what kind of harm they’re going to cause. That’s a thoroughly stupid way of
going about things, and the vast majority of the preventable catastrophes that
are dragging modern industrial society down to ruin result directly from that
custom.
Behind it, in turn, lies one of the bad ideas cited above—the
notion that history moves inevitably in the direction we want. Yes, that’s the
myth of progress, the bizarre but embarrassingly widespread notion that history
is marching ever onward and upward, and so anything new is better just because
it’s new, which keeps so many people from asking obvious questions about where
our civilization is headed and whether any sane person would want to go there.
I’ve discussed this in quite a few earlier posts here, as well as in my book After
Progress; I mention it here to point out one of the ways that the political
views I’m explaining just now interface with the other ideas I’ve discussed
here and elsewhere.
The way that a moderate Burkean conservatism works in
practice will be easiest to explain by way of a specific example. With this in
mind, I’m going to go out of my way to offend everyone, by presenting a
thoroughly conservative argument—in the original, Burkean sense of that word
“conservative,” of course—in favor of the right to same-sex marriage.
We’ll have to pause first for a moment, though, to talk
about that word “right.” This is necessary because by and large, when Americans
hear the word “right,” their brains melt into a puddle of goo. The assumption
these days seems to be that there’s some indefinite number of abstract rights
hovering out there in notional space, and all of them are absolute and
incontrovertible, so that all you have to say is “I have a right to
[whatever]!” and everybody is supposed to give you whatever it is right away.
Of course everybody doesn’t, and the next step is the kind of shrill shouting
match that makes up so much of American political nonconversation these days,
in which partisans of the right to X and partisans of the right to Y yell
denunciations at each other for trying to deprive each other of their rights.
If you happen to be a religious person, and believe in a
religion that teaches that God or the gods handed down a set of rules by which
humans are supposed to live, then it probably does make sense to talk like
this, because you believe that rights exist in the mind of the deity or deities
in question. If you’re not a religious person, and claim to have a right that
other people don’t recognize, you’ll have a very interesting time answering
questions like these: in what way does this supposed right exist? How do you
“have it”—and how do the rest of us tell the difference between this right you
claim to have and, say, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement on your part?
All these confusions come from the attempt to claim that
rights have some kind of abstract existence of their own. To the Burkean
conservative, this is utter nonsense. A right, from the Burkean point of view,
is an agreement among the members of a community to allow some sort of
behavior. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. The right to vote, say,
exists because the people of a given nation, acting through political
institutions, confers it on a certain class of persons—say, all adult citizens.
What if you don’t have a right, and believe that you should
have it? That’s called “having an opinion.” There’s nothing wrong with having
an opinion, but it doesn’t confer a right. If you want to have the right you
think you should have, your job is to get your community to confer it on you.
In a perfect world, there would no doubt be some instant, foolproof way to
establish a right, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world
where the slow, awkward tools of representative democracy and judicial review,
backed up by public debate, are the least easily abused options we’ve yet found
to accomplish this task. (That doesn’t mean, please note, that they can’t be
abused; it means that they’re not quite as prone to abuse as, say, the
institutions of theocracy or military dictatorship.)
With that in mind, we can proceed to the right to same-sex
marriage. The first question to ask is whether government has any business
getting involved in the issue at all. That’s not a minor question. The notion
that legislation is the solution to every problem has produced a vast number of
avoidable disasters. In this case, though, what prevented same-sex couples from
marrying was governmental regulations. Changing those regulations requires
governmental action.
The second question to ask is whether government has any
compelling interest in the existing state of affairs. History shows that
letting government interfere in people’s private lives is a very risky thing to
do, and while it can be necessary, there has to be a compelling interest to
justify it—for example, in the case of laws prohibiting child abuse, the
compelling interest of protecting children against violence. No such compelling
interest justifies government interference in the marital decisions of legally
competent, consenting adults; as noted further on, “Ewww, gross!” does
not count as a compelling interest.
The third question to ask is whether the people who will be
affected by the change actually want the change. That’s not a minor question,
either; history is full of grand projects, supposedly meant to help some group
of people, that were rejected by the people who were to be “helped,” and those
inevitably turn out badly. In this case, though, there were plenty of same-sex
couples who wanted to get married and couldn’t. Notice also that the proposed
change was permissive rather than mandatory—that is, same-sex couples could get
married, but they could also stay unmarried. As a general rule of thumb,
permissive regulations don’t require the same level of suspicion as mandatory
regulations.
The fourth question to ask is whether anyone would be harmed
by the change. Here it’s important to keep in mind that “harmed” does not mean
“offended;” nor, for that matter, are you harmed by being kept from forcing
others to do what you want them to do. One of the eternal annoyances of liberty
is that others inevitably use it in ways that you and I find offensive. We put up with the inconvenience because
that’s the price of having liberty ourselves. Claims that this or that person
is going to be harmed by a change thus need to evince specific, concrete,
measurable harm. In this case, that standard was not met, as there are no
Purple Hearts issued for being butthurt.
The fifth question is whether the proposed change is a
wholly new right, a significant expansion of an existing right, or the
extension of an existing right in its current form to a group of people who did
not previously have it. Creating a wholly new right can be a risky endeavor, as
it’s hard to figure out in advance how that will interact with existing rights
and institutions. A significant expansion of an existing right is less
hazardous, but it still needs to be approached with care. Extending an existing
right in its current form to people who don’t previously have it, by contrast,
tends to be the safest of changes, since it’s easy to figure out what the
results will be—all you have to do is see what effect it has had in its more
restricted application. In this case, an existing right was to be extended to
same-sex couples, who would have the same rights and responsibilities as
couples who married under existing law.
The sixth question, given that the right in question is
being extended in its current form to a group of people who didn’t previously
have it, is whether that right has been extended before. In this case, the
answer is yes. Marriage between people of different races used to be illegal in
many American states. When extending the right of marriage to mixed-race
couples was being debated, the same arguments deployed against same-sex
marriage got used, but all of them amounted in practice to someone being
offended. Mixed-race marriages were legalized, a lot of mixed-race couples got
married, none of the horrible consequences imagined by the opposition ever got
around to happening, and that was that.
So, to sum up, we have a group of people who want a
permissive regulation granting them a right already held by other people. No
actual harm has been demonstrated by those opposed to granting that right, and
no compelling interest prevents government from granting that right. The same
right has been extended before with no negative consequences, and a very simple
change in the wording of existing marriage laws will confer the right. Under
these circumstances, there is vastly more justification for granting the right
than for refusing it, and it should therefore be granted.
No doubt some people will take offense at so mealy-mouthed
an adding up of pros and cons. Where are the ringing affirmations of justice,
equality, and other grand abstract principles? That, of course, is exactly the
point. In the real world, grand abstract principles count for little. In a
society that values liberty—not, please note, as a grand abstract principle,
but as a mutual agreement that people can do as they wish so long as that
doesn’t infringe on the established rights of others—what matters when someone
petitions for redress of a grievance is simply whether that petition can be
granted without any such infringement. The questions asked above, and the
institutions of representative democracy and judicial review, are there to see
to it that this happens. Do they always succeed? Of course not; they just do a
marginally better job than any other system. In the real world, that’s
justification enough.
What about the religious communities that are opposed to
that right? (This is where I’m going to shift gears from offending my readers
on the rightward end of things to offending those on the other end of the
political spectrum.) Conservative Christian groups are a religious minority in
America today, and it’s a well-established rule in American law and custom that
reasonable accommodation should be made to religious minorities when this can
be done without violating the agreed-upon rights of others. That doesn’t give
conservative Christians the right to force other people to follow conservative
Christian teachings, any more than it would give Jews the right to forbid the
sale of pork in America’s grocery stores. It does mean that conservative
Christians should not be forced to participate in activities they consider
sinful, any more than Jewish delicatessens should be forced to sell pork.
By and large, businesses that serve the general public are
rightly required to serve the general public, rather than picking and choosing
who they will or won’t serve, but there are valid exceptions, and religion is
one of them. I’m told that in New York State, orthodox Jewish businesses are
legally allowed to post signage stating that Jewish religious law applies on
the premises, and this exempts them from certain laws governing other
businesses; thus, for example, a woman who enters such a business with
uncovered hair will not be served. It
would be a reasonable accommodation for conservative Christian businesses that
cater to weddings to be able to post signage noting that they only provide
services to the kinds of weddings authorized by their own religious laws. That
would let same-sex couples take their business elsewhere; it would also let
people who support the right of same-sex marriage know which businesses to
boycott, just as it would let conservative Christians support their
co-religionists.
Again, any number of shiny abstractions could be brandished
about to insist that conservative Christian businesses should not have that
right, but here again, we’re not dealing with abstractions. We’re dealing with
the need to find reasonable accommodation for differing beliefs in a society
that, at least in theory, values liberty.
Claims that this or that person will be harmed by letting a religious
minority practice its faith on privately owned business premises, again, have
to evince specific, concrete, measurable harm. Being offended doesn’t count
here, either, nor does whatever suffering comes your way from being denied the
power to make other people do what you think they ought to do.
My readers may have noticed that, given the arrangements
just outlined, nobody in the debate over same-sex marriages would get
everything they want. That’s at least as offensive as anything else I’ve
suggested in this post, but it’s the foundation of Burkean conservatism, and of
democratic politics in general. In the messy, gritty world of actual politics,
nobody can ever count on getting everything they want—even if they shout at the
top of their lungs that they have a right to it—and the best that can be
expected is that each side in any controversy will get the things they most
need. That’s the kind of resolution that allows a society to function, instead
of freezing up into permanent polarization the way America has done in recent
years—and it’s the kind of resolution that might just possibly get some
semblance of representative democracy intact through the era of crisis looming
ahead of us just now.
*******
Two other things. First, I’m frankly astounded by the
outpouring of congratulations—not to mention tip jar contributions—that came in
response to last week’s post on the tenth anniversary of The Archdruid
Report. On the off chance that anyone didn’t get thanked
sufficiently, please know that the lapse wasn’t intentional! I’m more grateful
than I can say for the support and encouragement I’ve received from the
community of readers that’s emerged around this blog.
