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May 21, 2009
Exclusive: The Premises of Conservatism
It was a lie. It is a lie. The left started its modern attack on Western Civilization with a lie. It knew it could not succeed by frontal attack on institutions that had delivered the greatest good for the greatest number, the highest level of civilization ever achieved and a disposition for freedom. In order to succeed at their malign project they had, first, to undermine the institutions on which the citizens most completely relied. They had to discredit the foundations of Western societies and call into question the rationale for their existence. They had to shake the peoples’ confidence in those traditions, customs and organizations that formed the basis of their societies and which constituted the establishment that enabled the people to enjoy the fruits of a high level of civilization.
There was no easy way to do that. It meant questioning the truth of accepted principles. It meant casting doubt on those institutions that had so faithfully served the people by suggesting they had dark and questionable practices. It meant finding and exploiting scandal as a means of diminishing established institutions and creating skepticism as to their good faith in the minds of the citizens. What was required, first and foremost, was to convince the people that they could not trust their own judgment; that the ideas, customs and traditions that had served them so well could not be trusted because they could not be objectively proven.
They had to discredit truth itself so the people, unmoored from reality and all that was familiar, could be manipulated by those whose project was contrary to nature itself. The lie they told the people was that there is no truth. That there are no absolutes. That all is relative and, therefore, judgment itself is invalid. The phrases came so trippingly off the tongue and have been so oft repeated that they have become an article of faith in the public philosophy.
But it is wrong.
Conservatives find themselves lost in the wake of the electoral defeat of its chief sponsor, the Republican Party, and are wandering in the wilderness confused by the rejection of their ideas; wondering if they can redefine themselves in ways that would be more appealing to the electorate. Conservative thinkers have almost uniformly argued that conservatives must articulate a vision they can take to voters. Some suggest that conservatism itself is the problem and that a new set of ideas that looks a lot like English conservatism be accepted as the new “American Conservatism.” Some suggest that all that is needed is a rediscovery of traditional conservatism and the development of a cogent rationale to take to the people.
It is clear that conservatives must define themselves. They must find a way to present a coherent, cohesive set of ideas if they are ever again to command electoral success. To succeed at this, they must first recognize that conservatism has not been rejected by the voters, Republicanism has. Republicanism is a practical effort that has as its project the election of candidates who generally, but not always, espouse more or less conservative ideas. But politics is a practical enterprise not naturally given to the vindication of ideals and when office holders, for practical reasons, betray the ideas on which they were elected, they will be punished for the one sin least tolerated by the electorate and that is the sin of hypocrisy. When the people conclude that their representatives advocated certain ideas only as a means of getting elected and not as a promise to govern in a certain way, those elected officials lose the voters’ trust as well as their votes. That is how conservatism was betrayed by its primary sponsor.
But the truth is that conservatives have never articulated an organized body of thought that represents at least a sort of political philosophy; a theory of Man’s relationship to government. That is, in part, because of the schizophrenic way in which modern conservatism was founded and has evolved. As I have argued in these pages, defining conservatism as including both political and social conservatism as a unified whole has combined two completely different projects with opposing and inconsistent premises and having thinking processes completely at odds with one another. One is based on control and the other on freedom. One is based on a progression of ideas and the other on tradition and social predisposition. One speaks to government; the other to society.
It is critical, now, that conservatives bend themselves to the project of finding the ideas that define them politically, setting them forth as a unified, organized, systematic political philosophy. But how to start? How do we get to a political philosophy? Before we settle on premises, we must start by agreeing on how we gain the knowledge that leads to them. Agreeing on a system of how to think about such things is necessary not only to define the philosophy but to provide an analytic tool through which to measure public policy issues against the defined philosophy.
If we are to create a theory of Man’s relationship to government, a philosophy of government and statecraft, it is for the purpose of defining what government should be, how government should be created, what legitimate power it may exercise and what impact its existence will have on those who live under its authority. The philosophy must, therefore, be derived through the employment of a method on which the greatest number can agree.
There is more or less universal agreement that the senses sense something and that we can rely on them as a guide for learning the nature of the world around us. There is also more or less universal agreement that the application of logic to empirical data is a means of yielding truth. Indeed, that system of reason is the only one that enjoys general public embracement.
All civilized mankind has some form of science and mathematics and it is the only truly universally accepted body of thought considered to provide a means of determining truth. t cuts across all societies, political views, religions and cultures. Two plus two equals four in all religious cultures. Two plus two equals four under all political systems. Science is based on empirical data – that which is sensed – and conclusions are extrapolated from the application of reason to experience. We know that, on earth, bodies with mass dropped from a hand will fall to the ground. We know that from having experienced it; from having sensed it and having taken it into our consciousness. We reason that if we hold something and let it go, then, it will fall to the ground. That is a known absolute. Science, through reason, extrapolates from observation to conclusion.
Reason is the only universally accepted means of determining truth. Though it is not often identified with religious contemplation, it is clearly employed by religious thinkers. Religious thought begins, generally, with revelation and faith; social interaction and personal conduct, from tradition, feelings, instinct and intuition. Neither proceeds in a strictly rational way. At some point, though, even religious thought and social interaction rely on reason to extrapolate to further concept.
Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, posits that reason is the means of determining objective truth in the temporal world but that knowledge of God, though partially conceivable through reason, must come primarily through divine revelation. He goes on to develop, through reason, a systematic description of the nature of sacred doctrine and the existence and nature of God. Theological speculation begins with faith but proceeds through reason.
The same is true of personal conduct and social interaction. Man is born with certain predispositions and is trained by others to conduct himself in a certain way. But, at some point, reason enters the picture. The traditional “hot stove” metaphor is true. We might not be told by instinct or training that a stove is hot but we touch one and know it hurts. Reason tells us not to touch another. We learn to drive automobiles and understand that if we do not apply our brakes when approaching another car, the two will collide. Reason tells us that that will cause damage even if we have neither seen nor experienced a collision. So, we apply our brakes.
Religious experience, social interaction and personal conduct are experienced in some manner and it is that empirical experience that provides the premises from which one reasons to additional thoughts that guide our actions. Logic is clearly the natural condition of man.
All other systems on which people rely to determine some truth – instinct, revelation, intuition, emotion, tradition and faith – are unreliable means of developing a philosophy of government because they are inherently subjective and cannot be consistently and adequately transmitted or explained. They cannot be proven and they cannot convince those with other opposing, equally subjective and deeply held sensibilities. They do not, therefore, even begin to gain the sort of universal acceptance necessary to describe the very practical correct relationship of Man to government.
It is reason, then, that must constitute the means of thinking that will enable conservatives to develop and articulate a body of political thought that can describe government and against which can be measured responses to modern problems.
It seems odd to me to have to defend rationalism as a means of deriving truth and determining a philosophy. There are those, however, who suggest that conservatism is more properly based on religious sensibility and that, as a result, revelation is the only legitimate basis for conservative political philosophy. But I am with Aquinas and Augustine. For things of this world, empiricism and logic are the means to truth. For things of the next, logic will be of little assistance in determining premises.
That is the overarching problem with viewing Edmund Burke as the father of American conservatism. His disdain for rationalism leaves adherents intellectually unmoored and provides no consistent theoretical guide for judging new facts and situations other than to hope that tradition will provide an answer. But there is no consistent answer when there is no consistent, logical, analytical framework. We are left, by Burke, to our subjective social and religious conceits; scant assistance in defining political principles.
Those who have read my criticism of Burke might be tempted to conclude that I find his thought of no value. Quite the contrary. His brilliant and insightful criticism of the French Revolution is without peer. His intellectual system is nothing short of perfection in suggesting the proper approach to social issues and their religious underpinnings. It is just that system, however, that is quite useless in developing a political philosophy that must have as its basis something more empirically provable and, hence, more universally acceptable.
With reason as our means of developing a political philosophy, then, we must turn our attention to determining the premises on which we will base it. For that, conservatives look to the principles of the Founding, for if we seek to conserve something, it is manifestly those principles that defined the nation.
Man, it is written, is endowed by his creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This seemed to the Founders a statement of the obvious. Man is inherently free. Whether one sees this as a gift from God or inherent in nature, it is clear that any person can do whatever he is physically capable of doing absent restraint from another person or collective body. Freedom is the natural condition of Man. Freedom is the fundamental premise. The individual is inviolable and the preservation of his freedom the sole legitimate point of collective enterprise.
That inherent freedom is what defines the fundamental premise of conservative theory and it distinguishes ours from any other. In subsequent columns I will explore how that premise has resulted in the greatest experiment in government in history and why it should define modern conservative political philosophy.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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