{"id":85366,"date":"2021-12-22T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-22T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-demanding-delicate-task-of-conservatism\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T09:11:18","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:11:18","slug":"the-demanding-delicate-task-of-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-demanding-delicate-task-of-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"The demanding & delicate task of conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editors\u2019 note: the below is a response to \u201cThe fallacies of the common good<\/a>\u201d by Kim R. Holmes, the lead essay in \u201cCommon-good conservatism: a debate<\/a>.\u201d Holmes\u2019s reply can be found here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kim<\/span> R. Holmes has written a lively and provocative, if ultimately unconvincing, defense of what he calls \u201ctraditional conservatism.\u201d Just how \u201ctraditional\u201d this conservatism really is remains open to question. His essay is best understood as a thoughtful and succinct encapsulation of the assumptions and analytic categories underlying mainstream intellectual and political conservatism for the last half century or so. It thus reflects both the real strengths and the considerable weaknesses of the old consensus. Holmes\u2019s challenges to national conservatism and to the conservative case for a politics centered around the common good are not without merit, even if he is too quick to dismiss what is legitimate in both notions. But the political philosophizing underlying Holmes\u2019s analysis is too hurried and facile, and his argument, as a whole, neglects to deal with crucial defects in the old consensus.<\/p>\n

Democracy entails both external limits and internal limits that require self-limitation in accord with the moral law and the requirements of the civic common good.<\/p>\n

Unlike Holmes, I would begin by insisting that core notions of territorial democracy, humane national loyalty, and citizenship in a national as opposed to a global framework are under systematic assault today, as is our broader civic and civilizational inheritance. Holmes\u2019s defense of the old conservative consensus seems to take priority over a serious eff<\/span>ort to come to terms with the unrelenting postnational or \u201cglobalist\u201d assault on the preconditions of democratic self-government. The American framers could avoid undue theorizing about the national or territorial framework of republican self-government precisely because they could more or less take it for granted. But what they largely presupposed (e.g., the nation-state, the inherited moral capital of the ages, classical education, the biblical heritage of the West) must now be consciously affi<\/span>rmed by us if we are to stand up against the forces of repudiation and cultural and political destruction. To defend the founders\u2019 achievement today is to articulate self-consciously the larger framework of liberty implicit in their political philosophizing and constitution-making. Where they affi<\/span>rmed rights, we must more forthrightly remind free men and women of the responsibilities and obligations inherent in the exercise of their freedom. With Madison, we must defend the sacred character of conscience; at the same time, we must insist with John Henry Newman and C. S. Lewis that the exercise of conscience, so integral to moral life and human dignity rightly understood, is never to be confused with \u201cself-will\u201d or \u201cthe poison of subjectivism.\u201d Democracy entails both external limits\u2014borders and boundaries for both passage and conduct that make for a community of citizens and not just residents or self-assertive rights-bearers\u2014and internal limits that require self-limitation in accord with the moral law and the requirements of the civic common good.<\/p>\n

Holmes largely passes over both the bounded and circumscribed nation (or \u201cterritorial democracy\u201d as Orestes Brownson called it) as the precondition of government by consent and the responsible exercise of rights. Holmes\u2019s half\u2013classically liberal public philosophizing does not deny these goods but assumes that they can take care of themselves. Nobody in America really wants blood-and-soil nationalism, and Holmes is right to defend Burke-oriented national conservatives against the specious charge. My own view is that a vigorous, responsible, and morally serious defense of the nation in today\u2019s world ought to eschew the rhetoric of \u201cnationalism\u201d since too many people assume that nationalism is, by definition, a pathology at odds with self-restraint and respect for other peoples and nations. But conservatives everywhere rightly oppose what Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve called the \u201cuniversal and homogenous state,\u201d believing it to be something that can only culminate in despotism and the destruction of the human soul. The two most profound theorists of humane national loyalty and of the nation as a political form conducive in principle to civilized liberty\u2014the late, great Roger Scruton and the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent\u2014have never referred to themselves as nationalists. Theirs is a coherent and compelling political and philosophical defense of the nation as the indispensable precondition of civilized liberty. National conservatives and their critics could both learn from a defense of humane national loyalty that does not begin or end with a defense of nationalism.<\/p>\n

Hol<\/span>mes is strongly invested in the defense of \u201cintrinsic\u201d rights, and properly so. No one should doubt that fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, so central to the life of reason and the exercise of self-government, are under frontal assault from censorious woke or progressive ideologues today. The freedom of religion, too, allows a free people to avoid both the subjugation of conscience and the moral and religious indiff<\/span>erentism that undermines the moral foundations of a free society. Such rights have intrinsic moral dignity and are central to the American understanding and practice of republican liberty. I\u2019m also inclined to agree with Holmes that rights are, in important respects, ends in themselves and not merely instrumental to lower (i.e., material) or higher ends and purposes (i.e., virtue and the life of the soul). Americans have fought and died for liberty, risking their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defend the great cause of freedom and human dignity.<\/p>\n

Holmes makes Locke much more of a traditional figure than he really was.<\/p>\n

Alas, Holmes makes Locke much more of a traditional figure than he really was. In his Second Treatise on Civil Government<\/span> (1689), Locke ultimately subordinated moral duty to the great desideratum of comfortable self-preservation. He rejected the beneficence of nature and God\u2019s providential order and bet on \u201cthe rational and industrious\u201d rather than the \u201cquarrelsome and contentious.\u201d Like Thomas Hobbes, he denied the reality of intrinsic goods or a summum bonum<\/span> and defined the moral life as an unending \u201cflight from evil(s).\u201d In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding <\/span>(1689), he equally denied \u201cinnate\u201d moral ideas and saw crimes and sins such as murder as \u201cmixed modes\u201d that were in eff<\/span>ect artificially and linguistically constructed. His eminent student the third Earl of Shaftesbury suggested that his skeptical categories undermined the moral life, as did the American framer James Wilson in his Lectures on Law<\/span> from the early 1790s. Locke\u2019s defense of \u201crational Christianity\u201d was seen by many of his contemporaries as a barely concealed form of deism or Socinianism, or perhaps even private atheism. If his moral skepticism can lead to despotism and nihilism, Shaftesbury and Wilson wondered aloud whether Locke was, in the end, a true friend of human dignity.<\/p>\n

Holmes is right to praise Father John Courtney Murray for his non-relativistic defense of religious freedom in a pluralistic society that still affi<\/span>rms a moral consensus deriving from sound tradition and the natural law. For his part, Murray loathed Locke for what he called his \u201crationalism, liberalism, and nominalism.\u201d For Murray, the inhabitants of the state of nature were \u201clittle gods\u201d whose only aspiration was to preserve themselves. He did not believe the American founders were Lockeans since, in the end, they had a more elevated conception of human liberty and the moral obligations that inform it than Locke himself did. Alexander Hamilton was equally wary of the idea of a \u201cstate of nature\u201d since it implied that justice and moral obligation were conventional in origin. Hamilton loathed Hobbes for denying \u201can intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor, and will be the final judge of the universe\u201d (see Hamilton\u2019s The Farmer Refuted<\/span> from February 23, 1775). Holmes is too sanguine about Locke\u2019s allegedly natural-law convictions and thus of the essentially Lockean character of the American experiment. Murray thought Americans built a better country than Locke had sketched out and indeed \u201cbetter than they knew.\u201d Their practice was significantly better than some of the Enlightenment theory that they had imbibed along the way.<\/p>\n

Whe<\/span>re Holmes goes wrong, and significantly so, is in his failure to confront what Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton both call \u201cthe ideology of human rights.\u201d A free society depends upon authoritative institutions whose raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/span> cannot be defined by the maximization of rights claims or the invention of ever new and often spurious rights. As Pierre Manent writes in Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason<\/span> (2020), law can become a \u201cslave to rights\u201d when ill-considered rights claims undermine the defining and animating purposes of truly authoritative institutions. Thus an institution such as the Catholic Church must ordain women as priests, religious and secular progressives insist, and reject its age-old understanding of sexual morality to accommodate the rights of those who in no way share its self-understanding. Likewise, universities must restrict the search for truth to accommodate the therapeutic demands of those insisting on \u201csafe spaces\u201d or ideologues committed to the extirpation of our civilizational inheritance. And the armed forces must accommodate the felt needs of those suff<\/span>ering gender dysphoria, regardless of its eff<\/span>ects on the cohesion of those troops as an integral fighting force.<\/p>\n

Over time, the ideology of human rights overturns the rules at the heart of all authoritative institutions.<\/p>\n

Over time, the ideology of human rights overturns the rules at the heart of all authoritative institutions. Social engineering becomes the order of the day. Moral antinomianism trumps the autonomy of civil society in the name of the autonomous individual unbeholden to the common good. In this new dispensation, authority is everywhere confused with authoritarianism. At the same time, as the indiscriminate rights claims of the least thoughtful and moderate supersede all other intellectual, political, and moral considerations, ideological abstractions prevent political and moral deliberation from playing an active and salutary role in civil society. Unfortunately, Holmes is silent about this entire dynamic in which rights, divorced from a larger moral and civic context, disrupt the contents of life that true conservatism is obliged to protect. Invoking the intellectual authority of Locke and intrinsic rights does nothing to clarify the matter.<\/p>\n

Holmes is right, in my view, that the Catholic integralists go much too far in severing the essential and necessary dialectic of truth, virtue, and liberty. Real and eff<\/span>ective liberty is necessary in order to search for truth and to live a virtuous life that is not the product of coercion. A confessional state is hardly possible in our time and perhaps desirable in none. Religious liberty should not be confused with moral indiff<\/span>erentism or a relativism that denies that the human person is called to truth. But to defend the American political order and the fundamental liberties it upholds is not to be a \u201cright liberal\u201d (as the integralists rather snidely claim) who is committed to \u201cliberal neutrality,\u201d that is to radical relativism about right and wrong. James Wilson was unquestionably correct: moral skepticism corrodes the society of free and morally responsible citizens and in the end paves the way toward despotism or, at least, civil war by other means.<\/p>\n

One problem is that the integralists and a few of the national conservatives conflate the common good with an a priori<\/span> imposition of an abstract idea on a static society. That is to miss the point altogether. Rather, the common good in a free society entails the constant eff<\/span>ort to \u201cput reasons and actions in common,\u201d in Aristotle\u2019s wonderfully suggestive words. It is an activity guided by free men and women who exercise practical reason at the service of the common good. It is perfectly compatible with debate and disputation, something more noble than the negotiation of competing rights and interests. Without being simply open or indeterminate, it must be informed by a reasonable moral consensus that rejects utopianism, angry moralism, and a corrosive subjectivism or relativism. That delicate task demands calibrated judgment and a well-ordered soul, goods that the political community can encourage but which are first and foremost products of authentic liberal and religious education.<\/p>\n

No <\/span>one could reasonably deny that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an eloquent and forceful critic of a liberalism shorn of sturdy moral foundations and a healthy sense of civic courage and moral self-limitation. People of a certain age remember the powerful challenge to Western complacency posed by his June 1978 Harvard Address. Yet in a little known 1974 speech on the strengths and weakness of the modern project (first published in English translation as \u201cAn Orbital Journey\u201d in National Review<\/span>, January 7, 2019), the great Russian writer and critic of totalitarianism argued that the Middle Ages \u201cfailed, in their time, to hold humanity\u2019s course; because the planting on Earth of the Kingdom of God was forcibly imposed, with essential personal rights being revoked in favor of the Whole.\u201d In reaction, modern man \u201cdove\u2014headlong and unbounded\u2014into the Material.\u201d We found ourselves in a new era of \u201chumanistic individualism, the construction of civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.\u201d Neither reactionary liberalism nor integralism provides worthy solutions to the theologico-political problem. The task of balancing conflicting goods must be guided by tough-minded moderation, prudence, courage, and fidelity to the best that has been thought and said over the ages. In my view, the \u201ctraditional conservatism\u201d that Kim R. Holmes defends needs to be rethought in light of pressing challenges and the need to make explicit all the tension-ridden goods at the heart of a free society still open to the tried-and-true verities of old. That demanding and delicate task is still ahead of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On rethinking traditional conservatism.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1372,"featured_media":132535,"template":"","tags":[920,1116,684],"department_id":[563],"issue":[2889],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":33,"value_formatted":33,"value":"33","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Thomas Chambers, <\/i>The Connecticut Valley, Nineteenth century, Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.<\/i>","value_formatted":"Thomas Chambers, <\/i>The Connecticut Valley, Nineteenth century, Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.<\/i>","value":"Thomas Chambers, <\/i>The Connecticut Valley, Nineteenth century, Oil on canvas, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.<\/i>","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651b519e4fcb7","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"Yes","value_formatted":true,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651d8874dce6f","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":3,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":1,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}},"set_paywall_at":{"simple_value_formatted":null,"value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66032c7fbb6f0","label":"Set Paywall At","name":"set_paywall_at","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"date_time_picker","value":null,"menu_order":4,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"display_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","return_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","first_day":1,"_name":"set_paywall_at","_valid":1}},"overlay_banner":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66196a3de1de4","label":"Overlay Banner","name":"overlay_banner","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"text","value":null,"menu_order":5,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","maxlength":"","placeholder":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"overlay_banner","_valid":1}}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"featured_img":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/the_connecticut_valley_1956.13.2-scaled.jpg","coauthors":[],"author_meta":{"author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/daniel-j-mahoney\/","display_name":"Daniel J. Mahoney"},"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 2 years ago","modified":"Updated 2 months ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on December 22, 2021","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on December 22, 2021 12:00 pm","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024 9:11 am"},"featured_img_caption":"Thomas Chambers","tax_additional":{"post_tag":{"linked":["Conservatism<\/a>","Political Theory<\/a>","Politics<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Conservatism<\/span>","Political Theory<\/span>","Politics<\/span>"],"slug":"post_tag","name":"Tags"},"department_id":{"linked":["Features<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Features<\/span>"],"slug":"department_id","name":"Departments"},"issue":{"linked":["January 2022<\/a>"],"unlinked":["January 2022<\/span>"],"slug":"issue","name":"Issues"},"section":{"linked":[],"unlinked":[],"slug":"section","name":"Sections"}},"series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["jetpack_sharing_enabled","author","featured_img","coauthors","author_meta","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","tax_additional","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/85366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/85366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122843,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/85366\/revisions\/122843"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85366"},{"taxonomy":"department_id","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department_id?post=85366"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=85366"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=85366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}