Why I Am Not a Conservative: The Critique if a Deist

Having attended Brown University for nearly two years, and having sampled the political discourse here for just as long, I have learned a great deal about the power of labels. In the last four months, I have also learned how easily labels can mislead. For most of my time at Brown, I thought of myself as conservative. My reasoning was based entirely on my policy preferences, as distinguished from those of my classmates: I stood up for the death penalty, the flat tax, and the Strategic Defense Initiative, and opposed the Kyoto Protocols, affirmative action, and abortion on demand. For me, conservatism was a label denoting support for Republican causes.

My subsequent readings of conservative philosophy have instilled in me the belief that conservatism is more a general disposition than a bouillabaisse of opinions about specific issues. While I have not changed my positions on any of the aforementioned issues, I no longer identify myself as conservative. In The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk lists six main principles underlying that disposition, of which I endorse five withvarying degrees of zeal— a healthy majority, but a misleading one, for I most strongly disagree with the first principle: “Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” The implication is that a conservative believes that history unfolds as it does for a purpose beneficial to the human species. In what follows, I will describe in detail my reasons for rejecting this principle. The main reason why I decline to label myself a conservative any longer is that I now deem this principle essential to conservatism. I assign the principle this importance because it informs a conservative’s view of both the nature and the purpose of the world.

The most prominent exponent of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, believed in “a world governed by strong and subtle purpose,” and this is a belief wholly contrary to my deep-seated deism. I believe in a God, or perhaps merely an impersonal force (I never have decided which), who created the universe and physical laws to govern it, but then withdrew from all involvement in it. This view is attractive to me for its simplicity: it explains to my satisfaction how such goodness and beauty as exists could have come into being and, at the same time, how such undeserved pain and suffering as we hear about daily can be allowed to go on. I do not believe that a benevolent deity who takes an active role in the affairs of the world would allow the manifold injustices to which Homo sapiens has become accustomed. It is difficult for me to understand the value of such divine intervention as, Burke imagines, since he would agree with Leonard Woolf that the permanence of earthly suffering is, in major part, due to precisely that intervention.

Another problem for conservatism is that, if Heaven is indeed moving history in a certain direction, it is not the direction favored by conservatives. With each generation, conservatives are holding on to a less and less conservative order. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke criticizes the “political benevolence” of the redistribution of wealth. Today, the welfare state is robust, and growing. No serious candidate for public office in the United States proposes abolishing it, and a number of authors whose work we read in this course criticized Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president in two generations, for failing even to control the growth of welfare spending. Consider also conservatives’ attachment to federalism.