The only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them.
—Edmund Burke
Conservatism is the doctrine of pragmatic pessimism. A conservative sees the human race as nature’s flawed sensation—a race whose talents have brought phenomenal progress, yet whose defects—primarily egoism-have survived its every innovation. Humankind is capable of great things, but to recast its fallen, selfish nature is not one of those things. One can live better than he would have, were he born a hundred years before. But he cannot be better-he cannot escape the limitations inherent in his species.However, a conservative does not accept these limitations asexcusesfor personal failings. Rather, he insists that the human race accept its shortcomings and strive to liveas wellaspossiblein spite of them. A quotation attributed to Winston Churchill dubs conservatism an ideology for mature-minded adults, and surely this stands to reason: the philosophy treats all as beings fully responsible for their lot in life.The two areas of society most affected by this orientation are economics and criminal justice. In economics, a conservative very closely resembles a libertarian, believing that people must rely on themselves and not on their neighbors or their government for support. In criminal justice, a conservative is a legal authoritarian who allows no excuse for breaking a duly enacted law.
Whereas vast inequalities of wealth are anathema to a liberal or socialist,a conservative regards them asentirely permissible in a free society. In an industrialized nation where millions are born in crushing poverty, yet are able to pull themselves up into the middle-class ranks, and where 70 percent of millionaires are first-generation, he will have no solicitude for those who claim to be disadvantaged. Quite often, people fare differently because they prepare differently. Yet, as a social Darwinist, he denies that one’s work ethic is the sole determinant of one’s fortunes. He also attributes poverty to humans’ endemic limitations: not every member of the species will add enough value to the world to earn his own bread; not every idiot is a savant. As Professor Thomas Sowell maintains in The Quest for Cosmic Justice, merit (hard work) and productivity (value) are two very different concepts, and only the latter drives society’s estimation of a person’s or a company’s value. Thus, even if a person is prepared to work hard, but has little or nothing to offer any prospective employer, it is only natural that he be unemployed. To a conservative,there is no reason for the economy to operate on a different principle than this. No one will buy low-quality food simply to reward the farmers for their commitment to a difficult profession. The reason for this is that people normally use their limited funds where they will have the greatest positive impact on their lives.
People constantly reward each other for their abilities to supply needs and desires, and do so without considering how they acquired (or whether or not they deserve) those abilities. It makes no difference to a company whether its employees have natural gifts for their occupations or simply worked hard to become proficient at those occupations. From a cosmic perspective, it may seem unfair that a movie star or singer can earn hundreds of times more than an equally industrious person, but merit is not the sole determinant of Aperson’s fortune. Aperson’s natural abilities may justifiably reap great wealth, as other individuals pay to see him in films or at concerts. It is difficult to understand why he should not get to keep the money that they give him. It is no sufficient answer to say that entertainers are unnecessary: every private individual is the world’s foremost authority on his own needs and interests. What he does not buy, hence does not need, is useless.
Accordingly,a conservative opposes any form of public assistance for the poor, since this would entail the forcible redistribution of wealth. A service or individual for whom the market has no use deserves no public subsidy, for such an individual is alien to the needs and wants of the people. The only maxim that could possibly justify holding productive masses responsible for the welfare of unproductive strangers is, “I need, therefore I deserve” -a statement to which a conservative does not subscribe. It is offensive to conservatism because it imposes a unidirectional and involuntary obligation, whether or not the welfare beneficiaries contribute anything to the public. As Ayn Rand argued in The Virtue of Selfishness, that is the essence of slavery. This is not to say that a conservative would forbid self-sufficient people to give others money for doing absolutely nothing. So to do is their privilege, not their obligation. What the government gives with one hand it takes away with the other, and, thus it must only finance the essentials, such as national defense. Compassion in economic policy sponsors weakness and waste, and these are not essentials. Aconservative finds egoism permissible in economics alone because it does not affirmatively harm anyone. Focusing on the liberty and comfort of the idle minority detracts from the liberty and comfort of society’s productive mass. Neither can the government mitigate the vice of financing dependency by levying a welfare tax only on the rich—a leech is a leech, no matter whose blood it sucks.
There is, however, a more dangerous kind of parasite against which society must protect itself: the criminal, debaucher of the culture. A conservative believes that order is indispensable to a good life, and emphasizes the negative right of the populace not to be disturbed by vice or harmed by crime over an individual’s positive right to instant self gratification. While his conscience abides economic egoism for its restraint of waste, as aforementioned, it forbids social egoism and regards it as noxious behavior. He therefore endorses community standards of behavior, and argues that society must forcefully and impartially punish transgressors of those standards. To recognize an excuse is to tolerate the offense, and to tolerate is to subsidize. If the courts accepted poverty, insensitivity, or stupidity as justifications for crime, the streets would run with blood. Aconservative accepts that the flaws that lead people to commit immoral acts, such as greed and envy are inherent in every person. He assumes, if only as a practical fiction, that everyone is capable of obeying the law, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of people, do not commit disruptive acts. A conservative’s ambition is to maximize order in an effort to forge the calmest possible background for its citizens to enjoy their economic freedom. Even a man who is somehow predisposed to violent or otherwise antisocial behavior must submit himself to rigorous punishment. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed in The Common Law, it is impractical to consider” congenital defects” in any court but that of Heaven-and, in any event, an act is none the less harmful because the actor is blameless from a cosmic viewpoint.
In the conservative view, because humans are imperfect and imperfectible, there will always be some who elevate their interests or passions above their neighbors’ rights. This holds true regardless of the standard of living that the populace enjoys, and so the task of the government is not to pay indigents to obey the law but to instill forbearance in the community. He assumes that moral education and a traditionalist ambience will not perfect the human race, but that they will, to some extent, improve most citizens’ morals, while leaving the justice system to dispose of the incorrigible remainder. Decency and self-restraint are not evenly distributed among the members of our race, but from this it hardly follows that those who are deficient in these traits should be treated like malnourished children. An evil attaches to every act proscribed by the citizens of a state, whether because the act inflicts material harm on someone or merely because it sets one person’s desires above the desire of the community that its duly enacted laws be obeyed. Invariably, the victim is society itself and not the criminal. To blame society for antisocial acts is the moral equivalent of blaming a woman for having been raped. Therefore, a conservative is indifferent to any “root cause” of crime other than the most plainly intractable one—which is human nature—and instead seeks to mitigate whatever negative effects redound to the public by a form of judicial catharsis by dealing every guilty person a punishment that allays the public anger at his misbehavior.
Rehabilitation, therefore, has no place in conservative criminal justice. Retaliation and deterrence are the bases for punishment, with a pragmatic emphasis on the former. One cannot determine that a specific sentence, will best deter crimes such as armed robberies without being excessive for the offense. Deterrence rests on society’s capacity to send a threat to prospective offenders that outweighs, from the latter’s perspective, the benefits that they stand to gain from breaking the relevant laws. Because imprisonment is qualitatively different from every crime, it is generally impossible to know what sort of penalty will quantitatively outweigh the advantage to the criminal of committing the offense. In the case of the armed robber, it is far more likely that the courts require such a sentence because the public believes that it will give the offender his just deserts-a mainly retaliatory explanation. A populace holding this retaliatory view reaffirms the importance of its most sacred norms and values by punishing violations of them. Moreover, this society expresses its abhorrence for those violations in the stringency of the punishment it chooses, as recognized by Adam Smith in The Vleory of Moral Sentiments. Law-abiding citizens, he wrote, “reflect that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and oppose to the emotions of compassion which they feel for a particular person [the criminal], a more enlarged compassion which they feel for mankind.”
Yet, a conservative is not satisfied with allowing moral sentiments mere play in the joints of the law. In contrast to a libertarian, he even approves of prohibitions of ostensibly “victimless” behavior that the general public nonetheless deems immoral. Prohibitions of this nature have ancient roots in the Western tradition of criminal justice, and for good reason. The populace has a compelling interest in preserving a healthy moral atmosphere. The most cordial relations prevail in relatively homogeneous societies, which imbue their citizens with common values and beliefs. For conservatives, then, the strength of a community’s revulsion at a person’s acts will determine more than the gravity of punishments to be assigned; it will also determine whether the offensive acts should be forbidden by law in the first place. Liberals in the tradition of John Stuart Mill have argued that communities of this nature have stifled creative thought and intellectual development, but this is far from clear. Victorian Britain and the early United States, though culturally very conservative and restrictive, never lacked intellectual vitality or initiative. Further, while diversity of lifestyles, of literature, of lyrics, has brought us skyrocketing rates of illegitimacy, increased contempt for authority figures, diminished regard for family obligations, and concomitant growth in crime, it is not at all certain that it has improved the scholarly discourse of the modern world. Surely the reader does not believe that we have many more geniuses now than before, when social freedom was vastly more restricted.
On the other hand, a conservative does not call for the elimination of personal autonomy in favor of public authority. He favors a balance between the two-albeit one tipped in the direction of authority, since it is order that permits liberty to exist in the first place. The health of his culture is a conservative’s primary concern. His opponents argue that by insulating itself, a culture prevents development as well as decay, but they are mistaken. A conservative is dedicated to his community’s material prosperity, for which economic libertarianism provides. As for moral prosperity, traditionalism is far more likely to serve than disserve this goal, as it strives to protect the fundamental traditions, beliefs, and arrangements that best conduce to the public good. Moral tradition exists neither for the thrill of priggishness, nor for the hatred of pleasure, but rather for shaping a community of which citizens can and should be proud. Conservative faith in the transcendence of certain values informs his wish to put them beyond the reach of shifting sentiments-to impart moral guidance for future generations. It is the government’s duty to enforce those values and the social conventions that convey them, so as to preserve them better. Aconservative believes that the future will more likely offer moral poisons and temptations to evil, than fruits yet to be discovered. This does not mean that every majority or elite opinion must be forever enshrined but that only the most important ones-those deemed essential to prosperity, civility, and shared moral identity, will be.
If the government does not assist in protecting fundamental values, it surrenders its obligation to protect the culture from decline. Foremost among those values is responsibility—the principle that every man bears his own burden. In economics, this translates to individual self-reliance and a duty for the state never to teach that everyone has a right to a share of his neighbor’s harvest. In law, it signifies a duty for society to discipline those who commit affirmative harm to others, whether the harm is physical, precise, and measurable, or confined to the introspective realm of sentiments and values. Conservatism therefore encourages the government to heed both the material and the emotional well-being of its members without empowering them to shirk their responsibility to provide for themselves. It insists that people have the liberty to reap unlimited profit from peddling goods and services that satisfy others’ wants and needs, subject only to the limitation that these not be so offensive to the conscience of the public that they see no alternative but to ban them. At the same time, it calls for order and moral clarity, so that the culture can endure for ages without becoming coarse-an omnipresent risk, to which the leadership must always be alert. In a significant sense, both branches of conservatism point directly to the goal of pragmatic pessimism. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the conservative lawyer/philosopher James Fitzjames Stephen assumed the role of the benevolent yet resolute sovereign addressing the immoral minority, and wrote, “It is impossible to lay down any principles of legislation at all unless you are prepared to say, I am right, and you are wrong, and your view shall give way to mine, quietly, gradually, and peaceably; but one of us two must rule and the other must obey, and I mean to rule.”
