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.
This tradition seems to be on its way out, as even the Rehnquist Court, well-known for reviving federalism, has imposed its views of desirable’policy on issue after issue for the nation as a whole, rather than let the issues be resolved by elected officials at the state level. In recent years, it has struck down anti-sodomy laws, a partial-birth abortion ban, capital punishment for retarded murderers, etc. And Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent contention that American courts must follow foreign law in their rulings indicates that a good deal more judicial legislation, completely unmoored from the customs and mores of communities in the United States, lies ahead.
One can respond that the purpose of the many hardships sent by Heaven is to test humans’ loyalty for their Creator—the
expression of such loyalty being humans’ purpose for existing—and that conservative defeats in the policy arena serve the same function—as Kirk argues. Besides, one might add, true conservatism does not profess that a culture will retain all its virtues; a conservative knows that the order to which he or she is accustomed will not last forever, and intends only to resist the most radical, precipitous changes. But the first counter argument relies wholly on faith and cannot be demonstrated logically. Lacking faith, I cannot merely trust that allowing communist regimes to wipe out 100 million lives in the twentieth century was an act of testing human piety, nor can I trust that if it were a test, then itwas justified. I have great respect for people who have this conservative faith in natural law, as they are more likely than I to have peace of mind. But it strikes me that no matter what horrors go on, people who have this disposition can still believe that, despite all the injustice and chaos, a just order prevails. I cannot agree.
The second counterargument has intuitive appeal, but it makes conservatism look ineffectual and contrary to the progression of history. If conservatism is meant as a brake on harmful social change, then the adherents of this philosophy have not discharged their responsibilities well in the last four decades, given the radical social, cultural,and legal changes that have occurred in that time. Their influence was insufficient to prevent the freewheeling judicial activism of the Warren Court, such as the expansion of criminals’ rights at the expense of the police, which caused a shocking upsurge in crime. And when the Burger Court delivered its ruling in Roe v. Wade, conservatism was thwarted again: rather than commence a slow trend towards abortion rights, the Court instantly brought down nearly all restrictions on abortion in the fIrst three months of pregnancy. Thus, conservatives have not only failed to prevent changes hostile to their values, they also failed to prevent those changes from coming so quickly as to help spark a “culturewar.”
If conservatism embraced religious faith only as an effective means to control the people,itwould be closertomyoutlook. Once, in one of my political theory classes, I
used this rhetorical question to demonstrate why I believe human nature is depraved and requires constraint: if someone crashed into your car at night, and nobody saw him do it, but he still left his name, phone number, and address, so that you could contact him, would you be surprised? I would be, for I think that people generally are too selfish to transcend their self-interest. This is why religion is valuable. It sets up a superior being, omniscient and omnipotent, and warns people that they all must obey that being’s will or face unspeakable torment But to accept that religiosity among the masses has positive effects is not the same as to accept it there is a spiritual force guiding the development of human events,and the latter belief is key to conservatism. Even James Fitzjames Stephen, who thought “that political institutions are no more than a veil for force,”believed that religion was not only beneficial, but also correct in its assertion of natural law: “Force, whether physical or moral, is ordained by Providence to save us from this anarchic impulse.”
My outlook on the world and its problems is therefore divorced from any notion that we will be saved. My pessimism forecloses hope that the troubles facing civilization today—terrorism, illegitimacy, drug use, creeping collectivism,etc.—are tests given by a stem but benevolent teacher who knows that his students will pass. The world, for me, is a darker place than I think true conservatives would allow. There are many who equate my bleak view with the views of the Religious Right, but this is not the case. The outlook I have been describing as my own is non-teleological, almost nihilistic, and it is perforce incompatible with the Christian worldview of Burke, Fitzjames Stephen, and the others. Compared to my convictions, theirs are optimistic, My position is more closely reflected in Robert H. Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, which portrays the sharp decline in respect for American values and concludes that in all likelihood, no good will come of the negative influences on our culture, and so, “Gomorrah is our probable destination.”
There is an ironic twist here. While conservatism is rooted in the belief that human nature is depraved, it is my negative view of humankind and the universe that leads me to diverge from conservatism. When I reflect on the killing of unborn children in the womb, the diminution of respect for family obligations, and the arrogation of legislative power by the judiciary, I cannot but question whether the world truly is ordered for the ultimate benefit of its inhabitants.
