Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recent discussion over conservatism and slavery (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and so on) has put me to questioning what a conservatism would look like whose view of tradition was a bit less Burkean (or “Burkean”, depending – on which see below) than the straightforwardly deferential attitude that modern conservatives have often championed. In that vein, I agree with Will that William Brafford’s old post on tradition and ideology is a must-read, as is this post from William’s days of guest-blogging at Upturned Earth. There, William cites Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticisms of Burkeanism as an articulation of what he takes to be the central problems that conservatives have to face up to. Here’s MacIntyre, from After Virtue:

We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution – a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital – is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Tradition, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

And William adds:

… if MacIntyre is correct about Burkean conservatives, then we should expect to see them having difficulty with justice claims that are not somehow rooted in the status quo. And at the risk of dredging up painful history, this is exactly what we see in the early responses of various traditionalist conservatives to the Civil Rights movement. I do believe that many of these conservatives (Buckley, Kirk) sincerely regretted the positions they took in the fifties. The point is not to vilify, but to remind those of us who keep a foot in the traditionalist camp to consider our blind spots.

Indeed so. But as William indicates, that last phrase suggests a possible way out, by leaving room for a Burkeanism that is a good deal healthier than what may or may not have been the Burkeanism of Burke himself (who, you’ll remember, was a supporter of the American revolution). To the extent that a Burkean is simply someone who gives the benefit of the doubt to convention and insists, as H.C. Johns puts it in a must-read post on conservatism and slavery, “that certain forms of the human good be allowed to flourish without the interference of the abstract reason represented by radicalism”, there is no reason why his approach to political life has to degenerate into the kind of dangerous anti-rationalism that MacIntyre attributes to Burke. For if Burkeanism is itself a tradition (or at least an element therein), then as such it’s open to those who inhabit it to keep it from “becoming Burkean” in MacIntyre’s sense – that is, to keep it from becoming a stale traditionalism that worships the past, seeks stability at the expense of human flourishing, and in which the elements of argument and conflict that MacIntyre picks out as essential to a “vital” tradition have gone missing. At the very least, as someone who remains a Burkean whether I like it or not, that’s the kind of position that I think one needs to be able to occupy.

Apologies for the half-baked post; this is mostly a reminder to myself to return to this issue soon. Suggestions for further reading are always welcome.