A warm and generous Evans-Manning Award to reader Jake Lukas for his answer on the thread that asks the question, “What’s Wrong With Conservatism (or Liberalism), and How Can We Make It Right.” I had asked readers to answer the question as it pertains to the side with which they identify. Jake Lukas is a conservative. Here’s what he said:

The best answer I’ve come up with requires one to indulge in a little historical materialism. I agree with Mark Mitchell about what conservatism has been at its best. But the economic bases for such conservatism have collapsed. I’ll elaborate on this, but that is my briefest answer to what is wrong with conservatism.

We are still feeling the effects of the industrial revolution. Indeed, in the grander scope of history I would even say that we are still in the midst of the industrial revolution. This revolution seems for the first time in human history to offer a real challenge to the natural limits everyone in the past would assume. Before the revolution, most people were tied to the land as a matter of both subsistence and vocation. There is a natural, unreflective conservatism that comes with this inasmuch as the chief objects of one’s concern are necessarily personal, concrete, and local. These are the things one wishes to conserve and protect. After the revolution, food traditions have become little more than questions of genre preference. Most people no longer have any discernible human connection to the land. They live in artificial and reproducible environments, leaving little natural impetus to conserve anything.

This change is not only to be seen in the movement of people from the fields. Before the revolution, a man living in a town and owning little more than a few basic tools and the knowledge his father gave him could hope to be a valuable and productive member of the community in which he lives. He would develop relationships with other members of the community and the whole community would benefit since trust drives down transaction costs by mitigating the risks of exchange. But the revolution destroyed the economic basis of such relationships and thereby undermined the reason for their existence. The small scale producer could no longer compete and thus had less to offer his community. He was replaced a vast class of labor, chiefly the out-of-work from agricultural backgrounds who could carry with them few connections when they moved to town. Without the value of human connections that the shop owner had, there is little compelling reason for laborers to stay in one city. They will necessarily move to wherever the jobs are to be found. In their mass congregation and competition, they will drive down the market prices for their own labor, again leaving little reason to stay in one place.

Before the revolution, moving from place to place was costly. I do not mean this merely in terms of the costs of transportation, though that was certainly an element. The bigger issue, however, is that the web of connections one has in any place worthy of being called “home”, the social capital as a sociologist would say, cannot be carried very far with someone who might move. Again, there is a natural impetus to conserve here as leaving a place means making a very real sacrifice. But with cheap energy and transportation we can feel like it is no great challenge. It is always possible to travel home for the holidays, or maybe even move back to the hometown when you’ve young kids. Psychologically, such mobility is made all the easier since we have cheap and efficient communication systems. But the real human connections between people withers unless they are fed by real contact. We may go back home once a year, but we cannot say we honestly care about people whom we only see annually as much as we might if we saw them regularly. Again the concrete and personal are lost and at best they are replaced with some abstract sense that we ought to take the kids back to see their aging grandparents.

Before the revolution, the family was the basis of all economy (οἰκονομία, after all, merely means household management). But as the revolution first eliminated the skilled laborer by out-competing him, lately it has begun to eliminate the unskilled laborer. Before the revolution a man and his wife often worked from the household, whether at the farm or above the shop. When the farm was abandoned and the shop closed, the man left the house to work in a factory. When the factory wages dropped so that he could no longer earn for the whole family, the women dropped the kids off to be cared for by the state and went to work for some boss as well. Having separate income, relying on the state to do an ever greater proportion of raising their children, and relying upon one another less, the husband and wife can now easily imagine a world in which they are not together. And so the economic foundations of the family collapse.

Conservatism’s chief problem is that it has to explain what was once assumed, and in the explanation it often risks becoming an ideology. All the things we care about as conservatives, place, concrete human connections, proper scale, locality and love of one’s own country, recognition of limits, all these things which Mark Mitchell mentions above, have been undermined by the industrial revolution. It is little wonder therefore that self-described conservatives should rely on ideologies. I can try to convince a man to love a place or a person, but the reasons I can give will only appeal to the mind. Conservatism no longer matches the material reality we live. And when it comes to cult, Nietzsche had this much right: the technology which came with the revolution has allowed us to feel we’re no longer subject to powers greater than ourselves. Who will work out his salvation in fear and trembling when technology promises him he has nothing to fear and the doctor can prescribe something for his trembling?

[…] and how can we make it right?

Like all accused of pessimism I do not think myself a pessimist. Nevertheless, I apologize if I sound like one. I do not think our prospects great. Of course, if cheap energy runs dry then the basis for the economy of the industrial revolution will collapse and we may again see a smaller scale to life. Then, eventually, conservatism will again be assumed. But I do not want to live through such a transition and I would not wish it on anyone. Nor do I care to see what might replace the industrial capitalism I would be rid of.

I will not leave it at that, however, since I do not accept the historical materialist’s thesis as complete. There may be something we can do, aside from just wait for new material conditions. My interests tend toward the bookish and intellectual, so I really think that I’m offering a disinterested answer when I say the solution does not lie with an intellectual’s arguments. I think it lies in teaching people to love the concrete and particular once more. This is not the intellectual’s job, however, it is the artists. Artists, whether story-tellers, musicians, or perhaps visual artists, can teach their audiences the skill of finding beauty in a particular person, place, circumstance, or object. One need but see real paintings to regard items of mass production as tasteless. One need but taste good food to see the beauty of the many hands that prepared it. Love of beauty could save conservatism.

Readers, I’m making a quick trip today, and will be away from the keys for most of the day. I’ll approve comments as I can. Please be patient.