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Clear A Space?

But a political ideology, a political movement, one that is primarily about figuring out proper means of governing, should be, in fact, the opposite—a way of allowing opposing, contrasting, varied ways of life and belief to thrive with as little interference as possible. [bold mine-DL] Larison’s conservatism would be preached from the pulpit, infused in every […]

But a political ideology, a political movement, one that is primarily about figuring out proper means of governing, should be, in fact, the opposite—a way of allowing opposing, contrasting, varied ways of life and belief to thrive with as little interference as possible. [bold mine-DL] Larison’s conservatism would be preached from the pulpit, infused in every minute and every decision of life, and while I have no quarrel with (and, in fact, heartily support) careful, principled existences, I don’t wish to see that sort of all-encompassing belief take over the political realm. There is a place*, for sure, to discuss how one should live their life, what principles, faiths, and notions are decent and good, but the goal of politics, and thus of political movements, should be to clear a space for those ideas to flourish, not try to inject itself into the discussion. [bold mine-DL] ~Peter Suderman

Conservatism’s roots do not lie in facile slogans about natural rights and free markets [bold mine-DL] — let alone angry, dismissive rhetoric that casts aside the poor and treats rich people as above the law. They lie in our attachment to families, churches, towns, and small businesses. [bold mine-DL] It’s time to remember who we are and who we should be defending. ~Bruce Frohnen

For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. [bold mine-DL] ~Russell Kirk

I appreciate Peter’s response (I also appreciate that I now merit my own category on his blog), I regret that I am delaying the completion of his review of Casino Royale, and I do see what he is saying about why he objects to my “lifestyle conservatism” as he calls it.  But I do fear that in all of this I have either failed to be clear in what I mean or he has not entirely followed what I have said.  The dreaded i-word keeps popping up, and I am unsure why.

He brings his post to a close with the quote given above.  He believes the end of politics is to create an arrangement that creates “a way of allowing opposing, contrasting, varied ways of life and belief to thrive with as little interference as possible.”  To the extent that I am a decentralist who believes in a variety of locally appropriate social and political arrangements (and I am a very big decentralist), I do not object in principle to the allowance of a variety of ways of life.  I do not propose that everyone in New Hampshire should live as we do in New Mexico, or that everyone in Albuquerque live as everyone does in Santa Fe in all respects (frankly, we couldn’t afford to live that way!).  An underlying reason why I resent the Yankee mentality in the War of Secession is that it essentially demands that everyone do and believe things in more or less the same way everywhere.  The freethinking mind cannot abide the lush variety of social life, but wants to level everything out and pour concrete on top of the razed jungle.  The person who loves his small town or who loves the landscape around his small town cannot help but find this sort of mind repugnant.  The freethinking mind seeks homogenisation when it can and otherwise pretends that social questions are beyond the proper realm of politics.  It is the great absurdity of the liberal mind, the mind of the Freisinnigen, that they both want everyone to be “free” but they also want everything as perfectly rationalised as possible, which in turn leads to increasing centralism and consolidation as a way of ensuring uniform rules across an entire country.  It is the same mentality that cannot tolerate the idea that there are other regime types on the face of the earth.  No one is more hostile to universalists of this kind than I am.  It is strange then, since I so frequently tear down such people and regard them as the bane of America and the American conservative tradition, that I should be mistaken for one of them.   

Preference for variety, born out of respect for the reality of contingent circumstances, human freedom and social complexity, is at the heart of any good rightist view, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn taught us many years ago.  Frequent conservative use of organic metaphors for society is suggestive of this respect for variety in different places.  But there is this curious idea that some have that you cannot insist on the cultivation of virtue having an important place in political life without thereby becoming a furious Puritan seeking to make everyone act in a uniform fashion. 

It is as if you cannot recognise some basically valid principles that, if followed, do lead human beings to flourish in every kind of society without also wanting to annihilate everything distinctive about each locality and place.  Most conservatives are generally on the same page in believing that marriage is an invaluable social institution that sustains social stability and order, and they also tend to be in agreement that at least for the raising of children a stable, married household is best for the well-being and development of children.  They might understand that the increasing practice of cohabitation, which tends to increase marital instability later on, and the widespread recourse to divorce are damaging to the good order of society and impose tremendous costs on society.  What I am proposing in speaking of a conservative ethos is that a great many other things have the same sort of ethical and social significance that shape what kind of communities we have.  It is these other things that a conservative politics ought to take into account and which, it seems to me, “the movement” typically has not for one reason or another. 

But I am apparently in favour of dictating every last detail of everyone’s “lifestyle” because I affirm certain general principles of human flourishing, which would include but not be limited to the virtues.  It is as if someone objected to a gardener watering different kinds of flowers to keep them all growing because he was violating the flowers’ diversity by cultivating them by similar means.  Rather than cultivate eunomia of the soul and society, Peter seems to suggest, we should have an arrangement whereby the dysfunctional and dysnomic are allowed their room to grow the same as anything else.  Not only should we not try to cultivate the flowers, but we should let them be choked by weeds and eaten by aphids if it comes to that.  The gardener wouldn’t want to interfere. 

It is precisely out of respect for locality and place and the natural affinities and loyalties that enrich and fill our lives that I insist that there are vital ethical and social dimensions to conservatism and to any conservative politics that aspires to do much beyond cutting marginal tax rates.  If being conservative means having a particular way of looking at “civil social order,” as Kirk wrote, conservatives probably ought to have something to say about civil social order that goes beyond government policy prescriptions.  Indeed, they must, because they would know better than most that policy prescriptions can only treat the symptoms of social problems and not their fundamental causes, which can be ameliorated or healed only through the building up of social capital, so to speak, by strengthening the natural institutions of a society so as to necessarily minimise the need for public authority to attempt its ham-fisted, often ineffective solutions.  Yet the moment that we begin talking about social obligations or what might constitute an ethos in keeping with such principles as encourage the flourishing of human beings rather than their degeneration and decadence, there seems to be a reflexive fear that we are coming to throw you in a dungeon for violating the terms of the “manifesto” that we have supposedly drawn up. 

A few points about politics.  We are going round and round about the question of what is appropriately political, it seems to me, because when I am talking about things that concern the political community, the polis, as a whole he is talking about something more focused and more specifically related to the state or the public authority.  The political in this latter view relates to problems of legislation, regulation, governance, institutions.  The social goods of the polis taken as a whole and the things of the ekklesia (here meaning the political assembly) are seen here as not only distinct, which they are, but essentially or largely unrelated.  This is an understandable view.  It is, more or less, the classical liberal idea of a neutral and level playing field.  

In this view, politics must “clear a space” to allow the debate to take place.  Certainly having a “space” where debate takes place is desirable to some extent, but the very act of “clearing the space” is to inject a political view into the debate and to make a claim about what can and cannot be in the debate just as surely as making a clearing in the woods for a campground determines how that space is used.  From the traditional conservative perspective, “clearing a space” to debate certain things that the conservative takes as given and prescribed by many years of habit and custom is a fundamentally hostile act against which he organises his own political opposition.  Conservatives would normally not be interested in having a debate about the virtues of the institution of marriage, for example, except that they are compelled to because a number of people are under the impression that the institution is either doing just fine, is not really all that important in the first place or should actually be actively subverted for the “emancipation” of individuals. 

So I don’t think a lot of conservatives would want to “clear a space” if clearing that space involves destroying the local natural conservancy of tradition or the historic district of custom or the residential area of community.  They probably think that their politics should instead be focused on defending and upholding those things.  Talk about conservatives’ desiring a politics that “clears a space” for debate sounds strange to me.  It is as if developers came to a town and said that they wanted to level several blocks of houses to build a convention center in order to help bring the community together.  Never mind that the act of “clearing the space” where the community could hold such community events visibly disrupts and throws into upheaval the actual community and attacks those things to which people in the community have strong attachments.  How a space, whether literal or metaphorical, is used reflects the values and priorities of the user: instead of open space, a developer would prefer a housing development; instead of a new office building, the preservationist would want to keep an old historic church or civic building from being demolished; instead of a national park, the paper company might want a new area for logging.  There are no neutral uses of space–every use embodies someone’s vision for that space and necessarily excludes others’ visions.  Likewise, opening up a metaphorical space for debate already predetermines to some extent what can and cannot be included in the debate; one of the rules of the space would be that no one in it can propose to restore whatever was in that space before it was cleared out.  But it is my view that many conservatives do and should want to “fill” such a space when it comes to fundamental natural loyalties and institutions.  Further, there is something essential to conservatism about this that we neglect at our peril.

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