Blimpish || a Tory

“When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland

The occasion for this post is further reflection on Tim Montgomerie’s ongoing attempt at formulating a statement of conservatism, upon which I have previously (negatively) commented.  I remain of the same basic opinion, but (and Montgomerie’s efforts are to be commended for this at least; at least by me), it has made me think a bit more about what it means to be a conservative today.

It’s entirely possible that I’ve missed it, but in Montgomerie’s original statement, I find no statement to the effect of that quotation above – or any one of a number of others, be they from Burke, Kirk, Salisbury, or whoever – praising continuity over change.  The closest we get is Montgomerie’s no.20, which even then is a brief for change; just not quite so fast, please.  That struck me as more than a little odd, and the thought has nagged at me.  After all, surely that’s where we conservatives, like, get our name from?

Now, ’tis true, the question of finding the right balance of continuity with necessary change has always been a central concern of conservative thought.  Conservatives and not preservatives, all of that.  Even more strange is that I know Tim Montgomerie is extremely concerned with defending substantive moral concerns – the original statement’s nos.1, 2, 3, 6, 14, 19, and potentially others, all allude to an underpinning morality, and I believe that Tim Montgomerie is an evangelical Christian.

I can only assume that that underpinning morality is assumed, along the lines of “if you’re with us, then you’ll get it”.  Leaving aside whether there’s a constituency for it (as I shall explain, not enough), it’s fair comment as an electoral strategy, but it’s not a coherent theory of politics…  If we think of contemporary liberal political theory (from Mill to Green to Rawls), it always attempts to frame its propositions in terms which all reasonable people should accept, at least in terms of high principle – respect each other’s space, look after the weak.  Some conservative political theory – appeals to group loyalty and respect for authority – have the same effect; it take a very brave liberal to renounce all group loyalty, or to argue for anarchy as such.  (For more on how political ideas appeal to our instinctive moral sense, see Jonathan Haidt’s article here.)

To just assume that substantive Christian mores are equally as appealing is to miss the scale of disruptive social change these past decades.  At the very least, for a large number of people, the rightness of traditional Christian marriage or the wrongness of abortion, are arguable in ways that, into the 1970s or 1980s, they were not.  This very fact is fatal to the potential of those mores to serve as the basis for a tractable theory of politics.  This is especially the case in Britain, which is highly (if lazily, indifferently) secularised.  The American Right can (could?) at least muster enough of an electoral coalition behind such propositions to win power in 2000 and 2004; but I think the political experience of those years highlights the unsustainability of the model.*

I come back to my starting point though; this is not conservatism.  Huntington made the point in the 1950s that an ideology that depends internally on a prior, absolute moral doctrine is not really conservatism, and this is the case here – I think the Bush ‘conservative’ movement is perhaps better seen as a democratic nationalist project…  and one where the nation in question is itself highly idealised (American Dream?  Manifest Destiny?).  Inasmuch as Tim Montgomerie’s purpose is to build something similar here, it’s doesn’t seem very conservative or in keeping with our own political tradition.**

More important though, it doesn’t fit with the lived reality of the British people today.  The arguable nature of substantive Christian mores reflects a society where the ideal of social and cultural autonomy is the leading moral principle for at least a plurality.  Now, in fairness, they can do this because of the achievement of late modern society – so deeply embedded are some of the basics of Christian ethics in our social practice, that we can see the full doctrine as inessential frummery.  So, love one another, but don’t hold me back with marriage or ‘owt.

Again, that point is arguable - I think it’s true, but it requires some persuasion for most people to get it, which means it serves no purpose as the basis of an authoritative tradition.  And that brings me to the critical point – there are now no authoritative traditions.  Christian conservatives (and atheist cultural conservatives) have for a long while hoped that the common inheritance of Christian ethics may at least provide the basic grammar, if not the vocabulary, of a new language for moral discourse, to allow a politics which can overcome our obsession with individual and sectional rights.  I’m not so sure that that’s really possible while the role of that common inheritance is not manifest to most people.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t leave us much to conserve.  The conservative vanguard, always ready to fend off the Barbarians, discovers not only that they’ve been governing us for some time (a la MacIntyre) but can now no longer be told apart.  Hegel reckoned that the modern state would balance out; “that personal individuality and its particular interests not only achieve their complete development and gain explicit recognition for their right…  but, for one thing, they also pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal, and, for another thing, they know and will the universal.”  Or perhaps not – and I think this is the anxiety of contemporary conservatives (at least, it should be), that aside from the fund of decency we now assume (paid for by the Christian virtue of previous generations), society now knows no inherent, self-sustaining source of order; only subjective desires, whims and demands rule the day…  Habit keeps us decent, but habit fades.

And, more rights-talk, rather than politics.  Politics means finding our way together; but now the State becomes increasingly there to administer conflicts between different demands – there is no agreement, there are only winners and losers, funders and recipients.  Where demands get too much, they have to be tramelled and regulated; appeals to self-restraint are, let’s be honest, pretty quaint these days.  The banking crisis shows us both cause and effect here – professional banking culture and all of its constraints died away, but State regulation didn’t compensate for its loss – it simply channelled the energies of greed into off-balance sheet vehicles which probably made matters worse.  (Consider that the banking crisis is more chaotic than anything experienced throughout the modern financial era, from the 1844 Banking Crisis, through the Long and Great Depressions and two World Wars…  Through all of which there was little or no bureaucratic regulatory apparatus.)

It is only on the ground of politics that conservatives need to make their stand; to argue for, and shape policies and institutions for, people to work out their differences rather than talk past one another in the great grievance and whining contest.  This is what it means to go forward, not attempt to move back to some ersatz tradition which finds no authority worthy of the name, and certainly not with new generations; it means going forward because it embraces autonomy, but then asks for people to step up to all its consequences – it privatises the costs as well as the benefits of social autonomy, and then gives people the means to manage the risks those costs bring.

That’s why I’m a localist, but in a way which the Party’s new paper doesn’t even imagine – because refounding politics in this way can only be done from the bottom up, by allowing communities the freedom to effect their own change in the way they live together, and in doing so, create some opportunity to find a way of being together.  This isn’t just a matter of shuffling grants between layers of statutory government bodies, or removing a few restrictions – it means completely rethinking the range of action and the basis of collaboration (and financing, and regulation) between all the different actors at local level; it means rethinking the relationship between the citizen and the market as well as the citizen and the State.

And to come back to where I started, I stand by my alternative, plagiaristic, statement of conservatism as accommodating all of these problems of being a conservative today.  As far as I can see, taking this approach, of making space for a settled people to be together, and therefore to refound the basis of their community, is how we should understand “the rational defence of being against mind, of order against chaos” today.  But hey ho.***

* This isn’t to say that it was only Bush and Rove’s fault.  The outraged nature of Left-wing opposition made it very difficult to seek consensus after a certain point – but there’s plenty of blame on either side.

** This criticism should not be viewed as personal.  Tim Montgomerie’s services to the British Right are many, and his blogging and his reputation both suggest him to be a man of both ability and good intention.  But I differ on the aims he seeks to achieve.

*** Inspiration for the post came, as well as the point about Montgomerie’s curious silence on continuity and change, from reading James Poulos’ writings here and here (it’s the one at the end); although these may only make sense if you’re up with some of the debates they’re written in response to.  This line especially is a keeper: “Through the market, the left has been able to offer the possibility of cultural novelty on demand; through the state, it has peddled the right to it.”