Conservatism: Philosophy and Practice
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- čas přidán 11. 07. 2024
- This video explains the nature of Conservative thinking and why it promotes human wellbeing. Conservatism is a method of approaching reality, rejecting the abstractions of most political ideologies, and rooting politics in the concrete. Its aim is to enhance the appreciation of each moment, seeing humans as the products of history and society, and seeking, above all, to enjoy life. Conservatives don't seek to change the world, but rather to deepen their love of it.
As a pipe smoker of 36 years, I have realized that certain things are best left exactly as they are. Much of what you expound is as simple as the quest for happiness. Sadly, today everything seems to need to be so updated, novel and innovative. Perhaps our best chance at a long lasting happy life is to accept its pleasures as they are, in moderation of course. Thanks 🙏 and kind regards, SF
ye word
Thank you so much Sandro. I am glad some of what I said struck the right note for you and I am sure your pipe helps you savour those moments as you say!
A fascinating video and I look forward to reading the essay.
As an American, I have long been fascinated by just how much conservatism in America has diverged from the traditional understanding of the philosophy. It of course is reasonable that an American interpretation of such would be more (classical) liberal owing to the more liberal starting point of the American Revolution in contrast to say the Glorious Revolution. However, in the 20th century the formulation of "The Conservative Movement" essentially amounted to marrying economic liberalism (neoliberalism) with puritanical reformism. To be a strong conservative is to merely adhere to both of these elements more strongly and to label everything else as liberalism or socialism. While there are contradictions in most ideologies, I think one can identify the root source of recent political developments within America (the rise of Trumpism for example) with the unavoidable conflict that would arise from combining an economic approach predicated on societal disruption (America experienced a massive wave of outsourcing between the 1980s and 2010s), with a moral approach predicated on faith and thus necessitating the preservation of religious traditions and local communities.
Around 2015, I became especially interested in the societal stability element of conservatism, which has been completely lost in American political culture. As factories were closed, communities declined, schools lost their tax base, drug use increased and so did divorce rates. Conservatives bemoaned the decline of the traditional family, yet pointed the finger at social liberalism, at Hollywood, etc, meanwhile turning a blind eye to the most destructive force for all those traditional societal elements, the economic upheavals caused by neoliberalism and especially free trade.
This doesn't even get into the disruptive impact of the Iraq War in American politics, which was the project of a third element within the American Conservative umbrella (but also one which has been decisively kicked out - perhaps the one positive development in recent years), the "neoconservatives". A foreign policy built on idealism and utopia (both incompatible with conservative thinking) and a rejection of realism, restraint, fiscal prudence, and societal stability (all core elements of conservative thinking).
The preservation of heritage and the resistance to over development has absolutely no bandwidth among so called American Conservatives, and indeed most take the side of economic development, suburban sprawl and car culture, while opposition to these things is mainly isolated to Greens and Socialists, which makes it a left-right dynamic.
Just like the British Conservative Party drifted away from conservativism under Thatcher while firmly declaring it to be doing the opposite, the same exact thing happened in the United States under Ronald Reagan and in some ways the initial appeal of Trump (regardless of what happened later) was itself a rejection of Reaganism, even if it didn't overtly say such. There was a key moment from a 2015 primary debate that sticks in my head. A question (designed to out Trump as being "not a conservative") asked the candidates to define conservatism and what it meant to them. Marco Rubio answered and gave the same 30 year old Reaganite "three legged stool" answer of neoliberalism, social conservativism and neoconservatism (without using those terms though). Trump responded that conservatism was about "preserving your country, your job, your society, and your way of life". While I have become harshly critical of Trump, I have always thought that he gave the most correct answer (even if accidentally) to that question in the last 35 years of American politics, and in so doing put a dagger through the heart of academic conservatism in the United States, as it has been constituted.
Of course the dangers of leaving it to a populist to make this case, has been on full display the past few years and itself poses a direct threat to core elements of conservativism (rule of law, constitutional governance, restraint of power, and once again societal stability).
Thank you for watching the video and your appreciative words. You are spot on I think. Economic liberalism is always disruptive as it owes no allegiance except to efficiency. But as you say social conservativism based around the family or religion is not about efficiency at all. The liberal economic bit is more powerful - you can't build a stable family or even religious community if your lives are being always turned upside down by the market. If your job is gone to China tomorrow and your kids travel around the world as corporate executives or just leave home to find work. In that sends the left is more conservative but then they reject so much that conservatives value so one jumps from from the frying pan into tjr fire. As I try to say both end up doing this as they pursuing abstractions - whether the free market or the just society. It's hard to opt out from this binary abstraction as the context or education or even space to provide an alternative approach is just lacking. No one in power is interested. But at least we can share thoughts and agree on much in places like this. Thank you again.
I found your podcast on spotify because I was looking for a comprehensive summary of clark's work and have since been listening to you, episode after episode.
Listening to this essay has been a great pleasure to me. Not only your thoughts but also your voice and mannerism make it so compelling to listen. I ought to say that I find the thoughts compelling and in its attitude towards life I see much of what I pratice or aspire to practice in my day to day life. On a greater scope, however, I frankly believe there to be some theoretical contradictions. I would love to write an essay as a response, I'm also a historian (or maybe aspiring to be a historian rather) myself. Before that I will buy & read your essay though.
When I'm in Britan the next time, I would love to meet you for a conversation over tea and tobacco product of our choice if that would ever be realistic.
In any case, I wish you a pleasent evening and much sucess with further videos!
Thank you for taking the time to listen to or watch my various offerings and for your very generous words. I am of course quite aware that there will no doubt be problematic or contradictory aspects in my take on Conservatism in particular. That essay was in fact written in a garden deckchair last summer and was really an attempt by me to explain how I saw conservatism as a practical guide to life, and how a conservative might approach the world - especially with a view to seeing the good in it, which i do take to be the essence of conservatism. But of course there are many other ways of viewing conservatism and of approaching life itself - many the exact opposite of conservative! If anything i write or say strikes any kind of chord with you or just provokes you to clarify your own ideas, I am gratified to know that. And certainly next time you are in London let me know and maybe we can meet up.
I ordered your essay on Amazon, a few days back, I loved it!
Keep doing amazing work,
Love and support from Canada
Thank you so much. I will do what I can but it's a losing game alas. However it's great to read your words of support.
A quite excellent presentation of our worldview, Ian and a timely reminder of what the American conservative, Russell Kirk, termed the 'Permanent Things'. I enjoyed a bowl with you during your discourse as I nodded along! It is saddening that what used to be rather an un-articulated instinct than an ideology seems to be disappearing from both the British people and, ironically, 'conservatives'. This makes the therapeutic laughter harder to summon - however, I have no doubt that your sterling book and this companion video will surely act as 'collects' to our age! A superb tutorial that should be widely shared.
Thank you Richard. I'm glad you enjoyed a bowl too and you nodded along - not nodded off! I know you do great work to keep the Conservative tradition alive and I hope this video does a little to maintain its existence.
Please, turn on the CC option. It's a great help for non native speakers. Thanks in advance.
It was delivered today and I read it immediately. I think the most difficult problems facing a Conservative Party (or even more unlikely, a US Republican Party) that took this path would be squaring the circle on balancing capitalism with tradition/society/wholistic human experience, and also the approach to the individual (far more in terms of the United States).
Recognizing the importance of well-being and improving it, also necessarily involves deriving benefits from gains in prosperity created by the combination of technology and capitalism. When you boil it down, the profit incentive motivated the deployment of technology that steadily reduced the resources and workforce necessary first for agriculture, and then for industry. This makes possible more time for pleasurable activities and more resources and workers for industries that cater towards them. Professional sports, entertainment industry, and so forth. None of which is possible when 95% of the population toil in the ground to just barely get enough food to not starve.
On the other hand, this is destructive with the elimination of jobs and communities in the process. There are also limits to which government action can be undertaken to preserve communities, especially if a conservative government should do as little as possible as the essay stated. I think some of this can be addressed via trade as we previously addressed and preserving gainful employment in a town has both social benefits for the local community, but also helps the fiscal picture since that means fewer people resorting to entitlements and less money needing to be transferred to keep the school/hospital from closing (since the tax base is preserved).
In the coal industry in the United States, while regulation is a part of the problem, much of the decline stems from natural gas being so much cheaper than coal owing to the rise in fracking and the shale energy boom. Many environmentalists want to ban fracking and coal, but ironically coal would benefit from fracking being banned as the price of natural gas would go up and power plants wouldn't face such an incentive to shift to gas based on the numbers. However, this not only means more expensive power, more expensive power and more expensive gas derived chemical inputs would damage manufacturing and halt the recent resurgence of manufacturing in the US.
I had some hope for the rise of corporate social responsibility in terms of a move away from focusing on just the profit calculation and consideration of the impacts on local community and also the national interest. However, that has merely served as tool for social justice warriors to infiltrate business decisions making, as opposed to any great improvement in a more "conservative direction". And of course the "US conservative" response is to just ban any form of corporate governance that doesn't prioritize shareholder interest.
I am intrigued that it kind of takes a "Social libertarian" approach to things like drugs and regulating behavior, but arrives at it through a complete rejection of the fundamental basis for libertarianism (the individual and the stateless society - another abstract utopia). There is also the expectation that a rejection of individualism, would necessarily invite an overbearing nanny state, with authoritarian social policies, combating that would present some difficulty.
Thank you as ever - not only for reading my effort but taking such care to express your thoughts and reactions. I totally accept that it is hard to imagine any organised political party pursuing my suggestions and of course you are right to point out how complex things are - like technology is clearly inevitable and necessary yet has clear downsides too. Settling the kind of right amount of technology at state level is impossible I think. In the end I feel that my focus is on the lived experience of the individual. This alone is real and in this alone can we make a difference to our own lives. The problem is the system won't leave us alone! I am a libertarian in social matters because I think people wish to have fun and I don't believe in judging people - my fun is not your fun and I have no wish to impinge on your pleasures and I resent that the government and middle class moralists are always trying to impinge on mine - like my right to smoke. As you recognise I wish to reduce as far as possible the project of forcing people to fit into abstract ideological structures whether left or right. Thank you again for your very thoughtful and positive engagement.
@@stjohnspipecasts6801 I appreciate the irony that I have arrived at 90% of the same viewpoints as you, while taking the exact opposite approach to humanity, moralism, and judgements. I frequently described myself as a secular moralist, and a social libertarian. As such, I fit no one's mold perfectly. I vaguely align with Protestantism but have no formal religious education, and have barely attended any organized religious services, so most of my views are derived on secular grounds.
When it comes to ethics and morality, subjectivism and relativism are problematic for me and I think a stable society depends on at least some basic objective ethical foundations, which can just as easily be derived from "learned human experience" as from scripture.
This means I have opinions and occasionally I admit, judgments of behavior. I possess a very skeptical view of human nature, which informs my opposition to utopian ideologies and my realism, which contrasts with the idealism of the utopians. My case against utopia hinges on the belief that human nature will always mess it up and any kind of "temporary dictatorship" will become permanent, as absolute power corrupts absolutely. I often made the case against Marxism on the grounds that Marx seemed to believe that the root of all evil was class and that if eliminated, human nature would no longer pose a problem. Obviously this abstraction proved deadly to millions of people. The theorists do not understand humanity at its core and you have certainly made a strong case as to why they cannot, with perspectives I would have never considered.
Operating from this basis, the organic, traditional society exists to reign in human excess and any ideology that seeks to dismantle or in anyway works towards weakening the societal checks on human excess, risks letting loose the rivers of blood that Burke warned about in 1790 and was proven correct. This calculation also applies equally to government and so perhaps the number one defining political issue for me for the past many years has been the preservation of checks and balances and constitutional limitations on power. This means that concepts like Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Jacksonianism horrify me as I see them as dangerously concentrating power into the hands of a single individual. Doubly so for any totalitarian ideology. It also puts me at odds with anarchists and libertarians since a stateless society would merely lead to a dictatorship as the chaos pushes people to overcorrect.
At the same time I mostly reject trying to legislate morality, because of considerations of practicality, cost, and the upheaval of doing so would have on society, families and culture (in the name of trying to save all three). A good example is the number of families split up because of the number of people in the US that have been incarcerated over minor drug charges like simple possession and three strikes laws. You also then have the criminal activity that springs up during Prohibition or the War on Drugs and the chaos that creates, the cost of trying to enforce it both in terms of money and the harm done across several categories, and lastly, the obvious failure to achieve the stated objectives. People still drank in Prohibition and people still use many illegal drugs. You can make a solid conservative argument against both attempts legislating morality and I do, even as I refrain from partaking of these substances and generally discourage their use or at least their excessive use (my father was an alcoholic). I have been open to sin taxes, much to the dismay of many US conservatives and libertarians, and my reasoning is not to control behavior, but that with government run health programs like NHS in Britain or partial ones like Medicare in the US, those programs will eventually eat the cost of these behaviors and so the preservation of these systems benefits from pricing that in.
We both took different routes to essentially the same place. You framed your conservatism on the opposition to abstract impositions on the joys of life. I framed mine on the opposition to idealistic utopians, breaking the restraints on human excess leading to waves of bloodshed and dictatorship. That conservatism can be accommodating to both of us, speaks volumes to the strengths of conservatism over the alternatives. Though obviously, "be a conservative to enjoy the pleasures of life" probably has far more appeal than "be a conservative or rivers of blood will flow". :P
@@David-fm6go well the great thing is we arrived at roughly the same place and that is the important thing and you have been most kind to reach out so thoughtfully. You think very seriously about these matters. I do so less diligently so i appreciate all your reflections on these questions.
@@stjohnspipecasts6801 I have tremendous gaps though in terms of my reading and while I know a great deal about these various schools of thought and their proponents, I feel inadequate in discussions because of my narrow selection to draw upon. I made great strides in the early 2010s: Locke, Burke, Smith, Ricardo were all plowed through in that 2010 - 2014 period, along with numerous other books on various topics. Then progress really slowed in the mid to late 2010s, partially as a result of work and medical issues.
Even so I have expanded my collection to include works such as the General Theory by Keynes, Road to Serfdom by Hayek and of course List's "National System of Political Economy", which I have picked at off and on for years. So those are all on my to read list. I also also like to expand beyond just Burke as people have in the past accused me of being a one trick pony so to speak. Your other videos have sparked my interest in Disraeli, and some of the others you reference in the essay interest me as well like Carlyle. I would also like to read some of Aristotle's work as I have a great deficiency when it comes to the Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers as well.
Leaving that aside, I do analyze and re-analyze a lot on these topics. Historical analysis and drawing connections between events that so often are not adequately presented in context, has long been an interest of mine as well.
I congratulate you on your outstanding essay! I will write a review on Amazon. It was a pure joy to read. Thank you for sharing your insight and wisdom on this commonly misunderstood philosophy. Sadly, I fear the true meaning of conservatism in the United States has been lost in the waves of political and social unrest coupled with the loss of classical education.
Thank you very much. You have been most generous in all your comments. I realise my version of conservatism will not be familiar to many but really those who incline to Conservatism need some way of thinking about the world that is positive and can actually attract people and make them feel good rather than grim and resentful.
Just ordered your book. I look forward to reading it..
Thank you very much Ken! I hope it's of some interest.
Dr St John, thank you for your video, it indeed is thought provoking though I find the doctrine of conservatism also deeply problematic and somewhat self-contradictory. It seems to be a doctrine well suited for those already at the top of the heap, who then have a vested interest to preserve things as they are. You speak of embracing the reality but the ideas also seem to want to freeze things and keep them in a stasis, which is not quite the true reality which is dynamic and, as you may consider unfortunate, one of change. It reeks of a nostalgia for time past, of aristocratic privilege supported by serfs, slaves and colonial subjects, which may well suit the members of the privileged class but perhaps not so much for the subjects. It requires a nobility, a true noble character in the aristocrats to take care of their subjects to keep them happy but from the historical record, it has not quite happened and instead we see ill treatment resulting in the revolt of the downtrodden. The doctrine seems to be against the attempts by people to improve themselves, to instead accept their lot in life, but you also mention improvements or perhaps reactionary reforms to restore a previous state. Are those not changes which you in principle argue against? Some traditions may be well worth preserving but I believe you will agree that some are best dispensed with. Who is to decide? I hope you, like Carneades in Rome, will tomorrow argue against what you have so eloquently expounded in this video.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments which raise a lot of good points - which would take a lot of time to thrash out! I would say two things. First, I don't think the value of a world is contingent on the place one occupies in a conceptual hierarchy. I dont think that those at the top lead inherently richer or better lives than those beneath them. As I say there is scope for anyone to realise themselves in the local community and I don't think that leaving that to occupy say an aristocratic position will yield some straightforward improvement. I'm not sure that privileged people lead better lives - the two Eton pupils I pictured in that class picture both loved sad lives and one died young. Second, yes j see the issue of what to preserve! I think modernism changes the rules there a bit by being committed to relentless change. Where something has emerged thro an organic process of change I would of course accept it. What I would reject is rapid change according to rationalist goal directed theory like a 1970s brutalist housing estate. I wouldn't preserve that - except maybe one as a monument to the folly of social planning.
I don't know why but what you describe is rather similar to parsons' functionalism
Thank you for your comment. That is interesting! I must say I don't know anything about that but it's interesting to know there is a parallel..
What kind of pipe and what kind of tobacco are you smoking?
Well in that video it was a savinelli pipe with Peterson navy rolls tobacco.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting you, and I'm sympathetic to conservatism, being a Christian, but it seems to me by making such a hard distinction between theory and practice, you've created a sort of trilemma. Either 1. you have some objective (trans-cultural) account of the good, hypothetical or not, in which case you are back to theorizing and abstracting from experience just like those pesky rationalists you are critiquing, the only difference being methodological (starting from first principles vs starting from common experience) or 2. you refuse to engage in this kind of theorizing, in which case whatever normative assertions you might have ought be taken as merely non-cognitive expressivism or perscriptivism (this is what the logical positivists did), or 3. You accept a cultural relativism from which you have no ground to criticize other cultures. 2 and 3 are unacceptable in my opinion. I would hope you think your normative assertions are more than simply expressing distaste, and you would condemn human chattel slavery of all kinds from all time periods, or oppression of women, such as in muslim countries.
A.N. Whitehead described speculative metaphysics as a series of test flights, in which we start on the ground of experience and take off into the speculative air, but make sure to come back down again and ground the speculation in our common experience. Theory and practice inform each other, but theory must be seen as an imperfect map of the territory, open to revision in light of new evidence and discovery. I think all of philosophy is like this: Hypotheses from top to bottom. Practice is indeed primary, but that doesn't make theory useless, or necessarily false, or unjustified in informing belief and opinion.
Thank you for taking the time to watch my video and then make such thoughtful comments in response. I do tend to cultural relativism I am afraid. I am not a christian and I don't feel that I can occupy a position from which to pass normative judgments on all manner of states of affairs. I cannot see what any abstract normative statements could be based on. Yes I could pursue ethical theory and derive some ethical world view but to me such ethical systems are still derivative of the context within which they are constructed. A Muslim has a world view and it would probably clash with many liberal western world views and I don't see how one can resolve which is the right one. In practice force seems to be the arbiter in the world, with each world view seeking to impose itself on people who hold other world views. Hence my preference is to discard world views altogether and focus on being in the moment but i would have to admit that my own cultural assumptions and inevitable normative views come in there of course. i agree my position is probably not rigorous or logical - though I would say that's just how conservatism is!