I recently saw a conservative Facebook friend share, approvingly, a translation of the following quotation from Roger Scruton. The post was relatively popular, and had a good deal of likes and shares, seemingly all from conservatives.
It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things: the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with “us” against “them” – not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.
So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live. (Scruton, A Question of Temperament, WSJ, 2002)
Soon after, I saw a different conservative friend share a different quotation. This friend was more open to listening to libertarian-leaning writers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was the source of the quote – of course, the quote speaks of conservatives in a superficially positive tone, so it was not that surprising. Similarly, the quote was shared approvingly and got nothing but positive reactions from his peers.
Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the “noise” of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. Within the realm of the humanities, including the social sciences, a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units. Moreover, the family household also represents the model of the social order at large. Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so is there a hierarchical order within a community of families—of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings—tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate and subject to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God.
Conservatives (or more specifically, Western Greco-Christian conservatives), if they stand for anything, stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations. (Hoppe, Democracy, §10)
What had struck me about the first quote was how Scruton frankly said that conservatism is nothing more than an animal instinct of loyalty to your family or community. Having this on my mind, I noticed how the second quote, although liable to a more philosophical interpretation of what “family bonds” mean, is also strongly suggestive of such an instinct.
Similar things may be found in other acclaimed conservative literature, such as Edmund Burke’s defense of “prejudice” in the Reflections, and Jordan Peterson also comes to mind, since he sees political beliefs in general as largely determined by temperament and personality, and after some time of noncommittally giving ideas “for conservatism”, has recently come to identify as a conservative himself, and joined the conservative media company Daily Wire.
I just think that there’s something deeply off about this whole thing. How can someone admit to be doing nothing but following his instincts? How can he do so without shame, and in public, and get away with it?
In the culture of Plato and Descartes, that ought to be social suicide. Why would we listen to a self-proclaimed mere animal? If your idea “is less a philosophy than a temperament”, you should be told to shut up and come back when you have more deliberate thoughts to communicate; insofar as that is not our reaction, we are a deeply unserious culture.
Of course, that conservatives in particular are the ones to do this is not surprising to me. They generally represent aristocratic ideas, which, like proletarian ideas, are fundamentally irrational; the aristocracy being addled by excess and the proletariat by want, only the bourgeoisie are capable of reason.
