The Conservative Habit of Mind
Adam Daifallah's recent article on the need to create a conservative infrastructure in Canada begged the one critical question: why? Certainly not to win elections. Winning elections is about selling the products of that infrastructure - advertising and marketing rather than policy prescriptions.
Amidst the attractive visions of think tanks and journals, policy institutes and conventions, the question of what exactly is being created is easy to lose. Is it a more successful Conservative Party? A better government for Canada? Yet another re-definition of conservatism in Canada?
The bankrupcy of the conservative idea in Canada - after the assorted mergers and acquisitions of the last couple of decades - can no longer be concealed from Canadians or the Conservative Party itself. Harper's campaign inspired as much fear as support. Canadians suspected, rightly in my view, the Conservative Party had a "hidden agenda". They recognized the brand new party's platform was missing more than a few planks. Canadians also recognized the platform had no decernable philosophical foundation voters could use to make educated guesses about the missing policy.
Daifallah's infrastructure would address the policy gaps and cobbling together platforms to meet the challenges of the 21st century. However, policy wonkery is essentially a value free enterprise. Faced with providing medical care, education or a military there are a variety of solutions which bright lights with economics and law degrees can label "conservative". But how to choose? Without a philosophical core, the choice becomes a matter of which policy alternative polls better and that's largely a waste of time because the Liberals cornered the value-free policy market years ago.
Canadian conservatism - as opposed to Red Toryism - has yet to produce a coherent account of itself. Think tanks and policy conventions cannot give that account, they cannot define the cast of mind, the political style and the principles of Canadian conservatism.
Red Tories had the anti-technological, Catholic, utopian socialism of George Grant to use as a water and flour paste patching together their unlikely three way alliance between the decendents of United Empire Loyalists, Fine Old Ontario Families and Protestants in the Maritimes. Grant's anti-capitalist message provided Red Tories with philosophical underpinnings. Not as a matter of policy prescription; rather as a flexible framework onto which to bolt various versions of the PC role of "official alternative to the Liberals".
Today's Conservatives, a generation removed from Grant, (who has found his natural home as a favorite philosopher of the anti-globalism brigade, and are bereft of a similarily Canadian political philospher to draw on. While the libertarian wing can cite Hayak and von Mises and the socons everything from the Bible to the tabletalk of Ronald Reagan, none of these offer a particularily Canadian understanding of conservatism.
Conjuring up a political philosopher to order is impossible, so Canadian conservatives will have to rely on an even more basic resource: the cultivation of a conservative habit of mind.
Conservatives and what have come to be called classical liberals begin with a tradition of tremedous humilty in the face of human folly, their own and others'. They are blessed with an almost limitless scepticism about personal perfectibility much less the perfectibility of the people around them.
With luck a conservative will have learned the personal habits of generousity, forgiveness and respect and the virtues of politeness, graciousness and modesty. Experience should have taught them to value learning, to recognize reason, to look for facts before making arguments and to honour language as the only bridge we have to each other.
These traits, if practiced carefully and constantly, open the possibility of a politics which is profoundly engaged with the human spirit and the human capacity for ganuine innovation, ingenuity and perserverance. This politics has only the most tenous connection to the rough and tumble of electoral politics. A conservative's politics are, ideally, embedded in his or her daily life. Participation in formal political world becomes a reluctant extension of this personal world and the idea of a conservative "professional" politician is antithetical to the conservative habit of mind.
For a conservative the personal, familial and communal are vitally important. Important enough for conservatives to prefer the particular over the general, the local over the national or the international, and the concrete facts of daily life over the abstractions of theory.
Politically these very basic mental traits translate to two core principles. First, the desire to have larger units exercise as little power over smaller as possible. Second, a belief in the organic evolution of a culture and society. The modern obsession with the big, the new, the fresh and the revolutionary, worries conservatives mindful of the unintended consequences and outright disasters which have characterized so many innovations in the political world.
The last three hundred years have not been kind to the conservative cast of mind: huge, anonomous, nation states arose, governments began to pursue ameliorist agendas, information became systematized, citizens became statistics. Entire classes of people have taken up the helping professions, mass education and bureaucracy in all its forms. The profound belief in the perfectability of human societies, if not actual humans, became a growth industry in the 1850's and never looked back. Missionary zeal, suitably repackaged in a politically correct, multi-culturally sensitive box, remains the theoretical underpining of the Liberal Party in Canada and church basement strategy of its hyperactive little brother, the NDP.
From economics to healthcare to education and the law, the essentially immodest, empirically empty ideas of the "just", the "well", the "fair" society have been sold to the increasingly gulible public. With the extension of the franchise, the hollowing out of the public education system, the replacement of print culture with mass entertainment we have lost the ability to actually explain why while each of these "societies" was wonderful in theory and unattainable in practice.
Conservatives had to wait for the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the rise of the dollar economy in China and the failure of every socialist inspired state in Africa to make their point. In the West they are waiting for the coming bankruptcy of France and Germany and the failure of limitlessly funded healthcare, public education and the social safety net in countries as diverse as Sweden, Britian and Canada to confirm the laws of economic gravity once again.
The mental habit most important to a conservative is empiricism. The capacity to see the world without hopeful or pessimistic illusion. It is the precise opposite of the idealism which drives the Liberal and socialist minds. Conservatives do not believe in magic beans, fairy godmothers or regional economic development programs. Experience has proven each to be in the realm of fable rather than fact.
Humility, skepticism about the perfectibility of society and people, respect for language and reason, modesty, politeness, generosity, valuing the particular above the general, empiricism: not one of these habits of mind needs an institute or a magazine or even an endowed chair at a prestigious university. Not one of them offends any religious, racial or cultural sensibility. Yet these simple traits of the conservative mind offer a full tool box for assessing the policy and politics offered up by the wonks in Dallifalah's think tanks.
One of the worst consequences of the Conservative's reflexive "me-tooism" with respect to the Liberals is its requirement that conservatives accept the philosophically barren calculus of political victory which has powered the Liberal Party since the second Trudeau election. This dooms the party to the role of echo and last resort when the electorate believes Liberals are in need of a short rest from governing. It's a recipe for tinkering, value free wonkery and polling for policy which has already been perfected by the Liberal establishment.
For the Conservative party to do well a steady, patient effort to create and encourage conservative minds and conservative habits of thought needs to begin in Canada. From that movement there will almost certainly emerge the political theoreticians and, with luck, philosophers, who will provide the analysis and the reflections which will, in their turn, allow the Conservative Party to create and be proud of a real and unhidden, conservative agenda for Canada.
(Note: a version of this was posted at the BlogsCanada Politics e-Board.)
Amidst the attractive visions of think tanks and journals, policy institutes and conventions, the question of what exactly is being created is easy to lose. Is it a more successful Conservative Party? A better government for Canada? Yet another re-definition of conservatism in Canada?
The bankrupcy of the conservative idea in Canada - after the assorted mergers and acquisitions of the last couple of decades - can no longer be concealed from Canadians or the Conservative Party itself. Harper's campaign inspired as much fear as support. Canadians suspected, rightly in my view, the Conservative Party had a "hidden agenda". They recognized the brand new party's platform was missing more than a few planks. Canadians also recognized the platform had no decernable philosophical foundation voters could use to make educated guesses about the missing policy.
Daifallah's infrastructure would address the policy gaps and cobbling together platforms to meet the challenges of the 21st century. However, policy wonkery is essentially a value free enterprise. Faced with providing medical care, education or a military there are a variety of solutions which bright lights with economics and law degrees can label "conservative". But how to choose? Without a philosophical core, the choice becomes a matter of which policy alternative polls better and that's largely a waste of time because the Liberals cornered the value-free policy market years ago.
Canadian conservatism - as opposed to Red Toryism - has yet to produce a coherent account of itself. Think tanks and policy conventions cannot give that account, they cannot define the cast of mind, the political style and the principles of Canadian conservatism.
Red Tories had the anti-technological, Catholic, utopian socialism of George Grant to use as a water and flour paste patching together their unlikely three way alliance between the decendents of United Empire Loyalists, Fine Old Ontario Families and Protestants in the Maritimes. Grant's anti-capitalist message provided Red Tories with philosophical underpinnings. Not as a matter of policy prescription; rather as a flexible framework onto which to bolt various versions of the PC role of "official alternative to the Liberals".
Today's Conservatives, a generation removed from Grant, (who has found his natural home as a favorite philosopher of the anti-globalism brigade, and are bereft of a similarily Canadian political philospher to draw on. While the libertarian wing can cite Hayak and von Mises and the socons everything from the Bible to the tabletalk of Ronald Reagan, none of these offer a particularily Canadian understanding of conservatism.
Conjuring up a political philosopher to order is impossible, so Canadian conservatives will have to rely on an even more basic resource: the cultivation of a conservative habit of mind.
Conservatives and what have come to be called classical liberals begin with a tradition of tremedous humilty in the face of human folly, their own and others'. They are blessed with an almost limitless scepticism about personal perfectibility much less the perfectibility of the people around them.
With luck a conservative will have learned the personal habits of generousity, forgiveness and respect and the virtues of politeness, graciousness and modesty. Experience should have taught them to value learning, to recognize reason, to look for facts before making arguments and to honour language as the only bridge we have to each other.
These traits, if practiced carefully and constantly, open the possibility of a politics which is profoundly engaged with the human spirit and the human capacity for ganuine innovation, ingenuity and perserverance. This politics has only the most tenous connection to the rough and tumble of electoral politics. A conservative's politics are, ideally, embedded in his or her daily life. Participation in formal political world becomes a reluctant extension of this personal world and the idea of a conservative "professional" politician is antithetical to the conservative habit of mind.
For a conservative the personal, familial and communal are vitally important. Important enough for conservatives to prefer the particular over the general, the local over the national or the international, and the concrete facts of daily life over the abstractions of theory.
Politically these very basic mental traits translate to two core principles. First, the desire to have larger units exercise as little power over smaller as possible. Second, a belief in the organic evolution of a culture and society. The modern obsession with the big, the new, the fresh and the revolutionary, worries conservatives mindful of the unintended consequences and outright disasters which have characterized so many innovations in the political world.
The last three hundred years have not been kind to the conservative cast of mind: huge, anonomous, nation states arose, governments began to pursue ameliorist agendas, information became systematized, citizens became statistics. Entire classes of people have taken up the helping professions, mass education and bureaucracy in all its forms. The profound belief in the perfectability of human societies, if not actual humans, became a growth industry in the 1850's and never looked back. Missionary zeal, suitably repackaged in a politically correct, multi-culturally sensitive box, remains the theoretical underpining of the Liberal Party in Canada and church basement strategy of its hyperactive little brother, the NDP.
From economics to healthcare to education and the law, the essentially immodest, empirically empty ideas of the "just", the "well", the "fair" society have been sold to the increasingly gulible public. With the extension of the franchise, the hollowing out of the public education system, the replacement of print culture with mass entertainment we have lost the ability to actually explain why while each of these "societies" was wonderful in theory and unattainable in practice.
Conservatives had to wait for the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the rise of the dollar economy in China and the failure of every socialist inspired state in Africa to make their point. In the West they are waiting for the coming bankruptcy of France and Germany and the failure of limitlessly funded healthcare, public education and the social safety net in countries as diverse as Sweden, Britian and Canada to confirm the laws of economic gravity once again.
The mental habit most important to a conservative is empiricism. The capacity to see the world without hopeful or pessimistic illusion. It is the precise opposite of the idealism which drives the Liberal and socialist minds. Conservatives do not believe in magic beans, fairy godmothers or regional economic development programs. Experience has proven each to be in the realm of fable rather than fact.
Humility, skepticism about the perfectibility of society and people, respect for language and reason, modesty, politeness, generosity, valuing the particular above the general, empiricism: not one of these habits of mind needs an institute or a magazine or even an endowed chair at a prestigious university. Not one of them offends any religious, racial or cultural sensibility. Yet these simple traits of the conservative mind offer a full tool box for assessing the policy and politics offered up by the wonks in Dallifalah's think tanks.
One of the worst consequences of the Conservative's reflexive "me-tooism" with respect to the Liberals is its requirement that conservatives accept the philosophically barren calculus of political victory which has powered the Liberal Party since the second Trudeau election. This dooms the party to the role of echo and last resort when the electorate believes Liberals are in need of a short rest from governing. It's a recipe for tinkering, value free wonkery and polling for policy which has already been perfected by the Liberal establishment.
For the Conservative party to do well a steady, patient effort to create and encourage conservative minds and conservative habits of thought needs to begin in Canada. From that movement there will almost certainly emerge the political theoreticians and, with luck, philosophers, who will provide the analysis and the reflections which will, in their turn, allow the Conservative Party to create and be proud of a real and unhidden, conservative agenda for Canada.
(Note: a version of this was posted at the BlogsCanada Politics e-Board.)
posted by jc at 12:56 AM
1 Comments:
Just a test comment to make sure the system is working...looks fine to me...If google wanted to be really clever they would have a spell check on the comment feature.
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