January 31, 2010
"Life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition"
Macklin Horton has a very good piece on what conservatism is, Catholic and Conservative (1):
...My opponents in the disagreement documented above seem to believe that it [conservatism] is, or at least intends to be, a systematic philosophy, which makes it a rival to the Church, which in turn makes a Catholic who is also a conservative less than fully faithful to the Church because, as we all know, a man cannot serve two masters. They also insist that it fails as a system, because it is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; it is not only a rival to the Church, but an incoherent one.Posted by John Weidner at January 31, 2010 08:42 PM
I have to say that the attempt to respond to this complaint reminded me of arguing with objectivists, in that in both cases there is an insistence that certain terms must be defined with absolute precision or be dismissed as meaningless. The statement that the word "conservative" does not have a very precise meaning is taken as an admission that it has no meaning at all.
But life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition, but yet exist, thereby making meaningful the words by which they are named. There are many such terms in the arts. Terms like "romantic" and "classical" cannot be defined in such a way that as to remove all doubt about whether or not any given work belongs to one of those categories, and there are others that are even more slippery—post-romantic, neo-classical, jazz. There are very few, if any, artists or individual works of art which fit perfectly into any of these categories, or which does not contain elements of both. Yet we continue to use these words because they serve a purpose in describing broad tendencies. If a critic describes one pianist's playing as more romantic than another's, everyone knows what he means; no one shouts Define your terms! And if he did, he would be laughed at, and deserve to be.
In answering the question "what sort of thing is conservatism?" these aesthetic terms provide the most useful analogy I've been able to come up with. Like them, the word "conservative" is more descriptive than prescriptive (as conservatives often note). Like them, it does not begin with a set of abstract principles. Like them, it is more understandable as a product of temperament and attitudes than as a book of rules. As Russell Kirk insisted, it is not an ideology, but rather the negation of ideology. It is a concrete human phenomenon, not an invented system. It has no necessary metaphysic, and one may be a conservative and an atheist, or a conservative and a Catholic. It is a loose alliance of people with broadly similar views about the management of worldly affairs....
But why are Conservatives pro-Business?
_____________________________________________
That excellent consummation of human society
passed, as we know, and was in certain Provinces of Europe, but more particularly in Britain, destroyed.
For a society in which the determinant mass of
families were owners of capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners ; an4 for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was un-known, there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism.
How did such a catastrophe come about ? Why
was it permitted, and upon what historical process did the evil batten ? What turned an England economically free into the England which we know today, of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national
life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies ?
The answer most usually given to this fundamental
question in our history, and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about through a material process known as the Industrial Revolution.
The use of expensive machinery, the concentration
of industry and of its implements are imagined to
have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the
human will, the action of English mankind.
The explanation is wholly false. No such material
cause determined the degradation from which we
suffer.
It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will among the many, which pro
duced a catastrophe as human in its causes and in
ception as in its vile effect.
Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial
movement, nor of chance material discoveries. A
little acquaintance with history and a little straight-forwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.
The Servile State by Belloc
Posted by: Bisaal at February 1, 2010 01:23 AM
