Human society can’t ultimately be based on individual satisfaction, since it can’t exist without willing acceptance of sacrifice.

Conservatism: Its Meaning and Prospects

by James Kalb

Conservatism at bottom is resistance to the technocratic project, the modern attempt to turn the social world into a sort of universal machine for the maximum satisfaction of preferences.

That project has been growing up for a long time. It comes out of an understanding of knowledge and the world with its roots in the early modern period, an understanding that emphasizes measurement and mathematics and accepts as real only individual subjectivity and objects of the kind studied by modern physics. The project is also closely associated with modern forms of social organization: the modern state, with its extensive bureaucracy and unlimited claims, and modern capitalism, with its energy, innovation, and global reach, and its flexible organization that combines infinite complexity with clarity and simplicity of basic principle. Its alliance with those forms of organization gives it a position of tremendous power.

The effect of the project has been continuing radical reconfiguration of social life. That process has involved replacement by technology of tradition, religion, and natural law, which are now considered arbitrary impositions on a world composed of atoms, the void, and human sensation. Instead of piety and inherited ways, we rely on innovation, marketing, organizational science, and therapy.

As the process has extended itself, older understandings have been pushed to the margins and come to be considered irrational, oppressive, and presumptively violent. The result has been an ever-greater tendency to declare opposition to the extension of technocratic principles irrational and evil. That’s how the Supreme Court came to assert that the only real reason for wanting to keep the traditional and natural definition of marriage is a desire to injure people who prefer connections of other kinds. That is a reasonable interpretation if the social order is simply a construction for the purpose of helping people achieve whatever goals they happen to have.

Conservatism is recognition that there’s something wrong with the technocratic project. Reason is not simply a matter of adapting means to ends, and the world can’t be understood as a system composed solely of atoms, the void, and human sensation. The attempt to do so wipes out the possibility of meaning, and with it rationality and the possibility of a humane social order.

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