What Is ‘Ethical Conservatism’?
A proposal for a politics of self-restraint in an age of anarchy
The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself.
Raised to rebel, the modern, anarchistic, progressive personality is always impatient with the world as it is and ever insistent that it change to suit him. Believing himself innocent, he blames others for the suffering he sees, indicting Society, Civilization, the Church, the State, the Establishment, the System, the Corporations, or the Man for crimes against the People and the Planet. Consistent with the age’s Luciferian culture of grievance justifying rebellion, the progressive lives passionately and impulsively as the hero of his own personal revolution, in which anything that stands in his way—that limits his autonomy, inhibits his self-expression, frustrates his ambitions, convicts his conscience, offends his sensibilities, or denies him satisfaction—can be condemned as unfair, unjust, intolerant, and therefore intolerable.
This is the spirit riling the two competing passions of our age, libertine individualism and envious egalitarianism. Both deny the moral relevance of the objective other to the subjective self. Both insist on the self as the point of origin and reference for all definitions of goodness, truth, and justice, in effect replacing the First Person of the Holy Trinity with the selfish first person—the singular “I” in the case of individualism, the plural “we” in the case of egalitarianism.
Resistance to this spirit and its culture of grievance and rebellion has been hobbled from the beginning by uncertainty about what should be resisted. Defenders of old ways and existing orders have not always understood what they are up against or should be fighting for. They are also sometimes self-serving and are easily portrayed as self-serving even when they are not. They have often been obliged to adopt the language and values of revolution even while opposing it, lest their resistance to “liberty, equality, fraternity” mark them out in favor of “slavery, caste, and hatred.” They too must champion freedom, equality, democracy, and human rights. They too must promise progress toward an earthly paradise satisfying everyone’s wants and needs. They too must evoke the image of the “shining city upon a hill” exemplifying the novus ordo seculorum.
Uncertain about what they stand for, the defenders of the old and the ordered are also uncertain about what to call themselves. Many admit to being “conservative” but are quick to qualify the term, there being so many different kinds of conservatives, including some who identify strongly with a particular people or regime and others who identify strongly with progressive values and the Whig tradition of resistance to authority. Some still advocate individualism as the essence of conservatism, in opposition to the collectivism of the socialist Left, but it is not always clear what kind of individualism they mean: Is it the “rugged individualism” of Herbert Hoover, or the moral individualism of Friedrich Hayek? Others fancy themselves “classical liberals,” but are they fans of James Fitzjames Stephen, or of John Stuart Mill? Still others prefer the name “libertarian,” but, lo, there are libertarians on both sides, too—conservative libertarians who love the Church and hate the State, and progressive libertarians who love vice and hate religion.
Many Americans identify as conservatives for religious reasons but cannot advocate political conservatism except by advocating their own particular religious tradition.
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