There is a very common and widespread misconception about the worldview and mindset of a conservative. Most people really tend to believe that conservatism is all about distaste of modernity, of irrational opposition to progress, in contrast to the cherished old-school values they claim to follow.
Granted, some conservatives are particularly vicious in their attacks against contemporary society, and some are extremely formal in their conceptions, not considering the essence of the problems we have to fight but absorbing themselves in the way to fight them.
These twisted conceptions of conservatism have spawned practical schools of thought that promote no preservation of values nor appreciation of the transcendental elements of existence. In a sense, these “conservatives” are no conservatives at all. They might be whatever they want to call themselves, but they aren’t conservatives because they don’t preserve anything, nor do they value anything worth preserving.
In contrast to the material nihilism of these so-called “conservatives,” true conservatism has a clear driving force, one that connects the appreciation of truth, beauty, and goodness to the preservation of past institutions and principles. That force is a powerful moral principle which is love.
There is a quote by the late Roger Scruton in his book How To Be A Conservative in which he explains this concept without calling it love but sentiment:
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it.
This sentiment, as the Great Thinker calls it, is what keeps civilization and society preserved against those who want to subvert and destroy it in its current form in an arrogant pretension of designing it “for the best” for numbers of people they have no relation with, and who, in their eyes, are nothing but stairs to be crushed in their way to power.
This sentiment is also what makes tradition such a powerful tool for social construction and cohesion. While some classical liberals such as F.A. Hayek see tradition as an evolutionary mechanism in which the invisible hand of the market selects by trial and error the best institutions to preserve and promote individual liberty, conservatives understand that tradition is the manifestation of love for institutions that promote the higher ends of the individual person and his or her community.
This relates to a concept unknown to most people in political circles which is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an idea first promoted in his 1943 essay A Theory of Human Motivation.
For Maslow, human needs are divided into basic needs, psychological needs, and self-fulfillment needs, and while love, understood as the feeling taken into consideration in human relationships, is different from the love expressed for higher ends which could be better categorized as admiration, both are higher needs and necessities than those crucial for human survival which most of the time are the moral principles of most ideologies.
Moreover, Maslow’s theory places virtue-driven institutional needs at a higher place than mere individual or communitarian ones, making sense of the duality of the individual person’s place and transcendence in society and society’s influence on one’s individual development.
Scruton himself recognizes this, saying that
[t]he real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.
This attachment creates an environment in which moral virtue, driven by love, can develop freely and help the individual person and his or her local community attain higher ends while retaining a clear identity based on their intrinsic aspects, expressing itself as tradition.
A sense of pride is also another manifestation of this love, always guided towards a devotion of the past and of its useful and symbolic elements such as a certain culture or significant meaning to the individual and his community. A society based on this idea would understand its meaning as a community of free beings “bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love,” as Sir Roger wrote.
And love, in this sense, would not be a release from moral constraint, but on the contrary, the basis for moral guidelines to ensure cooperation, commitment, and long-term prospects which would in turn provide for a fertile ground for economic and social order and prosperity.
And while conservatism is mostly driven by the love for virtue, for virtuous institutions and the search for a higher meaning and higher ends on both an individual and community level, other ideologies tend to be driven by more basic needs such as greed, jealousy, or what is commonly projected onto conservatism: hatred.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Adam Smith himself had written that “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” which makes a valid but materialistic and utilitarian point.
Simply put, this marks liberalism as an ideology for survival in which the individual interests make sense for material prosperity but often forget about social nature and its influence on human transcendence. This is not wrong, but it’s not enough for a civilization to exist and shine.
This difference, although little for the casual bystander, makes for the distinction between true conservatives and classical liberals. It doesn’t mean they can’t collaborate, which they can and should do to create policy and achieve governance, but that their perspectives and ultimately their goals are different, even if their political outlooks are the most reconcilable of them all.
As for the allegations that conservatism is based on hatred for modernity and what it represents, the Great Man wisely understood that the conservative’s duty to the modern world is to embrace it critically, fully consciously, and consider that human achievements are rare and precarious, and as there is no right to destroy the inheritance we leave to our descendants, we have a moral obligation to rationally submit to the voice of order and to have an ordered life so that we can teach virtue by example.
It may be true that some conservatives have a distaste for modernity, but this represents nothing but a comparative response guided by the love of long-lasting institutions which have proven their utility in the wall of tradition and their beauty in the light of time in contrast to the ephemeral and disposable nature of consumerism, the abominable destruction of history promoted by socialism, and the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by fascism.
After all, conservatives love the past because it proves that what is good, true, and beautiful is perennial and always endures in eternity, and when this is placed side-by-side with contemporary material and institutional structures, it makes them pale by comparison.
Misconceptions on conservatism are never promoted by conservatives themselves but by the people who misunderstand what it means because, if someone is a conservative, how couldn’t he be aware of his love for tradition and what it represents?
- Maslow, Abraham (1943), A Theory of Human Motivation.
- Smith, Adam (1776), The Wealth of Nations
- Scruton, Roger (2008), The Limits of Liberty
- Scruton, Roger (2014), How To Be A Conservative
- Scruton, Roger (2006), A Political Philosophy
- Feser, Edward (2006), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek