Great Throughts Treasury

"Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles."

"Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired."

"Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man."

"Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery."

"Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent?or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: ?the ceremony of innocence is drowned.? The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell."

"Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality."

"Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription?that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity?including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man?s petty private rationality."

"By the Permanent Things [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race."

"Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation."

"Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction?why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity."

"Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don?t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke?s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once."

"Culture is that which makes life worth living, [it is characterized by] such facets as urbanity, learning, philosophy, and the arts."

"Conservatives? hold that ?in Adams?s fall we sinned all?: human nature, though compounded of both good and evil, is irremediably flawed; so the perfection of society is impossible, all human beings being imperfect."

"Culture cannot really be planned by political authority, for much of culture is unconscious; and politics grows out of culture, not culture out of politics; and political planning itself is a product of culture."

"Demosthenes, the great Athenian patriot, cried out to his countrymen when they seemed too confused and divided to stand against the tyranny of Macedonia: In God's name, I beg of you to think. For a long while, most Athenians ridiculed Demosthenes? entreaty: Macedonia was a great way distant, and there was plenty of time. Only at the eleventh hour did the Athenians perceive the truth of his exhortations. And that eleventh hour was too late. So it may be with Americans today. If we are too indolent to think, we might as well surrender to our enemies tomorrow."

"For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well-intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity."

"I confess to writing in the spirit of [T.S.] Eliot."

"I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin."

"Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify."

"In a revolutionary epoch, sometimes men taste every novelty, sicken of them all, and return to ancient principles so long disused that they seem refreshingly hearty when they are rediscovered."

"In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Orwell?s was that [form of] radicalism which is angry with society because society has failed to provide men with the ancient norms of simple life? family, decency, and continuity?. Take him all in all, Orwell was a man, and there is none left in England like him."

"In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy ?change is the means of our preservation.?) A people?s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude."

"In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that liberty inheres in some sensible object, are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable liberty at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise."

"In America, the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in political history"

"In his book A Common Faith (1934), [John] Dewey advocated his brand of humanism as a religion. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race, he wrote. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant. Much more evidence exists to suggest that humanitarianism, or secular humanism, should be regarded in law as a religion, with respect to both establishment and free exercise in the First Amendment. It is this non-theistic religion, hostile to much of the established morality and many existing American institutions, that has come close to being established as a civil religion in American public schools."

"It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society?whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society?no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be."

"It is man?s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty?of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest."

"It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation."

"In Orwell?s case, of course, many conservatives were happy to welcome a convert to the ranks. Orwell was not a conservative, but an anti-collectivist. Not all anti-collectivists are conservative. So it was with Orwell. There are, obviously, strongly traditional elements in his personality and his writings. Still, his general attitude was that of a socialist. Even if he subscribed to nothing resembling Soviet collectivism, he nevertheless did anticipate rather gloomily a future of equality as uniformity."

"John Adams wrote, I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by. In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, No free communities ever existed without morals. The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved. What kinds of limits are we talking about? The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage. Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward. Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British. Legal limits of the natural and common law, which we also owe to our Western heritage. Certain social limits, which are extremely important to the survival of freedom. These are the habits of our hearts--good manners, kindness, decency, and willingness to put others first, among other things--which are learned in our homes and places of worship, at school and in team sports, and in other social settings. All these limits complement each other and make a good society possible. But they cannot be taken for granted. It takes intellectual and moral leadership to make the case that such limits are important. Our Founders did that. To an exceptional degree, their words tutored succeeding generations in the ways of liberty. It is to America's everlasting credit that our Founders got freedom right."

"Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite?these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty."

"Libertarians (like anarchists and Marxists) generally believe that human nature is good, though damaged by certain social institutions. Conservatives, on the contrary, hold that in Adam's fall we sinned all: human nature, though compounded of both good and evil, is irremediably flawed; so the perfection of society is impossible, all human beings being imperfect."

"Life is for action, and if we desire to know anything, we must make up our minds to be ignorant about much."

"Man was only a little lower than the angels? having it within his power to become godlike. How marvelous and splendid a creature is man!"

"Love, rather than ego, should be the moral foundation of learning."

"Mine was not an enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful."

"Men are put into this world, he [the enlightened conservative] realizes, to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward the triumph of Love. They are put into this world to live like men, and to die like men. He seeks to preserve a society which allows men to attain manhood, rather than keeping them within bonds of perpetual childhood. With Dante, he looks upward from this place of slime, this world of gorgons and chimeras, toward the light which gives Love to this poor earth and all the stars. And, with Burke, he knows that they will never love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

"Mankind can endure anything but boredom."

"Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light."

"Most Americans failed to distinguish between Labor with a capital L and socialism. The relationship was always sort of tenuous. George Brown was a Labor man rather than a socialist per se. Orwell would have liked to have been a wholehearted Labor man, but he couldn?t be. He thought he was a socialist, but he wasn?t. He was always trying to make himself into a member of the working classes and failing to do so. I think of the episode in one of his essays, in which he is traveling around with the hop-pickers. He comes to a hostel to stay the night. There is a former sergeant-major in charge of the hostel for migrant laborers. The sergeant-major says, ?You are a gentleman, aren?t you, sir?? Orwell says, ?Yes, I went to public school.? ?Oh, what a pity you?re in such circumstances; here, let me show you to a better bunk.? Orwell is furious at this because he wants to be taken as a man of the people and he can?t get away from being taken for a gentleman."

"My own study of such concerns has led me to conclude that a civilization, a culture, cannot survive the dying of the belief in the transcendent order that brought it into being. When belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly? So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century."

"Most of us are not really so arrogant as to think we have a right to remold the world in our image. The best we can do, toward redeeming the states of Europe and Asia from the menace of revolution and the distresses of our time, is to realize our own conservative character, suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state. We have not been appointed the correctors of mankind; but, under God, we may be an example to mankind."

"No novelist has exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion in Britain and America than Orwell."

"Orwell died, as many people do, of pulmonary diseases and the lack of will to live. The disease gains on those who really have no desire to go on?. He would be considered a disillusioned socialist or pessimist if you interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four as a direct statement of his belief. He said in a letter that he meant Nineteen Eighty-Four clearly as a warning about the dangers to which collectivism was leading?. I consider Nineteen Eighty-Four a veiled declaration of despair. The power behind INGSOC and the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is thoroughly diabolical. Orwell couldn?t admit that to himself because it was in conflict with his freely professed contempt for theology and religion."

"Now the enlightened conservative stood for true community, the union of men, through love and common interest, for the common welfare.[In contrast, modern men] have lost their community; they are atoms in a loveless desolation; they are desperately bored."

"Orwell succeeded in wakening the dread of the British and the American public against the conception of state socialism in Nineteen Eighty-Four."

"Orwell has been incalculably influential since his death in turning the minds of Englishmen against collectivistic utopias, more influential by far than he was when he lived."

"Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order."

"Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word ?conservative? as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order."

"Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology. The true conservative, in the tradition of Burke? is a theist, for he sees this world as a place of trial, governed by a power beyond human ability to comprehend adequately; he is convinced that earthly perfection is a delusion and in our time, quite possibly, a notion employed by the power of Evil to crush Good by the instrument of a pseudo-good."