It has been one of the great, failed projects of conventional American conservatism to encourage the fiction that the Christian civilisation conservatives admire and the Enlightenment civilisation that destroyed it are part of a real continuity. For the purposes of this essay, I take it as a given that conservatism is, or at least ought to be, the persuasion and mentality that seeks good order and that in a Western society a conservative’s understanding of good order is unavoidably defined significantly and primarily by the Christian intellectual tradition in general and by the received teachings of the early Fathers of the Church in particular. This latter point may not seem obvious or ‘given’ to some, but when we consider that these Fathers were responsible for the formulation of most of the formal doctrines that created the latticework of all subsequent Christian thought and they were likewise the architects of the Christian synthesis of reason and faith that survived unimpaired in all of Europe at least until the Reformation, this claim should seem far more compelling. I also take it as a given that a conservative acknowledges the overwhelming and irreducible cultural significance of the claims of the Christian religion, including its claim to the be the True Faith, and I assume that many philosophical conservatives are confessing Christians who see their conservatism as a logical, if not strictly necessary, accompaniment to their confession of the Faith and their conviction that Christianity is true and that Christ is the Truth who was incarnate for our sake. Such Christian conservatives are, I suspect, committed, to one degree or another, to the preservation of what remains of Christian civilisation in Europe and North America, and they believe that the Western experiment of modernity has been, at best, deeply flawed and generally hostile to the Christian tradition.
That might be too much to assume, but I regard these points as the sine qua non of any effort to develop a philosophical conservatism of real significance. This essay is written in the conviction that it is in some real sense entirely vain to imagine that American conservatives may re-imagine a Christian civilisation and preserve its existing remnants, much less restore such a civilisation, so long as we persist in this fiction of the basic compatibility and agreement of the two traditions, the Christian and the Enlightenment. This is because we may either rely on the Faith’s understanding of human nature and the proper relationship of man to God and to his fellow men, or we can accept the understanding of one of a host of modern derivatives of the liberal tradition in the knowledge that the assumptions we embrace will define and determine what sort of society and way of life our posterity will have. If the former is true, we will have to act as if it were true. A beginning would be to reject the false assumptions of liberalism broadly defined.
Understanding why such accommodation of stark opposites has been accepted at all reminds us what this specifically American conservatism has claimed to be: it was supposed to be a loyalty to and defense of the institutions and way of life of Western civilisation that had formed the peoples of the United States, as well as a peculiarly Anglo-American, pragmatic mentality that sought to harness and redirect the potentially corrupting effects of historical, social, and political change and turn them back towards the common good. That is the driving impulse for the expression of an explicit American conservatism, which, by the admission of Russell Kirk, was for much of American history largely latent or concealed in impulses towards inherited forms, towards virtue and order, and away from radical egalitarian leveling, centralized social planning and coercion. That this conservatism had to be uncovered by means of philosophical genealogies and scholarly inquiry underscores the intense role of imagination in defining this conservative vision. Such a conservatism could recognise the excesses of the philosophes in the eighteenth century because it was working from a long standing, and partly true, American contention that our “revolution” was sane because it was conservative of a prescriptive order that already existed, while the French Revolution was insane because it sought to conjure a new political order out of thin air. However, this American conservatism was never entirely committed to rejecting the French Revolutionary model of society and its conception of humanity, at least not when similar ideas had already established themselves in Anglo-American culture by means that were really no less excessive and revolutionary in the seventeenth century. American conservatism could readily abjure an offensive Continental radicalism to which it was not really connected while embracing the fruits of an equally philosophically offensive, but more politically moderate English radicalism drawn from the English Puritan Revolution that had created the Anglo-American political consensus of almost three centuries.
For an American, even one inclined to recognise the deep roots of American order in Israel and antiquity, these three centuries must seem nearly an eternity—indeed, they are virtually the whole of our historical experience on this continent. From an American perspective, circa 1775, the legacy of Whig usurpation, violence and abstraction was already in some sense “traditional” and relatively well-established in precedent—the rights of Englishmen our ancestors claimed were, in the sweep of history, fairly new and based on contractarian and rights theories just as speculative and ahistorical in their own way as any imagined in France, but they had acquired a certain respectability and stability through their institutionalisation and their ready application in colonial life. The accidental seventeenth-century alliance between Dissenting and Reformed Christianity, the parliamentary cause and a philosophy of natural rights grew steadily stronger in the course of the Stuart dynasty, which in turn lent an unusual plausibility to the accommodation of Enlightenment claims and Christianity in English and American societies.
The results were the virtually universal Anglo-American embrace of political liberalism of one stripe or another and the tendency towards the unhealthy and rather odd identification of the “causes” of liberalism and Christianity, which profited from and deepened the secularisation of Anglo-American cultures here and in Britain. It is not surprising, then, that it was not until American Catholics, for whom the mythical alliance of Protestantism and political progress was always as nonsensical as it was often offensive (for what it implied about the Catholic church and Catholic nations), began fully to come into their own culturally, politically and intellectually that this largely unexamined accommodation continued unabated. It is perhaps also not surprising that American conservatism found its early champions in intellectuals (e.g., Weaver, Kirk, Burnham) whose journeys typically began on the left or far left, as these men had already taken the assumptions of the liberal age to their logical and unavoidably absurd conclusions and then recoiled in contempt at what they had found waiting for them.
This was a sort of discovery that Christian liberals, who today form a sizeable bloc of what some still call the “conservative movement” (provided that we pay attention to the actual content of their political beliefs, and do not merely rely on the labels they choose to apply to themselves), could not make and would not want to make if they could, as the blithe and easy integration of these two wildly divergent traditions has been a staple of their politics and their religion for some time. For American conservatism to ever emerge, however, it required the sharp minds of former radicals to perceive the inadequacies and contradictions at least of post-1918 modern liberalism. Where American conservatism could not go, and where its founders did not want to take it, was towards a thoroughgoing repudiation of the entire liberal tradition all the way back to its seventeenth-century champions. (Obviously, for Kirk this would have been very difficult, since it becomes virtually impossible to define conservatism in terms of Burke when almost the entire political consensus of the late eighteenth century is founded on false Whig assumptions.) In a sense, resisting this impulse was a conservative thing to do, but to the extent that it was not simply imitative it wrongly sought to reconcile the substance of the liberal tradition with what were called “conservative” intuitions about well-ordered societies and polities. (To put it bluntly, it would be just as wrong to say that governments are justly established by consent when Locke says it as it is when Rousseau says it, but half of the American conservative project depends on our pretending that the two are saying very different things.)
The accommodation of Enlightenment liberalism and Christianity only seems plausible provided that neither is taken to its logical conclusions and only so long as one does not think too hard about what both must imply about the nature of man and society. By and large, American conservatism from its beginnings has admirably attempted to extract what was enduring and meaningful from this modern tradition that is fundamentally hostile to permanence and meaning as the Christian tradition has understood them, and conservatives have attempted to find points of continuity between the modern world and our classical and medieval heritages. But, as impressive as the effort has been in some ways, it is difficult not to conclude that the labour was misguided. To find nuggets of truth in the liberal tradition may well be interesting, and could even, in the spirit of Justin Martyr, make the Christian tradition intelligible to those alienated from its mind. However, given the quality of the liberal tradition, the exercise will be very like panning for gold in a sewer.
As we know, American conservatism, unlike all forms of Continental conservatism, did not emerge from a Counter-Enlightenment tradition, and even if it had so emerged it seems likely that modern American conservatives, including the impressive figures who led the intellectual movement beginning in the 1950s, would have found such an inheritance troubling and embarrassing. In spite of the prominent role of Catholics in its development, it has always been one of the distinctions of American conservatism that it is not supposed to have very much to do with its Continental namesake, and it was one of the well-intended conceits of the early conservative movement, as well as of modern British Conservatives, that European conservatives themselves were not really very good conservatives in the sense that we in the English-speaking world meant the term, and furthermore that most nineteenth-century conservatives were just the sort of dreadful people with whom we Americans had virtually nothing in common. Thus without too much of a sense of irony most “American conservatives” typically admire the French liberal Bastiat and execrate Metternich, with whom they have far more in common, while they will often, when pressed by annoyed foreigners to explain their “conservatism,” describe themselves by that delightfully evasive label of “classical liberal.”
It has also been one of the distinguishing traits of American conservatism, though it is one we would prefer to ignore whenever possible, to embody a thoroughly modern and modernity-embracing political tradition and to be not very philosophically or politically conservative at all, at least by the measures of what some might call the real Anglo-American conservative tradition on this continent that once existed among our neighbours to the north. It was this latter characteristic that often irritated the Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant when he heard Americans describing themselves as conservatives—how could we, effectively the defenders of a modern, technological empire full of universalist pretensions, be serious when we said this? To date, as far as I know, no American has ever really credibly answered Grant’s challenge or, for that matter, seriously and convincingly addressed his criticisms.
To give a serious answer, which I think is very much needed if it is to be saved from becoming just another shallow, armed doctrine (which it is in serious danger of becoming at the present time), American conservatism would have to be re-imagined, and its philosophical roots in Christianity, unspoiled by mistaken compromises with the liberal tradition, re-emphasised. Three steps, listed here in no particular order, need to be taken before anything else can be accomplished in divorcing ourselves from the legacy of the Enlightenment:
1) An extensive revival of a knowledge of patristic thought, especially patristic thought of the first seven or eight centuries, and the re-establishment of patristic authors as the core of a new canonical literature to be learned beginning during formative education and continuing thereafter (along with the classical languages in which this thought was originally expressed) to acknowledge its centrality not only generally for all subsequent “Western” thought but also to affirm the decisive, defining significance of this thought for what it means to be Christian as well as what it means to create and sustain a robust Christian social and political order. If Christian civilisation is what we wish to restore, we must acquire the common mind that fashioned it in the first place.
2) An elaboration of ethics founded in Christian personalism and so premised on the very nature of the One God in Trinity in koinonia (communion), which would strive to abandon conceptions of agency connected with notions of autonomy, self-interest and choice and affirm a morality rooted in asceticism, festivity (the natural complement to asceticism) as well as communion.
3) A recasting of discussions of the proper role of government in terms of chartered liberties (as opposed to natural rights) and the government’s duty to the welfare of the commonwealth or republic.
Theology takes high priority in this reimagining of conservatism in no small part because our conservatism, in spite of its genuinely secular nature, rests on the pillars of tradition and transcendence and is therefore useless and even unintelligible when it becomes separated from its moorings in the Faith, whose tradition has to date presented the only enduring and coherent understanding of transcendence in our civilisation’s history. It is also because of the Faith that we are best able to see the Enlightenment’s imagined world of autonomous individuals as the state of perdition that it would have to be were it to be fully realised, as it is from the Fathers that we learn that such autonomy is alienation from the Life and Light of God and the desire for autonomy the source of all evils in the world.
The Fall not only teaches us of the constraints, limitations and imperfections of man and society here below, which has been its most common role in conservative rhetoric for the last century, but it also reminds us that man turned away from God by pursuing the equivalent of “rational self-interest.” Between a desire for the ultimate Good and the desire for the advantage of the self there can be no compromise, just as there can be none between the traditions that espouse each respective desire. Conservatives have a chance to stop thinking in terms of choice and to begin thinking in terms of purpose and the Good. If American conservatism has any hope of remaining coherent, credible and principled, it must leave behind the pleasant fictions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century and genuinely pursue the “permanent things” it is supposed to treasure.
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