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More Principles of Conservatism: Denial of Progress, Trust in Wealth, and the Return of Leviathan

Submitted by Ken Watts on Mon, 08/20/2007 - 15:48

So far, I've commented on the first five of Kirk's conservative principles, as posted by Stephen Bainbridge at The Daily Dish, mostly questioning the clarity or accuracy of various claims. Principles six and seven, however,  bring us to the heart of the matter—some fundamental errors of conservative thought:

Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. ... 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. ... 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 are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.

This is wrong, seriously wrong, in several ways:

  1. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults

    I'll skip over my first objection, since I've already argued it elsewhere—human-hating is a silly enterprise for humans.
  2. ...no perfect social order ever can be created. ... 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.

    Here the argument goes seriously astray. There is, of course, nothing to say against a tolerably ordered, just, and free society. But the idea that we should not hope to eliminate, or at least limit, the remaining evils, maladjustments, and suffering is bizarre. One might as well argue that, because there's no such thing as a perfect recipe, no cook should ever attempt to improve a recipe, or, because there is no such thing as a perfect surgery, doctors shouldn't attempt to improve surgical methods.
  3. The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

    I won't quibble about how many liberals actually "promise the perfection of man", but the idea that attempts to improve the human lot, against the objections of conservatives, have universally, or even on the whole, led to disaster is ludicrous. The weekend, women's suffrage, the end of slavery, social security, fair and impartial courts, separation of powers—even democracy—these were all liberal ideas to begin with, resisted by conservatives in their time. In fact, most of the ideas that conservatives accept now were originally liberal ideas. I won't argue that every liberal project has been a one hundred percent success, but there is little doubt about the general trend.
  4. Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.

    I won't comment on the obvious class bias of this statement again (a poor person might well be more concerned about food and health care than property). Rather, I'd like to focus on the grain of truth in the conservative position.

    Quite simply, conservatives see private wealth as a hedge against a centralized power which would deprive them of their rights.

    They are quite correct to fear centralized power. Anytime a single entity gains control over the fortunes of common people, disaster and slavery are the results. And, since property is power, putting property in private hands helps, to some extent, to distribute power—which I might point out is a very liberal goal.

    But conservatives miss the basic point of their own position in two ways:

    First, they mistakenly believe that government is the only possible place that power can accumulate. They fail to notice that the very existence of private power, in the form of property, creates the possibility of another kind of Leviathan—the multinational corporation, and the multinational upper class. There are currently corporations, and groups of individuals, which have much more power than some countries, and have no internal process to mitigate its use. These pose grave dangers to democracy, freedom, order, and justice—all conservative (and liberal) values.

    Second, conservatives fail to notice that property, and the power it represents, is only a protection to the extent that one owns it. The poor do not feel its protection at all—ask any poor person who has been tried in a court of law with only an overworked and underpaid public defender for a lawyer. 

    If property rights are going to serve as a foundation for general protection against concentrated power, then property must be distributed as widely as possible. That is the natural conclusion of the conservative position—some system of redistribution of wealth, as the only road to justice for all.

    The conservative position on property is the result of an ideology that is stranded in the past, when the only power worth fearing was a king, whose power consisted largely of control over property. They are quite correct to guard against the return of such a system. But they are mistaken to believe that this is the only possible threat to freedom, or that liberal measures necessarily lead in that direction.

    In fact, as we have seen recently, it is exactly the conservative impulse which has nurtured the return to a kind of neo-Leviathan—a combination of religious and executive power which ignores the rule of law and the will of the people, which overruns justice, order, and freedom, and which seeks to become master of all.