Is a conservative a hardened egoist? Does he believe in unqualified “rugged individualism” to the exclusion of traditional duties toward God and man? In short, does the conservative have a conscience? The radical tells us that the conservative is a “wretch concentered all in self”; but I happen to have a different opinion.
“There is no necessary connection between knowledge and virtue,” old John Adams wrote. “Simple intelligence has no association with morality. What connection is there between the mechanism of a clock or watch and the feeling of moral good and evil, right or wrong? A faculty or quality of distinguishing between normal good and evil, as well as physical happiness and misery, that is, pleasure and pain, or in other words a conscience—an old word almost out of fashion—is essential to morality.”
If the good old word conscience was almost out of fashion when this Republic was founded, it has suffered still worse since then; and, as Adams knew, the whole world has suffered proportionately. Bentham endeavored to reduce “conscience” to mere enlightened selfishness; Marx declared that conscience had no function except as a weapon of the expropriated against the guilty expropriators; Freud thought that conscience was nothing better than guilt-complex derived principally from infantile mishaps. But as men and women denied any significance to the word and the concept of “conscience,” the world began to experience the dismaying consequences of a philosophy that abandoned the ancient moral instrument of private responsibility, individual conscience, and tried to substitute instead some abstract “pleasure and pain” equation in morals, or some amorphous notion of “social justice” unrelated to personal duties and personal sense of abiding laws of right and wrong. The atrocities and catastrophes of our century, like those of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, demonstrate the pit into which fall sophisticated societies that mistake clever self-interest, or new “social controls,” for a satisfactory alternative to conscience.
Now “conscience,” in the dictionary’s definition, is “the internal recognition of right and wrong as regards one’s actions and motives; the faculty which decides upon the moral quality of one’s actions and motives, enjoining one to conformity with the moral law.” Conscience is a private matter: there is really no such thing as a “public conscience” or a “state conscience.” Conscience has two aspects: one governing the relationship between God and the individual human person, and the other governing the relationship between one human person and his fellow men and women. The great majority of conservatives—men and women who were not born yesterday, and are not afraid of acknowledging that our ancestors were something better than fools—believe in the reality of conscience, quite as they believe in the reality of religious truth.
All during the twentieth century, radicals have been trying to convince the thinking public that conservatives are enemies of conscience. The conservative is a monster of selfishness, according to the radical propagandist: the conservative believes in “devil take the hindmost,” the radical insists; he believes in greed on principle, his heart is hardened against the weak and unfortunate in the race of life, and when he talks of duties and rights, this is a mere veneer over selfish interests. Conservatives, the radical proclaims, are somehow morally impure, ruthless, and avaricious, dedicated to the proposition that “they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can.”
Yet the real position of the thinking conservative is quite the opposite of this radical caricature. Of course, there are selfish and heartless conservatives, just as there are selfish and heartless radicals: political persuasion cannot of itself produce private virtue, and we are all of us in some degree sinners, whatever ticket we vote. This said, however, the theory of the thinking conservative, and ordinarily his practice, run all in favor of private conscience, with the rights and duties toward God and toward mankind which a serious conscience requires in any society and any age. It is the doctrinaire radical of modern times, rather, who denies the divine source of conscience and the sense of personal responsibility and traditional duty which gives conscience meaning. Some people calling themselves conservatives are afflicted with the vice of selfishness, arrogant pride of possession—just as some people calling themselves radicals are afflicted with the vice of envy, lusting after their neighbors’ goods. But we are talking here of social principles, not of individual failings.
It has been said by a hostile critic that the conservative believes all social questions to be at bottom questions of private morality. Properly understood, this is quite true; and thinking conservatives can take a modest pride in this conviction. A society in which men and women are governed by conscience, by a strong sense of moral right and wrong, by private convictions of honor and justice, will be a good society, the conservative thinks, whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of conscience, and intent only upon gratification of sensual desires, will be a bad society, no matter how many people vote and no matter how “liberal” its formal constitution may be. For justice and generosity in any nation are no better and no worse than the prevailing private convictions of the men and women who compose that nation. Soviet Russia may have a model constitution, in the eyes of the doctrinaire radical; but justice and generosity are nearly dead in Soviet Russia, because conscience is left out of question. Britain may have a very antiquated constitution, in the eyes of the doctrinaire radical; but justice and generosity are very much alive in Britain, because the influence of private conscience remains pervasive.
As the modern radical has come to disregard private responsibility in morals and politics and economic life, so he has come to depreciate the idea of private conscience. All the same, he knows there is power left in the word “conscience,” and he cannot be wholly unaware that a society decays if it recognizes no enduring standards of right and wrong: so, endeavoring to warp the word to fit his ideology, the radical frequently talks of “social conscience.” But he rarely defines this phrase; one gathers its meaning only by the context in which the radical puts it. By “social conscience,” the radical seems to imply a belief that one person ought somehow to feel guilty about being in any way superior to anyone else—and, more, that somehow an abstract justice dictates to mankind the right and duty to pull everyone down to a dead level of equality. I am aware that I am not being fair to all radicals when I write this: some radicals do mean something better when they say “social conscience”—they mean the traditional obligation of those favored in this world to assist those who have been unfortunate. But I cannot perceive how this latter usage of “social conscience” has any advantage over that simple old word “conscience.” Conscience always has dictated charity. And I am afraid that most radicals want simply to pull down political establishments and private property and superior private abilities when they talk of “social conscience.”
The conservative never has erected a wall between private conscience and society. Aside from the obligations toward God and one’s self which conscience dictates, the whole function of conscience is to teach us how to deal justly with our fellow men and women. And society is simply our fellow men and women considered collectively. There cannot be one kind of conscience for dealing with the men and women we meet, as persons—and a second kind of conscience for dealing with abstract “society,” as if somehow society were not made up of individual human beings. Conscience is simply conscience. It is not “social” or “anti-social.” It is the sense of right and justice which instructs us how we, as moral persons, ought to live with other moral persons.
So, the conservative is not “anti-social” or “conscienceless.” The thinking conservative believes that conscience is healthy in proportion as it touches directly upon particular human beings whom we know, and unhealthy in proportion as it becomes abstract, sentimental, generalized, institutionalized, and directed by impersonal political authority. Many of the people who “bestow a kiss upon the universe” and talk windily of “social conscience” are the least reliable guardians of right and wrong when they come face to face with private duties and their neighbors. Conservatism has been called “loyalty to persons,” as against abstract ideological attachment to impersonal establishments and theoretic dogma. Just so, the conservative is conscientious because he respects the truly human person, the moral individual. He is charitable precisely because he knows that charity begins at home; he is just precisely because he looks upon men and women as his brothers and sisters, under a divine commandment of love, not as units in an efficient planned economy.
Good old-fashioned conscience always has impelled men and women to be charitable. (“Charity,” literally understood, means “tenderness,” not simply “relief.”) It has always taught the strong, the wise, the industrious, the provident, the fortunate, the swift, the handsome, the inheritor of wealth, to assist from the charity of their hearts, and to the full extent of their ability, our fellow men and women who are weak or unfortunate or sick or old or bewildered. In this sense, conscience always has been “social.” The conservative does not need any new dispensation to inform him of his charitable duties. But he is convinced that the way to a good conscience is through personal charity, personal relationships, and private duties—not, ordinarily, through the mechanical and impersonal functioning of some grandiose state design. He wants to keep conscience, like charity, close to home; because once conscience ceases to be personal, it ceases to be conscience at all, being transformed into nothing better than enlightened selfishness or positive law. He recognizes that, in some matters and in cases of emergency, private conscience must work collectively, through public agencies. But, understanding the nature of conscience, he tries to keep, to the fullest extent possible, the operation of conscience as a personal and private matter.
When the conservative engages in charity, for instance, he first endeavors to do all that he can personally and privately. When that will not suffice—when self-help and family cooperation are not enough—he turns to private voluntary agencies. When these, in their turn, do not seem sufficient, he resorts to municipal and local and state action. If all these resources somehow fail, then he turns to charity on a national scale. But he is inclined to believe that all the ordinary problems of society, except in great emergencies, can be dealt with sufficiently, and most humanely, on the personal, local, voluntary foundation of simple conscience, the sense of duty which good men and women feel toward their fellow-creatures. If that healthy private conscience sinks into apathy or vice, there is no use talking about “social conscience”: there cannot be a nation in which private morality is bad and public morality is good.