The liveliest definition of a conservative is Ambrose Bierce’s in his Devil’s Dictionary: “Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” The conservative, truly, represents the feeling of sympathy with the past, the forces of permanence in society; the liberal, the feeling of glory in the future, the forces of change in society. Since it is the liberal who desires radical alteration of the existing order, ordinarily the liberal is more active than the conservative. It is the liberal, ordinarily, who writes polemical tracts and organizes mass movements; the conservative, except when he is aroused by dread of radical change or alarmed by the decay of his society, tends to rely upon the powerful and stable forces of custom and habit. It is this tendency which gave John Stuart Mill an excuse for calling conservatives “the stupid party.” Thus, Lord Silverbridge, in Trollope’s novel The Duke’s Children, tells his father the Duke of Omnium, by way of apology for having joined the Conservative Party: “In comparison with a great many men, I know that I am a fool. Perhaps it is because I know that, that I am a Conservative. The Radicals are always saying that a Conservative must be a fool. Then a fool ought to be a Conservative.”
Yet when the reflecting conservative is roused to serious thought and action, often he can move with a power startling to his radical or liberal adversaries. Cicero in the time of the dissolution of the Roman Republic, Falkland in the English Civil Wars, Burke in the age of the French Revolution, and John Adams in the early years of our Republic are examples of this power. And nowadays American conservatives, roused to the dread threat of the totalist state, are writing and acting to some purpose.
There are stupid conservatives, just as there are stupid liberals and radicals; but conservatives really are not the “stupid party.” It has been said that “conservatism is enjoyment.” The conservative believes life, despite all its afflictions, to be good; and he believes our American society, despite all its defects, to be sound at the core. Therefore, enjoying life and our old institutions, he does not share the radical’s frantic desire to mould all things anew. He does not believe that ours is the worst of all possible worlds; and he does not believe that there ever will be a perfect world, here below. Conservatives are the stupid party only in the sense that radicals are the neurotic party: that is, if some conservatives are merely dull and complacent, nevertheless some radicals are merely hysterical and malcontent—the men who went out to David in the Cave of Adullam. “Ordinarily,” the late Professor F. J. C. Hearnshaw wrote once, “it is sufficient merely for the conservative to sit and think, or perhaps merely to sit.”
Burke compared the conservative English of his day to great cattle browsing under the English oaks, silent and seemingly stupid when compared with the myriads of radical grasshoppers chirping in the meadow round about them; but when real strength is in question, he added, the grasshoppers are as nothing by the side of the conservative cattle. It is so still. A large number of conservatives now realize that it will not suffice for them merely to sit; they must think as well, and act; and I think that they may act to some purpose.
Stupidity is one of the principal accusations against conservatives—though what is meant by it, ordinarily, is simply that conservatives do not believe that abstract schemes of positive law and mass-meetings can make this world of ours into a terrestrial paradise. Another charge frequently brought against conservatives is that they oppose Progress. And this latter charge has just as much foundation as the former: that is, some superficial justification for it exists; but when one examines the real first principles of conservatism, one finds that the thinking conservative is grossly misinterpreted by his radical critics.
The conservative is not opposed to progress as such, though he doubts very much that there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society contains two elements, what Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression.
The Permanence in a society is formed by those enduring values and interests which give us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, and society slips into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate, and society subsides into an Egyptian or a Peruvian lethargy. The intelligent conservative, therefore, endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger all the great heritage bequeathed to us by our ancestors in a rash endeavor to bestow upon us a dubious future of alleged universal happiness. The conservative, in short, is in favor of reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the abstract cult of Progress, which cult assumes that everything new is necessarily better than everything old.
Change is essential to a good society, the conservative reasons. Just as the human body uses up old tissue and takes on new, so the body politic must discard, from time to time, some of its old ways and take on certain beneficent innovations. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be healthy, the change must be in a regular manner, and harmonious 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 society should ever be wholly old, and nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of our society, just as it is the means of conservation of our physical bodies.
Just how much change, however, a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the spirit of the age and the peculiar conditions of the society in question. It is one of the faults of the radical that commonly he advocates immediate and perilous change at the very time when gradual and temperate change already has commenced. Thus, it was in the French Revolution: as Tocqueville wrote of his nation, “Halfway down the stairs, we threw ourselves out of the window in order to get to the ground more quickly.” The conservative believes that any change which means a sharp break with established interests and usages is perilous; and he maintains that change, if it is to achieve real benefits, must be the voluntary work of many individuals and associations, not decreed by some presumptuous central authority. The United States have altered greatly since the founding of the Republic; some of those changes have been for good, and some for ill; but it is one of the chief merits of our country that we have not been in love with change for the mere sake of change. Our prosperity and comparative tranquility are the result, in no small measure, of the fact that we always have tried to reconcile the best in the old order with the improvements which our ingenuity has suggested. And our change has been the work, not of someone’s Grand Design, but of the independent endeavors of many men and women working prudently.
Some very important things, however, the conservative knows to be immutable; and he holds that it is highly dangerous to tamper with that which probably cannot be altered for the better. He does not think that we can change human nature, in the mass, for the better; there is only one sort of improvement in human nature, and that is internal improvement—the improvement every man and every woman can work privately. He does not think that we can improve upon the Ten Commandments as a guide to virtue. He does not think that we can create out of whole cloth a form of government better suited to our national temper than that which we already have. He holds, in short, that the great discoveries in morals and in politics already have been made; we will do well to employ these truths, rather than to seek vaguely for some new dispensation. He says, as Burke said more than a century and a half ago in reply to the eighteenth-century advocates of a new morality and a new politics, “We know that we have made no new discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.”
If one has to choose between the two, Permanence is more important than Progression. Between a custom and an institution that are known to function fairly well, and a custom and an institution that are unknown qualities, it is wiser to prefer the old and tried over the new and untried. Randolph of Roanoke cried out to a startled House of Representatives, “Gentlemen, I have found the philosopher’s stone! It is this: never, without the greatest provocation, to disturb a thing that is at rest.” The elaborate fabric which we call our civil social order—the complex of moral habits, political establishments, customary laws, and economic ways—has been erected over many centuries by a painful and laborious process of trial and error. It is the product of filtered wisdom, “the democracy of the dead,” the considered opinions and the weighed experience of many generations. If we demolish that edifice, it is scarcely possible for us to rebuild it. Our established order works; we cannot be sure that some conjectured new order would work. And we have no right to play with society as if it were a toy; the rights of millions living and more millions yet to be born are at stake here. So, I repeat, whenever a clear choice has to be made, we are wise if we prefer Permanence to Progression.
But often it is not necessary to make that choice. Frequently we have it in our power to combine moderate and measured progress with the present advantages of established society. The prudent conservative does not forget his obligation to unite to a disposition to preserve an ability to reform. The American conservative character has made it possible for us to grow from a few millions of people in Atlantic seaboard colonies to a great nation of a hundred and eighty million, extending from the Arctic to the Caribbean and from bases in Africa to bases in Korea. This has been genuine progress; but it has been progress within the framework of tradition. In accomplishing this progress, we have preserved almost intact the moral and social institutions with which our Republic commenced. Such is the conservative’s ideal of the satisfactory relationship between permanence and change. The grand principles endure; it is only their application which alters.
Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, a generation ago—when nearly everyone who wanted to be a la mode called himself a liberal—set down as accurate and pitiless a description of modern liberalism as I know:
A Liberal, to be brief, is one who thinks that human beings are by nature good and trustworthy, and that everything is sure to get better and better by mere lapse of time, provided only that we rid our lives of unfortunate social maladjustments brought about by ancient wickedness such as, of course, no longer exists, and can free human minds from the inhibitions of supernatural religion. The Liberal believes that man is a noble fellow with no soul, and that as such he is sure to come to possess the most sublime creations of culture as a sort of by-product of enlightened self-interest, or, as the vulgar put it, of “keeping an eye on the ball.” In education, the liberal regards with awe “the unspoiled human baby,” and seeks to develop that baby not by way of teaching him the necessary disciplines, but rather by letting him do as he pleases. In politics, the liberal believes that if you give a vote to every human being and always direct public policy in accordance with the majority of ballots cast, the highest possible social good is inevitably the result.
So much for the liberal. The conservative is a very different sort of being. The conservative knows that he was not born yesterday. He is aware that all the benefits of our complex civilization are the delicate creations of many generations of painstaking and sacrificing effort. It is not “by mere lapse of time” that everything gets better and better; when things improve, it is because conscientious men and women, working within the framework of tradition, have struggled valiantly against evil and sloth. Progress, though too rare in history, is real; but it is the work of artifice, of human ingenuity and prudence; it is not automatic. And progress is possible only so long as it is undertaken upon the sure footing of permanence.