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Three Things Conservatives Believe
I take the following to be among the most important principles that inform and motivate conservatives. I am not giving an argument in hopes of persuading non-conservatives, just an explanation of some foundational principles.
I say “foundational” because a decent statement of conservatism might not actually contain any of them. These aren’t the principles that are conservatism, but principles that motivate conservatives. Sometimes one of them (especially one of the first two) is an unstated premise lurking behind a conservative argument that just doesn’t seem to reach non-conservatives.
It is possible to believe one or more of these things and not be a conservative. And it is possible to be a conservative and not believe all three (though I believe all three myself). I certainly don’t presume to speak for all conservatives or aim to replace the other good explanations of conservatism that are out there.
1. We believe that any kind of an island theory of human nature is mistaken. We think the Apostle Paul and Breakfast At Tiffany’s are right: People do belong to each other–husbands and wives, parents and children, friends, etc.
People do belong to each other. And that’s why smoking isn’t just an individual choice, Audrey.
One consequence of this is that there is no such thing as a real but victimless crime. Every sin has a network of victims: starting with the sinner himself (as my homeboy Plato, a great enemy of island theories of human nature, understood), then moving outward to include the people close to him who hurt when he hurts, the people the sinner didn’t do good for as a result of his hurting himself, and moving further outward to include the people who had to help the sinner recover from the effects of his sin, and the other people they couldn’t help while they were busy helping him.
Now I’m not advocating anti-smoking laws with the caption in the clip above. Writing on Ricochet when kids need to be put to bed isn’t just a personal matter either, and I sure don’t want the government regulating my Ricochet!
There is a whole lot of room for common ground with libertarians even if you reject island theories (and I imagine some genuine libertarians do agree with us on this point). And I want Ricochet to succeed, just as I want the right-of-center coalition to continue, to grow, and to succeed.
Whether or not anti-smoking laws or marijuana bans are proper, conservatives will not (typically) oppose them on the grounds that smoking something is a personal choice for the individual. It’s not, and practically nothing is. (By the way, I myself don’t understand how — assuming originalism is correct — federal marijuana bans can be constitutional if federal alcohol bans aren’t.)
This is also one reason we tend not to like the “get government out of the marriage business” or the “same-sex marriage doesn’t hurt you” idea. If we happen to think that one idea of marriage is less accurate, less beneficial, or less just than another, we fear that its enactment in society will eventually affect everyone. Notably, we tend to think of marriage as an institution that involves everyone: the marriage partners themselves, any children they have, their friends, their family, their neighbors and local church, and even the government.
A few brief clarifications. We also – enthusiastically – reject the tendency (more popular on the Left) to reduce the individual to the community. And we tend to think that it’s an actual village that raises a child, not the federal government. And when we reject island theories of human nature, we’re usually not talking about economics. (But some of us might be up for combining a non-island theory of human nature with a liberty-based idea of economic cooperation; think Von Mises and the book I, Pencil. And, to be candid, many of us are comfortable with a degree of regulation and some sort of a scaled-down welfare system).
2. We believe that things have natures. And when I say “natures,” I mean the sort of “nature” in sentences like “It is the nature of the heart to pump blood” or “The natural function of the kidneys is to clean out the blood.” I don’t mean “the natural world” or “the laws of physics” or “the way things usually are.” (In the dictionary, I mean numbers 8, 10, and 18.)
In general, “the nature of X” refers to the kind of thing X is. And natures have implications for how a thing should be; it should be used in accordance with its nature, and not contrary to it. (This is the sort of ethics you get in Alasdair MacIntyre and others in the Aristotelian tradition.)
The fact that things have natures is the reason they have proper functions. The proper function of a heart is to pump blood, because its nature is that of a blood-pumping thing. The function of an eye is to see, because it is a seeing thing. The function of a leg is to walk, because it is a walking thing.
In really big stuff, the function of a human being is to do such-and-such, because the human being is a such-and-such-doing kind of thing. Such-and-such might be having reason govern bodily appetites (Plato, Aristotle, C. S. Lewis), or loving God and neighbor (various confessions of faith and, again, Lewis), or living according to moral law (Stoic philosophers or, perhaps, Kant; and maybe Confucius and, again, Lewis).
Lewis is awesome.
In really controversial stuff, the function of marriage – if marriage also has a nature — might be sexual companionship and reproduction, which can perhaps be reducible to one term: heterosexual companionship). And the function of sex might be the same. With that in context, we can ask:
- Are things contrary to nature sinful, or merely unhealthy?
- Should anything contrary to nature be subject to government restriction? And which things?
- Is occasional use of birth control to delay pregnancy an act against nature, or just a refusal to live up to the full ideal of nature (just as I – quite innocently – refuse to live up the full ideal of my body’s nature when I don’t keep constantly in fit condition for running marathons)?
Now, here is one sort of thing that is sometimes said in opposition to the idea that things have natures: “How can natures exist if all is matter, and hasn’t science proved that all is matter?” This is really two questions; the first one is a good one, and probably the best answer is they can’t. But the answer to the second question is no, and for at least two reasons. One reason is that science — while it does a good job studying things made of matter — doesn’t show that there is nothing that isn’t made of matter: that is not the business of science, but of metaphysics.
The other reason is that, as Thomas Nagel says, “the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” (more on this topic here and here on Ricochet). Another challenge is: “Explain these natures! What are they, and where are they? Why should anyone believe in such mysterious entities?” There are two ways to respond to this challenge.
One is the direct response, and that is to explain natures. I won’t attempt that here! (I’m not entirely sure I can, but maybe I can; at any rate, if I can I would need a new post to do it in.) A second response would challenge the premise behind the challenge: that you can’t rationally believe in something you can’t explain. This premise is false: We all rationally believe in the existence of time and believe that we are in it and moving through it, but few if any of us can explain time.
Note that sentences SoCon Ricochetti sometimes use such as “heterosexual sex is by nature fertile” entail the reality of natures, which we might as well admit are a bit hard to explain. However, sentences like “It’s 6:35 AM” entail the existence of time, which is just as hard to explain!
Everyday reality is almost infinitely mysterious. It’s best if we learn to live with the mysteries, or learn to explain them. But let us not explain them away or ignore them. And let us not accept some mysteries we like while rejecting others on the grounds that they are mysterious!
3. We think that religion can be a source of knowledge. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this topic. We conservatives commonly think it is possible to know something from God, or from the Bible – or perhaps another sacred text — or from the Church or even from the (uncapitalized) church.
Every item of knowledge, as philosophers have known at least since Plato, is a true belief, and also has some other characteristic: it is justified, or warranted, or believed on good evidence, or believed due to the operation of cognitive faculties aimed at truth and functioning properly in the right environment, or whatever.
Naturally, the beliefs we’re talking about include the material of our own internal theological and ethical squabbles. And, of course, the big controversial political ones often include beliefs like “Marriage is a man-woman thing” and “All human beings, being made in the image of God, have human rights.”
Now, since we think it is possible to have knowledge from religious sources, we think that such a belief is true. And since it is true it is not just a matter of personal opinion. So we can’t go along with the popular postmodern ideas that relegate all truth-claims to mere personal perspectives. And, since we think it is possible to have knowledge from religious sources, we don’t generally think that such a belief is something we are just lucky enough to have. We may be lucky (or, more properly, blessed or graced) to have such a belief, but such a belief will also stand to reason. So we aren’t obligated to just keep it to ourselves and pretend that our knowledge is a private matter.
Whether — and in what manner — to require others to act like they have the same knowledge is a separate question, and again, there is considerable room for agreement here with our libertarian friends. In fact, a lot of us think we have knowledge from religious sources that religious liberty is best! (See here, for example; scroll down to section XVII on religious liberty and note that the principles are justified by appeal to theology and Scripture.)
And since we think it is possible to have knowledge from religious sources, we are unusually invulnerable to fallacies of the appeal to the people variety – at least when it’s not our own people that are being appealed to! God overrules any popular view that history is heading in this way or that way. We prefer not to betray God just to side with history. If history really is going that way, we’d rather be with God on what looks, for the short term, like the losing side. And we know that history won’t go that way forever because God is never on the losing side.
Published in General
I don’t believe so, no.
You’ve lost me. What makes you think that I think that their marriage hurts anyone?
An interesting thesis! But if you gave a reason for it, I’m afraid I missed it.
Aristotle is wrong about physics in the same sense that classical mechanics is wrong about quantum mechanics.
Reading Aristotle’s physics, for instance, and coming away with the observation that he’s wrong about most things is missing the point of the Aristotelian project. Aristotle is a starting point on the path to scientific-like knowledge. In his day Aristotle was the cutting edge of science. It’s more fair to look at Aristotle and see hypotheses that were disproven rather than to just think his work is wrong.
The reasonable hope is that we have it less wrong than we used to have it. This is the case in the physical sciences at least. But as for Aristotle’s other topics of inquiry, the metaphysics, political sciences, logic, rhetoric, and poetry, I think we’ve still got a lot to learn from Aristotle.
If you’d like a good primer on the world of “conservatism” in all its intricacies and subtleties, you could do worse than The Graphic Guide to Conservatism, created by Olivier Ballou (former designer for the Conservative Party of Canada, now working for the American Enterprise Institute, and sorta a bit of a hero of mine for being a successful conservative communications/design guy).
His “Seven Conservative Ideas” seem like a pretty good attempt at defining the core principles on which (nearly) all conservatives agree (though he might have added the primacy of “family” as an eighth idea).
FYI: I disagree with #1. I do not agree that conservatives believe people do or can own/belong to each other. That is clearly a socialist rather than a conservative idea.
Instead, conservatives believe people can have obligations to each other which are akin to contracts, even when no formal contract has been negotiated, but that is not close to being the same thing as owning/belonging to another person.
Furthermore, conservatives do not believe that these obligations are absolute. If other parties do not reciprocate, then the obligation becomes null and void.
e.g. A parent’s obligations to their children become null if the children leave the home, and a parent has the right to exile a child from the home if the child does not conform to the rules of the household. The child is not owned by the parent, but both the parent and the child have obligations to each other. This is the lesson of the parable of The Prodigal Son. If the child had belonged to the father, then the father never would have given the child his inheritance and allowed him to leave the family household in the first place.
Swimming is not contrary to human nature in the sense that it doesn’t deliberately thwart the natural ends of human nature. Our feet and legs do better moving on land than thru water, but moving thru water in no way impedes or thwarts our ability to move on land. So, on the natural law view, it is not immoral to do it and have as much fun as you want swimming. To take a ridiculous example, surgically modifying your feet to become fins so you can swim faster, but that would impede your ability to walk, <i> would </i> be immoral. (I wonder if the Olympics would disqualify someone for this. I hope so.)
More realistically, things like bulimia are immoral because they intentionally thwart the natural ends of our digestive system. Same for contraception.
OK, but forgive me if this doesn’t seem so clarifying. You seem to have two conflicting elements of your definition of “nature” that need unpacking:
Because it is the nature of an asthmatic to have asthma attacks, just like it is the nature of a heart to pump blood – as you say, “the nature of X” refers to the kind of thing X is, and we know what kind of thing an asthmatic is: an asthma-haver.
If you want to restrict “the nature of X” to only the good, wholesome kinds of things X is, then you have to narrow your definition of nature from “the kind of thing X is”, even if that kind of thing is diseased.
Good intrinsic qualities are only a subset of all intrinsic qualities, no?
Misthiocracy 34, thanks for the comment. I don’t think we actually disagree on belongin g. Your words may have been more precise than mine–or that movie’s, or the Apostle Paul’s.
We may disagree on some specifics regarding who owes what to whom and when.
Augustine,
While I agree with you about the natural law and the superiority of Aristotelian ethics and metaphysics to contemporary alternatives, I’m not sure who your post is directed at. Someone like me, who already agrees with you, doesn’t need to be convinced. Those who don’t are going to first need to be convinced of the vacuity of modern ethics and metaphysics, and convinced of the superiority of the Aristotelian alternative. But we are hardly going to be able to do that in a Ricochet combox discussion, are we? That’s why guys like Ed Feser devote booklength efforts to project.
But, in any case, peace and keep the faith.
In the story Breakfast At Tiffany’s (much more so in the novel than the movie, but elements exist in both versions), both the characters are pretty terrible people, and we probably shouldn’t be taking any lessons from either of them.
Holly is a libertine. When she says she belongs to nobody she means that she has no obligations to anybody but herself, ever.
Meanwhile, on what basis can Paul justify his assertion that Holly “belongs” to him? We own things that we either create or that we buy. Paul certainly didn’t create Holly, nor did he buy her. He merely wants her. The idea that someone can belong to you simply because you want it to be true is an awful lesson.
In the novella, the male character (nicknamed “Fred” rather than Paul) goes even further in his unjustified appropriation (a word which means “to seize property”) of Holly, when he publishes her stories as his own. She only “belongs” to him because he’s a thief.
Neither character can possibly be described as “conservative”, nor can the creators of either the film (Blake Edwards) or the novella (Truman Capote) be thus described (though Capote actually comes closer than Edwards).
And I do think it is possible to be a conservative without being explicitly committed to the natural law or something like Aristotelianism.
A simple Burkean philosophy will do, that recognizes that cultural and social institutions that have developed over time embody a “cultural capital” that can be won through experience and no other way. Such a conservative is loath to agree to revolutionary or radical changes and respects the wisdom painstakingly captured in centuries old institutions – even if, in my view, he fails to recognize that the reason those institutions have endured is their consonance with the natural law. He’s not interested, for instance, in the natural law foundations of marriage and the human family, but he recognizes that the heteronormative institution of marriage has been the cultural bedrock of Western civiliation for thousands of years, and that messing with it with may have profound consequences well beyond anything gay marriage advocates have imagined. And that’s enough to be a real conservative.
On no. 1, I think Misthio hit closer to the mark with obligations rather than ownership. I bridge my libertarian, island tendencies with my conservative reasoning by acknowledging the real, metaphysical bonds between human beings but only considering government enforcement of these obligation in cases where material, physical harms occur from their breaking. Government has a place (perhaps) when someone breaks my arm, but not to make whole my broken heart.
Midge #36, I’ll do my best to reply using a phone!
Clarification is indeed needed, but the best way to do it is to elaborate more on the (broadly) Aristotelian metaphysics.
Strictly speaking, the X formula in the opening post is only to be used to describe what IS. And a defect is not a real thing, but a lack in a thing.
So a name specifically denoting a thing with a defect does not denote its nature.
Let me ask another question on the Island theory:
Who believes that the Island Theory of human nature is correct? The left – a-la-“it takes a village” a.k.a it takes a village / state / federal Government?
How is this a distinguishing “conservative” belief? As opposed to who? Is progressive, socialist or communist belief different from this?
What is uniquely conservative about it?
Misthiocracy #39,
All I’m going for regarding the movie is what you said about obligations, the sense of “belong” used in the film.
No need to take them as role models or call them conservatives.
Indeed, I believe conservatives believe in this so-called “island theory” much more than progressives do.
The difference between conservatives and libertines is that conservatives recognize that the inhabitants of islands still need to foster positive and healthy relations with the inhabitants of other islands.
I am an island, but I am not the only island, and I am not so far from the other islands that my actions have no effect upon them. This is precisely why I have obligations towards the other islands, but still I can only ever own one island.
I think the sense of “belong” that Paul uses in the film is a very selfish one. He truly believes that Holly “belongs” to him simply because he wishes it. I see no rational basis for his claim of ownership. He’s the epitome of the entitled wimp who thinks a woman is obligated to repay male philios with female eros, and who complains about being stuck in the friendzone when this reciprocation does not occur.
Barnhart #42,
So are you talking about two men?
Nice work. I would suggest in the future that something like this be taken up in a series of three posts. Each of these sections provides enormous room for discussion. Looking forward to following it.
Misthiocracy #47,
That doesn’t sound like a different sense of the word “belong”, but a lousy reason for saying it.
The only other meaning of “belong” that I can think of that does not at least imply ownership would be association membership. That’s clearly not the meaning being used by Paul in the movie.
Since association membership is voluntary (or at least it should be), it can’t be the meaning used when one argues that conservatives believe that humans belong to each other.
Barkha #34,
I’m not talking about conservative principles per second, but principles that often motivate and inform conservatives.
There’s nothing uniquely consevative about rejecting island theories. But rejecting them while simultaneously rejecting the reduction of the individual to the community is a powerful motive for preffering conservative principles.
J D F and J Climacus,
Yeah, but who has time to write an extra book on y he side? I don’t. And if I did how many Ricochetti would read it?
This is written for anyone who wants to read. And. maybe for a few folk who don’t understand consevatives.
There are three essays in the background which lay some groundwork for this post. They’re linked. I grant they may not be nearly enough.
I have not met any such libertarians. (And no, Ayn Rand was not a libertarian. Ask her, she’ll tell you.)
As an agnostic libertarian, I am fully in what you describe as the Jonah Goldberg camp.
I also consider myself a conservative by contemporary American standards, although I firmly reject all three prongs of Augustine’s description of conservatives.
Misthiocracy comment 51,
You said of a character in the film, “When she says she belongs to nobody she means that she has no obligations to anybody but herself, ever.”
That sense of the word “belong” is the only one I had in mind.
All I’ve said about the movie is that the thesis that people do belong to each other in this sense is in the film.
” …there is no such thing as a real but victimless crime. Every sin has a network of victims…”
I haven’t read the comments so this point may have been made already: I think that this use of crime and sin as if they were synonyms gets to the heart of most of what’s wrong with Conservative critiques of libertarianism. Many Libertarians will agree with most conservative insights about culture and the family including the contents of this post. These insights however belong to social but not political thought and libertarians insist on a strict separation between the two. You can make the argument in regard to issues like SSM that the difference has been made meanginless due to the state’s usurpation of society’s role. I’m sympathetic to this argument but don’t see how it applies to issues of prohibition. The state here is not simply recognizing the proper definition of social institution, it’s doing exactly what it is that the state does which sets it apart from society: coercing.
Darn phone software! Barkha # 42, are you talking about two men?
This presents a huge risk of presuming one’s conclusions. An aspect I like = true nature; one I don’t = defect. Taken as premise, these will certainly lead to a comforting conclusion, but one that is not very persuasive to someone not of the same mind.
I think you got to this matter first,
Londo MollariGaius. You’ve got me on something, but I’m not sure what: ambiguity maybe.I do sort of imply that every “real crime” is a “sin.” But I don’t think every (legal) crime is a sin, since for all I know my wearing Cookie Monster pajamas this morning might have violated some federal regulation, and I know it wasn’t a sin.
Nor do I think that every sin is, or should be, a crime. The extension of the opening post in comment 3 is relevant here.
Only if you take two fragments of a (broadly) Aristotelian approach and neglect the rest! We have to submit to reality. Like medical science, an investigation of the proper function of human beings is almost guaranteed to find out that we ought to behave in ways we don’t like to behave, but which make us happier in the long run.
That’s all in Aristotle, and any other serious ethicist in the same tradition.