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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
Huge risk or not, the task is unavoidable, because the only way we can talk about things is through distinguishing their natures, and that involves discriminating essential features from secondary or defective ones. Bears and dogs are different creatures even though they both can have black fur, because having black fur is not essential to being either a dog or a bear. The alternative is nominalism. And a deaf bear is still a bear, and we recognize the deafness as a defect, because in the ordinary course of nature bears can hear, and are equipped with the organs to do so.
I enjoyed reading this. I don’t know if all shades of Conservatism believes in all three things, but I certainly do. The world is a matirx, and acts and things are all interconnected. There is no such thing as isolated individualism.
Regarding comment#3: Most Libertarians in my experience use the harm principle in a way that is indifferenciable from the NAP: when you make an exception for harm that is consensual, either through direct agreement or the assumption of risk upon entering a voluntary relationship, then “harm” is just another way of referring to the initiation of force. While Libertarians probably need to be faulted for using the least precise of the two terms it’s still inaccurate to say that conservatives simply have a broader definition of harm when that’s not really what Libertarians are talking about at all.
Thanks, Manny!
You do realize how unfortunate it is that you must constantly say, “Don’t understand me? Read Aristotle!” It’s fine if we run up against questions that literally take a book to answer, because Ricochet has its limits, and it happens to me regularly, but if you want us to understand where you’re coming from it’d be better for you to be able to explain it as concisely as possible rather than ask us to earn part of a philosophy degree on our own.
My brain is slow on these acronyms. And we may have readers even slower, who no doubt will have NO TROUBLE AT ALL understanding my strike-throughed references to Babylon 5!
NAP = non-aggression principle, right?
So, I think, you said: My comment number 3 is not very fair to libertarians in that their understanding of harm might be just as broad as mine; it’s consent they emphasize, not harm per se.
What a great distinction to make,
Londo MollariGaius! You might be exactly right on this, and if that makes me wrong then so be it. (But maybe it depends on the strain of libertarianism.)I thought he did explain in the comment you quoted. He said “read Aristotle” (more or less that’s what he said), but then he went on to give a brief argument. Then he went on to suggest reading Aristotle again.
I didn’t mean “You should read Aristotle” (though that’s not a bad idea) so much as “You may not know this, but you’re misunderstanding the whole tradition of natural law ethics that motivates a lot of conservatives.”
Fair enough, though. But I think the relevant bit of Aristotelianism was presented pretty concisely above (bolded).
More of an explanation than an argument: What eating two gallons of ice cream for breakfast is to the body’s nature as understood by medical science, SOMETHING will probably be to human nature as understood by natural law ethics.
The quoted portion may have made my comment misleading. I was mostly responding in general and I may not have taken the time to realize he was addressing my concern.
This is all happening so fast! I need to get out of here and watch some sci-fi on Netflix.
I’ll look in later. If a zillion comments come up I may not be able to give them the attention they deserve.
You’re all awesome! Bye for now.
I would only offer two examples: here and here
I think both articles so the Libertarian line of thinking that holds that socially conservative people are a problem and that it drives some Libertarians to vote Democrat of all things. In my comment I was trying to make clear that you can be be atheist, libertarian or not, and make common cause with social conservatives. I do not think all libertarians hold to that view however. I am glad that you do.
I don’t necessarily equate “socially conservative” with religious. And yes, there is a strain of intolerance among some social conservatives that I find distasteful, although I think it is a strain that runs against, rather than with, the teachings of Judeo-Christian morality. But despite that, the intrusions on individual liberties come from the left, overwhelmingly, so I make common cause with the right. (After all, you can only vote on candidates, not policies.)
A quote I’m fond of: “Do you know the difference between the bad ideas of the left and the bad ideas of the right? The bad ideas of the left become laws.”
I think that principle (1) — “we believe that any kind of an island theory of human nature is mistaken” — is helpful in distinguishing between conservatives and libertarians, but not very helpful in distinguishing between conservatives and Leftists.
I agree with Mis that expressing this in terms of ownership isn’t accurate, and that recognition of obligation to others captures it better. I think that the word duty captures the idea even better than obligation.
And added to duty is the recognition of what economists call externalities. Sometimes one person’s actions really do affect another emotionally and spiritually, even if there is no physical harm. Having a child with a drug addiction is an obvious example.
The libertarian archetype is the Marlboro Man — strong, self-reliant, and individualistic. The conservative archetype is more Ben Cartwright (Lorne Green in Bonanza) or Cliff Huxtable — a strong and self-reliant man, but living in a family and with duties to neighbors, patients, etc.
I don’t really have an archetype for the Leftist view. On many issues, they tend to view the society itself as the relevant unit, like a bee hive – the individual bees don’t matter, only the hive. On the other hand, on an eclectic variety of issues (mostly relating to traditional “sins” like sexuality, substance use/abuse, and gambling) the Left takes a very individualistic, permissive position.
I absolutely disagree. I think the analogy to individuals as islands among many applies equally to conservatives and libertarians.
The difference is in the degree to which each philosophy believes the actions of one island affects and/or harms the others.
The libertine islander thinks nothing of the welfare of the other islands, and may not even acknowledge the existence of other islands.
The libertarian islander might believe that an island may take any action as long as it does not harm another island.
The conservative islander might believe that an island may be regulated if an action may harm another island.
The progressive islander might believe that every action definitely affects every other island, therefore every island and every action must be regulated.
That’s a very stereotypical view of libertarian thought. After all, the Marlboro Man is merely a static image. One knows nothing of his behaviour, other than the fact that he likes to smoke and that he works outside. He could just as easily be a bandit as a cowboy.
I’ve never heard a libertarian evoke the image of the Marlboro Man as an ideal. Only conservatives and progressives make that assertion.
And you are fond of it for good reason.
Indeed That principle alone indeed does not distinguish between Conservatism and Leftism!
No objections! I think words like “ownership” and “belong” only work if we use them metaphorically to convey duties and obligations. I think that’s how it’s meant in the film, and by the Apostle Paul.
(Continued)
(Continued)
Indeed.
A very vivid description, and I’ll concur on Huxtable, with the codicil that he relies on others quite a bit–especially his wife. I’m not the best one to speak on the Marlboro man in this regard, but it was interesting to see a Libertarian here at Ricochet tell me that Amish make good libertarians.
Yes! The left tends towards the most extreme communitarianism sometimes, and extreme individualism at other times.
I have been contemplating a post of my own along these lines, but circumstances mean it will have to wait a week or two before I can write it. The key point of importance to me is that all three of these propositions presuppose that there is more to the universe than mere material, but that essence, substance, and identity are real things, and not abstract things. That accidental and essential are real categories, and that while substances may produce properties, properties do not produce either substance or essence. That all of this is independent of mind and mind-state. That the world as it is really is more complicated than the world as it is simply perceived.
These are not beliefs most moderns are even acquainted with, let alone hold. At a folk level, most people believe, I imagine, that properties create essences (this is what Tom Meyer is saying in comment 13), that all substances are the same (this is the atoms argument), and that either accidental categories don’t exist (asthma argument) or that they can be swapped with essential categories by an act of will (see: Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezel).
So, at a certain point, Augustine, you will simply have to explain Metaphysics to the Ricochettiois, because they don’t know it -at best they know the pop version or their barely remembered college intro classes. I minored in it and had to review.
Also, one teacher to another, Ricochet is more like a bar room brawl than a lecture or academic debate. If you try to engage everyone, you’ll get cold-cocked by a chair or bottle, or you’ll take up all the air in the room. Embrace the chaos, and only leave the bar when you really want to clock someone.
Aristotle lived in age of ignorance about some aspects of reality (vide the comments re his science). Just to take an example that’s like to set teeth on edge here: Consider the human. Aristotle presumably took man as seen as a given. Now we know about the genetic code, are beginning to learn to read and modify it (google CRISPR). So, is the nature of man to accept what parents and random chance have given us? Or is the nature of homo faber to use the tools that are available and modify his environment, even himself?
I’m not sure if we’re disagreeing — I’m certainly not a materialist in the sense you use the term or ideas related to it — so much as emphasizing using the same tools in different proportions. To me, Augustine seems a little too interested in the form/essence/teleology of things in comparison to their individual characteristics.
This probably isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s sort of like arguing over the varying importance of individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and the image as a whole. Augustine seems to be saying that the constituent pieces have little value in the absence of the image, while I’m saying that the image can only exist because of the parts.
Neither approach is inherently right or wrong, though they’re differently useful.
I think it’s more like a kung-fu movie. In a barroom brawl you get a pile-on of toughs singling out weaklings. In a kung-fu movie they always attack one-at-a-time. Bruce Lee never whined about being picked on.
Hey, if you write it would you mind seeing me a PM to be sure I don’t miss it?
You were there for the metaphysics conversations, right? Perhaps my memory fails.
So in this analogy the whole picture parallels the universal nature of some kind of thing, and the individual pieces parallel the individual things that have that universal nature, right?
I do care about the individual characteristics of things. (Maybe even some natures are individual things.)
So what? So do we.
Moreover, ignorance of science doesn’t entail ignorance of metaphysics.
This bit of science doesn’t overrule Aristotelian ethics. There are in fact philosophers, perhaps Gilson and definitely Arnhart, who argue that contemporary biology is evidence for the truth of (broadly) Aristotelian ethics.
Aristotle says yes!
Aristotle says no to the sort of self-modification you’re talking about; that would be risky at best since humans have a nature that’s (at best) risky to tamper with. That’s what Lewis called the abolition of man.
Of course, self-modification to bring oneself into alignment with human nature is a different matter entirely. That’s what Aristotle called ethics.
“Of course, self-modification to bring oneself into alignment with human nature is a different matter entirely. That’s what Aristotle called ethics.”
WHICH human nature, Augustine?
The image of God within us that, defaced in the Fall, will only be fully restored to the blessed apocalyptically at the end of ages of ages?
Or human nature as it really is now? Fallen, fallible, sick, foolish, and ignorant?
Both can claim the label “human nature”, but the latter has the stronger claim here on earth.
It’s interesting how often claims of ancient ignorance are themselves expressions of ignorance. Eugenics (the genetic engineering of species) is nothing new. Man has been doing it for thousands of years with horses and dogs. That’s why we have both Clydesdales and thoroughbreds, teacup Yorkies and Great Danes. Even the idea of engineering the human race is not new – Plato proposed it in The Republic. So you don’t need to know about the genetic code to entertain the idea of engineering the human race.
Of course, when you talk about “modifying himself”, you don’t really mean yourself, right? You’re already here. You mean modifying other people in furtherance of your experiment in improving the human race, correct? I don’t think Aristotle addressed this question directly (he was certainly familiar with Plato), perhaps because the idea that any man could possibly possess the wisdom to pursue such a thing was self-evidently absurd to him. I hope it was; it certainly is to me.
Human nature is always a given, in the sense that we have no say in the human nature with which we are born. The question is who gives it: Is it given by nature and perhaps nature’s God (if there is one), or by some other man in terms of his personal vision of human perfection? (Assuming that is what he chooses to engineer. Maybe he’s trying to engineer you to be a slave.) I think we are at the level of basic human rights here. Doesn’t the “right to life” mean a right to life given to you by nature, and not engineered for you by another man for purposes of his own choosing?