Once upon a time, long ago, I found myself sitting in a hotel bar having coffee with a prominent writer who self consciously presents themselves as a defender of the best of conservative political theory. The conversation flowed pretty naturally. I love to talk about ideas, especially with people who come at things differently from me. My pal located themselves broadly in the tradition associated with the English philosopher Roger Scruton. They advocated a deep scepticism towards radical change and a profound respect for time-tested norms and established institutions. This particular proposal has never seemed interesting to me. Scruton was one of those guys who thinks good architecture has pillars. I do not share Le Corbusier’s slogan that buildings are machines for living, yet much conservative reflection I encounter lingers on façades more than on how people actually live.
If we make a list of the kinds of ideas that structure conservatism, we might end up
with something like this:
- Attention to concrete realities: While they generate plenty of fine philosophers, as a rule, conservatives eschew grand theories and are much more interested in practical wisdom.
- Traditions exist for a reason: Conservative thought places a high value on what we inherit – norms, traditions, institutions. They aren’t likely to be arbitrary artefacts that land in the present from an irrelevant past. They are the cultural glue that binds our society together. They persist because they are resilient and they are resilient because they offer us some fitness function.
- Social Order is to be prioritised: Conservatives believe that every revolution is a declaration of politics’ failure. They don’t want to keep the past in pristine order, like a museum piece on display. To preserve something that is actually alive and in use means you adapt to changed circumstances. But that change needs to be gradual, incremental, organic… at a pace that human culture can keep up.
- We aren’t perfect: For conservatives, all utopian schemes are to be mistrusted because, fundamentally, humans are frail creatures prone to self-deception. This is actually a pretty strong argument – a cursory glance of any history rather supports this sense that humans have a tremendous ability to reduce things to self-interest and advance their projects through self-deception. Conservatives and their opponents weirdly agree on this, but conservatives are happier to admit it.
- Place matters: Conservative philosophy gives a central place to ideas like “home” because they need a fixed place that can serve as the basis by which the rate of wider change is measured. A sense of belonging, loyalty to neighbours, shared responsibility for the common good – all these things are hard to cultivate if we aren’t embedded in a particular place, share a common language, and so on.
The conversation in the bar rotated around all these interesting ideas. But then it veered wildly off course. My new buddy asked me what I was working on and I told them that I was toying with the idea of writing a book about the climate collapse that never mentions the climate collapse (Ciara Murphy and I eventually got that book written). They were dismayed. Whatever energy had been built up in our exchange quickly fled and I was chastised for propagating “the environmental hoax”. The writer granted that the climate is changing but they denied it was alarming and doubted the causes involved humans. They recommended various people whose heterodox ideas could be found on YouTube and urged me not to fall for such dubious sources as NASA, the Royal Society, and the Pope.
The chat ended soon after and I have not been invited out again. Their intransigent and brittle hostility to the idea that the climate is changing and that species are going extinct was entirely incompatible with a good conversation. But I have often reflected on how even if the unprecedented climate collapse was in doubt and the primary role played by human activity was in question, my conservative interlocutor – had they been following their own principles – should have been inclined towards taking the claims of environmentalism seriously. Because climate collapse and biodiversity breakdown runs the risk of devastating conservatism more than any arrangement of political or cultural opposition ever could.
To deny climate change is to deny the concrete realities staring us in the face.
Nothing is going to be more corrosive for tradition than the erosion of actual seasons!
What can threaten social order more than unpredictability around wheat harvests?
If your entire philosophy is predicated to the dual convictions that humans are motivated by self-interest and prone to self-delusion, what story could more fully legitimate your philosophy than fossil capitalism – where, to this day, otherwise good people dedicate their working lives to lining their own pockets while devastating the natural world (and telling themselves that some technological trick will get us out the bind)?
And, finally, if place matters, you need to think about men like the farmers I once met in Dhaka who described how their families had farmed the same land for centuries but now the seasonal flooding was taking, on average, 3 acres from them, every year. Place can’t matter if the soil has been salted like a curse from the Old Testament.
Presumably, conservatism has something to do with conservation. The deep respect that the conservative cultivates for tradition and institutions, the reverence for the stability upon which society flourishes, the clear sense of belonging to a place we can call home… all these things are threatened by the climate collapse and biodiversity breakdown. If conservatism preserves what is good, surely the first thing
to conserve is the world that makes every other good possible. If someone claims they cherish culture and civilization, they surely also have to cherish hedgerows, bogs, rivers, and city streets. Otherwise, “conservatism” is not about conserving anything. It is a costume in lieu of a commitment. If you can’t be
convinced to conserve the conditions of life, you are not to be trusted to care for anything that rests on them.
Never trust a conservative who is not an environmentalist.
