disposition

Here I am not trying to say anything original; I’m trying to put clearly what are (in some circles anyway) familiar points.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

Therefore,

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Not indicentally, it is because conservatism is a disposition that Oakeshott titles this essay “On Being Conservative” rather than “On Being a Conservative.”

If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.

Note that this highly-valued inheritance takes many forms. It may be a marriage; a larger family; a friendship or network of friendships; a parish church; a university; a body of knowledge; a collection of artworks; the oeuvre of a novelist or poet or composer or painter. It is whatever one is grateful to have received; whatever encounter appears to one as a gift.

I would add that the disposition to conserve one’s inheritance is truly and fully healthy only when it is accompanied by a desire to share one’s good inheritance with others who lack access to it or even awareness of it. To conserve only for oneself and one’s own is avarice. As Lewis Hyde has noted, good gifts find their fulfillment in circulation. This is why I have written so often of repair: repair is often the first step in conservation. We want to pass our inheritance along in better shape than we found it.

The questions that then arise are:

What forces tend towards the preservation of my inheritance?

What forces tends towards its dissipation or depredation?

By what means might I protect it from harm?

By what means might I increase its health and extend its reach?

Among the conserving and destroying forces are

personal vices and virtues

social institutions and practices (healthy and unhealthy)

forms of government (healthy and unhealthy)

And the means of conserving are also to be pursued on each of these three axes.

From this outline several conclusions may be drawn. In this post and in subsequent ones I will try to draw some of them.

Let’s begin here: For the person of conservative disposition, the question of what form of government to prefer is secondary and instrumental. That is, it lies downstream of the inheritance one wishes to conserve.

Governance does not create or bestow any genuine inheritance; rather, its fulfills its purpose by safeguarding, or helping to safeguard, and extending, or helping to extend, the good things that are made and found extra-governmentally. Whether to prefer socialism to free-market capitalism or vice-versa is an empirical question, not a principial one. Those empirical reasons may be very strong but should never assume the status of first principles.

Therefore, persons of conservative disposition will not make their preferences in electoral politics, their party affiliations, central to their identity. Those affiliations will always be held relatively loosely, and will remain subject to critical reflection and reassessment.

Moreover, such persons will realize that an over-emphasis on party affiliation leads to a neglect of the other major forces that affect the conservation of their inheritance. They will understand that no matter who is elected to office, possibilities remain for personal formation, the strengthening of families, and the building and sustaining of the institutions of civil society. To be sure, governments can help or hinder such projects, often in powerful ways, but what Oliver Goldsmith wrote 250 years ago remains true:

In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

If we forget this, then we will falsely believe that we can preserve what we have inherited while watching institutions crumble and accepting or even delighting in vice — as though being on the Right Side excuses every other shortcoming. What does it profit a conservative to win an election but lose his soul — and along with it his inheritance?

Some people will read the above and think that my point is that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump. That is not my point. I am arguing that any vote for any candidate in any election (a) should be made with an eye towards preserving one’s inheritance and (b) should be one element in a larger pattern of thought and action that keeps questions of governance in their proper and limited place. I did not vote for Donald Trump and cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would do so, but I believe I could come up with a dispositionally-conservative defense of voting for Trump. It would not be a defense that I believe in but rather one that I regard as rational. (I say I could make such a case, not that I will.)

What I’ve done in this post is simply to outline what I think the conservative disposition is and what its key points of focus should be. In future posts I will write about some particular elements of our inheritance and what might be done to conserve them. For instance:

the arts

the Church

the family

the good Earth