The canons of conservative thought: a meditation

[elfs]

Russell Kirk is sometimes regarded as one of the founders of the moderns conservative movement. In the mid-1950's he wrote a book called The Conservative Mind in which he outlined a number of interesting tenants of what it meant to be a conservative.

Reading them, I can't help but see that each and every one of them is based on nothing more than a feeling of rightness, perhaps smugly so, written across Kirk's persona by his own experience with religion. I've been reading Kirk, and I'm reacting to it, like every reader. More to the point, although his ideas will surely feed my writing, I'd like to get a grip around his ideas and explore them.

Kirk's first two premeses are these:

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
2. The conservative believes that there exist natural distinctions, and that society requires orders and classes that emphasize these distinctions.

If you've already recognized the inherent tension in these two statments, congratulations. If you see the basic flaw in the first premise, and how its resolution resolves the second, you're way ahead of me.

If I were a theist, I might agree with Kirk's first statement: it flows naturally from the consequences of a unitary and interventionist theism. God made us. God imposed His Will upon us. But I'm not a theist and I don't believe in interventionist superstitions. So I have to turn to human experience, and the mounting collections of evidence to make my case, and not to an arbitrarily chosen minority religious position.

And I'll give Kirk's first statement as true, if the analysis is shallow and banal enough. Because here's what we know: there is not one human nature, there are many. There's no such thing as "neurotypicality," there are only varying degrees of many different human mental capacities. The biological focus on reproduction goes awry when other mental modules, meant to provide order among men in the tribe during the millenia of evolutionary adaptation, converge in excess: homosexuality. The mental capacity to understand the pain of others, meant to create sympathy among tribespeople and hold the tribe together, end up flawed among a small subset to provide the viciousness needed to survive in a competitive environment: psychopathy. Another mental capacity to multitask, to be distractable, to be capable of certain kinds of synthesis get sacrificed to make room for capabilities that give us invention, innovation, focus: high-functioning autism.

There is not one human nature: there are thousands of different kinds. This is not the "diversity" of Kirk's second principle, except in the poorest of constrained definitions: this is innate abilities that cannot be rectified by imposing a uniform order. No laws can be created that fit "human nature" perfectly because human nature has a temporal component: it is only the mass aggregate of human beings alive at any given moment, and the law is desperately trying to catch up with that aggregate, the one straining against the other. Law is forever adapting to the moving target that is human nature, and human nature only exists as the contingent outcome of recent events and the dead hand of tradition.

If we're to take what's left of Kirk's argument seriously, we have only this left to admit: if we go with illiberal communitarianism intent on solving the needs of real people, then our problem is finding a constraining framework for action that satifies everyone, and I mean everyone: the sociopath as well as the saint, and the ultimate constraint is one that satisifies nobody. If we go with a society that actually believes in real liberty of conscience and action, then we end up with a meritocracy where limited psychopathy ends up being rewarded, where unequal distributing of resources results from individual choices.

Somewhere in the middle there is the solution. And I think Kirk's got the better handle on it by respecting that those differences exist and must be managed, but he and conservatives like him have a hell of a lot to swallow in accepting that human nature is deeper and more subtle than even we humans commonly accept. There is a tension in Kirk's thesis that comes down ultimately to simple power dynamics, a world in which the powerful do what they can, and the powerless accept what they must. In Thucydides' time, that quote applied to very clearly demarcated classes. Unfortunately for Kirk and conservatives like him, that's no longer true.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know why, but the mention of homosexuality as an excess seems wrong to me. I seem to remember reading that homosexuality occurs throughout the animal kingdom, so explaining it as a mental module convergence seems to make it seem too human.

Then again, perhaps I've been conditioned to think of homosexuality as something normal, and thus singling it out is the weirdness. I really am not sure.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It is normal. But that's the problem with using the word "normal." Psychopathy is normal and, in some configurations the various behaviors and experiential filters that, in the whole, constitute psychopathy are functional, even desireable in tribal leaders. Homosexuality is normal and the behaviors and experiential filters that in one constellation create a homosexual orientation in others create male bonding and interpersonal empathy that can be very beneficial to a tribe of sexual segregants. Autism is normal and... you get the idea.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Interesting ... clinical depression can then be considered to be normal and beneficial in certain circumstances, following your reasoning. I'm referring to severe depression, where someone hides away from the world, curls up in a ball, and has no desire to eat or even move, while feeling emotionally numb. If a natural disaster, pack of wolves, or rival tribe slaughtered your entire family, those prone to depression would curl up under a pile of leaves and not forage for food for a week or two. Just as sleeping at night kept humans from stumbling over cliffs in the dark, or being snacks for nocturnal predators, lying in bed like Brian Wilson could make a big difference in whether or not you or your relatives pass on your genes.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Exactly. This is the lesson of modern evolutionary psychology.

On the other hand, assuming absolutely every condition is somehow "adaptive" is a pathological position all its own. For all we know, severe depression is made up of constituent impulses, each of which by its own serves an adaptive purpose, but manifest against the pressures of modern living is dysfunctional. We shouldn't be so quick to embrace this an a kind of "universal acid" that dissolves all investigation. But it's a worthy frame in which to view the subject, one that is itself amenable to investigation and correction. It is therefore consensual evidence rather than individual testimony, and much more deserving of the label "real."

[woggie.livejournal.com]

I am somehow reminded of militant agnosticism: "I don't know and neither do you." Because really, for there to be no change in the world, at some point you're going to have to throw up your hands and say you don't know why something is happening.

It's just that in their case, "I don't know" comes out of their mouths as "God is doing it."

So, is communitarianism a lot like smaller-scale socialism?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

There is a terrible arrogance in the first assumption.

Not only does it assume that the way things already are is good, it assumes that the way things are is the only way things can be - independent of external changes.
Half the men killed in a war? Sorry, no change. There is an enduring moral order, and men's place in that order is unchanging. A new technology obviates any labor? Sorry, no change. The enduring moral order dictates what it does.

A system cannot be so brittle and also survive - conservatism of that type is awfully young, and cannot endure with the speed of technological (for example) change.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's what Kirk is saying. He's saying that the enduring moral order is what God set it down to be at Genesis. The problem is that his analysis is shallow and contingent upon Christianity being true. Go deep and broad enough to encompass all of human existence, not just Western interpretations of it, and his "enduring human nature" is simply this: Those of us walking around are made of meat that doesn't malfunction so badly that we just fell over and died at birth. In the meantime, we have to not malfunction so badly that our peers kill us before we reproduce.

Whoop de doo.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It fails for essentially the same reasons as Pascal's Wager (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager), in that we cannot know (in a scientific sense) which of the many possible answers is the right answer is, as Pascal assumed.

At most, living in a state such as 17th Century France, with an overwhelmingly dominant official religion, it makes sense to follow a particular creed.

But what if those Protestants over there are correct?

What of that Gautama Buddha chap whose teachings those heathens follow in the orient? I mean, we're not the heathens. Are we?

At this point, M. Pascal retires with a headache.

[fallenpegasus]

So what do you think should replace liberty, and how would you constrain it. What fetters should there be on the fettering of liberty. What intellectual and conviencing arguments can you make that can convince me that the answer to "how much" is anything other than "as much as we can get the political system to let us grab, then we go back and push the political system to let us grab more on the next round".

That's the root of my problem with arguments about that, is that I have seen no philosophical or structural limits offerred on the argument on contraining liberty for the sake of "the solution". The middle is reached not because of any good will on the part of the folks who "mean for the best", but only because power politics prevents them from grabbing everything they "need" for their "good reasons".

"We just need this, and no more, trust us" is not conviencing, because all the trust asked in that statement has been burned away by experience over the last century.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

One thing that Kirk also misses, as do most "conservatives" these days, is something from recent psychological research: the Inner Chimp. Most of what we consider as, "moral," is supposedly much, much older than language.

So, yeah. Not handed down on stone tablets. It's etched in nucleic acids to let us make snap-decisions in reaction to environmental pressures.