11/11/2023 0 Comments Roger scruton conservatismIt is precisely in facing this charge that the real thinking must be done. Seeing politics in that way, however, Conservatives are exposed to the complaint that they have no positive vision, and nothing to offer us, save the status quo – with all its injustices and inequalities, and all its entrenched corruption. And the liberal ideal of universal human rights has likewise led to a downgrading of attachment, since attachment is a form of discrimination and therefore a way of giving preference to those who already belong.Ībstract ideals, Conservatives argue, are inevitably disruptive, since they undermine the slow, steady work of real politics, which is a work of negotiation and compromise between people whose interests will never coincide. The result has been a cantonisation of society in the name of “multiculturalism”. After all, the socialist ideal of equality has led to the belief that patriotism is racism, and that the attachment to an established way of life is merely unjust discrimination against those who do not share it. And for many of its defenders that is all that Conservatism amounts to – the suspicion of ideals. It is why they are now entering a period of self-doubt, as the nation disintegrates into its historically established segments, while European regulations dissolve our boundaries.Ĭonservatism does not fit easily with abstract ideals. That is why, in all the post-war political debates in our country, Conservatives have emphasised the defence of the realm, the maintenance of national borders, and the unity of the nation. If we cease to maintain a “specific people in a specific place”, then all political principles will be pointless, since there will be no community with an interest in obeying them. But governments are elected by a specific people in a specific place, and must meet the people’s needs – including the most important of their needs, which is the need to be bound to their neighbours in a relation of trust. It is very easy to dismiss Conservatism in the name of the universal ideals of the Enlightenment. But adaptation means survival, and survival means a maintained identity. As Edmund Burke said, “we must reform in order to conserve” – or, in more modern idiom: we must adapt. Without it, law becomes an alien imposition, not ours but theirs, like the laws imposed by a conquering power. The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural, and for Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being. When socialists promise a more equal society they are talking about us when liberals offer to expand the list of human rights, they mean the rights that we enjoy. The root of politics, they believe, is attachment – the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people who are theirs. They are questions of identity: who we are, and why we are entitled to use that very pronoun – “we” – to describe us.įor Conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community. Those are not questions to be answered in the abstract. But applying them raises the question: to what or to whom? Which group of people is to be made more equal, and who is to be made more free? Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls. It is because they believe that good government is not grounded in abstract ideas but in concrete situations, and that concrete situations are hard to grasp. This is not because they are more stupid than their socialist or liberal rivals, although John Stuart Mill famously declared them to be so.
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