Back To Basics

For the conservative movement the answer is the same as it was always been since Edmund Burke invented conservatism in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Conservatives stand for a balanced understanding of human life and human meaning. We assert a fundamental ignorance about our human destiny. That is why we stood against the French Revolution, as Burke did. We also stand against communism, fascism, socialism, and all the secular religions of the modern world, including the progressive religion of our liberal friends, the educated elite.

In putting flesh on the bones of this bare understanding of the human condition I turn to the ideas of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Spirit Novak develops the idea I call the Greater Separation of Powers. There are three differentiated sectors in modern society: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural. They are and ought to be separate and individual centers of power, and need to be separate and independent of each other. Each has its power, and each is checked and balanced by the jealous critique of the other sectors. But no one sector should ever obtain dominance over the others, and no two sectors should be allowed to gang up on the third sector.

Viewing our society through the lens of the Greater Separation of Powers we can see that our society suffers from three major diseases.

The first I call The Rape of Honor. It is a disease of the moral/cultural sector. In his book Honor: A History, James Bowman begins by defining honor. He says that, in men, it is bravery, the courage to stand in line with your brethren and not run away in the face of danger. In women, it is chastity, the reputation for right action, that is, the good opinion of other women. In our society we have allowed a sustained attack on these two anchors of right living, and the more that people allow their lives to deviate from the practice of honor the more their lives wither and decay.

The second disease I call The Weight of Government. It is a disease of the political sector. Our governments in the world today are too big, too powerful, too ineffective, and too bossy. “It’s the spending, stupid,” you might say. And if you don’t believe me, go to usgovernmentspending.com. Big government infantilizes us, and subsidizes the Rape of Honor, because people without honor are people who cannot live outside the sheltered liberal plantation of big government.

The third disease I call The Sweating of Business. It is a pollution of the economic sector by the political and moral/cultural sectors. Back in the 19th century, everyone knows, the world was full of sweatshops that worked people long hours for low pay and no benefits. Well, today, businessmen and women are like the sweatshop workers of old. The political sector uses business like a piggy bank, and the moral/cultural sector uses business like a punching bag. The other two sectors have ganged up on business to humiliate it and to reduce its reputation and its power.

Our conservative destiny to to cure these three diseases of the body politics, and right three great wrongs. We must rise up to end the degradation and the violence of the Rape of Honor, to reform and remove the great Weight of Government, and to liberate our Sweating Businesses.

It’s not that complicated, now, is it?

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close 0