David Brooks’s recent departure from the “conservative movement” is the most anticlimactic but news since Elton John came out of the closet. No offense to those gentlemen, but c’mon. Who did you think you were fooling?
Still, his bon voyage in The Atlantic deserves to be read. His reading of the Burkean tradition will upset lots of folks who consider themselves conservatives. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Like all turncoats, Mr. Brooks says, “I didn’t leave the Team. The Team left me!” Only, in this case, I’m not so sure he’s wrong.
Whether he means to or not, Mr. Brooks draws out a tension within Edmund Burke’s thinking—a tension that runs straight through the middle of Anglo-American conservatism. For the sake of convenience, we’ll call it a tension between the empiricism and the romanticism that are both indigenous to the conservative mind.
Mr. Brooks argues that conservatism, like liberalism, has its origins in the Age of Enlightenment. The difference between the two camps is this: conservatives are empiricists, while liberals are rationalist.
The original liberals (he says)—Jacobins and other radicals—tried to reorganize society based on their own abstract theories, which they drew mostly from books and discussions at their salons. Meanwhile, says Mr. Brooks,
Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe that human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness; most of the time our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness. They did not believe that individual reason is powerful enough even to comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental.
That’s true, so far as it goes. Burke was friends with David Hume, and the latter exercised a marked influence on the former. Yet Burke was also a romantic.
Romanticism, not empiricism, was the chief opponent to “Enlightened” rationalism. Some romantics (like Rousseau) were definitely products of the Enlightenment. Others (like Chateaubriand) were proudly unenlightened.
The romantics weren’t interested in “epistemological humility.” On the contrary: they had an even greater confidence in human knowledge than the rationalists. They simply believed in different epistemological means: different ways of knowing.
Some defended what Thomas Aquinas calls intellectus: the ability to perceive truth intuitively, without the need for either empirical or abstract reasoning, as the angels do. (John Henry Newman, who was only nine years Keats’s junior, followed Aquinas in his writings on the “illative sense.”) Others, like Joseph de Maistre, emphasized the need to rely on the authority of the Church, which is protected from error by the Holy Ghost. Still others, like Thomas Jefferson, stressed man’s ability to read the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Meanwhile, more “populist” romantics like William Cobbett championed the wisdom of rural folkways—a kind of sensus fidelium that grows up among honest, hard-working rubes.
These men were not skeptics like Hume. Burke himself warned against the tendency—common to both rationalists and empiricists—to limit epistemology to what can be perceived by man’s lower faculties. As he wrote in his essay on the Sublime, “For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.” David Hume would have balked at such a sentiment.
Most British conservatives would probably emphasize Burke’s affinity with empiricism. This is the view taken by Michael Oakeshott, Maurice Cowling, and (to an extent) Roger Scruton.
Here in the United States, however, most conservatives follow Russell Kirk in stressing Burke’s romanticism. Of course, they accept Burke’s (negative) critique of the Jacobins’ social engineering. But they also emphasize his (positive) defense of the British monarchy, the Established Church, the landed gentry, and the code of chivalry.
Today, most “romantic conservatives” in Britain today tend to be deeply pessimistic, like Peter Hitchens. The rest, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are cartoonish. In the United States, most of them can be found writing for The American Conservative, Modern Age, and The Spectator World. Their strongest of strongholds, though, is certainly The Imaginative Conservative.
Meanwhile, there are few “empirical conservatives” left anywhere at all. Not for ntohing are they sprinkled across a number of solidly left-wing newspapers and magazines. David Brooks is one, of course. So are Andrew Sullivan, and George Will. (Never mind what Bill Kristol and David Frum say. Neocons don’t count.)
It’s not surprising that these “EmpiriCons” align with a kind of milquetoast centrism. Again, as Mr. Brooks says, they believe that “social change should be steady but cautious and incremental.” The classical liberal Alfred Jay Nock likewise said, “Conservatism is a habit of mind which does not generalize beyond the facts of the case in point.” I’m sure Mr. Brooks would agree with that statement.
But maybe Nock was also right when he said that “the word [conservative] seems unserviceable. It covers so much that looks like mere capriciousness and inconsistency that one gets little positive good out of wearing it.” Judging by Mr. Brooks’s definition, everyone is a conservative—at least in their own mind. Nobody would ever say social change should be “sporadic, yet hasty and reckless.”
Needless to say, his lack of first principles alarms the “RomantiCons.” They believe the EmpiriCons are too willing to accommodate themselves to social engineering. In fact, accomodationism basically is their first principle.
And, in fairness to them, Burke had a certain accommodationist streak. As he wrote towards the end of his life,
If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.
Of course, what he says is perfectly true. It’s an excellent (and timely) reminder of man’s resilience. But it’s not a favorite among RomantiCons, for obvious reasons.
From the beginning, EmpiriCons and RomantiCons have been at odds—especially in how they relate to the past.
EmpiriCons are, as always, deontologists. They’re focused on means, not ends. They’re opposed to any sort of drastic change, be it radical or reactionary. They don’t necessarily have any loyalty to the Ancien Régime… except that it wasn’t swarming with Jacobins and Royalists trying to kill each other.
RomantiCons, on the other hand, are teleologists. They’re more focused on ends. They’re motivated by a sense that certain things of real, positive value are being lost, or have been lost already. These are what T. S. Eliot called the “permanent things”: institutions, authorities, traditions, belief-systems, folkways, etc. And they mean to get them back.
In other words, each faction sees in each other the worst qualities of the Left. The RomantiCons are too drastic for the EmpiriCons; the EmpiriCons are too impious of the RomantiCons.
Each faction would claim Burke for itself but, honestly, Burke was himself torn between these two attitudes. Those who would claim him for one faction or the other assume more coherence in his thinking than what actually exists.
And, to be honest, I don’t know where Burke would fall on the political spectrum today. Maybe he would be a reluctant Democrat like Mr. Brooks. Then again, Russell Kirk campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 1992. So, maybe Burke would be a paid-up Trumpist.
I don’t know, and I don’t especially care. The conservative’s goal isn’t to copy Burke as closely as possible, the way a Christian’s goal is to imitate Jesus as best he can. Edmund Burke wasn’t a sage or a prophet. He was a man—and, what’s more, a statesman. If Mr. Brooks claims to be the purer Burkean, let him.
For whatever it’s worth, this is why I wrote The Reactionary Mind. It’s basically a RomantiCon manifesto. It seeks to uncouple the radicalism of Kirk, his teachers, and his disciples from the milquetoast centrism of Messrs. Brooks, Sullivan, and Wills. I don’t know what he would think of it. I doubt he would approve of my ceding the mantle of conservatism. But I’m tired of having that fight.
Now, I’m perfectly willing to grant that I have no right to cede that mantle at all. I don’t claim to speak for anyone but myself. But I prefer to call myself a reactionary, for three reasons.
1. We’re not seeking to conserve anything, because there’s nothing left to conserve. (In this sense, David Brooks is more conservative, in the very literal sense.) We’re seeking to restore, to revert—to go back.
2. Like many “traditionalist” (or romantic) conservatives, I feel a deep affinity for certain folks who have been called radicals, even progressives: Francis of Assisi, Thomas More, Girolamo Savonarola, Thomas Jefferson, William Cobbett, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, G. K. Chesterton, Peter Maurin and Wendell Berry, to name a few. Granted, none of these men were much for “epistemological humility.” But I guess I’m not, either.
3. It sounds way cooler.
You may or may not find those reasons compelling. Just bear in mind that it’s not about labels. It’s about serving God and our fellow man. Russell Kirk knew that; so did Dorothy Day. You may call one a conservative and the other a progressive. But I’d call them both reactionaries. And that’s about the highest praise I can offer.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying my book The Reactionary Mind. Peace and the Good!