Traditionalism, Conservatism, and the Perennial Philosophy (Part II)

In parallel, in the last two decades, we have witnessed the renaissance of Russian Orthodox Conservatism, not unrelated to similar movements in certain Eastern European countries. The diversity of variants in the conservative or traditionalist trend illustrates the difficulty in defining a common Conservative creed and agenda, valid for all cultures and countries since by definition, every sort of conservatism is rooted in a particular history and civilisation, whether it adheres to a religious faith or is rooted in a mainly secular and liberal culture and way of life. In that sense, Conservatives are attached to their independence and personal identities, even though they put the traditional organic communities and institutions above the individuals.

If we review the past of mankind in the last few thousand years that are – superficially and partially – known to us, we find that adherence to local customs and institutions, combined with the gradual adoption of innovations and borrowings from other groups, is a natural feature of the human species. Hence, conservatism had been a state of affairs without a name since the remotest antiquity all over the world. It rested on what was described as cosmic, divinely prescribed order and it acquired an ideological and political identity only in response to major challenges, such as the Industrial Revolution in England and the politico-economic one in France. 

Responses and reactions to the 18^th century skeptical and rationalist ‘Enlightenment’ stream, the source of Jacobinism and anarchism, came from the first generation of ‘conservative’ philosophers, some of whom were seminal romantics: Burke in Britain, Rivarol, Lacretelle, Châteaubriand, Joseph de Maistre in France, followed by the large crop of European monarchist counter-revolutionaries who flourished in the 19^th century, from Kotzebue to Bonald, Lamennais, Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, Voegelin, La Tour du Pin, Donoso Cortes,  Pobedonostsev, Solovyov, Ilyin, Santayana, Ortega y Gasset, and Maurras (an atypical Royalist Conservative who based his prescriptions on ‘organisational empiricism’), et al. 

The tyrannical excesses and crimes of the French Revolutionary regime gave rise to a widespread and healthy suspicion of the State, particularly of the militant state committed to social engineering. The vulgarity and lawless cruelty of the first French Republic, masterfully predicted by Burke in his 1790 essay, (3) elaborating on the speech to the Commons on the 9^th February of the same year,  made many aware of the importance of spiritual and juridical guidance and control, whereas the damage caused by communitarian utopias based on confiscation evinced the need to enforce the sanctity of private property. However true conservatives were, and remain hostile to usurious capital accumulation and corporate monopolisation of resources. That explains their frequent criticism of the ‘Judeo-Protestant’ practices of seigniorage banking and financial speculation that subordinate politics and the very social order to the power of money management. 

The Conservative approach to the economy upholds its etymological meaning as ‘the science of the household’. It translates into an in-principle aversion to indebtedness, justified by concern about balancing budgets, promoting savings rather than conspicuous consumption, and generally encouraging state frugality

As Louis de Bonald, an early 19^th century Christian philosopher who had many followers in France, wrote: ‘A government should do little for the pleasures of the people, enough for their needs, and everything for their virtues’. This maxim cogently encapsulates the essence of classical conservatism. It is quite the opposite of what most governments practice today, often invoking the new monetary theory to print unlimited amounts of fiat money and borrow from international capital markets while promoting an ‘anything goes’ philosophy in the name of fostering and expanding freedom, endorsing full control of one’s body and the quest for personal enjoyment, with little attention paid to responsibilities.

Bonald’s farsightedness regarding the threats incipient in techno-scientific progressivism reflects the Conservative lucidity concerning the often naïve optimism of those who put their faith in human ingenuity’s pursuit of utilitarian satisfaction through the domination of nature. He wrote in one of his books: ‘Whenever there are many machines to take the place of men, many men will be mere machines, The effect of machines, sparing men, would be to diminish the population’. A few decades later C S Lewis described the political consequences of the ‘scientific social system in those words: ‘[When] the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology and who, in turn, being able to see through any system of morality, that might reduce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. In surrendering rational reflection on their own motivations, the controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like and the Abolition of Man will have been completed’ (C S Lewis, Ibid.)

The proliferation of Conservative philosophers on the continent contrasts with their paucity in Great Britain where Burke, perhaps the pioneer of post-revolutionary conservatism, had few notable followers in the following decades. In England, Conservatism remained mainly a political praxis intended to prevent radical changes in the fundamental institutions (the Crown, the Church of England, and the bicameral parliamentary system), upheld at home and abroad by statesmen and diplomats such as Castlereagh, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Curzon. In continental Europe instead, especially after the 1830s Revolutions, ‘true blue’ Conservatives were a shrinking minority, mostly confined to the opposition, and they developed a coherent doctrine to counter the liberal and socialist ideologies, by broadly upholding the ‘natural order’ resting on ‘the throne and the altar’ in the pithy formula used by Joseph de Maistre and his votaries. 

In the first part of the twentieth century, new challenges to the British political and economic compromise brought about the appearance of various eminent conservative, religiously inspired (usually Catholic) thinkers such as GK Chesterton and the earlier cited C S Lewis, as well as Evelyn Waugh. Some of the philosophically conservative thought-leaders in the United Kingdom today are, at least spiritually, close to Greek Orthodoxy because of the leftward drift in the Vatican since the ‘progressivist’ Second Vatican Council.

To be continued…