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Liberalism is made of up several elements, including
individualism, rationalism and linear progress.
Individualism
Sometimes the word individualism
is used in the same sense as individuality: the rejection of
conformism to create an individual style or personality.
Individualism in this sense would be supported by both liberals and
conservatives.
The term liberal individualism,
though, means something quite distinct. It refers to the belief of
liberals in a certain kind of individual autonomy. In short liberals
believe that human freedom depends on individuals being subject only
to their own reason and will, so that individuals are left free to
create themselves in any direction.
This belief has been asserted
strongly in Western societies ever since the Renaissance. For
instance, the fifteenth century writer Pico della Mirandola once
imagined God saying to man that,
"You, constrained by no limits, in
accordance with your own free will ... shall ordain
for yourself the limits of your nature ... We have made you ... so
that with freedom of choice, as though the maker and moulder of
yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall
prefer."
In order for
individuals to be "self-created" in this fashion, liberals have to
clear a path for the exclusive operation of individual reason and
will. Usually this involves:-
(i) An assumption that the individual starts out as a blank slate,
without anything inborn to limit or give a natural direction to
individual behaviour.
and
(ii) A rejection of forms of identity
and authority which can't be shaped by individual reason or will.
Conservatives are opposed to liberals
on both of these points. Firstly, for conservatives it is simply
untrue that individuals start out as a blank slate. Instead,
conservatives believe that individuals are heavily influenced by an
inborn human nature. This human nature is flawed, intricate and
difficult to shift. Much of the effort of society is to draw out the
finer qualities of this nature, whilst discouraging the worst.
Secondly, conservatives don't reject
forms of identity and authority simply because they aren't chosen by
individual reason or will. Conservatives have often found themselves
attempting to "conserve" such forms of identity and authority
because of their value to individuals or to society. Specific
examples of this are given in the next chapter on conservative
belief; in general, though, conservatives would argue that rather
than creating human freedom, the liberal approach tends to undermine
the social framework and erode important forms of human
"connectedness".
Rationalism
As already mentioned, liberals only
wish to accept what has been validated by individual reason. This
forms the basis of liberal rationalism: the idea that we come
to our beliefs and knowledge of the world through abstract reason,
i.e. through the "analytical intellect" alone.
Conservatives are critical of certain
aspects of liberal rationalism, especially when it is crudely
applied.
This is
because abstract reason is really only able to deal with a small
part of human experience. It is unable to adequately recognise many
of the finer, more subtle and more intangible qualities of life.
How can you, for instance, validate
through abstract reason such qualities as love and beauty, or
nobility and honour, or whimsy and fancy?
At its worst, liberal rationalism has
applied rigid "machine principles" to human life. For instance, the
French utopian reformer Charles Fourier once calculated that humans
should live in phalanxes of exactly 1620 people. The British
utilitarians believed that they could scientifically calculate
morality according to a balance of outcomes. And the German Bauhaus
architects went so far as to define a house as a "machine for living
in".
Another
conservative complaint against rationalism is that it sometimes
leaves liberals curiously dependent on abstract ideology. There are
times when liberals cannot simply accept the most natural and
healthy of human behaviours (e.g. romance between men and women,
boys playing with trucks etc. ). Instead, such behaviours have to be
agonisingly justified in reference to an abstract ideology: they
have to be declared "politically correct".
What alternative do conservatives offer
to liberal rationalism? Firstly, conservatives don't have such an
abstract starting point as liberals. Conservatives are unlikely to
want to "wipe the slate clean" in order to build up knowledge on
wholly abstract (and inevitably arbitrary) principles.
Instead, conservatives are likely to
start out with what we are able to perceive about ourselves, society
and the larger nature of things, and apply to this our critical
intelligence, in order to arrive at a consistency and reasonableness
of belief, as well as to draw the lessons of experience, i.e. the
testing of our beliefs in practice over time.
Also, in contrast to liberal
rationalists, who have often wanted to start from "year zero",
conservatives are likely to consider (but not blindly accept) the
guidance of tradition. This is because successful traditions are
often built on the collective insight and experience of generations;
it seems more sensible to conservatives to try to learn from such
traditions, rather than to force each and every individual to learn
from scratch.
Linear Progress
Liberals used to have a strong belief
in linear progress: in the idea that the world was steadily
advancing towards a higher level of civilisation. This idea was
clearly expressed, for instance, by the English writer Matthew
Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century, when he proclaimed his "faith
in the progress of humanity toward perfection."
Liberals today are usually not so
optimistic. Nonetheless, the idea of linear progress still exists
more subtly in liberal beliefs about the "progressive" nature of
social reforms and change, and fears of "stagnation" or "going
back".
Conservatives have a different reading
of history. For conservatives, history is more about the rise and
fall of societies according to their inner strengths and weaknesses,
rather than a constant progress. Nor would conservatives ever talk
of human perfection, given the flaws embedded into human nature.
Given these different starting points,
it isn't hard to see why liberals and conservatives have a different
attitude to social change.
It's not that conservatives are against
change; in fact, there is a great deal in modern societies that
conservatives would like to reform.
However, conservatives believe that
social change has to take account of human nature - in particular,
that the social framework that is put in place must intelligently
complement the real motivations and desires that are part of human
nature. Liberal reforms, based as they often are on abstract ideas,
often fail to do this and so misfire.
Furthermore, conservatives believe that
real reform, i.e. the shifting from worse forms of human behaviour
to better, is a difficult cultural achievement that takes place over
generations. Such achievements, therefore, are not to be lightly
discarded.
For this reason, conservatives are
critical when liberals make reforms merely in a spirit of
social experimentation, or when liberals want change just for the
sake of change.
Conservatives and liberals have usually
also wanted a different direction to change. Liberals, over several
centuries, have sought to deconstruct the traditional social
framework, in order to achieve a greater level of individualism;
conservatives have attempted, in contrast, to conserve the
more valued elements of this framework (hence of course the name
conservative).
Over time liberals have succeeded in
their aim; since the 1970s very little in Western societies has
escaped the influence of liberal individualism.
This means that conservatives today are
not the defenders of an established order, but instead are
challengers of what has become a liberal orthodoxy. |