I must confess to being more than a bit amazed at the ease with which so many of my fellow Americans, including and especially those in the media and politics, unabashedly identify themselves as \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 That this many people should declare themselves subscribers to this particular political orientation is in and of itself unremarkable; but when this phenomenon is coupled with the fact that few of these \u201cconservatives\u201d appear to know little if anything about the intellectual roots of their self-declared vision, it is hard not to be bewildered.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, while we can\u2019t but find shocking the ubiquity and depth of both this ignorance and apparent lack of desire to ameliorate this ignorance, both phenomena do<\/em> shed some much needed illumination upon an otherwise enigmatic reality, namely, the stone cold fact that most of what passes for \u201cconservatism\u201d in America today is nothing of the kind.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n With rare exceptions, what is today considered \u201cconservatism\u201d is actually neoconservatism.\u00a0 <\/em>This is no criticism; it is just an honest observation.\u00a0 In order to know a thing or two about genuine conservatism, we would be well served to revisit Edmund Burke, widely regarded as its \u201cpatron saint.\u201d<\/p>\n Burke, an Irishman, was an eighteenth century member of the English Parliament.\u00a0 Primarily in response to the metaphysical and other excesses of the French Revolution, he articulated what remains to this day the most provocative, impassioned, and imaginatively rich statement of what subsequent generations came to call \u201cconservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n The conservatism of which Burke is a progenitor, on the one hand, and the neoconservatism that dominates the contemporary American right, on the other, are not just distinct from one another; they are mutually incompatible.\u00a0 But more than this, they differ in kind <\/em>from one another.\u00a0 I have written at length about these differences in the past.\u00a0 I will here focus only upon one critical respect in which neoconservatism departs radically from Burkean conservatism, namely, its stance on the issue of \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201chuman rights.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While he never actually repudiated the concepts of \u201chuman nature\u201d and \u201cnatural rights\u201d\u2014in fact, he actually affirmed them\u2014Burke nonetheless was keenly aware that as far as the art of politics is concerned, such concepts were irrelevant.\u00a0 <\/em>Politics, rather, is concerned with \u201cthe civil social man, and no other.\u201d\u00a0 This means that political decisions are not to be settled according to some abstract, universal conception of \u201chuman nature\u201d; indeed, they cannot <\/em>be settled according to any such rule.\u00a0 Instead, politics \u201cis a thing to be settled by convention<\/em>\u201d (emphasis original).<\/p>\n Burke is direct: \u201cGovernment,\u201d he asserts, \u201cis not made in virtue of natural rights,\u201d for natural rights \u201cmay and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection[.]\u201d\u00a0 But Burke is quick to point out that \u201ctheir abstract perfection is their practical defect.\u201d\u00a0 Their strength is also their weakness, for it is precisely because of their \u201cabstract perfection\u201d that \u201cnatural rights\u201d are incapable <\/em>of supplying guidance for navigating our way through the endless maze of concrete details that constitute the stuff of everyday life.<\/p>\n Human beings do have rights.\u00a0 But these rights consist of both \u201cthe liberties\u201d as well as <\/em>\u201cthe restraints\u201d upon appetites and \u201cpassions\u201d for the sake of which \u201ccivil society\u201d came into being in the first place.\u00a0 Since \u201cgovernment is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants<\/em>,\u201d human beings living under it \u201chave a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.\u201d\u00a0 However, because \u201cthe liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule\u201d\u2014like, say, the proposition or principle that there are natural or \u201chuman\u201d rights to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness or anything else.<\/p>\n How different Burke sounds from today\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cconservatives.\u201d\u00a0 In order to justify one war after the other, neoconservatives routinely invoke the notions of \u201chuman rights\u201d and \u201cDemocracy.\u201d\u00a0 Burke, in sharp contrast, draws our attention to the fact that such \u201cabstract perfection[s]\u201d are wholly out of place as far as the governance of civil society is concerned.\u00a0 \u201cIf civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law,\u201d he tells us.\u00a0 What this in turn implies is that \u201cconvention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it.\u201d More specifically, \u201cevery sort of legislative, judicial, or executory [sic] power are its creatures,\u201d for \u201cthey can have no being in any other state of things[.]\u201d<\/p>\n There are no \u201crights\u201d to any particular kind of government, set of institutional arrangements or, for that matter, any <\/em>goods that <\/em>\u201cdo not as so much as suppose\u201d the \u201cexistence\u201d of civil society and that \u201care absolutely repugnant to it.\u201d\u00a0 Appeals to \u201chuman nature\u201d and \u201cnatural rights\u201d are misplaced, Burke says, because, in short, the civil condition is not <\/em>our natural condition.\u00a0 In fact, insofar as it is exactly in order to relieve ourselves of the inconveniences with which brute nature is replete that civil society arises, there is a real sense in which the natural and civil \u201cstates\u201d can be said to be contraries.\u00a0 \u201cMen cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Natural rights are \u201cmetaphysic rights,\u201d \u201cprimitive rights\u201d that, \u201cin the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns,\u201d endure \u201csuch a variety of refractions and reflections\u201d that \u201cit becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.\u201d\u00a0 But this is exactly what proponents of natural rights do.\u00a0 The trouble with this way of speaking is that it conflicts with reality.\u00a0 In the real world, \u201cno simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man\u2019s nature, or to the quality of his affairs,\u201d for \u201cthe nature of man is intricate\u201d and \u201cthe objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity[.]\u201d<\/p>\n It is no wonder that the neoconservative speaks little of Burke.\u00a0 This \u201cfather\u201d of the conservative intellectual tradition finds his cherished concept of \u201cnatural rights\u201d to be not just a fiction, but among the most treacherous of fictions to have come out of the modern world.<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I must confess to being more than a bit amazed at the ease with which so many of my fellow Americans, including and especially those in the media and politics, unabashedly identify themselves as \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 That this many people should declare themselves subscribers to this particular political orientation is in and of itself unremarkable; 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