Melanie Phillips’ claim that “conservatism is not so much a discrete ideology or philosophy as a state of mind” echoes Michael Oakeshott’s great essay, On Being Conservative. A re-reading of this highlights a tragedy - that a great strand of conservatism is now alien to the British people.
Conservatism, says Oakeshott, is “not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition”:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.
This disposition means that the function of government should not be grandiose efforts at social improvement. Rather:
Governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration.
And these activities, says Oakeshott, are the free choices of adults:
We are not children in statu pupillari but adults who do not consider themselves under any obligation to justify their preferences for making their own choices; and that it is beyond human experience to suppose that those who rule are endowed with a superior wisdom which discloses to them a better range of beliefs and activities which gives them authority to impose upon their subjects a quite different manner of life.
What’s more, says Oakeshott, politics should not be “an encounter of dreams” or a “jump to glory”, or an endeavour to improve the people:
The office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensible. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game.
All of this is, of course, utterly opposed to New Labour.
For me, this raises a paradox. Given a choice between Oakeshott’s temperament and New Labour’s, I would choose Oakeshott’s every time. But I cannot ever imagine voting for the Conservative party, partly because it does not share Oakeshott’s temper. He, surely, would have flinched at these fatuous words from Theresa May:
Politics is more than ever about individual people and families and what government can do for them. It is about making a difference to their day-to-day lives.
But could it be that Conservatives are so far from Oakeshott because the British people are so far from him?
How many people share Oakeshott’s view that “it is “a blessed relief to gaze in a shop window and see nothing we want”? How many are, if not content with their lot, then at least aware that it’s not business of the government’s to improve it? How many behave like adults, prepared to accept the consequences of their actions?
Very few. Maybe the death of conservatism is also the death of a particular, admirable, type of character. As Oakeshott himself said:
If the present is arid, offering little or nothing to be used or enjoyed, then [the conservative] inclination will be weak or absent.
Your point about the British people being so far from him seems the truest. Oakeshott's a curious figure, of course, in that he was pretty much the last of the British Idealists, carrying on long after that school became deeply unfashionable (after G. E. Moore dumped on them).
Personally, though, I'm with Paul Franco (his first book on Oakeshott is very good if you haven't tried it - I haven't seen the more recent "An Introduction") that Oakeshott is fundamentally a liberal, if a very unorthodox sort. In the end, he seeks a model of society - see "On Human Conduct" - which is about finding means through which politics is ultimately unimportant. His concern with securing a social order that allows for complete subjectivism over ends is a liberal one.
His liberalism is of a Hobbesian sort, although much more constructive (and truly liberal) than some other 20th century Hobbesians (Carl Schmitt, maybe). It's also a little odd, at times. On the one hand, he criticised rationalism to such an extent that a conservative ally (Kolnai) was ultimately repelled by "Rationalism in Politics," on the other hand, "On Human Conduct" is in itself quite abstract and rational. You can also contrast the gentle conservatism you talk of with his more directive talk about authority elsewhere.
Am wittering. Not many people know who Oakeshott is, so given half a chance...
Posted by: Blimpish | June 23, 2005 at 01:58 PM
"If the present is arid": that's pretty much my suspicion as to why many teenagers from educated, atheist homes have started taking an interest in Christianity. Anyway, what's to be done? Let's start by raising the voting age to 35.
Posted by: dearieme | June 23, 2005 at 02:29 PM
You're with Oakeshott on that one, Dearieme. Later in the essay, he writes:"politics is an activity unsuited to the young." But read the whole thing - personally, I think it's the most sympathetic account of conservatism I've read.
Posted by: chris | June 23, 2005 at 05:01 PM
Yessir
Posted by: dearieme | June 23, 2005 at 05:11 PM
... and from there, read the "Tower of Babel" - but the one in "On History," not on "Rationalism in Politics."
Posted by: Blimpish | June 23, 2005 at 11:39 PM
Steady on!
Posted by: dearieme | June 24, 2005 at 10:27 AM
Without having read any Oakeshott, I find it rather hard to understand how he gets from the kind of preference for the tried and tested to the quasi-Millian liberal valorisation of space empty of government interference in which people can exercise free choice. Conservatives don't like free choice: crudely, people shouldn't choose, they should do what their parents did.
Posted by: Rob | June 24, 2005 at 07:25 PM