#5 Regime Change: Rationalism in politics
Where it came from. Its errors & dangers. Rationalist morality: 'the desiccated relic of what was once the unselfconscious moral tradition of an aristocracy'. PS. The Elon Affair...
In short, one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one's throat... After all, there are continually turning up in life moral and rational people, sages, and lovers of humanity, who make it their goal for life to live as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours, simply in order to show them that it is really possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And so what? We all know that those very people sooner or later toward the end of their lives have been false to themselves, playing some trick, often a most indecent one. Now I ask you: What can one expect from man since he is a creature endowed with such strange qualities?
Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea; give him such economic prosperity that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with ensuring the continuation of world history and even then man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly, that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself (as though that were so necessary) that men still are men and not piano keys, which even if played by the laws of nature themselves threaten to be controlled so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And … even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of sheer ingratitude, simply to have his own way. And if he does not find any means he will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will thereby have his own way. He will launch a curse upon the world, and, as only man can curse … then, after all, perhaps only by his curse will he attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself - then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and have his own way! I believe in that, I vouch for it, because, after all, the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin! But he has proved it... (Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky)
The world revolves around the inventors of new values, it revolves invisibly. But the people and fame revolve around actors… Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great, far from the marketplace and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt. (Nietzsche)
In democratic societies each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself. (Tocqueville)
State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power. (Bismarck)
Vronsky, meanwhile, notwithstanding the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not entirely happy. He soon began to feel that the realisation of his desires brought him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of bliss he had expected. It showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that happiness consists in the realisation of their desires. (Anna Karenina, Tolstoy)
For progress there is no cure. (Von Neumann)
τέχνη δ’ άνάγκης άσθєνєστέρα μακρώ
[Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity. Prometheus, 514]
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote Rationalism in politics and essays on similar themes including Political education, The masses in representative democracy, and On Being Conservative. Oakeshott was unusual for an academic philosopher in having also served in an unconventional wartime unit, Phantom.
I’ll summarise Oakeshott’s arguments and make a few observations.
The SBF collapse, reflection among the Effective Altruist movement, and the particularly hysterical establishment response to Obama-voting-Elon supporting old Berkeley’s ‘free speech’ over new Berkeley’s censor ‘misinformation’ make it a good moment to consider ‘rationalism in politics’, where it emerged, and how it evolved.
In 2023 I’ll write more on philosophy as I re-read some Plato and Nietzsche, especially Beyond Good and Evil, the non-fiction book I think is best for understanding our culture and its politics. When you watch the latest craziness from the left and the attempts to fight it from the ‘conservative movement’, the most important dynamics were foretold by Nietzsche in the 1880s.
A deep irony of modern culture is the way in which the atheist far Left, via the dregs of post-war French philosophy interbred with Heidegger*, have tried to appropriate Nietzsche — a man who despised, to the depths of his German and Greek soul, Bismarck, anti-semites and the new (1870s) German nationalism, and who despised the atheist Left above all. Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead’ and thought of Christianity (‘Platonism for the people’) as a disaster for western civilisation, but he also thought that its replacement by newspaper-reading atheist democrats and socialists was even worse and his most savage attacks and mockery were aimed at the liberals, democrats and socialists who think of themselves as a higher type than the religious peasant who bows his head and takes off his slippers in church.
The way in which reverence for the Bible has hitherto been generally maintained in Europe is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe owes to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in order that they may achieve those millennia of continued existence which are needed if they are to be exhausted and unriddled. Much has been gained when the feeling has at last been instilled into the masses … that there are things they must not touch; that there are holy experiences before which they have to take off their shoes and keep their unclean hands away – it is almost their highest advance towards humanity.
Conversely, there is perhaps nothing about the so-called cultured, the believers in ‘modern ideas’, that arouses so much disgust as their lack of shame, the self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick and fumble with everything; and it is possible that more relative nobility of taste and reverential tact is to be discovered today among the people, among the lower orders and especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the cultured…
Every age has its own divine kind of naivety for the invention of which other ages may envy it – and how much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naivety there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above – he, the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head- and handyman of ‘ideas’, of ‘modern ideas’!…
The claim to independence, to free development, to laisser aller, is advanced most heatedly by precisely those for whom no curb could be too strong – this applies in politics, it applies in art. But this is a symptom of décadence…
Three loud cheers for Nietzsche’s taste! The self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand… The presumptuous dwarfs for whom no curb could be too strong… You can find them today tweeting from commonroom and newsroom, with Ukraine flags and Mastodon handles in their biographies, about how the guy who built SpaceX is clueless about managing technology companies, how ‘Brexit enabled fascism’, denouncing each other for sexism and racism while banning Euripides in case women faint from shock. It’s been a long road since Haight-Ashbury 1967.
And you sometimes see them tweeting, sad and confused, about how their children seem to hold them in contempt. Poor old Strepsiades sent his son off to Socrates to learn the art of reasoning. The son returned with his PhD in rationalism, beat his father and threatened to beat his mother. Enraged, Strepsiades led a mob to torch Socrates’ academy.
Strep. Ah me, what madness! How mad, then, I was when I ejected the gods on account of Socrates!... For what has come into your heads that you acted insolently toward the gods, and pried into the seat of the moon? [The thinking shop is burned down]
The world’s first explosion of rationalism was a mixed blessing, as rationalism must always be. Perhaps we will also see enraged parents torch the English literary theory departments of Oxbridge and Ivy League, on the way to or from torching the ‘how to help your child prepare for their sex change and fight the fascism of the nuclear family’ information department. Perhaps the torches will be paid for by the entrepreneurs who liberate the maths and science departments from their old university homes and re-establish them, ‘far from the marketplace and fame’.
Fundamental to the first flowering of rationalism in the 5th century BC was the emergence of the individual, just as it was with modern rationalism after the emergence of the individual in medieval Italy. And the defining characteristic of that part of the left that now dominates elite university politics and the cultural perspective of all western parties of the left — and, therefore, almost all the mainstream media — is an all-consuming focus on oneself. Behind all the tragi-comic lunacy of the left’s daily screaming and campaigning lies the overpowering feeling that my emotions are of transcendental importance and deserve to be indulged. Everything that encourages emotional self-indulgence and forceful expression is encouraged. Anything that discourages emotional self-indulgence, that encourages self-control instead of self-expression and focus on others rather than oneself is seen as not just unhealthy but outrageous oppression. ‘There is nothing so completely timely as weakness of will,’ as Nietzsche said. Indeed, emotions are so important that if they conflict with basic biological facts such as millions of years of evolution, then biology itself must surrender. Inevitably, the family, the last source of pre-modern authority with any teeth left, must have those teeth pulled out — the rights of parents even to know what the state and its agencies are doing to your children are in the crosshairs and the would-be new Guardians will be happy only when, like in Plato’s police state, they are in total control of education and children.
I never use the word w*ke. It’s an error to use the term if you hate it, or merely find it laughable and/or contemptible. I’m very confident it won’t be beaten while it’s enemies use the term. I’m not sure of a better alternative but it’s something like ‘the me cult’ because this phenomenon is (A) the latest in a centuries-long trend of emphasising the individual as all-important and (B) it resembles a cult more than normal Anglo-American politics. Supposedly egalitarian, the cult is suffused with hierarchies. Supposedly liberal, the cult often resembles a lame echo of Stalinism, particularly when trying to destroy careers, though some of its upper hierarchies clearly have ambitions to be less lame and more dangerous. Supposedly modern, like Nazism and Communism it’s a weird hybrid of modernity and anti-modernity, part offspring of rationalism and the Enlightenment and part offspring of the counteraction to both, mobilising communal pressure against the individual. Like Scientology it can seem both somewhat alarming and totally ludicrous. Yet the old universities of Europe and America, supposedly the bastions of the Enlightenment, have tumbled into the dust, prostrate before this anti-Enlightenment force.
What will challenge it? A new politics can only come from a new, part-Straussian part-demotic, elite.
(All bold in quotes is added, italics as in original.)
(* Heidegger was both a true Nazi sympathiser and is seen as one of the most interesting thinkers of the 20th century, certainly one of the most influential given his influence on the French left, which is not reassuring. In his infamous address to German universities in 1933, he said, ‘The much-lauded “academic freedom” will be expelled from the German university; for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative.’ This concept is alive and well today among the BLM-trans-rights Left.)
Rationalism in politics, 1947
His subject is modern rationalism, ‘the most remarkable intellectual fashion of post-Renaissance Europe’ which has coloured the ideas of every political persuasion and flowed over every party line.
Almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist.
What’s the general character and disposition of a Rationalist? He questions all tradition; is sceptical and optimistic; and finds it hard to believe others can honestly disagree.
At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of ‘reason’. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or widely held that he hesitates to question it and judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his reason (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.
Moreover he is fortified by a belief in a reason common to all mankind… But besides this, which gives the Rationalist a touch of intellectual equalitarianism, he is something also of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself.
He tends to focus on his own experience and to reduce ‘the tangle and variety of experience’ to a set of principles he then attacks or defends on rational grounds.
He has no sense of the cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a formula: the past is of significance to him only as an encumbrance.
He can’t accept mysteries and uncertainties without ‘an irritable search for order’. He likes the ‘large outline which a general theory imposes upon events’ and has no aptitude for close and detailed appreciation of reality. His cast of mind is gnostic.
The mind of a Rationalist impresses us at best ‘as a well trained rather than as an educated mind’, he does not give us a sense of having passed through an elaborate education into the traditions and achievements of their civilization. His activities are self-conscious and appear as ‘a succession of climacterics, each to be surmounted by a tour de raison’. His thoughts are insulated from external experience and cut off from tradition. If he were more self-critical he might wonder how humans ever survived. He believes that ‘to form a habit is to fail’. There is an ‘impatient hunger for eternity and an irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transitory’.
Politics, rooted in the traditional, transitory and circumstantial, seems hostile to rationalism but this has not deterred most!
The rationalist in politics looks for the ‘rational ground’, not the use, of institutions.
Consequently, much of his political activity consists in bringing the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of his society before the tribunal of his intellect; and the rest is rational administration, reason exercising an uncontrolled jurisdiction over the circumstances of the case. To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny. And his disposition makes both destruction and creation easier for him to understand and engage in, than acceptance or reform. To patch up, to repair (that is, to do anything which requires a patient knowledge of the material), he regards as waste of time; and he always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient. He does not recognise change unless it is a self-consciously induced change, and consequently he falls easily into the error of identifying the customary and the traditional with the changeless.
The Rationalist cannot retain or improve a tradition of ideas — both involve an attitude of submission. Traditional ideas must be destroyed and in their place the Rationalist puts an ideology, ‘the formalised abridgement of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition’.
The rationalist in politics focuses on solving problems and the character he claims is that of an engineer.
This assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics… The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment... That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense…
Political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of ‘reason’. Each generation, indeed, each administration, should see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tabula rasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean; as Voltaire remarked, the only way to have good laws is to burn all existing laws and start afresh.
The essence of rationalist politics is the combination of perfection and uniformity.
The Rationalist can’t imagine a political problem for which there is no rational solution and has no time for ‘the best in the circumstances’. Pursuing the perfect, the Rationalist necessarily has no place for variety.
There can be no place for preferences that is not rational preference, and all rational preferences necessarily coincide. Political activity is recognised as the imposition of the uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct.
We see this disposition in grand rhetoric about abolishing ignorance, poverty and division, in schemes for world government, and in the common disposition to believe that ‘political machinery can take the place of moral and political education’.
Founding a society on the basis of a Declaration of the Rights of Man, the idea of racial/national self-determination as a universal principle, the idea of a civil service in which the only qualification is personal ability, the Beveridge Report, the Education Act 1944, Votes for Women, the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the revival of Gaelic as the official language of Eire — all are progeny of Rationalism.
The odd generation of rationalism in politics is by sovereign power out of romanticism.
The source of Rationalism’s endurance is a doctrine about human knowledge.
Every human activity involves knowledge. There are two types of knowledge, distinguishable but inseparable:
Technical knowledge, or knowledge of technique. In many activities technique is formulated in rules which may be learned, remembered and put into practice. It is susceptible of precise formulation (whether or not it actually has been precisely formulated). Part of the technique of driving is in the Highway Code, the technique of cooking is in cookery books and the technique of discovery in natural science ‘is in their rules of research, of observation and verification.’ It is possible to write it down and it seems possible to be certain about it. It can be learned from a book.
Practical knowledge. It exists only in use and cannot be formulated in rules. Mastering any skill is impossible without it. Its normal expression is in a customary or traditional way of doing things, in practice. It is expressed in taste. It is not possible to write it down and it seems imprecise. It can neither be taught nor learned but only imparted and acquired — the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master, not because the master can teach it but because ‘it can be acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practising it.’
Cooking, painting, music, poetry, physics — all require both kinds. So does politics. We see in Pericles’ Funeral Speech (II.40) the value of practical and traditional knowledge.
He quotes a tale in Chuang Tzu about Duke Huan of Ch’i who asks a wheelwright why he thinks the books of dead sages must be useless. The wheelwright explains how he makes a wheel:
The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words, there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy still making wheels.
It must be the same with old sages, he says — all that was worth handing on died with them and the rest they put in their books.
Rationalism asserts that practical knowledge is not knowledge — the only knowledge is technical knowledge.
The heart of the matter is the preoccupation of the Rationalist with certainty. Technique and certainty are, for him, inseparably joined because certain knowledge is, for him, knowledge which does not require to look beyond itself for its certainty…
For the Rationalist the superiority of ideology over tradition is partly that the former is self-contained, it’s in books, it can be taught best to those whose minds are empty and the teacher must first purge prejudices and misconceptions.
The Rationalist is wrong — all knowledge is not in books and the knowledge that is in books is not certain.
But our goal is not to refute Rationalism but to understand its significance.
What is the generation of this belief in the sovereignty of technique?
Whence springs this supreme confidence in human ‘reason’ thus interpreted?
What is the provenance, the context of this intellectual character?
In what circumstances and with what effect did it come to invade European politics.
Modern rationalism shows itself unmistakably in the early 17th Century with Descartes and Bacon.
For Bacon the first and most important thing needed was a new method for acquiring certain knowledge to supplement natural reason. The art of research is:
a set of rules;
whose application is mechanical and does not require knowledge outside the technique itself; and
with universal application indifferent to the subject-matter.
This project was a remarkable search for a philosopher’s stone, a key to open all doors. It was explicitly about putting aside received opinion and clearing the ground, about separating knowledge and opinion — ‘the childish notions we at first imbibed’ (Bacon).
This distinguishes modern Rationalism from Plato — Plato was a rationalist but the dialectic is not a technique.
The technique of research in Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode corresponds closely with Bacon’s Novum Organum. The aim is certainty, it must start with a purge of the mind, the technique is formulated in rules whose application is mechanical and universal, there are no grades of knowledge. His method was modelled on geometry. He was more thorough than Bacon and in the end realised it to be an error to suppose that his method can be the sole means of inquiry, but his successors believed they learned from him the sovereignty of technique.
Modern Rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius. Les grands hommes, en apprenant aux faibles à réfléchir, les ont mis sur la route de l'erreur. [Great men, by teaching the weak to think, put them on the road to error]
Nothing escaped the doctrine of the sovereignty of technique.
With every step taken since Descartes, the Rationalist character has become ‘cruder and more vulgar’ — what was the art of living has turned into the technique of success!
Pascal was one of the first and most profound critics of Descartes. He argued that Descartes’ desire for certain knowledge was based upon a false criterion of certainty. For Pascal the only knowledge that is certain is so because of probability, not certainty. Further the mind is not wholly dependent on a conscious technique and where technique is involved the mind observes it ‘tacitement, naturallement et sans art’. For Pascal the significance of rationalism was its failure to recognise any knowledge other than technical knowledge, its false certainty in the doctrine of the sovereignty of technique.
The hold of rationalism on different fields has waxed and waned but its grip on politics has steadily grown and is stronger than ever. Traditional elements in English politics that might have been expected to resist, have almost completely conformed to the prevailing temper and even represent their conformity as a sign of vitality, a sign they can move with the times. Rationalism is not a style, one among many, it is ‘the stylistic criterion of all respectable politics’.
Traditions of behaviour have given way to ideologies.
The politics of destruction and creation have replaced the politics of repair.
Plans are considered better than what has grown up over a period.
For a long time English politics resisted putting too high a value on political action. This resistance has itself now become an ideology! This is the significance of Hayek — not the cogency of his doctrine but that it is a doctrine.
A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite but it belongs to the same style of politics.
Only in a society deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of traditional sources of resistance to Rationalism into an ideology of resistance be seen as a strengthening of those resources. Now, not to have a doctrine appears ‘frivolous, even disreputable’.
Rationalist politics, the politics of the felt need of the moment, is ‘the politics of the book’. When scientists try to influence politics now, they bring only technique. The sense of the partnership between present and past is lost.
How did all this happen?
The politics of Rationalism are the politics of the inexperienced and the outstanding characteristic of European politics for four centuries is the incursion of political inexperience: the new ruler, the new ruling class, the new political society and a new sex.
Oakeshott sketches Machiavelli.
Machiavelli wrote for the new prince, not the established hereditary ruler educated in a tradition and heir to a family tradition. Machiavelli provided a crib for the new ruler who had no tradition. Like Bacon and Descartes, Machiavelli was aware of the limits of technical knowledge and knew that politics are diplomacy, though his followers thought public administration could be learned from a book.
Locke’s Second Treatise another political crib. But Marx/Engels are the authors of ‘the most stupendous of our political rationalisms’ and ‘no other technique has ‘so imposed itself upon the world as if it were concrete knowledge’.
In America, a people not given to much reflection on the tradition they had inherited were in frontier communities where they had the experience of setting up law and order for themselves by mutual agreement.
They seemed to begin with nothing and to owe to themselves all that they had come to possess. A civilization of pioneers is, almost unavoidably, a civilization of self-consciously self-made men. Rationalists by circumstance and not by reflection…
The Founding Fathers drew on Locke who had distilled an ideology from the English political tradition. John Jay (1777) reflected that the American constitution was the first chance men had had to deliberate upon and choose the form of government under which they would live — other constitutions were the product of ‘violence or accidental circumstance’.
For Oakeshott, the failure of European politics springs from ‘the defects of the Rationalist character when it is in control of affairs’.
The prestige of the natural sciences has been used to strengthen Rationalism, though for Oakeshott that is not the work of the genuine scientist (who is not necessarily Rationalist) but the scientist who is a Rationalist.
No doubt there are scientists deeply involved in the rationalist attitude, but they are mistaken when they think that the rationalist and scientific points of view necessarily collide.
The combination of political inexperience and political opportunity has often existed. Rationalist politics since the 17th Century derives from the fact that the modern world invented ‘so plausible a method of covering up lack of political education that even those who suffered from that lack were often left ignorant that they lacked anything.’ The inexperience was never universal or absolute. There have always been men of ‘genuine political education, immune from the infection of Rationalism’ — particularly in England ‘where a political education of some sort has been much more widely spread than in some other societies’.
Further, so impractical is purely rationalist politics that those trying it often throw away their books and rely on general experience. Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, the Rationalist will always be ‘bewildered by a tradition and habit of behaviour of which he knows only the surface’ and by a strange self-deception ‘he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is preeminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics.’
Consequently, the Rationalist is a dangerous and expensive character to have in control of affairs, and he does most damage, not when he fails to master the situation (his politics, of course, are always in terms of mastery of situations and surmounting crises), but when he appears to be successful; for the price we pay for each of his apparent successes is a firmer hold of the intellectual fashion of Rationalism upon the whole life of society.
There are two characteristics that make it particularly dangerous.
First, Rationalism is an intellectual error concerning knowledge and this is a ‘corruption of the mind’. It cannot self-correct. The Rationalist ‘does not merely neglect the kind of knowledge which would save him; he begins by destroying it.’ He turns out the light then complains he cannot see. The Rationalist is uneducable. He sees the thing that could save him as the enemy of mankind.
Unsurprisingly contemporary politics has degenerated into a succession of failed Rationalist projects and a common Rationalist disposition, even in England.
Secondly, a society infected by rationalist politics will either drift or be steered towards exclusively rationalist education, not just the crude forms of Nazism and Communism but ‘the more plausible project of offering no place to any form of education which is not generally rationalistic in character’.
The Rationalist takes ‘an ominous interest in education’. He is determined that cleverness be rewarded with power. The Rationalist has no interest in initiation into the moral and intellectual habits and achievements of his society, a partnership between past and present, a sharing of concrete knowledge. He values training in books used as cribs.
Such half-knowledge and the institutions that teach it will have economic value in a rationalist society. Some think that an industrial society inevitably generates this but it confuses things.
What an industrial civilisation needs is genuine skill: and in so far as our industrial civilisation has decided to dispense with skill and to get along with merely technical knowledge it is an industrial civilisation gone to the bad.
Rationalism is now invading and corrupting genuine educational institutions: some have disappeared, others are obsolescent, others corrupted. Apprenticeship, a pupil working alongside a master who imparts knowledge that cannot be taught, is obsolescent and is being replaced by technical schools. Professional education is increasingly seen as acquisition of technique. (The war showed the difference — clever civilians could easily acquire the technique of military leadership but remained at a disadvantage beside the regular officer who understood the feelings, emotions and practices of his profession.) Family tradition, which transmits so much crucial knowledge, and depends on at least two generations of practice, is not valued by Rationalists. The priceless treasure of great professional traditions is destroyed in the destruction of so-called vested interests. Perhaps worst of all, universities are now being transformed to provide technicians.
Perhaps local fightbacks can happen, perhaps universities will resist. [They didn’t!] But there is a Rationalist victory already won that will be hard to reverse because although the Rationalist knows it’s a victory, ‘his opponent hardly recognizes it as a defeat’:
I mean the circumvention and appropriation by the rationalist disposition of mind of the whole field of morality and moral education. The morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals, and the appropriate form of moral education is by precept, by the presentation and explanation of moral principles. This is presented as a higher morality (the morality of the free-man: there is no end to the clap-trap), than that of habit, the unselfconscious following of a tradition of moral behaviour; but, in fact, it is merely morality reduced to a technique, to be acquired by training in an ideology rather than an education in behaviour. In morality, as in everything else, the Rationalist aims to begin by getting rid of inherited nescience and then to fill the blank nothingness of an open mind with the items of certain knowledge which he abstracts from his personal experience, and which he believes to be approved by the common ‘reason’ of mankind…
Like the politics of the Rationalist (from which, of course, it is inseparable), the morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-made man and of the self-made society: it is what other peoples have recognised as ‘idolatry’. And it is of no consequence that the moral ideology which inspires him today (and which, if he is a politician, he preaches) is, in fact, the desiccated relic of what was once the unselfconscious moral tradition of an aristocracy who, in ignorance of ideals, had acquired a habit of behaviour in relation to one another and had handed it on in a true moral education. For the Rationalist, all that matters is that he has at last separated the ore of the ideal from the dross of the habit of behaviour; and, for us, the deplorable consequences of his success. Moral ideals are a sediment; they have significance only so long as they are suspended in a religious or social tradition, so long as they belong to a religious or a social life. The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the liquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away as worthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokes us as we try to take it down.
First, we do our best to destroy parental authority (because of its alleged abuse), then we sentimentally deplore the scarcity of ‘good homes’, and we end by creating substitutes which complete the work of destruction. And it is for this reason that, among much else that is corrupt and unhealthy, we have the spectacle of a set of sanctimonious, rationalist politicians, preaching an ideology of unselfishness and social service to a population in which they and their predecessors have done their best to destroy the only living root of moral behaviour; and opposed by another set of politicians dabbling with the project of converting us from Rationalism under the inspiration of a fresh rationalization of our political tradition.
Political education, 1951
He defines politics:
[It’s] the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together... [We think mainly of] the hereditary cooperative groups, many of them of ancient lineage, all of them aware of a past, a present, and a future, which we call “states”… I speak of this activity as ‘attending to arrangements’, rather than as ‘making arrangements’, because in these hereditary cooperative groups the activity is never offered the blank sheet of infinite possibility. In any generation, even the most revolutionary, the arrangements which are enjoyed always far exceed those which are recognised to stand in need of attention… The new is an insignificant proportion of the whole.
We must observe the kind of knowledge and education inherent in understanding political activity and use this observation to improve understanding of politics.
Some think of politics as an empirical activity: wake up and consider ‘what would I like to do, what would someone like to see done’ then do it. It hardly seems possible to act like this [!] but a near approach to it is detected in the politics of ‘the proverbial oriental despot’, the wall-scribbler, and the vote-catcher. The result is ‘chaos modified by whatever consistency is allowed to creep into caprice’. It’s the politics attributed to Lord Liverpool of whom Acton said ‘The secret of his policy was that he had none’ and of whom a Frenchman remarked that if he had been present of the creation of the world he would have said ‘Mon Dieu, conservons le chaos’. The knowledge needed for this sort of politics is knowledge only of our passing appetites and the kind of education appropriate to it would be ‘an education in lunacy’.
The error comes partly because empiricism is not a concrete manner of activity and can become a partner in one only when joined with something else. Yes politics are the pursuit of what is desired at the moment but because they are this ‘they can never be the pursuit of merely what recommends itself from moment to moment’. Practically therefore the style of politics-as-pure-empiricism approaches lunacy but theoretically empirical politics are ‘merely impossible: the product of a misunderstanding’.
It seems that what this approach is missing is ‘an end to be pursued more extensive than a merely instant desire’ — empiricism preceded and guided by an ideological activity. A political ideology purports to be a set of related abstract principles which supplies an end to be pursued and therefore provides a means of distinguishing between desires which ought to be encouraged, suppressed, or redirected. E.g Equality, Racial Purity, ‘the principles of 1789’, Marxism. Here, political activity is the enterprise of seeing that ‘the arrangement of a society conform to or reflect the chosen abstract idea’.
To know the true good of the community is what constitutes the science of legislation, the art consists in finding the means to realise that good.
Here political education is knowledge of the ideology. The common characteristic of the kinds of knowledge required is that they may and should be gathered in advance of the activity of politics so that we can expound, defend, implement and possibly invent an ideology.
At least half the world seems to conduct its affairs in this way.
BUT in fact political ideologies are not independently premeditated schemes of ends — an ideology is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about politics, it is not a premeditation in advance of politics but a meditation on a manner of politics. Political activity comes first and ideologies follow, similarly to how only someone already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis (which depends on abstraction from already existing inquiry).
The Rights of Man ideology of 1789 and Locke’s Second Treatise were abstracted from English experience over centuries, including evolved common law rights.
Freedom, like a recipe for game pie, is not a bright idea; it is not a ‘human right’ to be deduced from some speculative concept of human nature. The freedom which we enjoy is nothing more than arrangements, procedures of a certain kind… And the freedom which we wish to enjoy is not an ‘ideal’ which we premeditate independently of our political experience, it is what is already intimated in that experience.
An abstraction and abridgement can be valuable. It can be convenient. But there is an alternative — what the British Empire did, i.e export the detail and the workmen with their tools, not the abridgement of the tradition. This approach is slower and less convenient. A simplified ideology is more convenient but the complexities of the tradition squeezed out by abstraction are demoted.
In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion… [There’s a Bismarck quote very similar to this ‘sailing on a sea’ analogy.] And if it suggests that politics are nur für die Schwindelfreie [only for those with a head for heights], that should depress only those who have lost their nerve.
If one agrees with this analysis, then political education is knowledge, as profound as we can make it, of our tradition of political behaviour and a manner of living in all its intricateness. This can’t be done by copying models and learning rules. Everything is changing and temporary but nothing is arbitrary. It is never wholly in motion or at rest.
Academic study of politics must be historical and focused on detail. Every society constructs legends, what it focuses on and remembers about its past. We must try to understand these legends, not to expose them as errors but to understand their prejudices. Institutions are not machinery designed to achieve a purpose but ‘manners of behaviour meaningless when separated from their context’.
It is therefore dangerous to look around the world looking for ‘the best’ features seen elsewhere, like Zeus trying to compose someone more beautiful than Helen by putting together features each notable for perfection. Our knowledge of others is important but can only be similar to our knowledge of our own — a knowledge of particulars and details.
The masses in representative democracy, 1961
Now ‘mass man’ is seen as the most significant revolution of modern times, an event that has changed politics, society, religion, art. This is wrong but we can only understand ‘mass man’ if we understand where he came from, the emergence of the individual which is ‘the pre-eminent event in modern European history’.
This did not come with the French/American Revolutions but with the modification of medieval conditions in the 14th and 15th centuries, a time that’s perplexing to historians because of its illegibility. It was not generated in claims and assertions but in ‘sporadic divergencies from a condition of human circumstance in which the opportunity for choice was narrowly circumscribed.’ The only self-knowledge possible for the vast majority had been to know oneself as a member of a family, church, village community, occupier of a tenancy and so on. Life and its decisions, rights and responsibilities was communal. Differences between individuals were insignificant and anonymity prevailed.
The individual first emerged in Italy. The famous historian Burckhardt wrote:
At the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved; a thousand figures meet us, each in his own special shape and dress.
A new image of human nature appeared — ‘not Adam, not Prometheus, but Proteus — a character distinguished from all others on account of his multiplicity and of his endless power of self-transformation’.
It spread from Italy. By the 16th century the new conditions could not easily be suppressed. E.g All the severity of the Calvinist regime in Geneva could not do it. A high degree of individuality came to be seen as the proper condition of mankind. It became an ethical and metaphysical theory and transformed art, religion, and political ideas and institutions.
Modern writing about morals begins with the hypothesis of the individual choosing activity. Hobbes was the first moralist of the modern world to grapple with individuality. He understood man as an organism with a natural right to exist and an impulse to avoid death and make choices, therefore a crucial question is his interaction with others. The same central question is in Kant — morality consists in the recognition of individual personality, and while we can promote the ‘happiness’ of others we cannot promote their ‘good’ without destroying their ‘freedom’.
This pursuit of individuality was reflected in a new understanding of government which emerged first in England, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Those intent on exploring the intimations of individuality for government developed three ideas about it:
Government must be single and supreme with authority at the centre so the individual could escape communal pressures.
Government must be sovereign and able to abolish old rights and create new.
Government must be powerful but not so powerful as itself to constitute a threat to individuality.
The parliaments and councils of the Middle Ages that transformed interests into rights had been pre-eminently judicial bodies. The new bodies developed a new instrument: legislation. Gradually there evolved expectations of freedom of speech, belief, labour and so on and, above all, ‘the rule of law’ — i.e the right to be ruled by a known law applicable to all alike. The appearance of ‘privacy’ is ‘the obverse of the desuetude [fall into a state of disuse] of the communal arrangements from which modern individuality sprang’.
Old certainties of belief, occupation and status were dissolving not only for those with confidence in their power to make a new place for themselves among other individuals but among those without such confidence. There were entrepreneurs and displaced labourers, libertines and dispossessed believers.
The familiar anonymity of communal life was replaced by personal identity which was burdensome to those who could not transform it into an individuality. What some recognised as happiness, appeared to others as discomfort. The same condition of human circumstance was identified as progress and as decay. In short, the circumstances of modern Europe … bred, not a single character, but two obliquely opposed characters: not only that of the individual, but also that of the ‘individual manqué’. And this ‘individual manqué’ was not a relic of a past age; he was a ‘modern’ character, the product of the same dissolution of communal ties as had generated the modern European individual… [He] sought a protector … and found what he sought, in some measure, in ‘the government’.
Governments increasingly modified in response to their needs, e.g the Elizabethan Statute of Labourers was designed to take care of those left behind.
The experience of individuality generated over time an appropriate morality — a disposition to approve the pursuit of individuality. This was a revolution that swept aside the relics of ‘the morality appropriate to the defunct communal order’. The weight of the moral revolution fell heavily on the ‘individual manqué’. As well as the struggle for existence he faced a radical self-distrust, an abyss, a misery of guilt. For many this generated resentment and some of these characters developed a militant anti-individualism, an impulse to seek separatist communities ‘insulated from the moral pressure of individuality’.
Over time the most numerous class in Europe consisted of such people, people who had no choices of their own to make — the anti-individual recognised himself as the ‘mass man’. The mass man is disposed to impose a uniformity of belief and conduct.
The ‘masses’ as they appear in modern European history are not composed of individuals, they are composed of ‘anti-individuals’ united in a revulsion from individuality.
Such people have feelings rather than thoughts, impulses rather than opinions and required leaders, and the modern concept of leadership is unintelligible without the anti-individual. The leader transforms impulses into desires and desires into projects and ‘from one point of view “the masses” must be regarded as the invention of their leaders’. The anti-individual was an instrument to be played upon and ‘the instrument provoked the virtuoso’.
What was this leader? Someone who could appear as the image and master of his followers.
He was enough of an individual to seek a personal satisfaction in the exercise of individuality, but too little to seek it anywhere but in commanding others… What his followers took to be a genuine concern for their salvation was in fact nothing more than the vanity of the almost selfless. No doubt the ‘masses’ in modern Europe have had other leaders than this cunning frustrate who has led always by flattery and whose only concern is the exercise of power; but they have had none more appropriate — for he only had never prompted them to be critical of their impulses.
It’s necessarily an uneasy relationship with the mass man often submissive but not loyal to his leaders. The ‘exiguous individuality’ of the leader raises suspicion and the leader’s greed for power disposes him to raise hopes that he cannot satisfy.
The anti-individual has (A) generated a morality designed to displace the morality of individuality and (B) generated a new understanding of government appropriate to his character.
The morality is no longer ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’ but ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’. It’s hard to trace historically because its vocabulary was at first that of ‘the morality of the defunct communal order’ and it derived strength from its affinity to it. The nucleus of it was the concept of the ‘common’ or ‘public’ good understood as an independent entity, not composed of the various goods sought by individuals. Instead of self-love, not charity or benevolence but love of ‘the community’. Private property was identified with individuality therefore should be attacked/abolished.
This morality began to be constructed in the 16th century and was already visible in the 17th century. By 1900 this morality was clear in Marx and was widespread, recognised by the likes of Nietzsche and Burckhardt as a new barbarism.
Thus government was cast for the role of architect and custodian, not of ‘public order’ in an ‘association’ of individuals pursuing their own activities, but of ‘the public good’ of ‘the community’.
This view has been explored from Thomas More’s Utopia to the Fabian Society and Lenin.
The form of government this morality generated, which we could call ‘popular government’, is wholly different from ‘parliamentary government’ generated by the aspirations of individuality. The emergent individual of the 16th century had sought new rights and by about 1800 in England and elsewhere they had been largely established. The anti-individual was persuaded that his poverty had prevented him sharing in them and sought new rights supposedly allowing him to benefit from the older ones. But the older rights were demanded by individuals so anti-individuals ended up not really wanting them, not being disposed to be individuals, and their leaders did not encourage them to be individuals and seek those rights. The rights of individuality were available to him as to everyone and what prevented him from enjoying them was not his circumstances/poverty but his character of anti-individuality.
Instead the mass man demanded rights of a different kind that necessitated abolishing the rights appropriate to individuals. The anti-individual mass man didn’t want a right to ‘pursue happiness’, a burden, but a right to ‘enjoy happiness’ and a right to security against having to meet the vicissitudes of life from his own resources. This necessarily pushes such a regime to be hostile to individuals, for individuals making their own choices threaten emotional security and the social protectorate. Popular government is a disposition to modify parliamentary government to make it appropriate to the aspirations of mass man.
This generated trends: 1) democratic voting, 2) for parliamentary representatives to be not individuals but instructed delegates of mass man, 3) for governments to become much more powerful, 4) for parliaments to become vulnerable to the plebiscite.
And in turn this has generated mass parties composed of anti-individuals. The plebiscite is not the means by which mass man imposes his choices upon rulers but ‘a method of generating a government with unlimited authority to make choices on his behalf’ and a release from the burden of individuality.
So popular government generated a new from of politics — the art of ‘knowing what offer will collect most votes and making it in such a manner that it appears to come from “the people”’.
This anti-individual is not necessarily ignorant and much of the ‘intelligentsia’ are like this. The mass man is powerful and has shaken the moral prestige of individuality. But it is still the emergence of the individual that is the event of supreme importance.
The desire of the masses to enjoy the products of individuality has modified their destructive urge. And the antipathy of the mass man to the ‘happiness’ of ‘self-determination’ easily dissolves into self pity. At all important points the individual still appears as the substance and the ‘anti-individual’ only as the shadow.
On Being Conservative, 1956
Oakeshott is concerned with a disposition, not a creed or doctrine, and a disposition as it appears in contemporary character, not as it might be transposed into general principles:
To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners.
To use and enjoy what’s available rather than to wish for something else, to delight in what is present.
No mere idolising of the past, ‘what is esteemed is the present’ and not because of its connections to antiquity but on account of its familiarity. It will be strongest when there is evident risk of loss. It’s a disposition appropriate to someone who ‘is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for’.
‘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.’
Changes have to be suffered. ‘[The disposition] is averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation.’ Slow and small changes will be more tolerable and he will value every appearance of continuity.
‘Change is a threat to identity and every change is an emblem of extinction.’ The only way a person or community can preserve their identity is by ‘cleaving to whatever familiarities are not immediately threatened and thus assimilating what is new without becoming unrecognisable to ourselves.’
The Masai, when they were moved from their old country to the present Masai reserve in Kenya, took with them the names of their hills and plains and rivers and gave them to the hills and plains and rivers of the new country. And it is by some such subterfuge of conservatism that every man or people compelled to suffer a notable change avoids the shame of extinction.
Innovation is supposed to be improvement. Someone of conservative temperament ‘will not himself be an ardent innovator’. He knows not all innovation is actually improvement and even if it seems convincing as improvement ‘he will look twice at its claims before accepting them’. Whether the improvements are worth it is exceedingly hard to judge, there will always be losses too, ‘the total change is always more extensive than the change designed’, and the losses and gains will not be equally distributed among those affected. The onus of proof therefore lies on the would-be innovator. The more it is a response to a specific defect the better. Therefore small, slow and limited innovations are preferable.
He is unadventurous and has no impulse to sail uncharted seas. ‘What others plausibly identify as timidity he recognises in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity he recognises as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit.’
Our world would look very different if there were not ‘a large ingredient of conservatism in human preferences’. Our myths warn us against innovation. On the other hand, ‘the disposition of adolescence is often predominantly adventurous and experimental’.
Looking at the last 500 years a reasonable person might concluded we are in love with change and innovation. We have made one innovation after another as if unworried about the effects. Given the pre-eminent impulse for change, the conservative disposition can appear as ‘unfortunate hindrance’ fixated on ‘quaint examples of superseded achievement preserved for children to gape at’, with the conservative disregarded as ‘a faded, timid, nostalgic character, provoking pity as an outcast and contempt as a reactionary’.
But there are activities which can be engaged in ‘only in virtue of a disposition to be conservative’ where what is sought is present enjoyment, not profit or reward. Even if we reject conservatism as a disposition appropriate to our conduct in general, as most of us do, there remain activities where a conservative disposition is necessary.
There are many relationships where being conservative is not particularly appropriate: e.g buyer/seller, principal/agent, where each seeks a service or recompense for a service. But the death of a friend is different to the retirement of your tailor and there are many activities where what is sought is enjoyment from familiarity, not success, (e.g fishing). When engaged in projects, we are usually conservative about tools, even though there are new designs. And most routines, like the rules of debate for Parliament, are not constantly changed radically; our assumption is they will be consistent.
What about politics?
A conservative disposition is not necessarily connected with any particular beliefs about the universe and has nothing to do with a natural law, a providential order, morals or religion.
It is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief … that 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 therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.
He then describes all the complexity of life in modern England with all its individual ends and choices, the variety of enterprises and the diversity of beliefs. It is not the product of ‘human nature’ nor of design and we know as much about where it is leading us ‘as we know about the fashion in hats of twenty years’ time’.
Many dream of turning this chaos into order, like Apollo watching Daphne’s hair hanging carelessly about her neck. Such people think of government as ‘the imposition upon its subjects of the condition of human circumstances of their dream … a perpetual takeover bid for the purchase of the resources of human energy in order to concentrate them in a single direction’.
But for the conservative, the variety, the ‘chaos’, the ‘excess, the over-activity and the informal compromise’ is all to be welcomed and protected. Government is not about imposing beliefs and activities, nor educating, nor to make people better, nor to galvanise them into action.
The office of government is simply to rule… The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.
Conservatives do not need any broader theories, about private property or anything else, to justify this perspective. It is based simply on the observation that ‘this condition of human circumstance is, in fact, current, and that we have learned how to enjoy it and how to manage it’, and it is beyond human experience to suppose that ‘those who rule are endowed with a superior wisdom’ which discloses a better range of ideas and gives them the authority to impose a different manner of life. It’s boring to listen to the dreams of others but it’s ‘insufferable to be forced to re-enact them’, we tolerate monomaniacs ‘but why should we be ruled by them’! We should set limits to the mount of noise and nuisance created by those who wish to impose their ideas on the rest of us.
The conservative resolves some of the collisions which our society generates, and tries to preserve peace, not by imposing beliefs or uniformity, but by ‘enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike’. He does not govern with ‘a vision of another, different and better world’, does not seek truth or perfection, ‘is not concerned with moral right and wrong’, but governs to enable the enjoyment of peaceable and orderly behaviour. It is a specific and limited activity, ‘not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises’. Indifferent to ‘truth’ and ‘error’, it merely pursues peace and therefore presents no obstacle to the necessary loyalty.
Our world now generates new inventions, new activities, and new beliefs therefore many rules seem inadequate, e.g copyright, and many new nuisances call out to be abated. Innovation is therefore needed to make rules appropriate to the activities they govern. But for the conservative, changes of rules should ‘always reflect, never impose, a change in the activities and beliefs of those who are subject to them’. The conservative is suspicious of those who talk of ‘the public good’ and ‘social justice’. He wants nothing more than basic loyalty, respect and some suspicion for government — not love or even affection. He does not seek to inject reason — ‘how should we expect that?’ — but to ‘deflate extravagance without itself pretending to wisdom’, to inject some inertia and scepticism, ‘like the cool touch of the mountain one feels in the plain even on the hottest summer day’, or like the governor ‘which keeps an engine from racketing itself to pieces’.
It is not at all inconsistent to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity. And, in my opinion, there is more to be learnt about this disposition from Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes and Hume than from Burke or Bentham… Politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of their … virtues.
It is not easy to ‘tolerate what is abominable, to distinguish between crime and sin, to respect formality even when it appears to be leading to error’ and they are achievements not to be looked for in the young. The young live in a dream, a ‘sweet solipsism’, the allure of violent emotions is irresistible, we are urgent and impatient of restraint, and we believe like Shelley that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. There are occasionally people born old, like Pitt, but they are exceptions.
For most there is what Conrad called the ‘shadow line’ which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of ‘political science’ can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity.
A few remarks
[Edited 12/9/23]
These essays help us understand how we got here which is necessary for trying to figure out what to do, but they don’t provide a map for what to do now — unsurprisingly given Oakeshott thought such maps to be rationalist errors.
We can see a combination of:
A. The emergence of the idea of the individual in medieval Italy, its spread across Europe.
B. Spreading Rationalism in philosophy.
C. The growing importance of natural science, Descartes, Newton etc.
D. England’s increasingly powerful example: a) a strengthening of Parliament and legislation, b) a deepening political and legal principle of ‘the rule of law’, that is, the idea that each individual deserves the protection of general laws that apply to all, and which even the government must obey (so also a spread of ‘judicial review’), c) the protection of private (i.e individual) property, d) the Industrial Revolution and the spread of Adam Smith’s and Hume’s ideas on markets and the emergence of cooperation out of complex competition.
All four aspects were to be challenged by the growth of Rationalism in politics and evolved from sources of pride to sources of shame (racist, sexist, capitalist, imperialist etc).
The economic and technological success of Britain, and its growing political power clearly connected to that success, sparked a process of ‘creative emulation’ (as Gibbon called it) with other regimes. This took many forms including:
strengthening liberalism — calls for Parliaments and constitutions including attempts to abstract English experience and codify it that we see in, for example, the Rights of Man, Locke, the US Constitution, the French Revolution and so on
strengthening calls for government led ‘modernisation’, industrialisation, and free markets
strengthening nationalism
undermining of Throne and Altar.
E. A counter-action — partly Rationalist, partly anti-Rationalist. Everywhere in Europe there was a reaction against the ‘bourgeois’, best described by Rousseau who inspired artists for generations to fight against the dominance of English/capitalist culture and the supposed triumph of the Last Man. From Goethe to Flaubert and Yeats, artists were anti-bourgeois and searched for meaning beyond the life promised by English liberalism/individuality. This is why artists were the first to find Nietzsche, the greatest enemy of the bourgeois and Marx.
Overall the Rationalist mindset in politics caused a lot of hubris and destruction. Oakeshott’s description of how Rationalists mistake the nature of knowledge seems true and Pascal seems prescient. But the reaction to the Rationalist mindset also caused a a lot of hubris and destruction.
There is inherent conflict between a) the English system of parliament, rule of law, individual rights, with government as umpire, and b) the Rationalist and anti-Rationalist alternatives that both appeal to ‘the public good’ and ‘the people’ and which tend to strengthen the central state and weaken the individual and see government as architect/engineer.
From these tensions we can trace some political dynamics:
English liberalism in the 17-19th century sense. In many ways it’s hard to distinguish from Oakeshott’s sketch of conservatism, which says a lot! This old liberalism — free markets, free trade, the state as a minimalist nightwatchman etc — peaked and came under growing pressure across Europe after 1848. As electorates expanded, its popularity faded. 1850-1914 the old liberals shifted towards conservatives (hoping for rearguard action against the Left) or towards the democratic/socialist Left. This old liberalism was sickening before World War I and was killed and buried by it. Political conservatism in Oakeshott’s sense — government as ‘umpire’ seeking only to enforce general rules fairly, defend against foreign threats and enable life to be peaceful and orderly, consciously avoiding a ‘vision’ — is as dead as this old liberalism. It was a response to dynamics of the medieval world which has gone. Its death has destroyed much of value but it cannot be revived in the democratic west any more than a libertarian party could win an election. The most one can hope for is that the odd character with an Oakeshott-disposition can be found and inserted in an appropriately eclectic Red Team to inject scepticism and deflate extravagance. This old liberalism is now seen as racist, sexist, fascist, and imperialist by those who call themselves liberals.
Reactionary conservatism on the Continent which tried to resist the English example and the explosions of the American and French revolutions. Its attempted retrenchment after 1815, championed by Metternich, failed. After the 1848 revolutions the reactionaries felt themselves doomed. Some wanted to dig in and die on the gallows, sacrificing themselves to Throne and Altar. Others felt they had to try to adapt. After all, perhaps the pressure for constitutions was just a passing fad that could be ridden out by playing for time (as Wilhelm I said to Franz Joseph). Like the old liberalism this reactionary conservatism was killed by World War I though with the surrender of the Tsars in the 1860s and success (temporary and partial but at the time dramatic) of Bismarck’s alternative, it was already dying. By 1914 all the old regimes thought they had no alternative to concessions to modernity. They all feared an imminent deluge, though many secretly hoped that a war could let them turn the clock back. It did the opposite.
Socialism/communism. From 1848, socialist/communist ideas escaped their elite ghetto and were a growing force in European politics. Already from the third-quarter of the 19th century you can see in brilliant novels like Fathers and Sons, Notes from the Underground, The Devils, Brothers Karamazov and so on artists pushing the logic of rationalism to its limits: not only why should we believe in God but why should we accept the morality that came with it, what rational basis does it stand on? As Nietzsche saw, this trend would continue with the left trying to pull themselves ‘out of the swamp of nothingness by their own hair’, certainly unable to find any ‘rational basis’ for morality. Socialism was not the opposite of liberal capitalism, as it thought of itself, but its spiritual fulfilment — both aim for the happiness of the herd, for the Last Man, ‘the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob’. Inevitably all traditional ideas about sex and the family were attacked; why should I be hypocritical, why should I restrain natural impulses, what authority knows better than me or has a right to force or judge me? And, after a few generations, what authority says I can’t decide what I want to be entirely independently of nature, of biology itself?
Rearguard/adaptive conservatism. Some conservatives groped for a new model — perhaps they could accept liberal economics and wider participation in politics but still entrench the power of Throne and Altar, perhaps using universal suffrage to mobilise peasants (loyal to throne and altar) against the liberals and socialists in such a way as to keep elite control. Bismarck, the most creative ‘conservative’ of the modern world, said, ‘State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power.’ The old aristocrat, born in the year of Waterloo, introduced universal male suffrage and then state pensions, unemployment insurance and much else we think of as ‘modern’ to undercut liberals and socialists. He explicitly rejected the idea of government in the English sense, drawn from parties in parliament, as a guaranteed trip to the madhouse but his alternative system, so dependent on him, did not survive him. In December 1897, Bismarck said, ‘Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this’; twenty years later, the crash came. The 1870-1 success of Prussia against France saw the red flag rise above Paris. Lord Salisbury collected pamphlets from this communist uprising and warned his fellow aristocrats that the old England and its loyalties were fading fast, that even the patriotism of ~1850 could no longer be relied on as modernity chewed up tradition. Like Bismarck he tried to exploit the errors of liberals and socialists while feeling that the flow of events was against him: ‘I can even think out the idea that some day “unbelieving Jesuits” will rule over [Prussia] together with a Bonapartist absolutism’, as Bismarck put it.
The Communism of Lenin and Stalin: the “unbelieving Jesuits”. Partly rationalist, self-consciously ‘modern’, theoretically committed to universal equality, mobilising communal morality against the individual — not the right to pursue happiness but the right to enjoy happiness. Logical result? Tyranny of party elite, the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Terror, the Cultural Revolution, many tens of millions killed and tortured. (Also, it left a legacy of Russia encouraging every western force that increases internal division. It’s odd given the KGB’s history that Putin has taken against LGBTQ+ rather than have the KGB amplify it, as it did civil rights decades ago.)
Fascism/Nazism. A weird blend of rationalism and romanticism, of extreme nationalism and targeted socialism, of hyper-modernism (e.g some of Goebbels’ propaganda, technology development) and anti-modernism (e.g Hitler ripping modernist pictures off the walls of museums). It was not a reversion to Throne and Altar but in some ways brought a conscious reinvention of (sometimes bogus) traditions, also theoretically giving the racial in-group equal votes in referendums and so on. Logical result? Tyranny of party elite, Auschwitz, many tens of millions killed and tortured. In their approach to propaganda and terror the regimes of Hitler and Stalin were much closer to each other than the older regimes of Europe and America. If Metternich were revived to look at their torture chambers he’d say: see, we told you what would happen if you pulled down the ancien regime.
Post-1945 ‘conservatism’ (rationalism manqué). This has accepted that religion and morality is a matter of individual choice (not knowledge), and accepted the newspaper (then TV) replacing prayer; universal voting; a large slug of state socialism. Such ‘Conservatives’ are, as Oakeshott said, almost all rationalists now and, in recent years, of a particularly decayed sort, rationalists manqué with little interest in the actual business of power and government and, like their political enemies, obsessed 100X more with the daily ephemera of the old media than ruling. Across the west ‘conservatism’ is almost entirely ineffectively reactive (but not reactionary). Further, as Oakeshott says, one of the most significant aspects of our political world is that not only have so-called conservatives become decayed rationalists but ‘conservatives’ now generally lack the education and self-awareness of the influences on their own minds to realise it or what it means. Understanding modern politics requires understanding the remarkable flight of talented people who oppose the Left away from the trajectory of public life (politics, media etc) to building their own walled gardens and cultivating their fish ponds (startups, hedge funds, VC, research etc). And this has accelerated a shift among those who command critical institutions: they have little exposure to the entrepreneur, to someone who has built something complex and valuable, and have little feel for large complex systems and the extreme likelihood that complex orders issued from the centre will not translate as intended to lower levels of the network. The lack of thought and talent means that even when nominal conservatives are nominally in power for twelve years, not only does almost everything shift left regardless of who wins elections — it does so without the nominal ‘conservatives’ even trying to change the hard-wiring of the system. They get spat out of office entirely baffled by their experience, yabbering to the media about ‘the lefties controlling Whitehall HR’ as if they haven’t been nominally ‘in charge’. In a culture like this, the ‘conservative disposition’, unlike in 1800, means at most slightly slowing the shift left.
The post-1945 left. It was broadly of two kinds: a) well-disposed to socialism/communism, b) ‘social democracy’. 1989-91 pushed the left more towards (b). Now left parties partly accept the market economy but are moving very rapidly to the left on cultural issues, a cause and effect of educational polarisation, with graduates identifying left and non-college voters shifting towards parties of the right. (I think left parties will also move economically further left as they realise they can do this and still win.) But they don’t feel themselves as moving left, they feel they’re responding to the racism, sexism etc of the ‘populist right’ / the ‘incipient fascism’ of Brexit/Trump etc. Andrew Sullivan wrote ‘What happened to you?’ a couple of years ago about his experience dealing with friends in America. His friends kept asking him ‘what happened to you?’ but his response was, ‘I voted for Obama and my views are the same as twenty years ago, what happened to you?!’ A recent example of this phenomenon is an Oxford professor of economics equating belief in the idea that Brexit might be good with belief in QAnon. To him, this is obvious and disagreement with him is a sign of madness. To others, he’s the one who seems to have lost the plot. So both sides increasingly see madness everywhere, and when you see madness you’re much less inclined to reason with opponents and much more inclined to suppress them, as if it’s a public health duty (and some use this analogy).
Supranationalism. Monnet and Delors, the two most important founders of the EEC/EU were self-consciously anti-American, anti-Locke, anti-English liberalism, anti what they saw as the 19th century English / 20th century American model of capitalism. They were self-consciously hostile to the nation state and saw building the EEC/EU as an alternative to it. And this meant they were necessarily also trying to limit democracy, as democratic elections were inherently national — and they did not flinch from admitting this, though their fans in the Foreign Office were not so honest. For those two, peace and prosperity required a supranational highly centralised alternative to the democratic aspects, the Hayekian aspects, and the national aspects of the Anglo-American state. This attitude inevitably is appealing to all those officials who think the world will work best when officials quietly pull the strings away from the chaotic clash of parliaments and markets. It’s not surprising to see people who threw rocks in 1968 side with censorship in Brussels. (I also believe in a very limited form of supranationalism, as I can’t see a political alternative that can cope with technological destruction, but I think strengthening the EU and UN is disastrous.)
Summary. Throne and Alter: dead. Old conservatism (in Metternich’s sense or Oakeshott’s): dead. Old liberalism: dead. Apprenticeship, education and university: poisoned. Family: besieged. Libertarianism: false and can’t win an election. New Left: socialism/communism plus destroy traditions and institutions especially the independence of the family viz the state plus cultural insanity. The Left now is restrained only by a) the dominance within it of intellectuals who are mostly useless at gripping power and b) its propensity to blow up in government, not by ‘conservative ideas’. It faces practical electoral barriers with expanding state power and taxes and with implementing its ideas on things like criminal justice (i.e let the most violent out). And it has to contend with state competition that imposes practical restraints — states have to fear the consequences of being left behind technologically and politicians have to fear looking like dupes and fools in their dealing with other states. But they don’t face conceptual barriers created by ‘conservatives’. If the Left simply stopped saying what they think about crime, sex, identity, racism and so on, if it stopped picking fights on cultural issues where non-graduates and older graduates think they’re foolish and/or dangerous, and could credibly say ‘we won’t put your taxes up or let the worst people in our jails out early to kill again’, then conservatives would be at a complete loss as they now define themselves almost entirely as opposition to the left’s madness and disasters. (Remember how lost the Tories were the entire time Blair was there? All they could do was wait for his own side to push him out.)
Nietzsche. Reject Christianity and Rationalism. God is dead. Science and knowledge won’t save you. Knowledge or faith? Neither. Truth is deadly. Liberalism or socialism? Neither. They both want the same — the Last Man, the triumph of the herd. We must turn deadly truths to life-giving truths. Untruth is more valuable for life than truth — this is the truth! I don’t know how much Oakeshott studied Nietzsche but he echoes him in his description of contemporary rationalist morality as a ‘desiccated relic of what was once the unselfconscious moral tradition of an aristocracy’.
A fundamental distinction of growing importance is therefore — a) the left shifting left but not feeling it and seeing itself as a reasonable defence of old institutions against ‘fascism’, while b) others (including some who saw themselves as bog standard Obama-supporters a decade ago) watch the left, think it’s going mad, speak out, and are labelled ‘fascist enablers’ which inevitably confirms for them they’re the victims of growing madness. Each side increasingly labels the other ‘the real fascists’ (neither side are actually fascist). Meanwhile establishment ‘conservatives’ of the Cameron/Osborne/Bush type drift left on all cultural issues, without noticing, pulled by their dinner parties, professional networks, children at university and so on. So you have more establishment ‘conservatives’ (and managers of big businesses) sounding increasingly like A.O.C and more libertarian entrepreneurs sounding (privately!) like MAGA.
And connected tightly to this distinction is another that has become critical and cuts across traditional left/right and party lines.
Do you roughly think A) ‘our old institutions for politics, government, academia and media are fundamentally sound and the true danger is from populism/racism/fascism’, or B) ‘these old institutions, exemplified by the CDC on covid, are themselves our biggest danger’, both in the sense of ‘failing terribly with things like covid and needlessly slaughtering millions’ but also in the sense of ‘the old parties/media/bureaucracies are, in their incompetence and growing intolerance of dissent, actively sparking the growth of extremist forces’?
How you answer this shows, for example, whether in the Brexit referendum you were nominally ‘conservative’ and Remain (e.g Danny Finkelstein) or, like me, actually much further ‘right’ and pro-Brexit. (For me, one of the best reasons for Brexit was the establishment continuing foolishly with its immigration policies and empowering the actual fascists who still lurk in Europe.) The same is observable in America. On the one hand are rationalists like Zvi who chronicled the appalling failures of the CDC/Fauci during covid (i.e more on my side) and on the other are classic ‘centrist’/‘sensible’ pundits like Yglesias:
No no no. The politicians not only are not good at government, they are not even good at politics — they cannot even read polls, they generally don’t even bother trying seriously.
This distinction lies behind what I observed in my previous blog on the dynamics of the 2024 US Presidential contest — entrepreneurs in general and Silicon Valley in particular are polarising fast and hard on this axis with powerful consequences. Ten years ago most entrepreneurs defaulted to the Yglesias position without much thought. Many have been red-pilled. Elites and electoral coalitions are breaking and re-forming across the west as a) educational polarisation deepens and b) elites increasingly polarise on this axis of ‘support the old institutions, their enemies are the real danger’ / ‘remake the old institutions, they are the real danger’. Those who consider themselves most ‘radical’ in academia are now the strongest supporters of the conservative position, just as many of those boomers who identified with the free speech movement in the 1960s are now openly pro-censorship and want to nationalise Elon’s companies and ensure voters aren’t conned by ‘misinformation’ into ‘supporting fascism’.
The Elon affair playing out in chaos on Twitter lights up these dynamics. Elon was a classic Silicon Valley Obama supporter who just two years ago was widely praised by the left for electric cars. To Elon and many of his supporters in the Valley, his politics haven’t changed. Like Andrew Sullivan, Elon thinks ‘What happened to you, I’m just supporting free speech?!’ But the sort of dissent from Official New York Times Truth that Elon represents is now intolerable in Washington and New York. After the shocks of Trump and Brexit, and the radicalisation of the universities and media, old fashioned support for free speech and genuine diversity is now seen in much of Oxbridge, the Ivy League, the New York Times, CNN etc as ‘fascist adjacent’. or ‘fascist enabling’.
This triggers its own actions and counter-actions. Elon doesn’t want to be in a dogfight with Washington, he wants to build rockets and Tesla. And many of those now supporting him don’t want to be involved in politics. But they see the attacks on Elon, how quickly he has been portrayed by the old media (which much of elite Silicon Valley now hates for its constant lies) as a ‘Russian asset’, a ‘menace to democracy’ who should have his companies nationalised and run by The Right People Who Don’t Do Misinformation (i.e the people who told us all that the Hunter Biden laptop story was … Russian misinformation!) — and they are increasingly up for a fight (check out Balaji). Pro and anti Elon forces feel like they’re responding to the madness of the other side.
You may say, well the Left believes their line, they really do believe Trump would destroy democracy if he wins again. Of course many of them do. But I suspect that elite Democrats are not actually so convinced about the ‘Trump is a fascist menace’ as they seem. Across America, elite conversations now turn, privately, in this direction: ‘well, look at the polls, you know we could never say this publicly but … he may be a lot more beatable than DeSantis, the crazy MAGA candidates got whacked in the midterms, maybe we’d have a better chance of holding the White House if Trump’s the candidate’. Yes, much of the ‘Trump is fascism’ is a fraud. If DeSantis runs, I predict the Democrats and NYT will forget the ‘Trump is a unique threat to democracy’ line and pivot to: ‘DeSantis is even more dangerous than Trump because he’s more competent but believes the same fascist things’. And if you’re fighting fascism, then you’re entitled to do all kinds of things, right, like deploy the CIA to spy on campaigns to make sure those pesky Russians aren’t stealing the election for their fascist ally?
As I’ve said before, new politics comes out of new elites. A new elite is very faintly visible, spectral networks forming over WhatsApp. Will it continue to form or will the pressure of 2024 scatter it? Will those with money and brains stick to their walled gardens and fish ponds or push chips forward? How many live players will join Elon’s network?
Ps. I got covid again last week. Does anybody know when there will be a reliable consumer machine that can detect viruses in the air and beep a warning to your smartphone? I remember seeing George Church talking about this a few years ago and I thought in 2020 they would come quickly.
I will read the rest of this later but I've read the Me Cult section. I find I agree of course, but there are a few caveats which I think are important because the sovereignty of the indivdual is one of the concepts that the West has got absolutely 100% slam dunk correct over history relative to other cultures. I have worked in hellholes like the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where there is absolutely zero concept of the individual whatsoever and societal development has been accordingly retarded. The best anyone can hope for from these highly collective cultures is perhaps to live in somewhere with at least a bit of wealth, perhaps in some fucking Lebanon or Lagos type scenario.
The book to read on this is The WEIRDest People In The World by Joseph Heinrich, who says (essentially) that the west is rich and successful because of Christian taboos against cousin marriage which, to cut his 700 or so pages short, encouraged people to make connections and develop trust networks outside their kin. There are societies round the world today where the strength of kinship is extremely intense, like Nigeria and Afg/Pak. He identifies rates of first cousin marriage as the best proxy measurement. I also read today by coincidence that in Bradford 75% of Pakistani marriages are between first cousins! WEIRD is a superb book by the way; I will not be the first amongst your subscribers to think so.
So no, I don't quite agree with the argument against individualism as presented here, if only because societies with the opposite malady (intense kinship) are even more disastrous. The fetishisation of feeeeeeeeeelings and of victimhood being seen somehow as a virtue is what has gone wrong in the west. This is not disconnected from individualism as such, but is overall a separate (but related) phenomenon to individualism.
Interesting comment about the ‘me-cult’. These days I increasingly notice narcissistic behaviours turned into political causes.