Exchange with Roger Sruton about Conservatism

BRIAN BARRINGTON:
Dear Mr. Scruton,
I am sympathetic to your writing and philosophy, but it seems to me that conservatism suffers from a basic logical problem: the standards conservatism defends did not always exist and were once considered radical. For example, the classical architecture that conservatives defend would have been “revolutionary” when it was first created in Ancient Greece. The Christian “tradition” that many conservatives defend was, at the time of Christ and in the centuries after Christ, a radical new teaching that challenged the pagan view of life that was prevalent at that time. The music of Bach and the painting of the Renaissance were also revolutionary developments. Even farming, and the country life that conservatives defend, would have been “revolutionary” at the time when human beings were moving from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies. Is there a way to overcome this apparent logical problem with conservatism?

ROGER SCRUTON:
To Brian Barrington,
There are two quite different understandings of the word ‘conservatism’. In one understanding the conservative is just anyone who is trying to hang on to the old order of things, regardless of its value, and perhaps because of his own secure position within it. In that sense people used to refer to ‘conservative elements’ in the Soviet Communist Party – i.e. people determined to hold on to the revolutionary doctrines of Marxism-Leninism and who endorsed the oppressive methods needed to put them into practice. In the other sense such people could not be described as conservative at all, but the very opposite. In the other sense the conservative is someone who believes that the solutions to social problems are hard to find, that they emerge over time, through custom and tradition, and that they are solutions precisely because they correspond to something deep in human nature which we must respect. Such a conservative believes that we make mistakes, that mistakes must be corrected, that tradition is a guide but not the sole guide, and that from time to time we must return to our basic intuitions about humanity and the moral life in order to renew the social fabric. Of course Christ was a disturbing figure; but his aim was to return people to the understanding contained in the two commandments given in Leviticus – to love God entirely and to love your neighbour as yourself. His message was addressed to the individual, and concerned the morality of daily life. Such examples are shocking, and people recoil from them, as the Gospels show. But their meaning is not revolution in the modern sense but moral renewal. Who can deny that our society stands in need, now, of such a renewal? My own view is that any such renewal must also be conservative – rediscovering the moral knowledge contained in customs and traditions on which we have trampled or which have been sneered at by the advocates of liberation.

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