The “conservative principle of imperfectibility” is anything but perfect
Because it’s a bald-faced lie
This is another installment in my critique of “Ten Conservative Principles” by Russell Kirk, one of the most influential “conservative” writers.
(Earlier installments are at these links: Overview, Principle 1, Principle 2, Principle 3, Principle 4, and Principle 5.)
Now it’s time to tackle the sixth “principle.” (You can read all ten of them HERE.)
[C]onservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
Detailed consideration of the sixth “principle”
We begin, as always with the initial statement stating the principle.
[C]onservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.
This is insufficient to understand what Kirk is talking about. It is already clear, however, that he is claiming this principle as something proper to “conservatives,” since he identifies it as “their” principle.
Let’s read on to gather more information.
Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know.
This statement reveals what Kirk is up to here. This is all about rejecting one of the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment.
As the Enlightenment was approaching full steam in the eighteenth century, thinkers began to notice something that should have been obvious from the beginning of philosophy, and was obvious to many ancient philosophers—namely, that human beings had a capacity for self-reflection and self-correction.
This fact was described perhaps most famously by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his 1775 Essay on the Origin of Inequality. He called this capacity perfectibility. It ended up being a core principle for most of Enlightenment philosophy.
[Perfectibility is] the capacity that the human species possesses for improving its faculties and ameliorating its condition through its own efforts.
[T]he perfectibility of the human species is then the result of the development of language, the invention of writing, and the use of tools, which in turn has allowed humans to create and build upon their own civilization.
[P]erfectibility is the primary cause of the progress of human society, as it allows for the development of different cultures, values, and knowledge (Rousseau, 2011, p. 15). (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress, [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992], 12-15.)
The principle of perfectibility does not claim that human beings are perfect. That is an obvious untruth. What it claims is that human beings are infinitely perfectible. They can use their rationality to examine their situations and their behaviors, determine where they are making mistakes, and choose not to make those mistakes any longer.
There is nothing esoteric about this. It is so obvious as to be self-evident.
On an individual level, anyone can realize that his smoking or gambling or drug habit is harming himself or others and take steps to break himself of that habit. It is difficult to change these habits but hardly impossible and many have done it.
On a societal level, any nation can analyze its political or economic practices, decide whether some of them are harmful, and change them to stop the harm. Every passage of a new law is such a change, let alone wholesale reforms of government such as that which happened in Germany and Japan after World War II.
On an international level, the community of nations can study its behaviors, decide where they are causing harm, and revise the rules stop the damage. This happened, for instance, when the international community agreed to stop releasing fluorocarbons into the atmosphere in order to heal the hole humans had punched in the ozone layer.
These observations could be multiplied on every level of human experience. There can be no doubt that the principle of perfectibility is a fact.
So why does Kirk go out of his way to deny it? Why does he insist on a spurious principle of imperfectibility instead? If, as he says, “conservatives” know that “human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults,” then they know something that is false. While it is certainly true that human vices like avarice, envy, anger, lust, selfishness, dishonesty, and prejudice are persistent and intractable in the species, that is hardly proof that human nature is irremediably, permanently corrupt and cannot be improved.
Indeed, much of religion is devoted to teaching people how to reject their corrupt impulses—and even to be cured of them altogether. And much of parental care is devoted to teaching children not to give in to their selfish desires. And there are thousands of self-help groups dedicated to helping people change habits that are harmful. None of this would be possible if, as Kirk says, human nature is irremediable.
In short, Kirk’s assertion here is wildly untrue, even flying the face of obvious facts. We will see in a bit why he thinks he can lie so baldly.
By the way, the use of the term “chastened” is an attempt to imply that “conservatives” own the virtue of humility. Nothing could be further from the truth. “Conservatives” are chastened by nothing. Our continued examination of this “principle” will show that “conservatives” are willing to say nearly anything that advances their ulterior motives.
Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created.
The logic of this sentence, though superficially plausible, is vitiated by the errors Kirk has already introduced. It is true that humans are imperfect and that these imperfections will influence all the social orders they create.
But that does not mean that humans cannot correct their imperfections to some extent and ameliorate the worst elements of the social orders they create. Because humans are perfectible, they can improve themselves and those improvements will influence their social orders. There may never be a perfect social order, but there certainly can be ever better ones.
Kirk’s objection is therefore asinine, a red herring.
The liberal—and every decent person—knows this to be true: the impossibility of a perfect society does not absolve us of the responsibility to keep improving society, making it more just, more equitable, and more supportive of human flourishing.
The “conservative,” on the other hand, seems to prefer shirking this responsibility. Why?
Because they don’t want the world to be better. They want it to stay the same, because they currently enjoy the benefits of the status quo.
“Conservatives” buy Kirk’s frontal assault on obvious fact and common sense for the same reason they “believe” everything else they “believe”—because it serves their purposes.
And “conservative” character is so perverse that it actually revels in denying obvious truths—as if being intransigent and immovable in the face of reality were a virtue rather than a vice.
This is why, as I mentioned earlier, Kirk thinks he can lie so shamelessly. The people he is courting don’t care about the truth, they only care about personal interest and power. If denying reality gives them the impression that they have an argument, that is all to the good for them. And if it comes with the added frisson of throwing their nonsense in the faces of decent and intelligent people—all the better.
Kirk is using a rhetorical strategy called “bullshit”—the flinging out of pseudo-arguments about which the speaker does not care a whit, because his real intent is to gain some other advantage. The locus classicus for this is Lysias’s speech on love in Plato’s Phaedrus, a speech which is just a list of pseudo-reasons why the person being addressed should have sex with the speaker. The different items on the list are random and even contradictory. But none of it matters because Lysias does not care about the argument at all, but only about getting what he wants.
Kirk’s strategy is the same. “Conservatives” don’t care about the truth of their arguments. They only care about getting what they want.
This is immoral. But “conservatives” only pretend to be moral. In fact, they couldn’t care less about morality. They claim it when it helps them and they deny it when it doesn’t.
Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things.
Everything Kirk says from this point onward is false, since it assumes the errors he has already made and the bullshit he has already slung.
Utopian societies are expected by no one, but all societies can be improved by human analysis and reform. Seeking for utopia is foolish, but seeking for improvement is possible, has been done in the past, and can be done in the present and the future.
The profound pessimism of the “conservative” world view is on full display here. “Conservatives” think humanity a poor thing, capable only of living in barely adequate societies, and unable to improve their governments or themselves.
This is all more rhetorical bullshit.
All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order.
This is all nonsense. There is no reason at all to expect only a “tolerably ordered” society. There is no reason to tolerate false beliefs and injustice in our social systems. And it is not seeking utopia to change our systems when we see false beliefs and injustices in them.
Here Kirk just contradicts himself. If our imperfection is irremediable as he claimed earlier, then reform shouldn’t be possible. Yet here is talks about “prudent reform,” leading to improvement in the social order. But this is an invocation of the principle of perfectibility, which this whole “principle” tries to deny.
Self-contradiction invalidates any argument. This is more rhetorical bullshit.
But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
We saw in our discussion of the “fourth conservative principle” that sticking to the old ways actually makes “conservatives” less prudent and more error-prone than others.
There is therefore no reason why societal change—especially change directed toward removing falsehoods and injustices—is necessarily more imprudent than stasis. Nor is there any reason to assume that changing laws, mores, or other societal “safeguards” will incite people—especially decent people—to wildness and anarchy. In particular, reforms that result in more truth and justice can be expected to create more societal coherence rather than less.
Indeed, since Kirk just suggested that “prudent reform” was both possible and beneficial, this statement amounts to another ad hominem attack on liberals and decent people: their suggestions for reform will always be regarded by “conservatives” as imprudent.
Ad hominem attacks, however, are not sound arguments. This is more rhetorical bullshit.
The quotation “the ceremony of innocence is drowned” comes from W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Here is the first stanza:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote this poem in 1919. It is a description of the post-war situation in Europe.
“Conservatives” like to use this passage to support their feelings about liberals, especially their irrational belief that liberals are irresponsible and heedless of consequences.
But here is the second stanza:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
How is this not a condemnation of “conservatism”? How does it not castigate the “conservative” worship of the status quo that produces “twenty centuries of stony sleep” in the pits of despair, where human beings suffer the irrationality and violence of old myths (the Sphinx, staring blankly and pitilessly) while carrion birds tear human flesh ceaselessly?
How is this not also a cry of despair? Terrible wars reawaken the old injustices—“the worst” reverting fiercely to atavistic, pre-social barbarism now that the hopes of reform (the appearance of a savior in the pre-war prospect of a well-regulated international order) awakened their mindless fear and instinctive selfishness?
And how is this not a condemnation of “conservatism,” the “rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem” to be born in the place of Christ, to replace the saving power of reform with the destroying power of selfishness by false teachings about human nature?
Sounds like a more convincing reading to decent people than the one that claims the poem is an attack on liberalism.
In any case, the devil can cite scripture for his own purposes.
And Kirk can quote anything for his own purposes. And does.
It’s still rhetorical bullshit.
The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
This is more misdirection and red herrings.
While Marx did make a case, rooted Hegel’s scheme of the self-revelation of Spirit in the course of history, that human beings and their societies would evolve toward perfect living, he also denied that communism as his contemporaries envisioned it was that state. He called it primitive or crude communism. Indeed, he saw communism as merely the first step in a long series of transformations that would have to occur before human nature and society reached their ultimate destinations.
Whatever the appeal of Hegelianism, however, it would seem that the World Wars put an end to the notion of the Spirit pouring itself out into an ever improving world. And the dream of communism died with it.
The utopian promises of twentieth-century communism and socialism were deceptions, lies told by authoritarians to make their populations docile, as we saw in our discussion of the “fifth principle.” It was not liberalism, as Kirk implies, that made the twentieth century hellish. It was authoritarianism.
And we also saw in the same discussion that “conservatives” share the authoritarian drive for power above all else, as the history of “conservatism” has revealed.
So contrary to Kirk’s implications, it is the authoritarian impulse of “conservatism” that makes life hell, not liberalism’s attraction to human perfectibility and social reform.
Conclusion: The “principle of imperfectibility” is a bald-faced lie, a hubristic and vicious deception attempting to pass for a humble admission of frailty.
To sum up, the principle of imperfectability flies in the face of all evidence about the human capacity for self-correction and reform.
Contrary to what Kirk claims, human beings are not incapable of improving themselves and their societies. Kirk even contradicts himself on this matter, claiming at one point that there is something he calls “prudent reform,” which is an admission that human imperfections can be alleviated by human perfectibility.
Contrary to what Kirk claims, there is no reason to tolerate falsehoods and injustices in society. We can detect them, pass new laws or reform government, and make continual improvements in society.
Contrary to what Kirk claims, the horrors of the twentieth century were not caused by liberalism imprudence, but by authoritarians, whose lust for power lies also at the heart of “conservatism.”
So, as we have found in each of the principles examined so far, there is absolutely nothing true or straightforward about anything Kirk argues in his “sixth principle” of imperfectability.
He has still yet to produce a single cogent argument for any of his “principles.”
This is a pathetic result for someone whom “conservatives” revere as one of their most insightful intellectual proponents.
But their admiration for Kirk is also a self-serving delusion. His rhetoric gives them the impression that he has reasons for his “beliefs”—which are also their “beliefs.” the fact that literally everything he says is wrong matters not at all to them. And even if they knew it, they would stick with Kirk rather than admit that they have no good reasons for their “beliefs,” which are in fact only “irritable mental gestures.”
Stay with me for my discussion of the four “principles” to come. It gets even worse for “conservatives”!