The "principle" of adhering to custom hides the depravity of "conservatism"
and "conservatives" are only too happy to blow this smoke around
My previous post showed that Russell Kirk’s “first principle of conservatism”—the notion that there is a permanent moral order coordinate with an unchanging human nature—was not only wrong, but a source of true harm to society.
In this post, I move on to Kirk’s “second principle of conservatism”—the notion that custom, convention, and continuity are the touchstones of “conservatism.” We will see that this “principle” is, if anything, even more corrosive than the previous one.
Kirk’s “second principle” with its supporting commentary
Here is the text of Kirk’s “second principle of conservatism” in full. You can read the whole list of ten HERE.
[T]he conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.
Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.
The “second principle” is contained in the first sentence:
[T]he conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
This is probably the most well known “conservative” belief. But why do they believe it? Because unless they have some good reasons, it is mere personal preference, a prejudice that no one else should be required to accept.
This passage is Kirk’s attempt to give reasons for adhering to the old ways. As we shall see, all his reasons are pathetic attempts to hide the psychological pathology that makes “conservatives” so reactionary—fear.
Let’s take apart Kirk’s supporting assertions sentence by sentence.
It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire.
It is true that the general acceptance of customs makes society more peaceful. General acceptance augments agreement and dampens disagreement. But it is hardly the only thing, or even the most important thing, that makes society peaceful. Good, well administered laws and good governance may be much more important, provided the people are not pig-headed, ignorant, and selfish but open-minded, intelligent, and generous.
A very serious drawback to this belief is that old custom may well be dead wrong. Take, for example, the example of slavery that I spent so much time on in my previous post. During the endless debates over slavery leading up to the Civil War, there were many who defended slavery as a custom. The Southern politician John C. Calhoun, for instance, argued that slavery was so ingrained into the Southern psyche that any attempt to remove it would destroy their society and rupture the Union.
We of the South will not, cannot, surrender our institutions. To maintain the existing relations between the two races, inhabiting that section of the Union, is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country in blood, and extirpating one or the other of the races. Be it good or bad, it has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people. (https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-abolition-petitions/)
“Conservatives” hardly ever address the question of bad customs. They don't care that old customs can be just as wrong as any other human invention. They don’t care that the same customs that let many people go along to get along may simultaneously be harming others. And they would rather adhere to old customs—even harmful ones—than change them.
Why are they so callous to the harm inflicted by bad old customs? That question will receive an answer as we go further into Kirk’s delusional arguments.
As for “the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire,” this is just orneriness. It suggests that there are people—no doubt he thinks liberals are like this—who want to destroy customs just for the hell of it. On the contrary, only rebellious adolescents run headlong at custom just to knock it over and laugh at it. Liberals, especially, move to change customs when they are bad and better ways could exist.
A well considered alteration in long established custom does not demolish more than its proponents know or desire. It understands that the change will cause friction, but it judges that the evil being done by the custom is worth expunging, even at the expense of rousing the ire of those who don’t care about the evil they are promulgating. The Civil War was necessary to put a stop to the evil being done by people like John C. Calhoun.
To sum up, adherence to custom for the sake of social tranquillity is lazy, selfish, and—if the custom is bad enough—even cruel. Adherence to custom is only acceptable if the custom is good. If it is bad, it should be rejected and eliminated as soon as possible.
And not caring about whether one is doing evil is just plain immoral.
Kirk’s putative defense of custom is in fact an argument against it—at least for decent and moral people.
It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions.
There is so much wrong with this that it would take volumes to draw out all its foolishness. Let’s just make a few points that refute it.
Again, convention is one of the ways we avoid disputes, but it is hardly the only way or even the best way. It is a convention, for example, that we go on green and stop on red. It could just have easily been go on violet and stop on blue. This convention keeps us from having disputes on the road.
But conventions are not very useful when the question at hand is not a simple practical matter. Repaying one’s debts is not a convention. It is a matter of character, an expression of honesty, truthfulness, decency, and good will. It is a fundamental prerequisite for a well regulated society.
Indeed, the notion that “law is at base a body of conventions” could not be further from the truth. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Law is at base a body of truths—truths concerning the most important relations among human beings. Upon these truths are layered many conventions to enhance the smooth operation of the law, but the grounding is not conventional.
For example, in society, which is the only place there can be law, “thou shalt not murder” is not a convention. Murder is universally prohibited because society is unthinkable if it is not. It is a truth of politics that murder is unjust. Law is not at all at base a body of conventions.
And finally, as to the abuse of the word ‘convention’: There is a good reason why people regard conventional things as dispensable, much as it irritates Kirk. It is because true conventions are not grounded in anything stable. That makes them ephemeral, malleable, changeable. Being intransigent about changing conventions is even worse than being intransigent about changing customs.
In sum, everything Kirk says here is wrong. None of it supports “conservative” regressiveness. On the contrary, it demonstrates that “conservatives” are very wrong to champions conventions over truth.
Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless.
Unlike most of what Kirk says, this statement is mostly true. The generations are linked by continuity. The survival of the past into the present in any of the ways it occurs—through history or artifacts or even traditions, customs, and conventions—is a source of inspiration both to the individual and to the community.
The final clause, though, is irrational. As long as memory remains a human capacity, human beings cannot be without continuity of some sort. People will build meaning on their memories if on nothing else. So societal meaninglessness is an impossibility. (Individual meaninglessness, on the other hand, is a pathological condition connected with failures of psychological coping mechanisms. However much anguish it may cause individuals, it cannot rise to encompass whole societies.)
Why would Kirk bring up an impossibility? Because he is implying that the customs and conventions adhered to by “conservatives” provide the continuity that society and individuals need. But we have seen that this is false. Bad customs ought to be changed even if “conservatives” prefer them. And conventions can be changed or not; it is a matter of no real importance so long as the truth is not injured by the change.
But changing customs and conventions cannot harm meaning. It outlasts all change.
When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.
This is just a negative interpretation of progress based on fear of change.
Of course, striking out on a new path involves innovation, insecurity, tentativeness, missteps, and even danger. Change necessarily involves experimentation, failure, reorientation, discovery, and learning. A successful change requires a process that moves through instability to a new stability.
A change may indeed be painful and slow. Or it may be painless and swift. Neither is a reason for avoiding change.
As to whether the new order is inferior to the old: even Kirk only says that the new order may be inferior. If it is not, the change is worth it. Case in point: The American Revolution. By old custom and convention, Americans should have remained monarchists. But they revolted, and after the failed attempt at a union under the Articles of Confederation, produced a new and much superior form of government—something the world still envies with good reason.
To be prejudiced against change because of possible failure is pure cowardice—quite the opposite of the principled stand that “conservatives” imagine.
At this point, we can see the psychological roots of “conservatism” taking shape, and they quite pathological. “Conservatives” are afraid of change, afraid of dissent, afraid of difficult relations, afraid of uncertainty. They prefer stasis, uniformity of opinion, ease in societal relations, certainty. They are stolid, conforming, lazy, timid. As a consequence, they lack the courage to experiment, to create.
Kirk t tries to dress these vices up as virtues. It is another part of the long con—making inferior people feel really good about themselves.
And that just makes them worse. Convincing cowards they are heroes is a prelude to disaster. This level of self-delusion is very, very dangerous.
Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.
Does Kirk think this is a positive trait? On the contrary, it is an admission of the fear and pessimism that lurks the bottom of “conservatism.” He and his ilk prefer to stick with a comfortable misery than to adventure toward a much more satisfying happiness.
It is telling that he presents the options as “they devil they know” and “the devil they don’t know.”
Devils are not the only option. It only seems that way to a deeply fearful pessimist—or, in other words, to a “conservative.”
There are also angels. So the options might be “the devil they know” and “the angel they don’t know.” “Conservatives” are too fearful to imagine a better situation than the one they accept and too timid to strike out to find or create it. It is easier, more comfortable, more customary and conventional to “champion” the old ways.
Which is to say, cowardly. And deeply pessimistic.
Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice.
One might be surprised by the phrase “artificial products.” Many “conservatives” seem to believe that order and justice and freedom were ordained by God just as “conservatives” like them.
But Kirk was not like the religious zealots who pack the Republican party today. His task was not to paint “conservatism” as God’s own political ideology. It was to paint “conservatism” as rational. He aspired to provide reasons to support “conservatism’s” beliefs.
It’s just that Kirk keeps failing. In this case, nothing in the statement provides grounding for adherence to custom and convention. The amount of effort expended in creating a society in the past does not justify the continuation of its institutions and practices if its current state is unjust.
A great deal of effort was expended over the centuries to establish the British monarchy. But it was right to reform it 1215 by limiting the power of the monarchy, instituting due process, establishing the right of trial by jury, and introducing habeas corpus.
The same is true about the American Revolution. It was right to dissolve the bands that bound us to Great Britain, since its form of society had become intolerable to us.
Furthermore, order and justice and freedom are not merely artificial products, not merely customs or conventions. They are founded on truths, which must be discovered by the mind of man. And once discovered, those truths must replace the old falsehoods incorporated in the the ancient ways.
In sum, there is no obligation to retain old ways that are harmful. Only a fool keeps throwing good money after bad.
Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls.
Taken by itself, this statement has a lot to recommend it. Any community is based on shared interests, shared beliefs, and shared labor, whether those elements are spiritual or political.
Unfortunately, the truth of this statement is falsified by its context. Kirk imagines that this is a conclusion (“Thus”) to be drawn from his earlier statements. This is incorrect.
In fact, the logical direction is precisely the opposite. Whatever the customs and conventions of a relatively good society, however much effort and time went into developing them, the reason they exist at all is because the community decided to come together around its shared beliefs.
To run that direction of causality backwards is to open the doors to the most horrendous malefactions that human beings can inflict on one another.
Because of the connection between beliefs and customs, it is possible to reverse the direction of causality. That is how tyrants, dictators, autocrats, and power-mongers of all sorts corrupt their societies. By instituting bad customs or by reinterpreting and twisting the beliefs that support what had been good or neutral customs, such people can adulterate the beliefs of large numbers of individuals.
When societies resist such corruption it is because they retain their good beliefs and reject the despot. When societies reclaim their integrity after being corrupted it is because they recover their good beliefs and oust the despot.
Kirk’s assertion that customs create society instead of the shared beliefs that support customs reflects ignorance about the truths underlying good customs. It also reflects a superficiality that bedevils “conservative thought.” “Conservatives” see the surface customs and imagine them to be the fundamental things. They choose to adhere to the surface customs rather than investigate the underlying beliefs that support those customs. They do not really care about whether the underlying beliefs are true. That is why they are willing to entertain any nonsense about the underlying beliefs as long as they can keep their superficial customs.
And this is why Kirk keeps failing at his project. Trying to create the illusion of rational depth from materials that are inherently intellectually shallow is a fool’s errand.
It goes without saying that caring more about customs than truth is another way in which “conservatives” are inferior.
Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically.
Who thinks society is a machine? Oh! Kirk must think liberals treat society mechanically. But why? Because they keep offering plans for changing it? It is not only machines that can undergo change. Organisms can too. So why does Kirk bring this up at all?
The next sentence explains it.
The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted.
This is the analogy that Kirk wants to make, which contrasts with the previous sentence. A society is like a living organism, not like a machine. A living organism cannot continue to live if its vital functions are interrupted. A machine, presumably, has no vital functions to interrupt, no life to maintain. Kirk is claiming that the customs of society are like the blood: take them away and the society dies, just as an organism would die if it were suddenly exsanguinated.
Unfortunately, like everything else Kirk tries to argue, this analogy fails for all sorts of reasons.
First us all, as we have already seen, it is not the customs that create society, it is the beliefs underlying the customs. So if anything is like the lifeblood of society, it is its beliefs, not its customs.
Second, if the beliefs are bad, then this would be like a disease of the blood in society. The beliefs need to be changed for the society to be healthy.
Third, if the customs are bad, this would be like a skin rash on society. It could be caused by bad beliefs in society’s blood, as just mentioned, and the cure would be the same. But it could also be caused by a skin infection, the customs on the skin being bad while the beliefs in the blood are good. In that case, the customs should be changed to come into harmony with the beliefs. In neither case does society have to die. So if Kirk’s analogy is meant to support adhering to customs, it fails miserably.
Fourth, as is so often the case with Kirk’s attempts at reasoning, the analogy actually supports the opposite of what he intends. It is the machine that is more likely to stop working if any of its parts is altered. This is because many machines do not have self-regulating systems that can adjust to the removal or reshaping of their parts. An organism, on the other hand, can actually continue functioning even with diseases, because it can compensate for a wide range of changes both within and without.
Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative.
It is astonishing, given what Kirk has argued so far, that “the mind of the conservative” can countenance any change at all. But here Kirk has to capitulate to the obvious fact that change occurs and humans often need to embrace it. So in order to maintain some sort of agreement between his rejection of change up until this point, Kirk introduces the notion of “prudent change” and draws on the authority of a “conservative writer” to paper over the breach.
Once again, though, we must ask, Who is committing the sin of “imprudent change”? Oh! It must be liberals, Kirk’s universal enemy.
But as usual, Kirk has got it exactly backwards.
Serious liberals (not pouty adolescents pretending that it is their right to overturn all of society’s rules) are always more prudent about the change they advocate than “conservatives” are prudent about the status quo they prefer. Serious liberals produce reasoned critiques of the state of society and offer rational plans for going about addressing the deficiencies they find.
Contrast this with the mindless adherence to custom that Kirk recommends as the “conservative” way—“mindless” because, as we have seen, there is not a single good reason for it. Who is more prudent? The party that analyzes problems and proposes solutions or the party that adheres to the old ways without being able to give sound reasons for doing so?
But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory [sic], never unfixing old interests at once.
I put in the [sic] here because Kirk obviously means “discriminate” rather than “discriminatory.” The former signifies “making minute and deliberate distinctions” while the latter means “biased.”
If “conservatives” argue this, they do so irrationally. The more necessary the change is, the more urgently it should be made. If the urgency is great enough, then it justifies unfixing old interests all at once.
Of course, there is danger in sudden disruption. A long established custom or law takes root in society, even if the beliefs on which it is based are wrong. If the damage that the custom or law does to society is not too great, it can be allowed to change gradually while people adjust to the new situation. It may even be more prudent to allow the change to occur this way if the harm is light.
But the greater the harm, the more urgent the change. Once the law recognized the enormous harms being done by educational segregation, it was imperative that the laws be changed swiftly, no matter how much it confused and angered a portion of the population. “Going slow” in such cases is wicked, not prudent.
This is so apparent that it adduces the agreement even of an authority that many “conservatives”—especially Catholic “conservatives”—consider one of their own:
[L]aws are changed when they no longer correspond to the common weal. To put this in a general way, laws are not only enacted for the benefit of the majority but for the benefit of all citizens. Hence if circumstances change, so that the law no longer promotes the common good, it should be changed or abolished. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II, II, Q. 97, A. 2.)
Prudence does not require, as Kirk believes, adherence to the old ways. While it might be all right to go slowly when justice is not being materially harmed, it it not all right to go slowly when the damage being done to the common welfare is great.
Conslusion: Kirk’s “second principle” is both vacuous and irrational
Kirk’s preference for sticking to the old ways turns out to have no rational basis. He consistently fails to produce rational support for this preference. Indeed each and every sentence intended to support the dictum that “the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity” is either irrational altogether or makes the opposite case!
Along the way, we have seen that this “principle” arises from deep psychological pathologies. “Conservatives” are fearful, selfish, lazy, irrational, and anti-social. Kirk’s “principle” rhetorically transforms those vices into virtues, encouraging “conservatives” to consider themselves courageous, generous, industrious, rational, and communal.
This profoundly deceptive rhetorical mirage increases the danger of “conservatism” greatly. By giving the veneer of respectability to people who are fundamentally indecent, ignorant, and corrupt, society suffers from the unperceived promulgation of their true beliefs, which are rooted in vice rather than virtue.
As we continue to examine Kirk’s “ten principles,” we will see just how corrosive the poison of “conservatism” is to real community, which requires love and good will rather than fear and selfishness.
Stay tuned for more revelations about the depths of “conservative” depravity!