Rita made my morning today by emailing me a link to David Brooks’ column in the NYT for today: The Republican Collapse. The opening paragraphs couldn’t pluck my heart strings more sweetly:

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.

Amen. The rest of it is just as insightful and conservatively delicious, so go take a look.

[Update: It seems Mr. Brooks didn't quite get Burkeanism right. Both my ISI Honors Progam listhost, to which I sent the link to the article, and my fellow bloggers have taken shots at Brooks' summation. To sum up what I think is the most apt criticism, I'll quote an ISI contributor:

The conflation of natural law with abstract truth shows that Brooks doesn't understand the relationship between common law traditions and natural law jurisprudence. I think Burke understood this better.

This is correct. To read more critiques, go here and here. After reading Dreher's critique (the first link), I think he may misconstrue Brooks' points on Burke's organic view of society, but he is spot on in criticizing the passage about stem cell research and related issues:

It seems to me that the truly Burkean response to stem-cell research, for example, is to practice the politics of moral prudence, and to honor what society until five minutes ago considered sacred. It is most un-Burkean to decide that we can reverse longstanding moral tradition just because we either can do it technologically, or simply want to do it. Brooks is probably right that social conservatives alienated non-ideological conservatives by standing on principle in these matters, but to say that the social cons were un-Burkean in so doing strikes me as stealing a base.

Update #2: Postmodern Conservative has more insightful input on Burkeanism and the possibility of maintaining traditions for their useful ends:

Burke's big problem with the way we do things today would be that we do them all self-consciously, that we are all critics, that we have turned our critical faculties upon every pillar of social order and everything that a healthy people must take, unawares, for granted. And of course this might be exactly right while also caught in a trap seemingly custom-built to catch Burkeans: in order to defend unconscious tradition one must become conscious of its becoming conscious and, worse, make others conscious of it too by way of talking to them about it. Burke was never able to resolve this dilemma because it cannot be resolved,...

Accidents of geography, moral and social habit, and religion provide the unconscious templates of practice which, as we gain self-consciousness of them, nonetheless must remain as they have been for our harnessing in the midst of profound change to function properly. And that's a lesson that takes us past Burke without leaving him in the dust.

This is an excellent point. Poulos cites Alasdair MacIntyre with this criticism of Burke and it is my understanding that Strauss made a similar critique in Natural Right and History. Strauss' problem with Burke's defense of the latent parts of society was that, in defending them, he had stripped naked their latency, their efficacy. This is the dilemma of being a conservative: whatever progress threatens to erode can only be defended by a defense which deprives it of the latent beauty which once made it so effectual. In other words, things that change can never be the same but our defense of them must learn to adapt them to function as if they were.

Update #3: And finally we have a bit from National Review, where Yuval Levin chimes in. The irony here is that Levin's take on conservatism and Burkeanism is just what Brooks' interpretation (despite the flaws discussed above) was trying to counter. Levin seems to make the logical reasoning error of respond to a "X is wrong and Y is right because..." arugment with a "No, Y is wrong because X is right" argument.

Brooks hinges a lot on his reading of Burke, and returns to it throughout the column. But his description of Burke just doesn’t ring true. Brooks seems to want to make conservatism purely an attitude, rather than a political cause. But that’s not what Burke argued.

And that's not what Brooks argued. The point about dispositional conservatism wasn't one of exclusivity; in fact, Brooks even concludes that:

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots.

Further, Levin mistakes Burke's defense of principles derived from tradition for a defense of abstract principles qua principles. But the worst part comes when Levin goes legitimately nuts and tries to cast some sort of American brand of conservatism as a 'grand coalition':

Social conservatives believe deeply (at times surely excessively) in precisely the kind of social cohesion and unity Brooks finds so lacking in individualist libertarians.

Libertarians, in turn, push against the excesses of social conservatism and refuse to abide a politics of theological abstractions. And the neoconservatives, finally, have been from the beginning concerned with culture on the one hand and with data and empiricism on the other. Their belief in the importance of a culture’s internal institutions, and in the notion that over long spans political reform can help spur cultural reform, are hardly the stuff of the French Revolution.

Um, what? No, it's not the stuff of the French Revolution, but it is the stuff of Imperial India, which Burke opposed. Levin tries to support this with a shady interpretation of a couple of Burke quotes about the need to "act in concert." But Burke didn't advocate a sort of conservative coalition where the goal was met by various faults canceling each other out. That seems more like an attempt to manufacture an imagined organic system out of whole cloth than something truly Burkean. I think Levin just wants to have his cake and eat it too.]

Tags: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Nota Bene, NYT

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