Maverick Philosopher

1. The individual is the locus of being and value. As important as groups and institutions are, they exist for the sake of the individual and his flourishing and not vice versa. We don't exist for the State, the State exists for us. Human flourishing is individual flourishing. Only in the individual case is humanity real and important. We need groups and institutions to socialize us, thereby lifting us from the plane of the merely animal; but the true task each of us faces is one of self-individuation. Collective entities often interfere with this process of self-individuation — a task that it is up to the individual to either prosecute or leave unprosecuted — and so these collectivities must be kept in check. This implies a commitment to constitutionally based limited government.

How limited? That is a topic subject to ongoing debate. There are only so many legitimate functions of government. I say control of the national borders is a legitimate function of government. Hence I distance myself from those libertarians who are in favor of open borders. And since to ask which functions are legitimate functions of government presupposes that there are legitimate functions of government, I cannot be an anarchist.

Conservatives share some values and ideas with libertarians, but they must not be confused.

2. Accept #1, and you cannot be a liberal in the current acceptation of this term. Contemporary liberalism is scarcely distinguishable in intent and tendency if not in present execution from socialism, which of course implies the subordination of the individual to the collective and the curtailment of the individual’s liberty. And of course accepting #1 rules out accepting more extreme forms of collectivism and totalitarianism such as communism and such combined political-religious ideologies as Islamo-totalitarianism.

3. An economic corollary of #1 is that the money people earn belongs to them and not to the government. The individual does not have to justify his keeping of his money; the government has to justify its taking of it. Inequalities of wealth are inevitable because people have different levels of ability and make different uses of the abilities they possess in accordance with their free choices. Some, for example, defer gratification and save and invest for the future. They typically — given a stable political and economic order such as we enjoy in countries like the USA — end up wealthy. Others choose to expend their income on present desires and give little thought to the future. They typically end up poor. Either way, it is matter of freely made decisions. There is nothing unjust or unfair or morally dubious about my net worth's being 100 times yours, or Bill Gates' being 10000 times mine.

Socialism does not derive from envy any more than capitalism derives from greed; it does seem to be true, however, that envy is the characteristic vice of those attracted by socialism.

There is nothing wrong with inequality as such. As a matter of fact, economic inequalities benefit the worst off, making them better off than they would have been without the inequality. But this, pace John Rawls, is not the justification for inequality. It needs no justification since there is nothing wrong with inequality as such. This is a key difference between conservatives and liberals/leftists. It apears to be a deep and non-negotiable difference.

4. Government is necessary for human flourishing and so is morally justifiable as a necessary means to this end. We need government to do jobs we cannot do ourselves. But government is a mere means, not an end in itself. This is why asking how to ‘save Social Security’ is to ask the wrong question. The right question to ask is how to arrange for individuals to have secure retirements, assuming they want them. (And if they don't want them, if they are forever in favor of the front-loaded life? Then that is their choice.) There is no rational presumption in favor of the maintenance of existing government programs since they are merely means to ends, not ends in themselves. It would be better to have no government if that were possible. But it is not possible. If anarchism is the doctrine that no government is morally justifiable, then a conservative cannot be an anarchist.

5. The justification for #4 is in the theory of human nature. Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of human nature. They maintain that the world is a dangerous place, that it always has been and always will be, and that that these are not contingent facts but necessary consequences of human nature. This conviction distinguishes conservatives from liberals and leftists on the one hand and anarchists and libertarians on the other. For the conservative, his political brethren to the Right and Left of him cherish too sanguine a view of the world and the people in it. They dream of possibilitities that are not genuine (realizable) possibilities, possibilities which are such that, if one tried to realize them, would make things worse. For example, the notion of a classless society does not not correspond to a realizable possibility, and 20th century attempts to achieve it led to mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The communists murdered 100 million in a vain attempt at realizing their utopian dreams.

The essential point is that conservatives believe that there is such a thing as human nature. Human beings are not indefinitely malleable, and they are certainly not perfectible by human effort whether individually or collectively. Improvable yes, perfectible no. Conservatives understand that human beings are capable of good but also of great evil, and that the propensity for evil is fixed and ineradicable. A conservative may seek to provide a metaphysical or theological underpinning to this observed fact of the human inclination to evil behavior, or he might just accept it as a fact that the study of history reveals. Conservatism and theism fit together nicely, but there is no logical necessity that a conservative be a theist any more than there is a logical necessity that a liberal be an atheist. There is a Religious Left just as there is an Irreligious Right.

To underscore the essential point: Human beings are not inherently good, the fantasies of Rousseau and Marx notwithstanding. Conservative thinkers, since they are reality-based, understand this. It is not as if society corrupts what is inherently pure. All the deeper thinkers recognize radical evil in man. Utopian schemers tap into this radical evil and release it in their murderous revolutionary activities.

6. A consequence of #5 is that the conservative sees the need not only for various checks on the power of government, but also the need for various checks on the power of individuals and corporations. Conservatives thus avoid the equal but opposite errors of liberals and libertarians. Whereas the liberal tendency is to look to government for the solution of problems, the libertarian tendency is to see government as incapable of doing anything right. This leads to such absurd libertarian proposals as the selling of the National Parks. The libertarian in his naivete thinks that the people who would acquire them would, motivated by their own self-interest, manage them wisely, forgetting that greed is a powerful force in human life, a force that must be kept in check. The libertarian, like the anarchist, thinks that human beings are better than they are, that they know their self-interest and will act in accordance with it. The evidence is otherwise. Many people do not know their true, long-term, self-interest and even if they did would not act in accordance with it. One simply has to have one’s eyes open to see that this is true.

7. It is sometimes superficially maintained that while conservatives want to conserve the old, liberals want to progress to the new. This is superficial because there is nothing in the nature of conservatism to require opposition to change as such. It is also obvious that when liberals/socialists/progressives gain power they aim to consolidate it and maintain their status quo. Here their progressivism meets a severe limit. The Soviet state did not ‘wither away’ in the approved Leninist manner, but simply collapsed under the weight of its own ‘internal contradictions’ with the aid of some well-placed kicks from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. It is easy to show that on specific issues such as Social Security reform, it is conservatives who play the reformers and progressives the reactionaries.

It would be better to say that for conservatives, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things, and a certain scepticism about the application to human affairs of a reason unchecked by traditional judgments. The very fact that a policy, institution, mode of comportment works is prima facie evidence that it ought to be treated with some respect. Given their realistic (neither optimistic nor pessimistic) view of human nature – see #5 above – conservatives do not hanker after ‘pie in the future.’ They work for a better future without denigrating the past or the present.