The memorial dimension in conservative life

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Steven C. Skultety

I

IT IS OFTEN SAID that conservatism is not simply an intellectual movement which seeks to preserve the status quo. After all, the content of the status quo can be inimical to everything the conservative believes to be true: it can destroy good government, trivialize life, and annihilate the spirit. Rather than merely preserving the status quo, conservatives criticize its perverse elements with just as much gusto as any liberal or progressive.

Yet no conservative wishes to engage in critique alone, donning nothing more than a well-dressed deconstructionism. The conservative criticizes and critiques in order to come to the defense of something which endures. But what is it that endures? If we say that the conservative defends enduring principles, we do not seem to identify anything that identifies the conservative position in particular. All serious intellectuals, of every political position, fight for their enduring principles and ideas. Even if we try to qualify "enduring principles" by picking one set of special conservative principles that differ from those of liberals, we have still come dangerously close to portraying the conservative as just another species of progressive. For, conceived in this way, the conservative, like his liberal counterpart, is fighting to make the current and the future state of the world conform to a set of principles. Such a conservative is essentially an activist, and though we may insist that he has a clearer and more defensible basis for his struggle than his liberal counterpart, his life so conceived is fundamentally oriented towards creating change within current and future affairs.

Of course it would be a gross error to think that conservatives cannot be activists, and cannot be critiquing within and fighting upon today's political battlefield. On the contrary, my point is simply that this account has to be supplemented with some additional element that better explains the nature of conservatism. I suggest the following: a conservative must be though of as someone who, to be blunt, conserves. More specifically, he is someone who conserves the past. The purpose of this essay is to try and map out a few of the basic, foundational elements that help us understand the manner in which conservatives "bring things along from the past." When this process is better understood, we are better able to understand the element that makes conservatism what it is.

At first glance, my assertion should strike the reader as a tired platitude. Is there really any question about the way in which the past is conserved? It seems quite obvious that conservatives bring things along from the past by remembering them; indeed there are two accounts of such remembering which are already quite familiar to conservatives. Explicitly, the conservative remembers by studying history and keeping track of its past successes and failures. Implicitly, the conservative remembers by cultivating the aesthetic balance and tacit comprehension that characterize the practices of craftsmanship. The former kind of remembering makes the conservative wary of reckless visions of future utopia, while the latter kind makes him suspicious of the functional inhumanity of technology.

But these two familiar ways of accounting for the conserving element are inadequate; they both obscure the way in which conservatives hold onto the past as past. First, it is easy enough to toss out the phrase, "conservatives remember their history." But it is difficult not then to understand the conservative as one who possesses a kind of data-set which only happens to be historical. The conservative becomes the scientist of history who is no more backward looking or preserving of the past than an astronomer who records the current appearances of light that were emitted from stars millions of years ago. Both work to analyze the past--but this past is really but a present fossil. Second, no matter how eloquent our praise of craftsmanship, thinking of remembering as a kind of tacit know-how depicts the conservative as focusing exclusively on the present, albeit in a way that stresses the way in which the present is quaint. The "past," if it still plays a role here at all, is essentially a label we affix to a feeling of balance and joy in our present constructing.

But before we suggest any new explanations of how remembering conserves the past, we should appreciate how difficult a challenge this really is. By even asking how memory conserves the past as past, we are running afoul of one of the modern world's crucial assumptions: a human being is essentially free consciousness. This false assumption derives from the radicalization of an important truth. It is true that no matter the quality of chains within which a person is caught, no matter what environment he inhabits, no matter how he was raised, a human being has the capacity (even if it is never perfectly actualized) to ruminate, cogitate, and think his way along a path that leads outside these limitations. This truth will forever be one of our greatest safeguards against propaganda, but also one of the greatest sources of hubris and disaster. Nevertheless, rather than taking free consciousness to be one faculty among many, the modern world focuses exclusively on it and claims that it is our one essential characteristic. All other aspects of a human being are classified as nature, and nature, unlike consciousness, is determined, predictable, and, thus, decidedly non-human.