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The paragraphs below are extracted from the book The meaning of Conservatism by Roger Scruton, Revised 3rd edition, pgs. 12-14, St. Augustine's Press, South Bend, Indiana.
The desire to conserve is compatible with all manner of change, provided only that change is also continuity. It has recently been argued with some force that the process of change in political life has become 'hyperactive'. Overstimulation of that shallow part of our being which constitutes the sum of our articulate views has led to a profusion throughout the public realm of a sense that anything can and should be altered, together with proposals for reform, and political strategies, mounted by those within and by those without the institutions whose life they thereby threaten. This disease is of the kind which any conservative will attend to, first by trying to recognize its nature. The world has become peculiarly 'opinionated', and in every corner of society people with neither the desire nor the ability to reflect on the social good are being urged to choose some favoured recipe for its realization. Even an institution like the Catholic Church has become afflicted with the fashion for reform, and being unable to take Christ's words to Simon Peter in their egoistic Lutheran meaning, has partially forgotten the tradition of custom, ceremony and judicious maneouvre that enabled it to stand seemingly unshifting in the midst of wordly change, calling with a voice of immutable authority. The Church, an institution with an aim that is not of this world, but only in this world, sells itself as a 'social cause'! It is hardly surprising if the result is not only empty moralism but also ludicrous theology.
Politics and purpose
But surely, it will be said, all politics must have an aim, and in the realizationof that aim, change and disruption will be inevitable? How then can conservatives both seek to guard their heritage, and not participate in the public pastime of reform? At this point, it will help to step down from the world of national politics, into the microcosm of ordinary human relations.
Some human relations presuppose a common purpose, and fall apart when that purpose is fulfilled or discontinued. (Consider, for example, a business partnership.) But not all relations are of that nature. The pursuit of a certain mechanical analogy has led to the belief (widely held but seldom stated) that an activity without an aim is merely aimless. So that if we are to consider political activity as a form of rational conduct, we should ally it to certain aims - to a social ideal that translates immediately into policy. Rational politicians must therefore be able to indicate the form of society at which they are aiming, why they are aiming at it, and what means they propose for its realization.
Such a view is in fact confused. Most human activities, and most relations that are worthwhile, have no purpose. No purpose, that is, external to themselves. There is no 'end in view', and to attempt to provide one is to do violence to the arrangement. Suppose I were to approach another in the spirit of a given purpose - there is something that I have in mind in, and hope to achieve through, my relations with him. And suppose that the sole interest of my relations with the other lies in this aim. Now there is a sense in which I can still treat him (in Kant's famous terminology) not as a means only, but also as an end. For I may try to accomplish my aim by seeking his agreement. I reason with him, I try to persuade him to do what I want him to do. But, if that is my approach, then it is always possible that I shall not persuade him, or that he, in his turn, will dissuade me. A certain reciprocity arises, and the absolute authority of my aim - as the sole determining principle of what it is reasonable for me to do - must be abandoned. And there is nothing irrational in that. If my aim is abandoned in these circumstances it is because it has proved impossible or unjustifiable. In other words it has failed to become part of the fellowship upon which it was first imposed. It follows that, if I am to allow to another the degree of autonomy which his human nature demands of me, I simply cannot approach him with a clearly delimited set of aims for him, and expect the fulfillment of those aims to be the inevitable, natural or even reasonable outcome of our dialogue. I might discover new ends, or even lapse into that state of 'aimlessness' which is the norm of healthy human relations. Indeed, if friendship has a basis it is this: that a person may desire the company of someone for whom he has no specific purpose. The continuity of the friendship will generate its own passing aims and aspirations, but no one of them can ever come to dominate the arrangement without changing it from friendship to something else.
So too in policits. Politicians may have aims and ambitions for the people whom they seek to govern. But a society is more than a speechless organism. It has personality, and will. Its history, institutions and culture are the repositories of human values - in short, it has the character of an end as well as means. A politician who seeks to impose upon it a given set of purposes, and seeks no understanding of the reasons and values which the society proposes in return, acts in defiance of friendship. And yet, where else does the right to govern lie, if it is not in a policitian's fellowship with a social order? The subjection of politics to determining purposes, however 'good in themselves' those purposes seem, is, on the conservative view, irrational. For it destroys the very relationship upon which government depends. This, the conservative might say, is the true source of the absurdity of communism: that it saw society entirely as a means to some future goal. Hence it was at war with the very people it had set out to govern.
It is the mark of rational intercourse that aims are not all predetermined, that some ends - perhaps the most important ends - remain to be discovered rather than imposed. And in the life of society they are discovered not by the perusal of utopian treatises, but, primarily, through participation. And that means by sharing in a form of life. (Likewise, the 'ends' of friendship are alive in its continuity, and show themselves from day to day, but have no independent existence and die with the friendship.) To participate in a social arrangement is to possess not just a set of beliefs, expectations, and feeling towards one's fellow citizens; it is to possess a way of seeing, through which the value of conduct may be recognized. That value will not be the outcome of some all-embracing principle, applied abstractly, but on the contrary, it will proceed from the immediacies of politics. One might say that, for the conservative, political ends make sense in conduct, but for the most part resist translation into recipes. Politicians cannot reasonably propose them until they have understood the social arrangement which they seek to influence, and having understood it, they may find that their ends cannot be 'proposed' in the form of a programme. To propose a recipe in advance of understanding is a sentimental gesture: it involves regarding a society as an excuse for political emotion, rather than as a proper object of it. To avoid sentimentality we must recognize that a society too has a will, and that a rational person must be open to its persuasion. This will lies, for the conservative, enshrined in history, tradition, culture and prejudice. The nations of Britain, far from being savage societies that would justify imposition of overarching decrees, are founded in the maturest of national cultures, and contain within themselves all the principles of social life. True conservatives have their ears attuned to those principles, and try to live, as a result, in friendship with the nation of which they are a part. Their own will to live, and the nation's will to live, are simply one and the same.
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