Roger Scruton 4 January
2014
When pressed for a statement of their beliefs, conservatives give
ironical or evasive answers: beliefs are what the others have, the ones
who have confounded politics with religion, as
Socialists and anarchists
do. This is unfortunate, because conservatism is a genuine, if
unsystematic, philosophy, and it deserves to be stated, especially at a
time like the present, when the future of our nation is in doubt.
Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed
through our relations with other people, and not through our relation
with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is
the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world
emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community
life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from
below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been
imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a
conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or
control them.
Only in English-speaking countries do political parties describe
themselves as ‘conservative’. Why is this? It is surely because
English-speakers are heirs to a political system that has been built
from below, by the free association of individuals and the workings of
the Common Law. Hence we envisage politics as a means to conserve
society rather than a means to impose or create it. From the French
revolution to the European Union, continental government has conceived
itself in ‘top-down’ terms, as an association of wise, powerful or
expert figures, who are in the business of creating social order through
regulation and dictated law. The common law does not impose order but
grows from it. If government is necessary, in the conservative view, it
is in order to resolve the conflicts that arise when things are, for
whatever reason, unsettled.
If you see things in that way, then you are likely to believe in
conserving civil society, by accommodating necessary change.
New Labour
sought to weaken our society externally and to divide it internally by
its unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of EU supranational
authority, internally by indiscriminate Immigration, class warfare and
the ‘reform’, which usually meant the politicisation, of our hallowed
institutions. Conservatism, by contrast, aims at a cohesive society
governed by laws of its own and by the institutions that have arisen
over time in response to its changing needs and circumstances.
Such a society depends upon a common loyalty and a territorial law,
and these cannot be achieved or retained without borders. But we find
ourselves bound by a treaty devised by utopian internationalists in
circumstances that have long ago disappeared. The EU treaty obliges its
member states to permit the ‘free movement of peoples’, regardless of
their desires or their national interest. With its open welfare system,
its universal language, its relative wealth and its carefully defended
freedoms, our country is the preferred destination of Europe’s new wave
of migrants. At the top of every conservative’s agenda, therefore, is
the question of Immigration: how to limit it, and how to ensure that the
newcomers integrate into a civil society in which free association,
freedom of opinion, and respect for the law are all axiomatic.
Conservatives recognise that the right to vote out our rulers and to
change our law is the premise of democratic politics [ i.e. the
Consent Of The Governed ]. Whenever possible,
they believe, our law should be made in Westminster, or in the
common-law courts of our kingdom, not by unelected bureaucrats in
Brussels nor by courts of European judges.
Until recently the conservative emphasis on civil society has led to
an equal emphasis on the Family as its heart. This emphasis has been
thrown into disarray by the sexual revolution, by widespread divorce and
out-of-wedlock birth, and by recent moves to accommodate the
homosexual
lifestyle. And those changes have to be absorbed and normalised. Ours is
a tolerant society in which liberty is extended to a variety of
religions, world views, and forms of domestic life. But liberty is
threatened by licence: liberty is founded on personal responsibility and
a respect for others, whereas licence is a way of exploiting others for
purely personal gain. Liberty therefore depends on the values that
protect individuals from chaotic personal lives and which cherish the
integrity of the home in the face of the many threats to it.
Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does
not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. For
conservatives, environmental politics needs to be rescued from the phony
expertise of the scaremongers. But it must also be rescued from the
religion of Progress, which urges us to pursue growth at all costs and
to turn our beloved country into an array of concrete platforms linked
by high-speed railways and surveyed from every hilltop by eerie
wind-farms.
Those beliefs are difficult to act upon now. Through quangos and
official bodies, the state has been amplified under New Labour to the
point of swallowing private initiatives and distorting the
long-established charitable instinct of our citizens. Regulations make
it difficult for people to associate, and the nonsensical rulings of the
European courts constantly tell us that, by living according to our
lights, we are trampling on somebody’s ‘human rights’. Conservatives
believe in rights but rights that are paid for by duties, and which
reconcile people rather than divide them.
Left-wing thinkers often caricature the conservative position as one
that advocates the free market at all costs, introducing competition and
the profit motive even into the most sacred precincts of communal life.
Adam Smith and David Hume made clear, however, that the market, which is
the only known solution to the problem of economic co-ordination, itself
depends upon the kind of moral order that arises from below [ see e.g.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Editor ], as people
take responsibility for their lives, learn to honour their agreements
and live in justice and charity with their neighbours. Our rights are
also freedoms, and freedom makes sense only among people who are
accountable to their neighbours for its misuse.
This means that, for conservatives, the effort to reclaim civil
society from the state must continue unceasingly. One by one, our
freedoms are being eroded: free speech by the Islamists, free
association by the European Court of Human Rights, the freedom to make
our own laws and to control our own borders by the European
Union [ & Treason At Maastricht et
cetera - Ed. ].
We
conservatives value our freedom not because it is an abstract possession
of the abstract individual, but because it is a concrete and historical
achievement, the result of civil discipline over centuries, and the sign
of our undemonstrative respect for the law of the land.
This article first appeared
in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated
4
January 2014