The Patience of Conservatism

I learned my conservatism at the kitchen table.

There my family read (the now defunct) Alberta Report with editorials by Ted Byfield, critiqued Joe Clark, sometimes praised Brian Mulroney, cheered for Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein, and recoiled at the Trudeau family. I also watched as my parents—farmers and ranchers—struggled against the arbitrariness of the Canadian Wheat Board, the snooping overreach of Statistics Canada, and the rapacity of banks and big corporations.

Such things, however great their impact, shape only one’s policy preferences. I still distrust big government and big business, am mixed about free trade, moved to the United States, and now, as then, recoil at the Trudeau family. That’s just policy, however, and as conditions change so, too, do policy preferences, and one is wise to hold policy rather loosely. My conservatism, however, is more firmly held, closer to how I understand reality.

That was learned at the kitchen table as well, for there we prayed before meals, grateful—perhaps the basic conservative mood—for life and sustenance dependent on things beyond our making or control. At the table I watched my parents bravely and steadfastly confront the challenges of weather. Of this, I once wrote in this journal:

If memory is true, I first read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath just as an odd, greenish sky portended the approach of a hailstorm to my family’s farm. These had not been good years, the mid-1980s, with drought, grasshoppers, and hail ruining the work and livelihood of many. Foreclosures were not uncommon, and the bankers owned, or soon would own, land they had never worked and never would. My family, on the other hand, had worked the soil for generations. But the loans were large, the previous seasons disastrous, and the sky green while my father silently sat at the kitchen table, drinking weak coffee and watching clouds form in that sickening light.

You can see far in the prairies; the time to watch and wait is very long. Once the prayers are said, nothing can be done except waiting—waiting to learn if your plants and plans will be again crushed and shattered.

Steinbeck describes a Dust Bowl–era storm hitting the Red Country of Oklahoma. In its destructive aftermath, “men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn.” They were silent as their wives came to stand beside them, “to feel whether this time the men would break.” Losing the corn was one thing, but “the corn could go, as long as something else remained.” In recognition, I read how “the children stood nearby . . . to see whether men and women would break,” as my father watched the clouds. I knew, as Steinbeck did, that once the faces of the watching men “lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant” that we were “safe and that there was no break.”

This is the conservatism of settlement, of belonging to a place and its history, limits, sorrows, and joys. Roger Scruton reminded us that another conservative commitment is “local questions, and the loves and suspicions that thrive in specific places and time,” and for whom “the root of politics . . . is settlement—the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people that are theirs.” Scruton calls this oikophilia, the love of home.

Later, my conservative commitment was buttressed by books and teachers of books. Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, Marion Montgomery, and James Schall; rather too many to list, and a great debt owed. Each, in his way, formed my love for what was near rather than far, concrete rather than abstract, rooted rather than adrift, indebted to history rather than to a utopian future; and that authentic freedom demanded piety, fidelity, allegiance, humility, and self-sacrifice.

Given their commitment to the concrete, they taught me that conservatism was not a worldview or an epistemic acknowledgment of a list of propositions—how thin, how vague, how bloodless—but an inherited and inhabited set of practices, virtues, stories, and forms of life. Conservatives are often derided for being the “stupid party,” but that’s the vain conceit of those who know and value only a cheap and abstract rationalism instead of the long accumulation of wisdom. Those very clever sorts—we would now call them technocrats—are perhaps very cunning, but stupid in a remarkably destructive sense. My grandfather wasn’t a learned man—I think he finished only ninth grade—but he was wiser than the elites running the Labour Party just now, whatever their credentials.

Of course, I hardly discovered these books on my own. I had teachers, some known in the classroom and others only through print, and some met briefly at weekend gatherings of small educational institutes and think tanks. They provided books, some like-minded friends, and access to a great inheritance.

I am hardly alone in my debt and gratitude to those organizations and to my teachers. They were very patient, almost monkish, in preserving and handing on the tradition and its ways of acting.

At the moment, however, there is great impatience. Each and every election risks the end of the republic, we’re breathlessly told. We click refresh on SCOTUSblog to learn the new “law” of the land each June, with great anxiety. “Wake up!” we’re scolded. Aren’t we noticing the growing shadows, the looming collapse, the imminent threat? If you’re to exhibit oikophilia it’s not enough to cite Chesterton on conservatives knowing the fence needs painting from time to time; you best be ready to fight, to punch, and conservatives are no longer supposed to entertain their monkish ways, or maintain civility, manners, and mores—no longer allowed to cultivate the settlement. The real conservative, it seems, has lost patience for thought, reading, and the traditions and actions which have always defined and manifested what it was to be a conservative. Oikophobia has run amok, and it’s time to fight dirty, we’re told.

Well, I’m no pacifist, but the just war tradition insists not only on the justice of the cause of war but also the justice of its means and instruments. Marxists might believe that truth and morality are relative to victory, but conservatives never thought this. We valued morality, we thought even the enemy was an immortal soul who might be redeemed, and we judged it far worse to do evil than to suffer it.

So, I’m concerned to observe the rise of the angry, spiteful, vengeful mood in so much contemporary conservatism. (A fighting mood bothers me not at all, but a resolute will to justly defend one’s home is categorically distinct from revenge.) I’m also concerned to see the new mood of impatience when it comes to teaching, formation, books, and thoughtfulness. Some of this is the internet age, of course, which has coarsened and corrupted our intellects, but much of this betrays a mood of urgency, anger, and panic.

In his massive book Insight, Bernard Lonergan distinguishes between what he terms shorter and longer cycles of decline. Shorter cycles occur when we are unintelligent, selfish, driven by passion, and so poorly understand, judge, and act. This happens frequently, and generally the situation can be ameliorated or salvaged through the exercise of normal intelligence and action. Not so the longer cycle, which relentlessly locks into decline, not only because of the mistakes it makes but because it neglects and casts aside the slow, patient work of allowing the intellect to dispassionately seek the truth of things in favor of the immediate, the productive, the technical, and the speedy. Such thinking has many virtues, to be sure, and is sometimes necessary, but “its many excellences cover its single defect,” namely, that “its rejection of the normative significance of detached and disinterested intelligence makes it radically uncritical.” Once uncritical, once impatient with patience of thought, it acts and reacts, often ignoring the needed insight that could make things better. Having ignored the needed insight, intelligence finds itself in a worse bind, a worse social situation. But if it continues to ignore what dispassionate intelligence would find if given time, it places a mere patch on the problem, even if that patch makes things worse in the long haul. This pattern repeats until the situation is precarious, and policy has made things worse, beginning to interfere with thought itself. And impaired thought makes for worse policy in a cycle whereby a civilization in decline “digs its grave with relentless consistency.”

I’m not speaking here of voting for or against Trump. (That I need to say this shows how impatient and tense everyone has become.) Voting is a prudential decision, although let’s not forget that prudential is not the same thing as utilitarian. This election will come and go, and the results will be, as usual, a mixed bag. There are better and worse alternatives, of course, and I have my own judgments and evaluations about such things, as does everyone else. Rather, I’m thinking about a mood too prevalent among conservatives in our time, one where gratitude, patience, caution, and fidelity have given way to anger, panic, urgency, and bile. Such are not conservative, nor are they good for us or our opponents, and they are likely to make things far, far worse. 

Image by Igor and licensed via Adobe Stock.