Motus Mentis

SIxteen years ago, Bill Vallicella offered a post on the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s classic essay On Being Conservative, and I commented briefly on his post in two items of my own, here and here. (The link in my old posts was to Bill’s old Typepad site, which is no more, and the links to Oakeshott’s essay that I’d provided has gone dead as well, so I’ve repointed them to the archive at Bill’s new site, and to another copy of the essay, respectively.)

Bill has now reposted his 2009 item over at his Substack page, and it’s a good opportunity to bring this essay to readers who might have missed it all those years ago.

Bill excerpted several passages, among them these (the bolding is his):

. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.

[. . .]

And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

[. . .]

. . . the office he attributes to government is to resolve some of the collisions which this variety of beliefs and activities generates; to preserve peace, not by placing an interdict upon choice and upon the diversity that springs from the exercise of preference, not by imposing substantive uniformity, but by enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike.

Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different, and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other’s way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.

Alas for the modern conservative! When Oakeshott wrote this essay in 1956 (the year of my birth), his call for a limited, neutral government, administering like an umpire a formal system upon the rules of which all could agree — rules that simply codified the “self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises” — was rooted in a far more homogeneous, and dare I say a far more civilized, gracious, and virtuous world than the petulant and chaotic hodgepodge of incommensurate ideologies, truculent tribal factions, and surly freeloaders his homeland has since become.

I’ve said often that for political systems, the “form” must suit the “matter”. Sadly, the form Oakeshott’s conservative temperament yearned for was only appropriate for a nation that really no longer exists.