How rationalists can help conservatives

I have seen the view expressed quite a few times recently that the rationalist movement is gradually rediscovering or reinventing conservative ideas. What I propose to do below is to give one example of what that might mean in practice. (Thoughts prompted by the ever-interesting Peter McLaughlin – thank you.) 

There is always a risk of this sort of thing of getting sidetracked by asking “who are these ‘rationalists’ anyway?” or “what count as ‘conservative’ ideas?”. Rather than engage in any definitional throat-clearing, I will simply point you towards a couple of examples and I hope you will see what I'm getting at. 

– Example 1: this, from me, about how (among other things) very clever modern rationalists have worked out that it's a good idea to treat manioc according to the traditions of your ancestors even though you don't know why. One theme this illustrates is epistemic humility, in particular “Chesterton's Fence”, a little argument derived from Chesterton and beloved by rationalists to the effect that until you understand the real purpose of a feature of life, you have no business getting rid of it.

– Example 2: this, also from me, picking up on how very clever modern Effective Altruists have carefully worked out a number of bits of common sense, e.g., that charity begins at home and that sometimes foreign aid money gets siphoned off by the bad guys. One theme that emerges from that thread is that having good institutions is a Good Thing.

I think it’s pretty obvious that thinking that Chesterton’s Fence is valuable reasoning is pretty conservative. For one thing, Chesterton himself was that way inclined. For another, the idea that you shouldn’t just ditch old-fashioned things just because they seem useless is almost a parody of conservative thinking.

The more interesting case is institutions. McLaughlin pointed out that there are perfectly good liberal, Hayekian reasons for supporting institutions, and he directed me to an interesting piece he wrote about (among other things) how different liberal traditions think about the threats or values that institutions present or protect.

I would recommend that you read McLaughlin’s piece. It’s interesting in its own right. Also, you’ll be able to judge whether I’m misrepresenting the thrust of his argument. But whether you have read it or not, here goes my reasoning for why what the rationalist thinks about institutions is properly to be described as “conservative” rather than “liberal”.

Liberalism is famously a broad church. But if there is a core sense to liberalism – a sense in which people on the Left can ultimately be pinned down as being liberals rather than, say, socialists, or people on the Right can be pinned down as being liberals rather than, say, conservatives – it must surely be something to do with individual liberty. (Or freedom, or political liberty, or autonomy, or ...) At root, it’s all about people (in some sense of the word ‘people’) getting to exercise personal choice (some more or less informed and more or less restrained kind of choice) about the things that matter to them and the polities to which they belong. 

That means that – ultimately, at some point, when the chips are down – the liberal has to say that institutions are justified by what they do for individual freedom. So, for example, to return to McLaughlin’s piece, we see that it might be said that “[intermediate institutions, e.g. churches] are themselves the site of freedom” or that “mediaeval cities [i.e., another set of institutions] were often quite literally founded on a contract, and that their offer of significant individual freedom to their citizens was the basis of the contractarian understanding of liberty”, and that that kind of thinking is why these institutions are Good Things.

The first example of an institution that came to my mind when I was thinking about this issue was the National Trust. I think it’s a good example. The National Trust is definitely a political thing: it’s the subject of several acts of Parliament, it makes statements about matters of public importance (e.g. the environment) and it’s forever in the news for being too “woke” or not “woke” enough. 

So why does the liberal think that the National Trust is a Good Thing (if indeed s/he thinks it is)? The answer will be along the lines of “the National Trust is a way for people to express themselves and live life fully by freely participating together in an activity in which they have chosen to take part and collaborate”.

More generally, if asked “what is this (good) institution good for?” or even “what is it for?”, the liberal will have to give the answer “freedom”. 

Now of course, conservatives don’t say anything like that. If asked “what is this institution good for?” (or “what is it for?”) they will answer in terms referable to the institution’s own goals, e.g., “the purpose of the National Trust – the good of the National Trust  – is to preserve nice old buildings; that’s what it’s for” (or “what it’s good for”). The conservative values the institution in itself, not merely as a means towards an end of political freedom.

So far, so familiar. But what do rationalists say? 

Broadly speaking, rationalists have some kind of utilitarian or at least consequentialist outlook on life, which at first sight seems far removed from conservative modes of thinking. However, let’s investigate a little further. Rationalists are discovering (see my example 2 above) that the best way of delivering some desired outcome is to build a solid institution with a healthy culture that will scale up, perpetuate itself, learn from its mistakes, be resilient to chancers, fraudsters and failure etc etc. It seems to me that that means that when we ask, “what is this (good) institution good for?” or “what is it for?”, the answer given by rationalists will be phrased in terms of the desired goal of the institution.

Let’s return to the National Trust. If we suppose that rationalists were to discover that the preservation of nice old buildings was something that made people much happier, or improved life outcomes in some measurable way – and, let’s face it, that’s exactly the sort of thing they might well discover – then they would end up saying, for example, “the purpose of the National Trust – the good of the National Trust – is to preserve nice old buildings; that’s what it’s for” (or “what it’s good for”). The rationalist has therefore arrived at exactly the same destination as the conservative.

Of course, the rationalist and the conservative may head off in different directions afterwards. If asked “why should we preserve nice old buildings?” then the rationalist might point to studies showing that people who visit nice old buildings have better mental health or are more productive, while the conservative might just say “because they are nice and old and part of our shared history”. I am not saying that their ultimate values are aligned. But I do say that what we see is a common test for what makes an institution valuable.

I think the point is even clearer if we consider how an institution might fail. What would count as the failure of the National Trust?

The liberal will say that the National Trust will have failed – will have become a Bad Thing – if, say it becomes so over-bearing of its membership’s day to day lives that their freedom is infringed, or if it exercises so much power over the wider polity that conservation concerns crowd out freedom of association more generally. 

Now of course any sane person would be rather worried by a National Trust that turned into a cult or a conspiracy against the public. But those are weird answers to the question. Both the conservative and the rationalist would surely say that the most obvious way for the National Trust to fail is by failing to do what it’s meant to do, i.e. preserve nice old buildings. Maybe the conservative is more annoyed if it fails by spending money on spreading “woke nonsense” while the rationalist is more annoyed if it fails by spending money on ineffective preservation techniques. But there’s not a lot in it: both sets of people are annoyed by both kinds of failure. 

What I find harder to understand is why the liberal could object to the National Trust failing in that way. If the membership are sufficiently involved in the decision making (i.e. freedom internal to the National Trust is protected/enhanced) and wider society is still free and vibrant (i.e. freedom external to the National Trust is protected/enhanced), then what’s the problem? There is no problem for the liberal (qua liberal anyway).

Of course, it’s open to the liberal to say that that’s no black mark against liberalism. There are political goods and there are other goods, and the liberal need have no position on whether the National Trust is doing a good job, just as the liberal need have no position on whether the manager of the England football team is doing a good job.

But I don’t find that a terribly convincing answer. I started by giving the National Trust as an example of a political organisation, in the broadest sense, and I stand by that. Many things that the National Trust does are apolitical, granted, but it also plays a recognisable role in the life of the nation; it is surely a shortcoming in your political theory if you can’t evaluate whether the National Trust is doing its job properly or not. 

Standing back from rationalists and the National Trust, I think there’s a broader point. Conservatism is perhaps a set of attitudes and prejudices more than it is an intellectual position. But (perhaps surprisingly) it is quite good at finding intellectual supports for those attitudes and prejudices. 

Hayekian thought is a good example: his ideas about decentralised information and free markets provided support for the instinctive love of private property and dislike of socialism that were a feature of mid-twentieth century conservatism. More recently, those elements of liberal thought that emphasise freedom of speech have become “right-coded”, providing intellectual cover for conservatives’ instinctive dislike of the Islamic blasphemy laws and various forms of politically correct speech. We are, I think, seeing many of those feminists and post-feminists who place particular emphasis on the biological nature – and inherent biological vulnerabilities – of women providing arguments that right-wingers are happy with. 

None of that is to say that all of those people are conservative (or, even less, vote Conservative), simply that where their concerns and arguments echo those of genuine conservatives, the magpie-like minds of right are happy to them pick up and (culturally) appropriate them.

The rationalists are a good new source of sustenance for conservative thinking, just as the feminists and liberals were before them. I shouldn’t let the topic rest without noting that there are a number of rather unpleasant alternative sources of new ideas and sustenance, but I will leave that as a topic for another day.