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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 16, 2003
Conservatism
Don't we (that would be royal "we") just write another essay on this topic every five years or so? I am trying not to remember my last one. For it seems to me in retrospect that I missed an important point about "conservatives" and "conservatism" in our time. A very important point now I think about it: that the thing itself has almost ceased to exist. I remember the glorious morning when I discovered I was a "conservative". This happened many years ago at age twenty over a rooming-house breakfast with my new Czech friend -- one Miloslav Scholz. I was very young; he was older and wiser having among other accomplishments escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in 1968. This Milos who remains a close friend is in some respects the wisest character I have ever met. He has an ability to identify the obvious that is shared with few other human beings. Though to fully appreciate his greatness you must imagine his Moravian accent and the largeness of his teeth. The reader may gasp to learn that once upon a time I considered myself to be a "liberal". I "believed" in free markets and free elections; in an objective moral order; in due legal processes; that laws were above men and men above animals; and so on and so forth. I also believed all such things were worth fighting for even in distant countries. As perhaps the only enthusiast in my Canadian high school for fighting the War in Vietnam I was already tagged "right-wing". But I couldn't think of a more liberal cause than saving a helpless country from communist totalitarianism. My intellectual heroes in that long-ago adolescence included figures of the Scottish Enlightenment -- such as Adam Smith and David Hume. And such Englishmen as John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell (before he lost his sanity). I was an atheist too; though on my way to losing my faith in atheism. I was only beginning to read alternative worldviews. I was nevertheless fairly certain that if I wasn't a liberal there were no liberals. "Varren you fool explained my Czech friend. You are living in the past. On this continent today people like us are called by the word Conservatiff." This came as a revelation to me at the age of twenty. But at the age of fifty I am no longer convinced. I believe that the years and my own modest experience of the world have conspired to make me what my youthful self would have called a conservative indeed. Which means in turn that I no longer have the right to claim the word as a self-description. For it is one of the invariable rules of post-modern linguistic practice that nothing may be called what it is. The convention is instead to call things by their opposites. It began perhaps with the exchange of the words "liberal" and "conservative" but by now has spread into every aspect of our political life. Take so obvious an example as the words toleration, tolerance, tolerant . It is the word we use today to describe people and ideas which are flagrantly intolerant. We apply it to those who work tirelessly to impose laws forbidding various kinds of public speech and behaviour. On the contrary an "intolerant" person is ten chances in ten a person who takes it for granted that people who disagree with him have the right to their opinions. In the case of this word "conservative" something more has happened. The word had already been inverted to mean its opposite; to mean in effect what used to be meant by "liberal". But then it continued to spin and weave in popular usage. This was because it came to be used as an epithet for "people we don't like". In the mid-seventies a hard-line Stalinist -- as left-wing a person as one could hope to find -- became transmuted into a "conservative" of the "extreme right-wing" in liberal journalese. Today I notice mad mullahs hard-line Wahabi sheikhs and other violent Islamists are also called "conservatives" to distinguish them from the broad majority of Muslims whom we are left to assume are all "liberals". To be fair the people who now agree to be called "conservatives" have been using the word "liberal" in the same tar-and-feathering way though they haven't succeeded in twisting it into quite such a pretzel. It still means only the opposite of a liberal in the old-fashioned sense; nothing more complicated. A liberal today could be defined as a person committed to special privileges for preferred classes of men and women; who is suspicious of free trade and individual enterprise; and who thinks laws should be written by the social elites, and not by Parliament. It is hard enough to understand the nouns but once adjectives are employed we progress towards the intellectual equivalent of the heat-death of the universe. Consider if you will what might be meant today by the term social conservative . It is applied to people who have strangely backward views about society; who are against things like killing unborn children or publicly celebrating homosexuality. And they are categorized with persons in other cultures who advocate e.g. stoning rape victims for adultery. This can only mean that a person who does not agree to the revolutionary overthrow of the social order is a "social conservative" beyond the pale. The term has in other words been twisted so far around that it has come out right-way-up again but on a wheel off its axle. For what was previously "normal" is now labelled "abnormal" and vice versa. This fills me with hope. It suggests the possibility that with further twisting other ideas may come out right again albeit in a crazy off-the-spindle sort of way. In the meantime I'm looking for another word to communicate the idea of "conservative" other than the word "conservative" which must inevitably communicate something else. I am playing with the word "traditionalist" which might at the minimum have the advantage of not being understood at all. The idea itself is that all sound action within a society will come out of a development of that society's own traditions rather than from a negation or inversion of them. For it is a secret of society and nature that few things are improved by turning them upside-down. It is one of those things that just works like gravity; always worth another try. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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