Conservatism and human nature

Conservatism accepts mankind's fallenness, advocating for order and discipline while eschewing utopianism.

Written by Bo Winegard.

By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fallen condition is, and to me owe
All his deliverance, and to none but me.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

A good political ideology must be concordant with human nature. Ideologies that are not, however inspiring they might sound, will inevitably lead to frustration and ultimately to disillusionment. This essay presents the case that conservatism is the political ideology that is the most consistent with human nature.

The fundamental premise of conservatism is original sin. Humans are flawed, fallible, limited creatures. For thinkers in the Christian tradition, original sin was a separation from God and an almost inexplicable drive to disobey his divine orders. For the secular, original sin can be understood as the inevitable gap between ideal and real.

Being ethical animals, humans are compelled to imagine and create a moral order that they cannot wholly obey. We can imagine paradise, but we are condemned to dwell in the purgatory of earthly reality, bound inevitably by our biological natures. We can, for example, envisage a world of perfect cooperation, a world free from the strife of conflict and competition. But we can never realize it. Thus, original sin in this sense is a separation of humans from their moral ideal.

Humans have four chief limitations that lead to this separation. We are tribal, local, competitive, and fallible. These traits lie like maggots in the fruit of humanistic idealism and preclude the creation of a progressive’s paradise. Communism, socialism, a world without tribes or irrational attachments, a world without rape or murder or misery—these are fantasies that will never come to pass. The conservative accepts this disappointing truth as the price of moral maturity and attempts to deal with humankind’s frailties and shortcomings without counseling despair but also without promoting utopian optimism.

Evidence suggests that humans largely evolved in small communities and cooperated in groups that often competed, sometimes mortally, against other groups. Because of this, they evolved tribal propensities. They care more about close kin and community members than about strangers. And they prefer ingroup to outgroup.

Consider the most obvious and powerful example. Humans have more potent bonds to immediate family members than they do to others. If you present a normal human with this choice:

There are two buildings. In one, your daughter is playing. In the other, 200 children whom you don’t know are playing. You must blow up one building. Which do you blow?

Most will not hesitate to kill the 200. The utilitarian might lament this, pointing out that this behavior does not conform to the principles of a perfectly rational moral system. And although there is something laudable and awe-inspiring about this kind of preferential concern, it is a limitation on a radical progressive vision of a world in which all “irrational” bonds are eradicated. And it can be a stubborn obstacle to a meritocratic society guided by talent and the rule of law, not familial biases.

Conservatism responds to this reality not by decrying it, but by celebrating it within its appropriate domains. The nuclear family is the fundamental unit of Western Civilization. Parents are better at raising their own kids than are other people precisely because they have strong bonds to them. What strengthens the family strengthens society. However, the conservative also promotes strong norms against nepotism. Family bonds cannot interfere with the basic meritocratic arrangement of social institutions; otherwise, people will see the social hierarchy as unfair and corrupt. Thus the important thing is to create the appropriate balance. Encourage nuclear families and kin favoritism but discourage venality and nepotism.

Humans are also competitive. Many denigrate this proclivity, bewailing the fact that humans are strongly motivated by the lure of tribal contests. Some even seek to eliminate such competitiveness, disparaging dodge ball, football, and other team sports as unfortunate relics of a barbaric past. Even more so, they deplore it in the economy and in society more broadly. And they often talk of a time in the idyllic past in which competition and jealousy were almost nonexistent.

But the abhorrence of competition and the fantasy of a pacified past will no more eradicate competitiveness than will listening to John Lennon’s Imagine while reading Karl Marx’s collected writings. One cannot eliminate human competition without eliminating humanity altogether. The desire to dominate others is ineradicable.

This is why conservatism praises markets. Markets channel human desires for status and resources into a kind of competition that has positive externalities. No other socioeconomic system is so capable of harnessing the power of human nature for the benefit of society as a whole. Benevolence is wonderful, but it does not always put bread on the table.

But this is also why conservatism applauds religion and other narratives that blunt the sharp edges of human nature. It is true that humans will always compete, but such competition can be mitigated by compelling and unifying stories and ideologies. Christianity, for example, celebrates peacefulness and humility and praises the transcendent power of love. Some competition is healthy, but without the restraint provided by prosocial narratives, competition can easily explode into violent conflict.

And this is also why conservatism praises hierarchy. Hierarchy disciplines the competitive spirit, teaches it to submit to those with more wisdom and skill. Without hierarchy, society would be an anarchy of ambition, each human against another, trying desperately to win the spoils of wealth and power. With hierarchy, it can be an ordered system in which most jealousies are suppressed by reverence and a sense of fairness.

Hierarchy also promotes the propagation of knowledge, skills, and technique. The young writer may believe she has nothing to learn from the greats and may wish to dismiss Shakespeare and Milton and Dryden as antiquated authors. Progressivism, with its emphasis on autonomy and rejection of tradition, encourages this. But Shakespeare and Milton and Dryden do in fact have much to teach. And hierarchy—in this case the Western canon—instils a veneration of the past so that we can learn from it. For the past is not a burden on the present. It is a boon. It enhances and enriches our existence.

The limitations of humans also lead conservatism to praise localism. Families, communities, and nations are what provide meaning to people; they guide them through a difficult and often disappointing life with a sense of connection to something greater than their own material existence. Many progressives appear to view such bonds as parochial and ruinous to a more cosmopolitan ideal of humanity. And therefore, they often attack nationalism as barbaric, myopic, and inherently divisive, a factitious identity that merely divides humans from each other. But conservatism views nationalism as a praiseworthy force that both constrains and expands natural tribal tendencies, creating a broadly shared identity that promotes sympathy and cooperation.

Perhaps most importantly, conservatism is skeptical of humankind’s most lauded, most celebrated, most unique power: Reason. It is not that reason is bad, evil, never-to-be-trusted, but that reason has the power to abstract from the world and to concoct entirely fantastical realities that disconcerts the conservative. Reason can posit red grass or a purple sun. It can create elaborate counterfactuals and speculate about the consequences. What if Franklin Roosevelt had lost the 1932 election? What if Plato had never existed? What if humans could be taught to be endlessly altruistic?

Of course, this is great in one sense, because it gives reason its remarkable power to deduce, induce, abduce, and ferret out causes and effects. But it also means reason can ignore important realities. It can invent social systems that sound beautiful but that ignore the constraints of nature.

The more idyllic these social systems, the more alluring they become. And the more alluring, the more pain they justify inflicting. Ephemeral suffering is worth it, after all, if it leads to endless bliss. And thus reason can promote a hankering for a social world that we can never obtain, justifying many atrocities in the futile quest to create it. That flowers must be trampled below the wheel of progress is tragic, of course, but justifiable when the new world, the new man, the new social order will shine so brightly compared to the dreariness of the old.

Conservatism does not necessarily stand athwart history yelling “stop,” but it does yell “slow down!” And it contends that reason should be tempered by the wisdom of tradition and prejudice.

One can think of culture as an evolved organism. It is not the result of one genius, not a fully formed Athena springing from one brilliant Zeus’s head. Rather, like an organism, it is the result of many thousands of years of evolution. Today’s practices and norms have subtly changed—mutated—and spread from generation to generation. Bad practices and norms have been culled. And good ones have survived. Thus when reason says, “This tradition is preposterous. Let’s get rid of it,” conservatism urges caution. Perhaps the real wisdom of the tradition is simply lost to reason. The exquisite wisdom of a bird’s circulatory system, for example, is not obvious to the human mind.

Suppose that you want to cross a river. You are familiar with canoes, but you look at them and think, “I don’t want to be inside a shell. That is confining and uncomfortable. I want something flat.” Reason can imagine a flat floating device that takes you swiftly across the river without hiccup. Perhaps radical progressivism advises you to follow this suggestion. Iconoclasm. Rebellion. Innovation.

Conservatism however councils caution and prudence. All canoes have a shell. And people have been making canoes for a long time. It might be wise to assume that their shape is a response to a long period of experimentation with the water. Perhaps many people who tried flat canoes failed and some died. As the saying goes, there’s often no need to reinvent the wheel.

Consider another example: Christianity. The educated and the intellectually adventurous may find Christianity’s metaphysics absurd and may mock them, arguing that they promote irrationality and extremism. What is church but a waste of time on a Sunday!? And what is religion but a superannuated superstition? But conservatism urges reflection. Perhaps religion is a culturally evolved technology that promotes cooperate and self-control, among other things. And perhaps it is not the religious who are blinkered but the rationalists who rely too much on the fallible tool of reason.

Or consider a final example: the formal wear of many authority figures. Judges preside over cases from a high bench with an intimidating robe. Such accoutrements are easy to mock. They just seem silly. But they also quite possibly create the appropriate reverence toward authority figures and ease the tricky dilemma of authority and obedience.

Most humans have no idea how the cultural traditions came to exist. The logic and wisdom of such traditions are hidden, as it were, behind a veneer of familiarity. We take them for granted because each generation receives them from the last and is spared the impossible task of recreating them from scratch. They are thus easy to mock, to assail, but once they are destroyed, they are very hard to replace. Therefore, conservatism advises that humans begin with the assumption that they serve an important social function. This certainly doesn’t mean all criticism is verboten. But it does mean that humans should begin with respect and humility. The traditions that we ridicule today may save us from the nightmare of terror and oppression tomorrow.

The same applies to prejudice. Unfortunately, in social psychology and in common discourse more broadly, prejudice has become a pejorative term, a term that denotes an irrational dislike of some group or another. But, understood more properly, a prejudice is simply an intuitive judgment about something that can be good, bad, or somewhere in between.

We have, for example, a prejudice against open wounds. We find them disgusting, even emetic. On the other hand, we have a prejudice in favor of sunsets. We find them beautiful. Prejudice guides so much of our behavior that it is hard to imagine our lives without it. A perfect reasoning creature without prejudice would not only be limited but also dead. The world is simply too dangerous to navigate without prejudices, hunches, intuitions. Reasoning through every obstacle, every question, every challenge is impossible.

Many on the left ridicule prejudices and policy recommendations based on them. They view a deference to prejudice as an unthinking submission to the irrational, an abdication of the duty of every morally serious human to think rationally and justify his or her preferences using logic. The problem here is two-fold according to conservatism: (1) humans are often unaware of the wisdom of their own prejudices and (2) logic and reason can easily lead humans astray, causing them to prefer novel errors to wise prejudices. Prejudices hold society together. And like tradition, they deserve deference.

But not absolute deference, of course. In the case of, for example, long instilled prejudices against homosexual relationships, conservatives were arguably, though not obviously, wrong. Nevertheless, even when prejudices are wrong, society should at least heed them. Prohibitions against many sexual acts and behaviors are largely based on prejudice, and many are wise and prudent, even if reason has a difficult time explaining them. Those who seek to elevate reason at the expense of prejudice and tradition will ultimately elevate deceitful rationalizations and clever rhetoric more than they will elevate wisdom and truth.

It is often claimed that the conservative clings to idols of the past and pines for a paradise that never existed; but properly understood, conservatism is not opposed to change or progress. The conservative, in fact, is so astonished with Western Civilization, so amazed at the progress humans have made, that he or she wants carefully to preserve it, to protect it, and to pass it to another generation. The forebears of the West blessed modern humans with a world in which survival is virtually guaranteed, rights are expected and demanded, and wealth that would have made Henry VIII bitter with envy is simply taken for granted. The conservative wants to bequeath this wonderful state of affairs to the yet-to-be-born, with whom they have a sacred covenant, so that they too can enjoy the glory of the West.

Conservatism thus is ultimately an understanding that the past, the present, and the future are not entirely different but are somehow preserved in each other like the notes of a melody, each with an irreplaceable obligation to the whole.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor of Aporia.

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