Starting from home
Part II of our epic journey through Roger Scruton’s “How to be a Conservative”
Where are you most fully yourself? Where are you most truly known and accepted, despite your flaws and failings? Where are you most likely to give and receive gifts, to sacrifice, and to share? For most of us, the answer is: when we are at home. Home is the place we belong, where we first encounter the world and learn what it means and how we should act in it. Home is where we learn who we are, as we see ourselves reflected in the people tied mostly closely to us. To make and inhabit a home is one of the most basic human instincts. It’s also a good metaphor for starting to understand conservative thought.
Last month, I argued that conservatism is a maligned and minority position in New Zealand but that, rather than abandon the term, we should see if we can retrieve and renew it. While conservatism is often hopelessly misunderstood and tainted by the misadventures of conservatives themselves, I argued that it’s worth preserving the term if only because we don’t have any choice—it’s baked into our political discourse, alongside “liberal” and “progressive.” I think Roger Scruton’s 2014 book, How to be a Conservative, is a good vehicle for this endeavour, and so I’m working through a chapter a month to shed some light on the meaning of conservatism.
This month, we’re “starting from home,” to use the title of Scruton’s second chapter. Scruton opens the chapter observing that the “great societies” we live in share a “great problem, which is the problem of coordination.” Living in close proximity, making choices that affect one another, debating the distribution of resources, means we must answer this question: “How is it that we can pursue our lives in relative harmony, each enjoying a sphere of freedom and all pursuing goals of our own?” Political philosophies are basically attempts to answer this question, and I’m going to pick out four key themes from Scruton’s response.
We didn’t choose to be born. We are all born into a society that we didn’t choose and didn’t create. Instead, we received it as something like an inheritance. We will pass on this inheritance, better or worse, to those who come after us. This idea originates with the Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, “who saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn.” On this view, we “see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and [we] recognise that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil. There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have, and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.” We are not absolute owners, entitled to consume and exhaust social or natural capital as we see fit. We are temporary custodians, responsible to the coming generations for our actions.
Tradition represents accumulated wisdom. Our ancestors bequeathed us various traditions, and we may appreciate some and resent others. I don’t believe tradition should be blindly defended; it’s not hard to think of discriminatory or unjust examples. But Scruton argues powerfully in defence of tradition not as “arbitrary customs,” but as “forms of knowledge,” representing “the residues of many trials and errors.” They are “answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.” We may not be able to defend or explain individual traditions ourselves, but they represent “an accumulation of reason in society that we reject at our peril.” Take the monarchy, for example. If we were establishing a society now, I doubt we would choose to empower a hereditary elite. But as Danyl Mclauchlan recently argued in The Spinoff, constitutional monarchies seem to have some real-life advantages that republics don’t; in Scrutonian terms, they represent a form of encoded wisdom forged over centuries that serve us well even if they sit uneasily with some modern sensibilities.
Societies depend on membership, not contract. A lot of political thought (and posturing) presumes that we are completely free agents, entitled to choose and consume whatever we want so long as we do not harm those immediately around us. In this character of homo oeconomicus, “economic man,” we are unattached and unencumbered by traditions or obligations, unless we have chosen them and consented to them ourselves. In this world, contract is the basis of society; we are a people because we have agreed to be, on certain conditions, and we can revoke our consent if we choose. Against this, Scruton argues that the “binding principle” of society “is not contract, but something more akin to love.” As he points out, “we” precedes “I”. We can only imagine ourselves as entering into a social contract when we already stand in “a relation of membership” to the other parties, a relationship we did not choose. Rational, individual agreement is the basis of most contracts, but not of society.
“Conservatism is the philosophy of attachment.” When we are members of a society, we receive benefits (and burdens) from the preceding generations and from those around us who, out of charity and love, help us grow into the kind of people who can live together in harmony. We develop attachments to those people with whom we share a literal and metaphorical home, and to the place we inhabit with them. Scruton puts it like this:
“We are attached to the things we love, and wish to protect them against decay. But we know that they cannot last forever. Meanwhile we must study the ways in which we can retain them through all the changes that they must necessarily undergo, so that our lives are still lived in a spirit of goodwill and gratitude.”
When we are home, we belong; that is why it is home, and it is why we owe each other something. These unchosen obligations and gifts are the beginning of society, and of conservative thought.