Fenster writes:
As the geneticist/journalist Matt Ridley begins his review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book Antifragile:
You don’t need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover “heuristics,” or rules of thumb, by trial and error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory, ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system.
Just so, no? I mean, it has the ring of truth about it, at least for a hidebound evolution-answers-all-even-if-I-am-not-myself-a-scientist guy like me. It seems reasonable to me that our capabilities to discern and measure patterns inevitably gives rise to a reification of those explanations, putting of them at the top of some hierarchy, as though they come first in some Platonic sense, with the world to follow. As Ridley goes on to remark, discovery is a trial and error process (though, to be fair, a process in which theoretical insights play a key part in the iteration of trial and error).
Is this relevant to the discussion on this site about whether America has a conservative tradition? Maybe. At the least, I think it is wise to start by recognizing that Conservative Traditions or Theories of Conservatism need to be taken off any unnecessary pedestals. The political ideas/ideals don’t come first. Better, perhaps, to start by looking at what actually happened in America and go from there.
Paleo linked to an article by Patrick Deneen from Front Porch Republic, a kind of paleo-con publication (and here I thought Paleo Retiree named himself in honor of his eating habits).
I liked that Deneen was on to this problem of putting theory first. As he seems to suggest, people end up turning complex historical lineages into rough and ready Big Ideas, then swinging them around like clubs. I take my Conservative club and bang you on the head before you can hit me with your Liberal club. Meanwhile, what do we mean by these clubs? As Deneen points out, much of what we think of as the conservative tradition in America comes from a kind of liberal tradition, meaning that the conservative-liberal fight is really just a form of cousin’s war. As he puts it, most of the tenets of conservatism in America, like the parallel tenets of liberalism, presuppose the primacy of the individual, going back to Locke, Hobbes and the rest. The only tenet of conservatism that is in tension with the dominant theme of individualism is support for family and tradition–i.e., a recognition that we are not really the masters of our own fate, but, like it or not, part of a more deeply woven fabric. Under this view, it is an inescapable part of political philosophy to accept that fate, and that fabric, and deal with it. Can’t be wished away with dreams of autonomy.
Alas, Deneen concludes “a true conservatism has few friends in today’s America” except, perhaps, on his front porch. Sounds about right.
But might Deneen’s analysis be sharpened a bit by adopting a little more scouring a la Ridley and Taleb? Deneen does spend most of his energy discussing intellectual traditions as though they lead events around on a neat little dog leash. But what if we give a little more weight to the events themselves? Might that possibly illuminate a bit more of the predicament Deneen is concerned about?
Here’s one possible path in that direction: Rogers Smith’s Beyond Tocqueville. The abstract:
Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870-1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.
In other words, we have had a more bustling and lively set of energies in a “true” conservative direction than we may often realize. It has been, though, a true reactionary tradition, and it has tended to lose most of the fights. In consequence, it has vanished for conservatives. For liberals, it exists mostly in the form of of grimm bedtime stories. White people will lynch again given half a chance. The country is forever racist. The church and its allies will stop you from your right to reproductive freedom.
Me, I am from Massachusetts, and I don’t see much reactionary behavior in the vicinity, and thus I have been prone to laugh at my fellow blue-staters’ obsessions. But Smith’s analysis–and it is worth a read, as a decent scholarly work–reminds me that liberal bedtime stories have a mooring in the truth, in actual history.
So I think we have had a conservative tradition in the country. OK, it hasn’t been highfalutin’ and may have substituted Father Coughlin for Edmund Burke. But if Deneen wants to know why no “real” conservatism, Smith may help him with his answer.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Occidental Dissent takes the position that the South is not part of America, and extrapolates thence.
The section relevant here is “Metapolitics”. That’s the one which lays out the conservative tradition in Dixie. Like it or not, like O.D. or not; that is at the heart of what Dixie is.
But you were wanting to expand this outside Dixie; that job becomes harder, as you note. I would have picked (in fact, did pick) FitzHugh as the bearer of a reactionary standard applicable to North as well as South. Since O.D. has no interest in America outside Dixie, he does not mention FitzHugh – also, FitzHugh was pretty idiosyncratic even in his own day. Perhaps better exemplars of non-Dixie conservative are the Burkean disillusioned whigs: Charles Nordhoff and Charles Francis Adams Jr.
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There’s also a home-grown Midwestern conservative tradition, growing out of our agricultural background, the experience of the frontier, and our central position in the United States. It often gte written off as simple economic individualism, religious fundamentalism, and isolationism, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. By the way, Fenster, it’s also important to realize that liberal bed-time stories, like most such things, may be rooted in history, but are also distorted, elaborated, twisted, and are for entertainment value only. Liberals, like most people, enjoy a good supply of tame enemies that they don’t really need to fear.
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I think one of the issues which makes it so difficult to identify conservatism is because conservative intellectuals have shot themselves in the foot by conflating conservatism with traditionalism. Traditonalism means doing it the old way, and hence, viewed from this point in time and in this light, many of the the American socio-politicital traditions are conservative. Yet at the time of their introduction they were profoundly radical. This traditionalist poisoning of the concept of conservatism means that anything that is old is “conservative” and anything new radical.
To my mind, a conservative is a man who believes in the Truth, with a capital T. This definition of Conservativism does seem to earn you the enmity of both traditionalists and radicals, since both groups prefer their favoured ideological stances over empirical evidence.
Our forefathers got a lot of things right (town planning for instance) but a lot of other things wrong, such as women’s, and workers rights. Traditionalists will oppose any changes to the status quo, no matter how wrong, because “you don’t tinker with what works”, and are quite happy to live with injustice. The Left, on the other hand, is always proposing solutions to problems but refuses to acknowledge that they are wrong with their proposed solutions. They almost have a perverse insistence in not allowing people to speak up on issues in which the left obviously fails. Political correctness is nothing more than a mechanism by which to avoid speaking about the truth.
The veneration of the truth is the central pillar of conservatism, its overlap with traditionalism stems from the fact that our forefathers got a lot of things right, conservatism’s inability to deal with today’s issues stems from the fact that it has been intellectually strangled by the traditionalists. It was Whittaker Chambers who managed to drum this idea into my thick skull.
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“They almost have a perverse insistence in not allowing people to speak up on issues in which the left obviously fails.”
You could cut the word “almost” from that sentence…
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slumlord: with respect, I wonder if “Conservative” versus “Traditionalist” are names you have imposed upon them, and not the names they chose for themselves. If you went to a Southern Baptist convention, and asked if they were “Conservative”, they would wholeheartedly tell you that they were Conservative. If you introduced the term “Traditionalist” they might stop and think before saying something kind about “traditional values”.
I do not find that the Conservative accepts “the truth”. I find at most that the Conservative accepts Jesus and declares Him as the Truth.
Mankind cannot bear too much truth. I am not sure if it was Mencken or Lovecraft who said this first.
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@Zimriel
What people call themselves and what they are is frequently quite different. For instance, the Baptists approve of divorce but to the Catholics that is a radical and novel position. Catholic Traditionalists would hardly say that the Baptist position is conservative.
The reason why I make the distinction between the conservatives and the traditionalists is because the latter find it extremely difficult to accommodate novel ideas which are truthful. Whilst conservatives have the cognitive flexibility to accept new truths as they are revealed. Traditionalists therefore prefer to believe in erroneous beliefs rather than demonstrated facts and in that way, share the intellectual pathology of the left.
The Galileo saga is a perfect example of what happens to an institution once traditionalists get in control. New facts are persecuted in preference to old dogma. They nearly took the temple down by their stupidity. All the while loudly proclaiming their orthodoxy.
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