The Problem with Edmund Burke and Defenders of “Tradition”

“The problem here is that one man’s stable hierarchy and proud tradition is another’s tyrannical oppression and ideology.”

Introduction

“Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” – Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event

Many have been puzzled by post-modern conservatism’s distrust of so-called “liberal elites” and the appeals these liberal elites make to scientific consensus, academic authority, and other rationalistic tropes. Less appreciated is the fact that this animosity on the part of post-modern conservatives has a longstanding basis—far-right priests of “reason” and “logic” notwithstanding. Conservatives have long defended tradition as the stored locus of wisdom and insight, which is only to be deviated from with great caution. This is linked to the longstanding conservative skepticism of reason’s power to accurately know what is and what should be. The store of insight available to even the most intelligent personalities is so limited that it would be unwise to put faith in its power. This inclination goes back to Edmund Burke, who castigated the rationalistic philosophes of his day for thinking they could simply recreate the world wholesale from the idle speculations of their pens. For authors such as Burke and Michael Oakeshott, the skepticism towards universal reason—and the over-educated intellectuals who swear by it—can lead to flirtations with the virtues of a “politics of faith.” At its most extreme, in the work of figures such as Joseph de Maistre and Carl Schmitt (and the counter-Enlightenment movements they cheered on), it can trend towards an outright embrace of irrationalism.

The unusual feature of this embrace of tradition is that it is often very hard to tell what insights conservatives think we should glean from it. This relates to another fundamental feature of “the conservative mind,” which is that it is driven more by what Russell Kirk called an attitude or disposition that is resistant to the changes put forward by liberals and, especially, the political left. As my friend Nate Hochman put it in National Review ,“the path to conservatism begins as a knee-jerk reaction to the contemporary Left: a feeling that its assertions must be wrong, with little understanding of exactly why.” This means that many of the defenses conservatives put forward of tradition are rationalizing, rather than rationalistic. Conservatives sense that this or that venerable institution or principle, which is being attacked for its prejudices, serves a valuable function, and they, then, set out to justify its existence. This is quite different from liberals and progressives who hold certain first principles to either be self-evident or required for any society to be called just and, then, seek to steer their own in the correct direction.