Observations On Perception

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In a recent exit interview published by The New York Times, Ross Douthat interpreted several transformations in American politics and culture through a vocabulary whose principal terms appeared to require no explanation.   “Conservatism,” “liberalism,” “the right,” and “the left” appeared as recognizable conditions, constituted in advance and available for comparison.   Douthat’s familiarity with the institutions and political tendencies under examination conferred upon those terms the authority that their definitions did not provide.

The difficulty lies not in the substance of the convictions expressed by Douthat, but in the categories through which those convictions are recognized and classified before they are examined.   The words through which the argument proceeds do not identify stable objects.   Those words gather different histories, institutions, dispositions and political constituencies under names whose apparent familiarity conceals their instability.   The speaker can then move among electoral conduct, religious belief, party organization, ethical judgment and cultural temperament without establishing the relation among those matters.   The word remains constant while its referent changes.

This instability is not peculiar to one commentator.   Conservatism and liberalism have become political names whose authority often exceeds their descriptive capacity.   Both terms are invoked as though they designated two coherent conditions through which persons and societies might be classified.   Yet neither condition exists independently of the judgments made in its name.   No society conserves everything it receives, and no society releases every person from every restraint.   The decisive question is therefore not whether an order conserves or liberates, but what it preserves, which restraints it maintains or removes, who makes those determinations and through which institutions they acquire force.

Conservatism is frequently associated with preservation, although preservation alone cannot define it.   Every political order preserves laws, expectations, jurisdictions and forms of conduct.   Revolutionary governments preserve their revolutions; liberal governments preserve constitutional rights; commercial societies preserve the legal conditions upon which exchange depends.   Preservation becomes conservative only after an inheritance has been selected and invested with authority.

The act of selection cannot be avoided because inheritances conflict.   The authority of the family may conflict with the demands of the market.   Local autonomy may contradict national sovereignty.   Religious continuity may conflict with constitutional equality.   Private property may protect one inherited arrangement while permitting the destruction of another.   A commercial system defended as conservative may dissolve communities, occupations and customs more rapidly than a public program undertaken in the name of reform.   No appeal to tradition can resolve these conflicts until someone determines which tradition should prevail.

Conservatism may therefore be understood not as the passive preservation of what exists, but as a judgment concerning inherited forms:   which forms should retain their authority, who may alter them and what losses would become irreparable if those forms disappeared.   This judgment may contain prudence.   Institutions often contain knowledge that no individual designed and that no single generation comprehends in full.   The destruction of an institution may disclose its value only when the relations it sustained can no longer be recovered.   But duration does not establish innocence.   An institution may endure because it embodies accumulated experience, because it protects those who depend upon it or because its beneficiaries possess the power required to prevent its alteration.   Time alone cannot distinguish among these possibilities.

The invocation of tradition can conceal this uncertainty when it presents a chosen inheritance as though the past itself had selected it.   Tradition then appears to speak, command or resist.   The persons and institutions responsible for the selection disappear from the sentence.   What has been deliberately preserved assumes the appearance of natural continuity.   Conservatism becomes deceptive when selection is represented as inheritance and political agency is transferred to the past.

Liberalism encounters a corresponding difficulty, although not an identical one.   It is commonly associated with freedom, consent and emancipation from arbitrary power.   Yet no political order can eliminate restraint as such.   Rights require laws; laws require interpretation; interpretation requires institutions; institutions require the power to compel conduct.   Freedom of contract depends upon courts capable of enforcing contracts.   Freedom from discrimination depends upon restraints imposed on conduct that might otherwise be defended as private choice.   The protection of individual autonomy requires collective determinations concerning the conditions that make autonomy possible.

Liberalism is therefore not the absence of restraint.   It is a judgment concerning restraint:   which exercises of power require justification, whose consent makes authority legitimate and what protections a person may claim against institutions, majorities and inherited arrangements.   Like conservatism, liberalism does not discover its answers without adjudicating among competing goods.   The liberty of an employer may restrict the security of a worker.   The liberty of a proprietor may limit public access.   The liberty of a market participant may depend upon circumstances that leave another person without any effective alternative.   To call a relation voluntary does not establish that the conditions producing consent were freely chosen.

Liberalism can conceal these decisions when it presents liberation as the simple removal of interference.   A restraint is abolished, but another distribution of authority follows from its abolition.   Public regulation may recede while private power expands.   An inherited prohibition may disappear while economic necessity acquires greater command over conduct.   The language of choice records the moment of decision but may omit the circumstances that determined which choices were available.   Liberalism becomes deceptive when a newly established arrangement is presented as the absence of arrangement and institutional agency disappears behind the autonomy of the individual.

The conception of the person presupposed by each tradition also requires examination.   Conservative discourse often conceives the person as formed through family, custom, religion, place and historical continuity.   Liberal discourse often conceives the person as capable of consent and entitled to protection from authorities that person did not choose.   Neither conception is sufficient by itself.   A person does not enter the world independently of every relation, yet no inherited relation possesses unlimited authority over the person whose formation it helped to shape.   Formation does not extinguish judgment; autonomy does not eliminate dependence.

The opposition between conservatism and liberalism becomes misleading when these partial conceptions are presented as descriptions of two different kinds of people.   The same person may depend upon inherited relations while resisting the authority exercised through them.   The same institution may preserve a freedom acquired through reform.   The same law may interrupt one continuity in order to protect another.   Political life does not divide cleanly between those who inherit and those who choose, because choice is exercised within an inheritance and inheritance persists through successive acts of choice.

The historical relation between the two traditions likewise resists a fixed opposition.   Liberalism developed through challenges to hereditary privilege, confessional authority and arbitrary government.   Conservatism acquired much of its recognizable form through opposition to revolutionary attempts to reconstruct society according to abstract principles.   Their histories intersect without becoming symmetrical.   Liberal institutions eventually become inheritances defended by conservatives.   Conservative defenses of limited government may employ liberal arguments concerning individual rights.   Movements described as liberal may construct extensive administrative powers, while movements described as conservative may accept radical transformations when they proceed from markets, technology or executive power.

The contemporary use of these names in the United States compounds the confusion.   “Conservative” and “liberal” may identify party coalitions whose members agree upon their electoral adversaries while disagreeing about religion, commerce, war, sexuality, federal power and constitutional interpretation.   The names produce an appearance of internal coherence by placing incompatible commitments on opposite sides of a presumed division.   Once the division has been accepted, every new controversy is interpreted through it.   The categories do not proceed from the inquiry; they determine what the inquiry is permitted to recognize.

For this reason, fluent political commentary can appear more explanatory than it is.   A speaker invokes conservatism, liberalism, the right or the left, then supplies examples already assigned to those categories.   The examples appear to confirm the classification because the classification determined their relevance from the beginning.   Historical proximity may strengthen the performance.   Someone who has worked within influential institutions may present personal experience as evidence that the categories possess the coherence attributed to them.   Experience may provide valuable testimony, but it cannot replace a criterion.   To have observed a political tendency is not to have established what makes its disparate expressions a single tendency.

The problem becomes most visible when metaphor occupies the place where definition is required.   “Pagan energy” and analogous constructions, such as Christian conscience, liberal exhaustion or conservative strength, gather impressions without determining their relations.   They may refer to theology, temperament, aesthetics, political conduct or retrospective fantasy.   Their imprecision permits them to circulate among these domains while retaining the resonance acquired in each.   The result is an oratorical projection of insight:   language announces that something has been discerned before specifying the object of discernment.

A diagnostic inquiry must interrupt this movement.   Whenever conservatism is invoked, the inquiry must ask what is being conserved, who selected it for preservation and which competing inheritance is being displaced.   Whenever liberalism is invoked, the inquiry must ask what restraint is being removed, what authority replaces it and which circumstances determine whether consent is effective.   Whenever either tradition presents its judgment as a historical necessity, the inquiry must restore the agents omitted from the account.

“Tradition requires” and “progress demands” appear to proceed from opposing vocabularies, but they perform a comparable displacement.   Both expressions convert decisions into imperatives without responsible agents.   One assigns action to the accumulated past; the other assigns it to an anticipated future.   In each case, identifiable persons and institutions act while history receives grammatical responsibility for their actions.

Conservatism and liberalism may retain meaning, but not as self-evident conditions.   Both terms identify recurrent ways of adjudicating matters of inheritance, authority, restraint and change.   Their value depends upon whether the judgments made through them remain open to examination.   Their danger begins when the names are allowed to settle the questions they should compel us to ask.

Political vocabulary does more than describe an argument.   It determines who may participate in it, which continuities become visible, which restraints appear legitimate and which decisions can be concealed as inevitabilities.   The persistence of conservatism and liberalism may therefore tell us less about the permanence of two coherent doctrines than about the authority acquired by their names.   Before deciding between the two traditions, we must recover the acts of selection that each conceals.   Only then do the words cease to govern the inquiry and become answerable to it.

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