Brian Hurley

The English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that conservative thinkers who attempt to define and defend “conservatism” often find themselves trapped in a paradox. To the extent that they succeed in making their points through reason and argument, they ironically end up contradicting the conservative way of living in the world, which is supposed to be intuitive, unconscious, and natural, rather than reasoned, self-conscious, and philosophical. After all, Scruton writes, the classic tradition of “English conservatism is rooted in the patrimony of the English upper class, in the quiet common sense of the old English constitution and in the plain-man unassuming practices that are, in the life of an English Tory, a handy substitute for thinking.” Scruton’s point is that conservatives distrust intellectual abstraction and grand theory as ways of making sense of the world, instead defining themselves and their times with reference to the realm of lived experience as it manifests in the “patrimony” of the “upper class,” the “common sense” of custom and tradition, and the collective wisdom that guides “unassuming practices” in everyday life, sparing the individual the burdens of independent reasoning. In this view, conservatism is a way of living in the world as it is, rather than thinking about the world as it could or should be. None of this will come as a surprise to readers of conservative thought, who have encountered versions of Scruton’s argument in numerous contexts. But what stands out in Scruton’s rumination on conservatism more starkly is his claim that the desire to live in the world as it is rather than to change it into what we imagine it could be is what makes conservatism the modernist frame of mind par excellence. In an essay on the prominent modernist poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot, who has long been read as a conservative, Scruton reflected on the paradox “that our greatest modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative” (Scruton, Political Philosophy, 194). He explained that although modernism in literature and thought is usually associated with the avant-garde who self-consciously break from the past as they attempt to create something radically new, Eliot’s conservatism was in fact a more meaningful form of modernism because Eliot engaged the modern world of “fragmentation, heresy and unbelief” as given, attempting to live within its contradictions rather than trying to transcend them (194). Scruton concluded that in so doing, Eliot revealed that “conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes [the classic conservative thinker Edmund] Burke from the French revolutionaries [whom he famously criticized in Reflections on the Revolution in France] is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality that is offered to us” (194). With this, Scruton radically reorients our understanding of conservatism in modern times: rather than thinking of “conservatism” as a backward-looking form of nostalgia attached to an idealized past that can never be recovered, he suggests that conservatism is in fact a bold form of modernism that sets aside the utopian alternatives conjured by intellectual abstraction in order to live within the constraints and imperfections of “the only reality that is offered to us.”