#Debate: The Return of Conservative Thought Is a Bad Thing, Because It Crosses the Bottom Line of Humanism

Conservatism is not necessarily bad. What should worry us are the inhumane acts now carried out in its name

#Debate is a new QDaily column for arguing about interesting, contested questions. We know we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

Older people may see it as the pendulum swinging back to where it started. Young people who want to change the world are astonished by it. Over the past decade, the world has been growing more conservative — or, to put it another way, conservatives have surfaced again.

This looks like a global phenomenon. After Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in late 2016, he nominated one conservative justice after another to the Supreme Court and tightened once-open policies on gender and immigration. Most recently he has been deadlocked with the Democrats, who speak for the liberal camp, over building a wall on the US-Mexico border.

Europe has been coming apart since the 2008 financial crisis. Britain voted to leave the European Union, and although the talks have been hard, the outcome now looks unavoidable. The refugee crisis troubles nearly every European country, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, once the refugees' firmest defender, dropped her support for them after her party lost ground to far-right groups at the polls.

The Islamic world has tilted further toward fundamentalism. The Turkish government has stepped up its crackdown on dissidents and taken control of the media and the courts. Saudi Arabia appears on the surface to be pushing social reform, but the murder of a journalist has made its intentions look suspect. Egypt, over the past stretch, has arrested a journalist who interviewed gay men and an actress who spoke out about being sexually harassed.

In the Chinese-speaking world, young people in Taiwan are troubled by the wide margin by which a same-sex marriage bill lost in a referendum. On the Chinese mainland, from attacks on literary works for their "warped values," to a teacher fired by his kindergarten for being gay, to the large-scale promotion of traditional Chinese culture and values, conservative views are returning at every level, from the bottom up.

Defining conservatism is not easy, above all because people voice completely different demands from one issue to the next.

On January 22 local time, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Trump administration's ban restricting transgender people from serving in the military was valid. This was read as conservative. Liberals hold that the progressive course is to widen the understanding of gender, so that people may have many genders rather than only the biological male or female.

But in the eyes of the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, this was not merely a question of gender. US Secretary of Defense James Mattis, urging Trump to push the ban, said transgender service members could "lower the military's vigilance, undermine the cohesion of combat units, and place an unreasonable burden on the armed forces," to the detriment of military effectiveness and offensive capability.

The Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning, and in legal terms the Department of Defense seems to think this was mainly because the Court trusts the department to decide enlistment policy on its own. In a statement, the department said it should be "permitted to implement the personnel policies it deems necessary to ensure the most lethal and effective fighting force in the world." Each side argued for the ban in its own way, but all of them arrived at the same conservative result.

Abortion works the same way. Some opponents argue from the right to life, holding that an embryo also has a right to exist; others argue from traditional ethics, citing passages of the Bible to show that abortion is immoral. On refugees, some who refuse them believe that taking them in would collapse the welfare systems European countries already have; others simply refuse to live in the same space as refugees; and the most extreme plainly believe refugees are an inferior people who should not be let into their lives.

Many political scientists call this a defining feature of contemporary conservatism: on specific issues and policies it produces demands and claims that are scattered and hard to summarize. In earlier years this led many scholars to treat conservatism as a loose bundle of opinions rather than a systematic ideology.

But as conservatism rose around the world from the 1970s on, political scientists began to revise that view. Having given up the idea that conservatism is simply reactionary, backward-looking and authoritarian, people came to see that its core rests on a human instinct. People want society to continue, and they try to locate themselves within tradition — much as anyone arriving in an unfamiliar place naturally feels lost and uneasy.

In the end this is a picture people hold of their own lives: they want the way they live not to be broken. In that sense any act tied to that wish can be filed under conservatism. Understood this way, conservatism stands against change. It opposes sudden social change, and the disorder such change may bring.

On whether transgender people may serve, people have long been used to the male-female split. The existence of transgender people falls outside what they understand gender to be, and many who follow tradition read it as an act of destruction, a trampling.

People who hold conservative views tend to think that between change and custom, custom usually deserves the greater respect, because custom holds society steady while change is to be watched with care.

Change usually arrives in the name of progress. Since the Enlightenment the power of human reason has been raised high, convincing many that whatever reason produces must make human society better. History has shown that humans are just as good at wrecking everything in reason's name.

The French Revolution turned into bloodshed, and was followed by a dictator, Napoleon, and by the backward step of the restored Bourbon monarchy. Naturally, to the English across the Channel, their own route — getting from feudal monarchy to constitutional monarchy through less violent change — looked like the better choice.

In the 19th century, to answer the problems of capitalist society, Marx set out the idea of socialism, which later countries such as the Soviet Union and China put into practice. The planned economy that spread under it not only failed to help those two countries overtake the United States and Europe economically, it produced crises such as mass famine. In the end both abandoned planning through the 1980s and let the invisible hand of the market do the work.

Colonial history, two world wars, the tyranny of imperialism and outright genocide all pushed people, and scholars in particular, to think again about the power of human reason. Roger Scruton, the best-known conservative intellectual of our time, reminds us that "good things are more easily destroyed than created."

What tradition, custom and religion do inside a society is in fact plain to see. Growing up, everyone takes in a set of rules without noticing, and then relies on those rules to deal with, talk to and understand other people. Some are explicit, such as not harming others. Some are less visible, such as saying thank you when someone helps you.

Break a custom and disorder follows. The smallest example may be the elevator: when everyone faces the doors, the one person standing with their back to them makes the others uncomfortable. The recent argument online over whether you should thank a food delivery courier is the same kind of thing. Plenty of users said they had already paid for the delivery and so owed no extra thank-you, which drew immediate criticism from many who regard thanking someone as basic courtesy.

In this sense, what looks self-evident to many who argue for progress looks to others like the collapse of the social order. Take gay people and their families. Many gay people seem to assume as a matter of course that there is nothing wrong with them, and set out to get their parents to accept their sexual orientation. But one gay man's view better represents what most people think. He said, "In your parents' world, they've already imagined what your life is going to look like, but the day you tell them about it — your orientation — their world collapses completely, and you have to know how to build that world back up for them."

This is the most honest and most generous reading of conservatives. They really do cherish what is good in traditional values, and they take pride in it. It explains why conservative thought has been flowing back around the world in recent years. When progress cannot offer people the picture of life they want, they turn to the other option they know: the past.

Troubled by the arrival of refugees and the public-safety problems that came with them, Europeans elected far-right parties that shut refugees out, rather than the incumbents who believed humanity to be one. The United States, squeezed by the division of labor under globalization, watched manufacturers move offshore in numbers, throwing what had been the blue-collar class out of work and shrinking its cities. No surprise, then, that Americans picked Trump, who wanted to keep companies at home, to lead them for the next four years.

But as the world swings toward the conservative side, holding on to tradition has led to two entirely different currents of thought. One is the conservative ideal described above, with Scruton as its representative. Conservatism's refusal of change does not have to be reactionary.

Tracing the history of ideas, political scientists today place the intellectual source of conservatism with Edmund Burke, the British political philosopher born in 1729 — and Burke's own road to conservatism is telling.

The French Revolution broke out in 1789. Burke did not oppose the French pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity; what worried him was their methods. The Bastille was taken by force and the rule of the Bourbons was overthrown, but no new institution appeared to keep order, and panic spread. "One cannot but respect the spirit of the people of Paris, but their anger showed itself in an astonishing way."

Out of fear of violence, and of what a dictator might do with it, Burke insisted that tradition, custom and religion are the contract that keeps a society running: "This contract is not only between those now alive; it is between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born."

History arranged a coincidence: 200 years later, Scruton reached conservatism through a similar experience. In his essay "Why I Became a Conservative," he describes his shock at the student movement in France in 1968. To him, this mass movement, which mainstream historians regard as profoundly significant, was disorderly, chaotic, blind, and came to nothing. His doubts about progress led him to Burke's writings.

"He convinced me that society is not, and cannot be, organized around a plan or a goal. History has no direction of advance, and there is no moral or spiritual progress either," Scruton wrote.

When Burke first defended conservatism at the end of the 18th century, he did not oppose the French goals of liberty, equality and fraternity. He also supported the American Revolution: "If a government is indeed evil and arbitrary, and cannot be reformed — as sometimes happens — then it ought to be replaced, and, if necessary, by force."

As our contributing writer Wang Jianxun, associate professor at the School of Law of the China University of Political Science and Law, points out: "Conservatism will not accept autocracy and tyranny, nor any tradition that advocates or condones slavery... Conservatism has a soft spot for old things, but it does not refuse to discard the old and bring in the new; on the premise of prudence, it keeps an open attitude toward what is new."

In this sense, conservatism as traced back to Burke, and the liberalism taken to stand opposite it, are both expressions of the spirit of the Enlightenment. Both stress fairness, justice and equality in society, and both have a humanist core: every person's freedom is sacred and inviolable. This is regarded as the most important pillar of the Western world today, and conservatives and liberals rest on the same idea; they differ only over which way progress should go.

Yet in the return of conservative thought today, the bottom line of humanism has been broken. In October 2018 Brazil elected a new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. On issue after issue his reactionary positions are startling. He opposes indigenous peoples and the descendants of slaves, and says he will not set aside a single centimeter of land for them. He would force ethnic minorities to take on the customs of the dominant group, "or else disappear." He has even said that the only way to move Brazil toward the future he wants is a civil war that kills 30,000 people.

Turkey is another country moving backward. Since 2016, President Erdoğan has kept pushing the country further into Islamization. After putting down a military coup that had backed secularism, he launched a purge. As of March 2018 more than 50,000 people had been arrested and 110,000 people from the military, the courts, schools and the media had been dismissed. Many private companies were taken over by the state, and the democratic process the country once had has gone sharply into reverse.

All of which shows that the wave of conservative thought the world faces now is not the conservatism of Burke or Scruton. Its spiritual core has been eaten away and replaced. This seems to be the corruption every political ideal undergoes once it meets reality.

One face of this wave is oppression. Take the Trump administration's ban on transgender military service. The Department of Defense argued that transgender troops would hurt combat morale, but this runs against the view of the American think tank RAND. In a 2016 report, RAND found that the cost of giving transgender troops extra health services was relatively low, and that their effect on the military's operational effectiveness was minimal.

Far from the Pentagon's position: "Commanders believe that by creating a more inclusive and diverse military, the relevant policy benefits everyone who serves," said a group of lawyers challenging the new policy. "Since June 2016, transgender individuals have served openly across the branches of the US military, including on active duty in war zones. The government has produced no evidence that their doing so harms military readiness, effectiveness or lethality."

On women's rights, the government of Tanzania has expelled pregnant students and students who have given birth from school, on the grounds that women need to care for their children. President John Magufuli said these women would be distracted by childcare and would affect the others. "After doing a few math problems, [a woman who has given birth] will ask the teacher, can I go out and feed my crying baby?" Even by the standard of social custom, this is not a fair view of women.

Another danger is that rulers treat conservative values as an instrument of rule, ignoring entirely the spiritual core that conservatives themselves prize, and so abuse those values. Trump's push for a wall on the US-Mexico border may reflect his own values, but on a larger scale it is still a way of calling up public support: stir extreme feeling and collect the political backing that follows.

The Marxist scholar David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, offers a theory of how conservative values become a tool of rule. He argues that neoliberal reform worldwide over the past twenty years has turned people into separate units of self-interest. In that condition, "the drive towards market freedom and the commodification of everything can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. As Mrs Thatcher put it, the destruction of all forms of social solidarity, and even of the very concept of society itself, leaves a gaping hole in the social order. It then becomes peculiarly difficult to combat anomie and control the resultant anti-social behaviours."

"The answer to this has necessarily been the reconstruction of social solidarities, albeit along different lines — hence the revival of interest in religion and morality, in new forms of associationism (around questions of rights and citizenship, for example) and even the revival of older political forms (fascism, nationalism, localism, and the like)." Harvey holds that conservative values can serve as a force binding society together, and that this drove the rise of neoconservatism.

This has appeared not only in the United States but in China. Some political scientists turned to neoconservatism early. Gan Yang, who once presented himself as a liberal scholar, raised the slogan of "uniting the three traditions," meaning that the Confucian tradition, the Mao Zedong tradition and the Deng Xiaoping tradition should be joined together.

To some degree this elite turn toward conservatism happens to match the conservative ground note of the public. Compared with intellectuals, who treat doubt and reflection as their calling, ordinary people live much more inside a society woven out of custom. The internet has further amplified this meeting of elite and public on conservative ground.

The magazine People's Tribune once ranked the social currents of thought from 2010 to 2016. Neoliberalism stayed in the top three for the first five years, but by 2016 it had dropped to fifth, behind populism, new authoritarianism, nationalism and extremism, in that order.

Analyzing the shift, the article wrote: "With the development of global online information technology, cyberspace — virtual, convenient and decentralized above all — has dissolved the limits on the spread of populism, making populism a worldwide phenomenon and an important feature of the world's political landscape for the period ahead. In our country, the influence of populism shows up mainly in public-opinion incidents, and it also shows a strong tendency to converge with other social currents of thought."

The same holds in the United States. The social network Gab has become a haven for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists. The reach of mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has created the conditions for manufacturing fake news and hate speech in bulk.

If the channels for speaking out in the past — newspapers, television and the rest — were held by a relatively elite group, today more and more ordinary people put out their views and opinions through the internet, and conservative voices have for the first time been shown in full. Their appearance has knocked the line of historical advance running since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment off course, on a large scale, for the first time.

Liberals and conservatives alike have been losing ground before this conservative tide, apparently because neither can say where society should go next.

After the Second World War ended, liberals took the political advantage first and built the welfare-state model across Western Europe. Through relatively high taxes and a large body of nationalized public services, people could get a complete system of protection running from education to health care to housing. More than two decades of postwar growth made the welfare state look like an excellent choice.

But as European growth slowed toward the end of the 1960s, a system in which the state carried welfare became hard to sustain. "Every country in Western Europe was already staggering under the weight of spending on social welfare, social services, public facilities and infrastructure," the European public intellectual Tony Judt wrote in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

Unable to solve the crisis, liberals were replaced through the 1980s by conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. By privatizing state-owned firms and letting market forces take these industries over, they released more productive capacity and eased the government's fiscal burden, and helped Europe through a painful economic crisis.

Like the liberals before them, the conservatives had no permanent cure either. The limits of the market showed up quickly. Unable to compete with Asia's low costs, manufacturing in Europe and North America began to move away, throwing large numbers of local workers out of work and producing what came to be called the Rust Belt crisis. On the other side, finance became the beneficiary of conservative reform: Wall Street rose from the 1980s to become the center of global wealth, which widened the gap between rich and poor and left many people aggrieved.

When neither liberals nor conservatives can offer a satisfying future for society, people inevitably start to question Western civilization as a whole — and that is exactly how so many strands of conservative thought have walked onto the political stage. From Trump to Bolsonaro to Erdoğan, the policies these leaders have introduced challenge the humanist creed of the Western world head-on, and yet they have won more public support.

This is the largest challenge the world has faced since the Enlightenment. On January 25, thirty of the world's best-known intellectuals from 21 countries published an open letter in the French newspaper Libération titled "Fight for Europe — or the Wreckers Will Destroy It." They wrote that the European Union and the values of liberal democracy now face their greatest challenge and crisis since the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

As one of the signatories, the Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, said in an interview with The Guardian, "Without the idea of Europe, values such as freedom, women's rights, democracy and equality will be hard to defend elsewhere in the world as well... Europe is not just a geographical concept; it is first of all a set of ideas. And right now the idea of Europe is in crisis."

In fact, if we all firmly believe that a person's worth lies in the person, and that human rights and freedom are worth protecting, then in the end we should come back to the frame of humanism and solve the social problems in front of us on that basis. This is also the value line that liberals and conservatives both accept, which makes it worth both sides' trying, on that ground, to find ways of closing the splits between them.

To some degree the attempts have begun. The New York Times, once regarded as the liberal camp's stronghold, has in recent years invited a series of conservative intellectuals to write for it. The conservative magazine National Review welcomed the move with reservations. Its columnist Kyle Smith said, "This is the first time the Times has recognized that it has a cognitive-bias problem — the echo-chamber effect."

Meanwhile, as some liberals and some conservatives move toward their respective extremes, plenty of others are moving toward the middle. David Brooks, who once worked at National Review, thinks it has become hard to find a young evangelical Christian who likes Trump; most young conservatives are willing to accept the idea of racial diversity.

The latest Pew report supports that observation. Among the youngest generation of Republicans, more than half say racial and ethnic diversity is good for American society; fewer than 40% of their Millennial counterparts say the same, against 34% of Generation X and only 10% of Baby Boomers. Young Republicans are also more likely to approve of same-sex marriage and more accepting of transgender people.

In a way this is what genuine conservatives such as Burke and Scruton would want to see. As Burke put it, "Just as timely reform benefits a government, moderate reform benefits the people. It benefits them not only because moderate reform has continuity, but because it contains a principle of growth. Whenever an improvement is made, it should leave room for further improvement later — that, beyond doubt, is the right way to proceed."

Cover image / Jason Leung on Unsplash, Jakob Owens on Unsplash