While written law and regulation is critical in our society (see Part 5), much of what makes society work is actually unwritten, even in a highly-litigious society like our own. The US constitution is a remarkable document, but the constitution is not the source of our prosperity or stability as a society; it is merely a written institution surrounded by an array of unwritten institutions. The Federalist Papers are wonderful philosophical treatises on the role of government and the balance of powers, but they are not an “instruction manual” for building a good society; they are merely an approximation of the lived reality of the 18th century, and offer wisdom for the 21st.
So then, where does this unwritten wisdom come from? In short: tradition.
“Tradition,” as the philosopher GK Chesterton put it, “means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” He continues, “Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”
Unfortunately, we can’t ask the dead why it is they did what they did. We can comb their books and their writings for insight, and we still do. (Again, read The Federalist Papers! Brilliant political philosophy, and still eminently comprehensible and appropriate.) But even Madison, Hamilton, and Jay might not have fully understood why what they did worked.
As an historical digression, it’s worth comparing some 18th century revolutions. As a young writer in the 1830s, future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli reflected on the American constitution and why it worked:
Why has the republican constitution flourished in New England, and failed in New Spain? Why has the Congress of Washington commanded the respect of civilised Europe, and the Congresses of Mexico, or Lima, or Santiago, gained only its derision or disgust? The answer is obvious: The Constitution of the United States had no more root in the soil of Mexico, and Peru, and Chili [sic], than the Constitution of England in that of France, and Spain, and Portugal: it was not founded on the habits or the opinions of those whom it affected to guide, regulate, and control. … The electors and the elected were both suddenly invested with offices for the function of which they had received no previous education and no proper training; and which they were summoned to exercise without any simultaneous experience of similar duties.
If the US constitution were a perfect document, we should expect that its precepts would work everywhere they were tried. But it’s not, and they don’t. So, why did the American experiment work? To Disraeli, the answer was simple: experience and tradition.
He is a short-sighted politician who dates the Constitution of the United States from 1780. It was established by the Pilgrim Fathers a century and a half before, and influenced a people practised from their cradles in the duties of self-government. The Pilgrim Fathers brought to their land of promise the laws of England, and a republican religion; and, blended together, these formed the old colonial Constitution of Anglo-America. … The Anglo-Americans did not struggle for liberty: they struggled for independence; and the freedom and the free institutions they had long enjoyed secured for them the great object of their severe exertions. He who looks upon the citizens of the United States as a new people commits a moral, if not an historical, anachronism.
In other words, the American constitution worked because it solidified institutions that had been built over generations of experiential learning. It did not attempt to build new habits from scratch, or destroy the existing order entirely. While firebrands like Thomas Paine saw the opportunity “to begin the world over again,” the more responsible American approach was to tinker with existing habits and structures.
The opposite, of course, was the French Revolution, where the desire for rationalization and “newness” led to silly things like a brand new calendar and the utter destruction of the old regime. The great Edmund Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, reacted to the French approach with well-deserved scorn:
All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we [in England] have pursued, who have chosen our nature, rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. You [in France] might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and, in all, the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations.… but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.
The proof is ultimately in the pudding: American society was built on solid ground, en route to a centuries-long process of expanding the promise of American life to a larger and larger span of the population. France descended into chaos and tyranny and was “rescued” only by a once-in-a-generation historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. (Meanwhile, America’s Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, was channeled by the structures of government and society into the productive tasks of constructing an effective financial system. But that’s a different story.) Burke was right; Paine was wrong.
At the risk of mischaracterizing my progressive friends, much of the project of the progressive Left is about the rejection of tradition in its quest for greater public equality. To quote Damon Linker, when progressives do study the past, “it is often in a spirit of antiquarian curiosity about how the oppressor classes and benighted masses of past ages managed to defend the indefensible,” rather than an effort to glean wisdom for our current day. The past that is actually written down is rejected, as we are smarter than they were; the unwritten past--the source of the world we live in at present--is just ignored, or accepted as vestigial and unimportant, a speed bump in the way of progress, rather than a map that hints at something vital and essential.
The core conservative insight is that social harmony (see Part 3) is endogenous; in other words, it grows out of a deep historical context, and it is fragile. George Will writes about this in his Statecraft as Soulcraft:
... when the social sciences do their work well, they convey a sense of complexity and necessity in the life of society. In this regard, not even journalism is invariably a net loss to understanding. It too occasionally helps people understand that the milieu in which politicians operate is not the light, open space of Newtonian philosophy; rather, the milieu is more the thick, clinging mud in which Darwin embedded mankind's sense of itself. Liberalism thinks of society too much the way the eighteenth century thought of the heavens (and society): as clear, tidy and timeless. Liberalism is political astronomy--anachronistic astronomy, unaware that even the planets do more wobbling and wandering and banging about than the eighteenth century thought. Conservatism is political biology. It emphasizes the indeterminateness, the complexity of things, and the fact that there is more to a social system than meets the eye. (156)
Will rightly emphasizes the fundamental mystery of the world around us. We can learn things, but to conservatives, much of what makes society work is not necessarily knowable. (Indeed, the unseen plays a large role in conservative thinking in general; unintended consequences lurk behind every plan.) Contrary to this, the Left often seems to believe that the foundations of society are indestructible: whatever preexisting social harmony, stability, and prosperity we have are just the canvas onto which they can paint their desired reforms and changes. It all just happens, regardless of what we tinker with, so we should tinker with anything and everything to achieve our aims, rather than recognizing the complex, deep balancing act that we must keep in mind when pushing forward.
The progressive aims are noble, and ones that I often admire and share. But to pursue them in a way that ignores tradition and attempts to shunt aside well-established institutions, like the family, can lead to unintended consequences. This is not to say that we should be slaves to tradition or resistant to change at all. But we should accept that there may be things that have worked for years, or centuries, for reasons that we do not fully understand, and opting to dislodge those institutions is something that we should only do with great caution. When we do feel compelled to make changes in pursuit of fairness or justice (as we should at times), we should attempt to do so within the confines of existing structures, rather than from scratch.
A final comment: in addition to traditional structures, we should also be mindful of traditional personal virtues. Things like personal honor are out of vogue these days, but striving for virtue can be a source of meaning. We dispense with this sort of meaning--particularly in a world where remunerative work is often scarce or tedious--at our peril.
In the next piece, I will offer some thoughts on populism in a world we do not understand.
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