Confessions of a Conservative Socialist
Hux, Samuel
CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE SOCIALIST SAMUEL HUX When a boy and, I suppose, fashionably radical, I feared growing conservative with age. I must have had strong conservative inclinations even...
...But a polis we inhabit in a more direct, engaged, and mundane way...
...But such a rapprochement is—or ought to be—too easy: a cavalier attitude toward the sufferings of the destiConservatism in America today strikes me not as an investment in the cultivation of mind and sensibility, but simply as an investment in capital...
...in recent periodicals...
...But assume for the moment's sake of argument that it is generally true: the average liberal is glad to hear it...
...I find it hard to separate books, art, and conversation from people...
...My conservative view of reality—what can that mean if I am never willing to vote conservative...
...I find myself edgy, distrustful, around people whose immediate, habitual response to this or that is a liberal, progressive one...
...With which I agree without reservation, but add that there are different qualities of strife : I want, no easy task, to know more things and feel more deeply, to become wise before I die—otherwise there's no reason for my being here...
...On the one hand, he shares with our own conservatives: a fear of conflict and a quest for stability, a preference for minimal politics without participation or passion...
...and sometimes the quite different judgment that a merely temperamental conservative does not have the political courage of his temperament...
...I think it asinine to say, as we do, that one should cultivate his mind and morals and aesthetic sensibilities, on the one hand, and on the other to suggest that a preference—or perhaps a need—for wooden furniture instead of plastic, for good cognac, quality weaves, and so on, is the mark of a superficial soul...
...Normally now what a person feels he is and what he does are two different things...
...That attempt is the least debt I owe for the accident, or privilege, of my being born...
...but I'd like to choose my cares as far as possible, rather than have the basest cares-of-necessity thrust upon me...
...But conservatives are traditionally supposed to have a talent for accommodating antitheses, for accepting inconsistencies...
...I admire and often quote Hawthorne's phrase, admitting its faint irony: "custom, so immemorial it looks like nature...
...Death...
...I want them to enjoy me, which means I want to be enjoyable, not a craggy beast his mind perforce on next year's meals...
...And my memory when aided by history is l long enough to recall there was a time when conservatism was distrustful of the capitalist ethos (once called economic liberalism), feared it as an upstart threat to values— values much like those I've been speaking of, the cultivation of what we now half-mockingly call the "higher things...
...But more than this...
...And I'm slightly confused when a reviewer (Leon Wieseltier in New York Review of Books, May 13, 1976) identifies it as Chiaramonte's liberalism: A respect for measure in argument and action...
...transformable, but which everything shows us to be simply changing...
...it is this sublunary world which nothing in our experience shows us to be I fear the clumsiness of government bureaucracy much less than the efficient stinginess of the private sector...
...Perhaps, then, what I can sympathize with in the conservative cast of mind is its liberalism, so considered...
...Why should one have to choose between a new dental set and a set of Edmund Burke...
...His work has appeared in New Republic, Saturday Review, and Dissent...
...Is it absolutely inconceivable, beyond the stretch of reason, that conserva- , tism should become somewhat (find another word if one likes) socialistic...
...My God!—is there any chance of escaping cares anyway...
...A certain objective distance may be appropriate to, say, cosmology: we inhabit a particular universe and can do little about it but understand it...
...Well, get thee to a monkery— might someone then say?—and contemplate...
...None of this is to say that I want a life free of cares...
...Illness...
...I'd call that a conservative cast of mind...
...Is the "good life" to be enjoyed only by stockbrokers, if they have the inclination...
...an understanding of it presupposes that one not exclude from consideration what he wishes the quality of his life to be...
...The reason: I feel so strongly attached to an essentially conservative view of reality that I want to believe that view is really shared by thousands of other people—and this in spite of the fact (those last five words I shall question shortly) that my political preferences are profoundly social-democratic, laborite, so much so that I always have to tilt significantly rightward in order to find someone to vote for, and often can't...
...For—not as a permanent state of mind, but for the extent of these reflections— I'm concerned not with the destitute, but frankly with myself...
...Dissatisfaction with the size of one's mind, one's soul...
...I should refine my notions further...
...but since the majority of the art I wish to be conserved reminds me of the past, I must be a cultural reactionary...
...One can feel lucky if the manner of livelihood indeed supports the kind of life one thinks of as singularly, expressively, his own...
...But with this distinction goes, sometimes, the notion that the two kinds are autonomous functions, so that one need not penetrate the other...
...Well, the inclinations have deepened, much earlier than I expected, the fear has been realized—but not quite the way I expected...
...The 30s southern agrarians' (John Crowe Ransom's, Allen Tate's) notion that one's way of life and way of livelihood should be the same was a noble idea, but it had already passed away along with the agrarian society which they felt embodied it...
...And further: my temperamental conservatism demands of me a social-democratic political orientation...
...So why should I buy the grandest schizophrenic hypocrisy of all?— that one must sacrifice, or leave to the thoughtless, the things of this world (mere baubles, don't you know...
...But I do not think "the sanctity of profit" has a very biblical ring...
...I'm not worried about my moral backbone...
...But I find at the same time that my enjoyment of the company of conservatives is a temperamental matter having little to do with political positions...
...But my point is that if that characterization of "a 'conservatism' like ours" is apt, I'm sorry to hear it, and I don't want to believe it...
...But why should I? I don't believe that dumb women are the more attractive, that a fuller sexual experience follows an afternoon of sunbathing than an evening of Shakespeare, or that abstinence makes the mind grow sharper...
...and that that responsibility can better be exercised through a liberally conceived and intelligently administered public program than through the private sector is a considered judgment...
...tute cannot be countenanced, its opposite must be a given—or I, for one, cannot imagine a political conversation, only disgusted shouting, contempt for the fed who'd let others eat stale cake...
...I might quarrel in return, insisting that neither "bourgeois" nor "compromise" is an offensive word to me...
...I want my loves, I want my friends...
...The conservative, I imagine, hears something here which doesn't sound terribly heroic—for we like to say that dignity comes from striving...
...Man-made things provide a sense of stability, some small certainty of identity, the necessary illusion, at least, of permanence (see Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, chapter IV...
...To say that worldly things, possessions, must rule the mind of the possessor is silly, an insult to human capacities, although some romantic poets, some priests, and some not-disinterested possessors-of-much conspire, for their various reasons, in the insult...
...Or rather, that the state does?—since that's what's now implied in that old saw...
...And in any case and for instance, should not the conservative be offended that some medico marveling sweetly on our ills (I mangle a line from John Crowe Ransom, old conservative), and grown round and rosy on our cares-of-necessity, should come to him for ideological aid in defense of doctorly profits, wheezing that not enough cocks by far have yet been paid to Asclepius, that health, since so important, should be accorded the honor of remaining expensive, and that living owes no one a life...
...There is also a certain stability required before one can appreciate the comfort of people and familiar things...
...Reality always remains the same...
...I cherish privacy, and respond more immediately to Oakeshott's distaste for political involvement than to Hannah Arendt's notion that everyone should be a member of some public council large or small, although I recognize intellectually the better sense of the latter...
...Cradle to grave security" strikes many as downright immoral...
...Is Professor Pitkin right, about "our" conservatism, I mean...
...There are no "distractions" there...
...The political conservative is inclined to accept as obvious that the state has a responsibility to protect its citizens from foreign invasion...
...And I confess I do not understand the view which holds that a life free of the cares-of-necessity is free of the cares which make for dignity, as if cares were such a rare commodity...
...Aha, he says, I knew it all along...
...Just as the average conservative is delighted to hear of a liberal ideologue who sends his kids to an expensive private school to keep them away from the "wrong elements" in public schools...
...I fear the clumsiness of government bureaucracy much less than the efficient stinginess of the private sector...
...there will always be cares enough to stiffen it...
...The "good life...
...Political Science" as it is most often practiced—with no concern for the "good," only for what is— strikes me as a craven enterprise...
...That the state has, as one of its few reasons for existing, a responsibility for the health and social welfare of its citizens is a rock-bottom faith with me...
...I've read often enough, and been told, how they prefer the world's lumpy realities to the rationalist engineering which tries to make everything fit, seamlessly, with everything else—so long, that is, as certain trusted essential values do not disappear amidst the lumps...
...I wish instead to imagine the stuff of a conversation with my conservative friends...
...I smile, with sympathy balancing irony, whenever anyone says, "The old ways are best...
...What I'm worried about is certain fruitless distractions...
...Some images: I'd like to enjoy my job, but have it be only a major part of my life...
...Political thought should be personal, or give up any pretense to being serious...
...In short, it doesn't seem to me that mainline political conservatism is very temperamentally conservative...
...that would suggest more systematic rigor than I can claim for it...
...But it seems to me it does owe its citizens a certain protection from those distractions of the cares-of-necessity...
...what I don't understand is why a temperamental conservatism doesn't demand the same of the...
...I know of instances where "livelihood" and "life" are almost the same, except that both have to be supported by yet another livelihood...
...if he wishes to attain to wisdom...
...democracy has proven itself to be the only socialism worth having, not least because it has dispensed with the revolutionary rhetoric which superficially comforts my bungalow-leftist friends, who are as bourgeois as I. But I don't want to quarrel with them here...
...I must have had strong conservative inclinations even then, or I'd not have had the fear...
...Is there some justifiable reason that it should not by deed encourage—at least insure the possibility of—worthy choices...
...I don't think Oakeshott would disagree with that, but he'd not agree about how it's to be implemented—which is what I can't appreciate...
...I don't think it, or its fellows, is an 11th Commandment...
...That is to say, I want my relationship to "culture" to be intimate, and my relationship to people close to be aesthetic...
...I abhor what has happened to higher education in the last decade or so, think "feely" courses on the one hand and instruction in hotel management on the other have no place in a university...
...the person who thinks he's more himself in an empty room than among beloved objects is a self-satisfied oaf...
...I can no more trust an impersonal political theorist than I can someone who writes ethics for someone else...
...well...
...above all, an unflagging patience with all human affairs...
...Loss of friends and loves...
...And I confess, with all good will and no (or only a little) intention of being barbed, that conservatism in the main in America today strikes me not as an investment in the cultivation of mind and sensibility, in the family, in the community of man, in the validity of the religious \ sense of life, a love of what's good 1 from the past, and all its other simi- ] lar claims—but simply as an invest- \ ment...
...a systematic irreverence toward all ideas and policies which have yet to prove their truth and efficacy...
...the real conservative...
...and it appears fairly widespread, given the several symposia on Left?-Right...
...Nameless floating anxieties which come to naive and sophisticated alike...
...To both I say no...
...Are professional insecurity, and illness, for goodness sake, not "in the nature of things," so that non-token welfare and socialized medicine are illegitimate expectations, to be filled, if and when they really must, with all the largesse of a moral reprimand...
...This world is given to us in its entirety andforever—with its limits...
...for as my own conservative inclinations have deepened, I have grown more socialistic, not less—and I don't understand why that is not their experience as well...
...Or respect in liberalism its...
...I find it easier to talk to, to enjoy the company of, people of cautious, conservative reflexes...
...Then what is it for a man to lose his job through corporate decision, business fluctuation, or whatever other "natural" course of events, and have to sell his books, hock the china, tap his wife's insurance policy, and offer his guest a pepsicola and peanut butter...
...and, even were they, social Samuel Hux is Professor of English at York College of the City University of New York...
...Mostly it is a collection of intuitions and prejudices...
...It means, partially, a respect for, a kind of instant sympathetic recognition of, a certain skeptical and sometimes gloomy cast of mind...
...My leftist friends would quarrel with me: you're no socialist, merely a social-democrat, subscriber to the historic bourgeois compromise...
...one simply wants the benefits along with the alienation...
...There's a certain discipline involved in this, but it's worth practicing...
...An army, then, is in the nature of things, since collective aggression seems to be...
...And political thought is about the "good life," or it doesn't seem to me worth doing...
...However, the speaker is the late Italian liberal-leftist essayist Nicola Chiaramonte (in The Worm of Consciousness...
...I have to suspect a sort of ideological convenience in where he draws the line...
...either one's "cultivation" doesn't go deep enough to affect his workaday choices, or it does but he doesn't have the cash wherewithal...
...What that means to me is hard to put briefly...
...When someone reminds me that segregation, like starvation, is also "customary," I remind him of the twenty-five percent—a flippant answer that serves appropriately the stupid assumption that one need respect all custom...
...All of which I would offer, ask, in a spirit of respectful discourse...
...I suppose I could call myself a cultural conservative...
...Clearly it's impossible to answer— some kinds yes, some kinds no...
...I can't call my "conservative view of reality" a philosophy...
...It would be idle to complain in any large way of industrialism, technology, of the passing of the manual and mental artisan...
...Such assumptions about state responsibility we normally quarrel about, except for some rapprochement in the case of those citizens least equipped by birth or circumstance to provide health and welfare for themselves...
...And there isn't all that much time: a shame to waste so much in the ideally-avoidable cares-of-necessity—and then be told they are good for you, \requirements of dignity...
...in capital...
...I assume that "custom" is at least seventy-five percent wisdom...
...Now, I am not so blinded by my commitment to social democracy that I cannot see, for instance, that cradle-to-grave welfare and socialized medicine are in some basic way antithetical to the ethos of the free market (which, incredibly, some people choose to believe still exists), the law of profits, supply and demand, reward of enterprise, and so forth...
...Now, there is a distinction between sociopolitical conservatism and temperamental...
...I know why it does...
...This is not the quandary I referred to earlier, but a part of it...
...But, practicing now for a conversation with the political conservative, I ask for no such rapprochement, but for something more difficult...
...a reluctance to hurry the gradual improvement of the human condition...
...for I have some serious questions to ask them and a sort of quandary to explore, maybe to share...
...Few words gain my immediate, appreciative attention so readily as "tradition...
...What more often rules is the losing struggle to get possessions...
...Am I suggesting that life owes one a living...
...On the other hand, he would surely be appalled to see a "conservatism " like ours: devoid of all tradition, contemptuous of the society's history, using its traditions of constitutional liberty only as propaganda slogans while readily sacrificing them in the name of law and order...
...clearly my sort is temperamental...
...One can't make a living wage writing poems or essays, so most wordy people do something else for the real money: teach, edit...
...one wants the availability—as a given—of creative leisure...
...Rather, it seems to me, a love of quality in things intellectual and aesthetic and interpersonal, and a proud make-do with mere quotidian things, is a kind of schizophrenia...
...Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, in an essay on the British political thinker Michael Oakeshott, in the Fall '73 Dissent, wrote: Reading Oakeshott in America today is a fascinating and ironic experience...
Vol. 3 • May 1978 • No. 6
