Is Conservatism Useless?

An amusing question to ask genuinely conservative-minded people is when did it all go wrong? The answer might be: 1997, 1960s, World Wars, French Revolution, Inudstrial Revolution, Reformation, and the most reactionary (and usually racialist) conservatives might blame Christianity. A few might say the loss of absolute monarchy, the introduction of female suffrage or the 1832 Reform Act, but they are mostly silly provocateurs (though I must confess I think the case against the Reform Act is underappreciated). Others might even say, or may well in the future say, the 2016 referendum; I would describe them as conservatives of a kind, though others would disagree.

This is, however, the mark of a conservative: someone who does not believe the present is better than the past. He might believe it is neither superior nor inferior to the past. He might refuse to draw any line between the past, present and future denoting general progress or decline. There are of course specific areas where one can observe progress or decline. A conservative will probably believe the latter is more common, and will likely hold things like spiritual decline to be more important than growing tolerance of exotic sexualities. Even when a conservative is happy to see some change, some genuine progress, his support usually comes in the form of 'yes, but...'

The paradox inside most conservatives is that while his primary motive is to conserve, as a pessimist he looks around and finds very little he wants to conserve. More honest and thoughtful conservatives either admit they are essentially defeatists, that they merely want to preserve what is left of what they love, thus slowing its decline, or that they want change or a revival, which hardly makes them conservatives.

I'm slowly and very reluctantly coming to the conclusion that conservatism is dead. I use it to describe myself because it still usefully indicates a temperament: the progressive looks forward for hope and inspiration, the conservative backward. It seems obvious to me that the latter is the preferable outlook. The Romans looked to the Greeks. The medievals looked to both the Romans and Greeks. 17th and 18th century Britons would have looked back to England's 'ancient constitution'.

However, none of these societies, nor any of the people one admires as conservatives, were actually 'conservative'. The temperament we know as conservative was, I suspect, the common worldview of western men until it no longer was, the same way classical music was simply 'music' until it no longer was. No one, then, called themselves a conservative. A Tory perhaps, or an aristocrat, but a rampant democratic like Chesterton was equally a 'conservative' as I would use the term, and I find a lot of what I consider to be conservatism in old socialists, even in old Engels and his excellent book The Condition of the Working Class in England. 

If you look in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary you will indeed find 'conservative', but the definition (there is only one) is probably not what you expect, though I rather like it:

'Having the power of opposing diminution or injury.'

Samuel Johnson was a great conservative, yet he clearly can't have been a conservative, for no such word existed to describe political thought. This is one of conservatism's great problems. Nearly all the great conservatives were pre-conservative. One reason for this, I would suggest, is because conservatism has very little political force. The term seems most effective when used to describe a political side which has lost, or is about to lose. To call oneself a conservative is almost to the sign a death warrant for those things one wishes to conserve.

I cannot think of an alternative term. Tory is of no use. Reactionary is a fun term, never a serious one except when used by one's enemies. Right-winger brings to mind either Moggists or Yaxley-Lennonists, neither of whom I wish to lumped in with. So we are stuck with conservative, I suppose.