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kristennd's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting, thought-provoking book. The first half was basically how fundamentalism -- Islamic, Christian, or even secular -- is antithetical to liberty and should not be allowed influence in govt, and I certainly agree with that. The second half meandered more. He discusses a few philosophers I've never read, so I have no idea whether his interpretations of their work are sound. He mostly seems to end up arguing for pragmatism over ideology, which I also support and would love to see more of. I didn't agree with all of his positions, but appreciated the mellow way of presenting them. I found myself going back and rereading paragraphs to make sure they completely sunk in, which I don't usually bother with.
gvenezia's review against another edition
4.0
Conservatism at the Turn of the Century: Skeptics versus Fundamentalists
Sullivan’s target is not so much the "conservative soul" per se, but rather the stark political divisions that have recently developed under the “conservative” umbrella. In Sullivan’s telling, the skeptical, philosophical conservatism that he espouses has been overshadowed by a growing fundamentalist pseudo-conservatism (a.k.a theoconservatives and neoconservatives). Sullivan takes a historical and philosophical approach, showing how political events marshaled fundamentalist aspects of conservatism and how intellectuals have codified and rarified this new "conservative" fundamentalism.
Much to Sullivan’s credit he has taken on the most distinguished and respected proponents of this fundamentalist movement, namely John Finnis and Robert P. George, and evaluated them within the longstanding tradition of natural law theory. I read both of these authors in an undergrad philosophy course under a conservative, classical liberal professor, and Sullivan’s arguments are among the strongest I have heard. Sullivan takes the ideas of Finnis and George seriously, showing how they end up being internally contradictory and/or ahistorical.
While this new fundamentalism has many tenets and goals, Sullivan’s skeptical conservatism has almost no political platform. I had wanted a more thorough examination of conservatism’s history and philosophical extension, but Sullivan partly disabused me of that desire with his focus on the skepticism and hesitance of philosophical conservatism to prescribe a systematic program:
So in Sullivan’s view, the history of conservatism is not the history of ideas and programs so much as the history of contextualized and careful decision-making. If any goals should direct policy they would likely be (1) basic security from violence and (2) institutions that limit the extent to which fundamentalists can force others to abide by their controversial, immutable, and blinkered view of the world. But even here, the proper conservative would reevaluate the goals given the right circumstances.
To support his claims, Sullivan’s conservatism draws heavily on Montaigne, Michael Oakeshott, and the founding fathers; he also references many other famous conservatives—Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Leo Strauss, T.S. Eliot, Reagan, Thatcher, etc. (A happy surprise is Sullivan’s extensive use of Darwin and evolution to highlight conservative insights.)
Even as I have drifted far left from my quasi-fundamentalist conservative roots (and recently drifted back more towards the center), I have retained Sullivan's sense of conservative skepticism. Sullivan’s book is the first I’ve come across that both (1) satisfactorily summarizes the conservative zeitgeist which shaped the contingency of my own upbringing and (2) gives a “systematic” treatment and voice to my own philosophically conservative tendencies. (He also piqued my interest in reading more about the founding fathers and the Constitution which hasn’t happened in years.)
Highly recommended for all audiences interested in contemporary American politics—although, strong fundamentalists on the left and right might have trouble focusing on the arguments instead of the occasional unfortunate potshots Sullivan can’t help himself to. The only reason I haven’t given it 5 stars is in part because of these potshots but also because some of the formulations of skeptical conservatism become repetitive and because the book will likely become dated and cede analytical high-ground to future studies of conservatism in the 20th and 21st century.
___
Favorite Quotes
"The regret you feel in your life at the kindness not done, the person unthanked, the opportunity missed, the custom unobserved, is a form of conservatism. The same goes for the lost love or the missed opportunity: these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us. (9)
"Intrinsic to human experience—what separates us from animals—is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It is part of what we are. (10)
"…breaking something is far easier than building something...our common bonds are more easily wounded than healed. (13)
"These are bewildering times for the empowered, let alone the powerless. I am fortunate enough to have won the demographic lottery in my own time. Born into a free, prosperous West, I have had every advantage available to a global citizen in an age of dizzying metamorphosis. And yet it is still unsettling. In a mere twenty years of adulthood, I have gone from writing on an electric typewriter with carbon paper to blogging in real time on the World Wide Web. My own economic niche—writing—has gone from relatively few centers of expensive, exclusive print power to an army of blogging self-publishers. Paper has ceded to pixels. Editing has been outsourced to writers. On the Internet, there are no institutions; there are merely pages. And each page is as accessible as any other.
It should be no surprise, then, that a world full of such loss is also a world full of resurgent conservatism. A period of such intense loss and cultural disorientation is a time when the urge to conserve what we have left is most profound. (15)
"...nonbelievers miss something central to the fundamentalist experience. That central fact is that, from the point of view of the fundamentalist, this experience, far from being suffocating or encumbering, is a form of complete liberation. The extreme manifestations of observance emanate from a deeper, calmer place where faith frees the troubled mind from the burden of existential fear and everyday trembling. (26)
"...in pre revolutionary America, only 17 percent of Americans were formally “churched,” with the highest degree of religious observance in Massachusetts, where the proportion was still a mere 22 percent. By the mid-nineteenth century, that proportion had risen to over 30 percent. By 1980, it was 62 percent. It is even higher today. The American constitution was well aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism allied to government power, hence the First Amendment. But the founders, aware of many religious movements in their own time, nonetheless never had to grapple with the sheer power and institutional coordination of fundamentalist Christianity that we see in America today.
To put it another way: the kind of fundamentalism we are now witnessing has plenty of historical forefathers, but it is also quintessentially modern. (42)
"it. If conservatism is about preserving one’s own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh. If conservatism is about the acceptance of imperfection, fundamentalism is about the necessity of perfection now and forever. If conservatism begins with the premise of human error, fundamentalism rests on the fact of divine truth. If conservatism is about the permanence of human nature, fundamentalism looks forward to an apocalypse in which all human nature will be remade by the will of a terrifying and omnipotent God. If conservatism believes in pragmatism and context to determine political choices, fundamentalism relies always on a book. (72)
"If the first mistake with respect to fundamentalism is to underestimate its appeal, the second is to undervalue its intellectual coherence. The power of fundamentalism is precisely this coherence. It makes sense of everything—and marinates that sense in the power of God’s love. Nonbelievers who think that fundamentalism is merely an existential leap or an emotional crutch often forget that fundamentalisms of various stripes, from Islam to Christianity, have developed over the centuries rich, careful, nuanced accounts of human nature, conduct, and morality. As their doctrines have come up against logical gaps, they have been filled in and finessed. (74-75)
“...on the bones of an evangelical revival, and an alignment of one form of religion with one political party, the theoconservatives provided the meat of philosophical argument. They brought a brain to the fundamentalist psyche; and made arguments about social policy that, in the 1990s and new century, helped tear the United States apart at the seams. If you want to know why abortion has come to dominate American political debate, why homosexuality has been thrust into the center of the culture wars, why the Terri Schiavo case became such a pivotal moment in American history, and why sex itself is now inextricable from political warfare, then it is important to understand the arguments these men have made. (78)
"The founders of natural law—Aristotle and Aquinas—were as unaware of these dynamics as they were ignorant about female anatomy. But any fair reader of those great philosophers would be in no doubt that they would have been fascinated by the uncovering of new worlds and new theories. These philosophers were trying to make rational sense of the natural world around them, and, in Aquinas’s case, to help it cohere within the context of Christianity. The idea that these philosophers would not want to know what we have subsequently found out about human nature misreads their seriousness and open-mindedness. It is to turn their arguments and observations into others’ doctrines and assertions, to freeze human thought at a particular moment in its development, and to blind oneself to new and revealing facts. Indeed, you can read any number of essays by natural law theorists and find not a single reference to the scientific literature of the past five hundred years, let alone the past fifty. And yet they rest their case on what is found in nature. This is ideology, not reason. (93-94)
"Classical liberals and secular conservatives differ [from fundamentalists on the left and right]. They cling to the notion that government can try to be above the fray, that it can aspire to be the mediator for very different people who have to live alongside one another with radically divergent ideas of what is good or true. These limited-government liberals and conservatives believe, as a critical part of this notion of politics, that there is a clear distinction between what is public and what is private. The law can allow for different moral choices, they argue, without privileging one over the other. So a law that permits abortion merely allows some women to choose it and others to refuse it, according to their own views of what is right and wrong. And a law that allows for legal pornography simply lets individuals make their own decisions, and takes no stand on the underlying issue itself. A law that allows gay couples to marry does not forbid straight couples from marrying. The law, in this sense, is indifferent to what any couple or person might choose. It just grants them the right to choose it, and provides the mechanisms to defend the choice. (123)
"When so many proffer so many contradictory truths, how can we know for certain which one is real? (175)
"The key, therefore, to politics and to life in general is a recognition of imperfection. The core truth of this imperfection is that what we can know to be true in our minds or souls, in the realm of ideas or faith, can never be easily replicated in the real, material, physical world, either individually or in association with others. There is, in short, a deep disjunction between perfect theory and imperfect practice. (180)
"A Marxist will counter that the real meaning of history is the unfolding of class conflict, of materialist economic forces leading to an inevitable revolution. A Whig—or the twenty-first-century version of a Whig, a neoconservative—will describe it as the gradual and unstoppable advance of human freedom. A Hegelian may argue that it is the result of a philosophical dialectic in human self-understanding. A Christian fundamentalist will explain that it is a series of dispensations leading inexorably to the Final Judgment. A secular secular liberal will see it as the slow victory of good ideas over bad ones.
The conservative, in contrast, will argue that we cannot actually know if there is some meta-narrative to our human past. We can only know from our own lives, by an awareness of our own paths, and by a careful study of our collective pasts, that history is necessarily a dynamic succession of uniquely and distinctly chosen actions, each of which has incalculable and often unintended consequences. (211)
"The key to being human is knowing that chance and choice determine our lives, and, rather than resisting that, rather than insisting that he can know and attest to a deeper meaning or direction, a conservative will simply accept the limits of his own practical knowledge. (214)
"The fundamentalist sees in Darwin a threat because he proffers an alternative version of history, natural and human, than is written in their sacred texts; the conservative sees in him an interesting ally. What Darwin discovered was that our very bodies are the accidental products of countless millennia of random selection—yes: random. The shuffling of the genetic pool has no direction in itself. (215)
"Most of the time, we are utterly unaware that the threat of massive violence by a unitary sovereign entity underpins everything we do in a free society. But that’s a sign of a successful polity. It is one where we have become so used to security that we have forgotten its origins.
…
So the first goal of conservative politics is not virtue, or education, or liberty, or the integration of a divine or eternal truth into every rule and regulation. It is much more basic than that. It is security...Without security, we cannot even afford the luxury of questioning whether we need security. (231-233)
"A constitution does something quite miraculous in human affairs, and few constitutions have been as miraculous as America’s. What it does in the brutal world of competing human interests and opinions is to change the subject. Instead of focusing on what a polity is for, what meaning it is supposed to represent, which virtues it is supposed to inculcate, a constitution restricts itself to pure procedure. (244)
"When people bemoan the inefficiency of American government, they show how little they understand the genius of the founders. The genius is precisely the inefficiency. By putting a constitution in place that eschews any single human good, by enshrining it in institutions that, given human nature, would spend the bulk of their energies wrestling each other into paralysis, the founders maximized the real goal of their experiment: individual freedom. (249)
"In the modern world, in other words, conservatism often means repealing laws, abolishing unnecessary institutions, getting rid of needless government departments in order to let people make their own choices as much as possible. A free market is critical to this, but not because it somehow succeeds in creating wealth...For a conservative, it is not a criterion for a successful country that it increase its GDP by a certain amount each year. Freedom is what matters—and that includes the freedom to be inefficient and indolent if that’s what someone chooses and can afford. (266)
"Tradition is not a static entity. Although conservatism leans toward regretting change and loss, it is not wedded to the past. It never seeks to return to a golden age or a distant past: when you hear that voice, it is a reactionary and not a conservative speaking. (268)
"A conservative will also understand that one of the great bulwarks against abuse of government power is simplicity. The larger and more complex a government gets, the harder it is for most people, busy about their own lives, to keep an eye on it. (272)
Sullivan’s target is not so much the "conservative soul" per se, but rather the stark political divisions that have recently developed under the “conservative” umbrella. In Sullivan’s telling, the skeptical, philosophical conservatism that he espouses has been overshadowed by a growing fundamentalist pseudo-conservatism (a.k.a theoconservatives and neoconservatives). Sullivan takes a historical and philosophical approach, showing how political events marshaled fundamentalist aspects of conservatism and how intellectuals have codified and rarified this new "conservative" fundamentalism.
Much to Sullivan’s credit he has taken on the most distinguished and respected proponents of this fundamentalist movement, namely John Finnis and Robert P. George, and evaluated them within the longstanding tradition of natural law theory. I read both of these authors in an undergrad philosophy course under a conservative, classical liberal professor, and Sullivan’s arguments are among the strongest I have heard. Sullivan takes the ideas of Finnis and George seriously, showing how they end up being internally contradictory and/or ahistorical.
While this new fundamentalism has many tenets and goals, Sullivan’s skeptical conservatism has almost no political platform. I had wanted a more thorough examination of conservatism’s history and philosophical extension, but Sullivan partly disabused me of that desire with his focus on the skepticism and hesitance of philosophical conservatism to prescribe a systematic program:
"The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know." (173)
"While not denying that the truth exists, the conservative is content to say merely that his grasp on it is always provisional. He may be wrong. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead. And this, the conservative avers, is what it means to be human." (173-174)
"As a politics, [conservatism's] essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for the here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge. It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism." (230)
So in Sullivan’s view, the history of conservatism is not the history of ideas and programs so much as the history of contextualized and careful decision-making. If any goals should direct policy they would likely be (1) basic security from violence and (2) institutions that limit the extent to which fundamentalists can force others to abide by their controversial, immutable, and blinkered view of the world. But even here, the proper conservative would reevaluate the goals given the right circumstances.
To support his claims, Sullivan’s conservatism draws heavily on Montaigne, Michael Oakeshott, and the founding fathers; he also references many other famous conservatives—Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Leo Strauss, T.S. Eliot, Reagan, Thatcher, etc. (A happy surprise is Sullivan’s extensive use of Darwin and evolution to highlight conservative insights.)
Even as I have drifted far left from my quasi-fundamentalist conservative roots (and recently drifted back more towards the center), I have retained Sullivan's sense of conservative skepticism. Sullivan’s book is the first I’ve come across that both (1) satisfactorily summarizes the conservative zeitgeist which shaped the contingency of my own upbringing and (2) gives a “systematic” treatment and voice to my own philosophically conservative tendencies. (He also piqued my interest in reading more about the founding fathers and the Constitution which hasn’t happened in years.)
Highly recommended for all audiences interested in contemporary American politics—although, strong fundamentalists on the left and right might have trouble focusing on the arguments instead of the occasional unfortunate potshots Sullivan can’t help himself to. The only reason I haven’t given it 5 stars is in part because of these potshots but also because some of the formulations of skeptical conservatism become repetitive and because the book will likely become dated and cede analytical high-ground to future studies of conservatism in the 20th and 21st century.
___
Favorite Quotes
"The regret you feel in your life at the kindness not done, the person unthanked, the opportunity missed, the custom unobserved, is a form of conservatism. The same goes for the lost love or the missed opportunity: these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us. (9)
"Intrinsic to human experience—what separates us from animals—is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It is part of what we are. (10)
"…breaking something is far easier than building something...our common bonds are more easily wounded than healed. (13)
"These are bewildering times for the empowered, let alone the powerless. I am fortunate enough to have won the demographic lottery in my own time. Born into a free, prosperous West, I have had every advantage available to a global citizen in an age of dizzying metamorphosis. And yet it is still unsettling. In a mere twenty years of adulthood, I have gone from writing on an electric typewriter with carbon paper to blogging in real time on the World Wide Web. My own economic niche—writing—has gone from relatively few centers of expensive, exclusive print power to an army of blogging self-publishers. Paper has ceded to pixels. Editing has been outsourced to writers. On the Internet, there are no institutions; there are merely pages. And each page is as accessible as any other.
It should be no surprise, then, that a world full of such loss is also a world full of resurgent conservatism. A period of such intense loss and cultural disorientation is a time when the urge to conserve what we have left is most profound. (15)
"...nonbelievers miss something central to the fundamentalist experience. That central fact is that, from the point of view of the fundamentalist, this experience, far from being suffocating or encumbering, is a form of complete liberation. The extreme manifestations of observance emanate from a deeper, calmer place where faith frees the troubled mind from the burden of existential fear and everyday trembling. (26)
"...in pre revolutionary America, only 17 percent of Americans were formally “churched,” with the highest degree of religious observance in Massachusetts, where the proportion was still a mere 22 percent. By the mid-nineteenth century, that proportion had risen to over 30 percent. By 1980, it was 62 percent. It is even higher today. The American constitution was well aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism allied to government power, hence the First Amendment. But the founders, aware of many religious movements in their own time, nonetheless never had to grapple with the sheer power and institutional coordination of fundamentalist Christianity that we see in America today.
To put it another way: the kind of fundamentalism we are now witnessing has plenty of historical forefathers, but it is also quintessentially modern. (42)
"it. If conservatism is about preserving one’s own past, fundamentalism is about erasing it and starting afresh. If conservatism is about the acceptance of imperfection, fundamentalism is about the necessity of perfection now and forever. If conservatism begins with the premise of human error, fundamentalism rests on the fact of divine truth. If conservatism is about the permanence of human nature, fundamentalism looks forward to an apocalypse in which all human nature will be remade by the will of a terrifying and omnipotent God. If conservatism believes in pragmatism and context to determine political choices, fundamentalism relies always on a book. (72)
"If the first mistake with respect to fundamentalism is to underestimate its appeal, the second is to undervalue its intellectual coherence. The power of fundamentalism is precisely this coherence. It makes sense of everything—and marinates that sense in the power of God’s love. Nonbelievers who think that fundamentalism is merely an existential leap or an emotional crutch often forget that fundamentalisms of various stripes, from Islam to Christianity, have developed over the centuries rich, careful, nuanced accounts of human nature, conduct, and morality. As their doctrines have come up against logical gaps, they have been filled in and finessed. (74-75)
“...on the bones of an evangelical revival, and an alignment of one form of religion with one political party, the theoconservatives provided the meat of philosophical argument. They brought a brain to the fundamentalist psyche; and made arguments about social policy that, in the 1990s and new century, helped tear the United States apart at the seams. If you want to know why abortion has come to dominate American political debate, why homosexuality has been thrust into the center of the culture wars, why the Terri Schiavo case became such a pivotal moment in American history, and why sex itself is now inextricable from political warfare, then it is important to understand the arguments these men have made. (78)
"The founders of natural law—Aristotle and Aquinas—were as unaware of these dynamics as they were ignorant about female anatomy. But any fair reader of those great philosophers would be in no doubt that they would have been fascinated by the uncovering of new worlds and new theories. These philosophers were trying to make rational sense of the natural world around them, and, in Aquinas’s case, to help it cohere within the context of Christianity. The idea that these philosophers would not want to know what we have subsequently found out about human nature misreads their seriousness and open-mindedness. It is to turn their arguments and observations into others’ doctrines and assertions, to freeze human thought at a particular moment in its development, and to blind oneself to new and revealing facts. Indeed, you can read any number of essays by natural law theorists and find not a single reference to the scientific literature of the past five hundred years, let alone the past fifty. And yet they rest their case on what is found in nature. This is ideology, not reason. (93-94)
"Classical liberals and secular conservatives differ [from fundamentalists on the left and right]. They cling to the notion that government can try to be above the fray, that it can aspire to be the mediator for very different people who have to live alongside one another with radically divergent ideas of what is good or true. These limited-government liberals and conservatives believe, as a critical part of this notion of politics, that there is a clear distinction between what is public and what is private. The law can allow for different moral choices, they argue, without privileging one over the other. So a law that permits abortion merely allows some women to choose it and others to refuse it, according to their own views of what is right and wrong. And a law that allows for legal pornography simply lets individuals make their own decisions, and takes no stand on the underlying issue itself. A law that allows gay couples to marry does not forbid straight couples from marrying. The law, in this sense, is indifferent to what any couple or person might choose. It just grants them the right to choose it, and provides the mechanisms to defend the choice. (123)
"When so many proffer so many contradictory truths, how can we know for certain which one is real? (175)
"The key, therefore, to politics and to life in general is a recognition of imperfection. The core truth of this imperfection is that what we can know to be true in our minds or souls, in the realm of ideas or faith, can never be easily replicated in the real, material, physical world, either individually or in association with others. There is, in short, a deep disjunction between perfect theory and imperfect practice. (180)
"A Marxist will counter that the real meaning of history is the unfolding of class conflict, of materialist economic forces leading to an inevitable revolution. A Whig—or the twenty-first-century version of a Whig, a neoconservative—will describe it as the gradual and unstoppable advance of human freedom. A Hegelian may argue that it is the result of a philosophical dialectic in human self-understanding. A Christian fundamentalist will explain that it is a series of dispensations leading inexorably to the Final Judgment. A secular secular liberal will see it as the slow victory of good ideas over bad ones.
The conservative, in contrast, will argue that we cannot actually know if there is some meta-narrative to our human past. We can only know from our own lives, by an awareness of our own paths, and by a careful study of our collective pasts, that history is necessarily a dynamic succession of uniquely and distinctly chosen actions, each of which has incalculable and often unintended consequences. (211)
"The key to being human is knowing that chance and choice determine our lives, and, rather than resisting that, rather than insisting that he can know and attest to a deeper meaning or direction, a conservative will simply accept the limits of his own practical knowledge. (214)
"The fundamentalist sees in Darwin a threat because he proffers an alternative version of history, natural and human, than is written in their sacred texts; the conservative sees in him an interesting ally. What Darwin discovered was that our very bodies are the accidental products of countless millennia of random selection—yes: random. The shuffling of the genetic pool has no direction in itself. (215)
"Most of the time, we are utterly unaware that the threat of massive violence by a unitary sovereign entity underpins everything we do in a free society. But that’s a sign of a successful polity. It is one where we have become so used to security that we have forgotten its origins.
…
So the first goal of conservative politics is not virtue, or education, or liberty, or the integration of a divine or eternal truth into every rule and regulation. It is much more basic than that. It is security...Without security, we cannot even afford the luxury of questioning whether we need security. (231-233)
"A constitution does something quite miraculous in human affairs, and few constitutions have been as miraculous as America’s. What it does in the brutal world of competing human interests and opinions is to change the subject. Instead of focusing on what a polity is for, what meaning it is supposed to represent, which virtues it is supposed to inculcate, a constitution restricts itself to pure procedure. (244)
"When people bemoan the inefficiency of American government, they show how little they understand the genius of the founders. The genius is precisely the inefficiency. By putting a constitution in place that eschews any single human good, by enshrining it in institutions that, given human nature, would spend the bulk of their energies wrestling each other into paralysis, the founders maximized the real goal of their experiment: individual freedom. (249)
"In the modern world, in other words, conservatism often means repealing laws, abolishing unnecessary institutions, getting rid of needless government departments in order to let people make their own choices as much as possible. A free market is critical to this, but not because it somehow succeeds in creating wealth...For a conservative, it is not a criterion for a successful country that it increase its GDP by a certain amount each year. Freedom is what matters—and that includes the freedom to be inefficient and indolent if that’s what someone chooses and can afford. (266)
"Tradition is not a static entity. Although conservatism leans toward regretting change and loss, it is not wedded to the past. It never seeks to return to a golden age or a distant past: when you hear that voice, it is a reactionary and not a conservative speaking. (268)
"A conservative will also understand that one of the great bulwarks against abuse of government power is simplicity. The larger and more complex a government gets, the harder it is for most people, busy about their own lives, to keep an eye on it. (272)
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