The Essence of Conservatism: A Reply to Boris Mezhuev
Novodevichy (‘New Maidens’) Monastery, Moscow. Photo: Sergey Ashmarin
‘Why do we not turn to the Byzantine Church Fathers in search of an alternative to the Augustinian concept of a fatal original sin that devalues human virtues and ultimately leads to the pessimism, cynicism, and misanthropy of Western European modernity? ’ – Victor Taki
[The following introductory comments accompanied the original publication of Victor Taki’s essay in Russkaya Istina, Oct. 17, 2023]
I am very grateful to Victor Taki for continuing our extremely substantive debate about the “conservative Enlightenment,” a debate which began on the website of the magazine “Russia in Global Politics” and which can be further developed here, in Russkaya Istina – always assuming, to be sure, that our site overcomes various internal difficulties which may complicate our lives in the near future. Obviously, we should be trying to publish all thoughtful materials on the topic of the “conservative Enlightenment” and in this sense, Victor Taki’s article, his response to my contribution to this current of thought, deserves our attention. In essence, the author of this text says exactly what Western post-liberals, whose point of view we have already presented on our website, defend. I am referring here in particular to David C. Schindler and Patrick Deneen. The only problem is that Schindler and Deneen are precisely dissatisfied with all versions of “conservatism,” from Burke to Russell Kirk. European conservatism seems to them insufficiently ‘fundamentalist,’[1] in the sense of being too dependent on the ideas of the Enlightenment, too burdened with relativism and skepticism. Victor Taki, on the contrary, is in favor of conservatism, but against combining it with the Enlightenment.
Leaving aside arguments about vocabulary and terminology, we can’t help noting that the unity of the position taken by Taki and that of the post-liberals is self-evident: in both cases the skepticism of conservativism is contrasted with a certain positive idea of the public good, a position rooted in the thought of Aquinas and Aristotle (and again we have, in respect to both, the influence of Alasdair MacIntyre and his famous book After Virtue). On the one hand the anthropological pessimism of the reformers and enlightenment ‘educators;’ on the other the anthropological optimism of the classical tradition. Now, this would be all well and good, but there is something new that the modern age brings to the universe of values, and this something, in my opinion, is the mysterious priority of freedom over other moral and legal principles and attitudes. Freedom is higher than the good -- this is the riddle of the new era ushered in by the modern, and, if you like, it is equally the riddle of the Enlightenment itself. What is more, this is the source not only of liberalism, with its cult of individual freedom, it is also the source of the entire modern preoccupation with political sovereignty -- the imperative to protect national freedom in spite of the benefits that inclusion in the so-called global, or, if you like, ‘civilized world’ might give to a person or to a people. This priority of freedom over the good, in my opinion, is the main mystery of modernity and the Enlightenment, but all this is not taken into account, or is denied as a curse, or as “diabolical freedom,” by post-liberalism, the philosophical current to which my respected opponent undoubtedly belongs. – Boris Mezhuev
I was, of course, very glad to receive a thoughtful and detailed response from Boris Mezhuev to my criticism of his principles of paleoconservatism.[2]
I will not return to the issue of the boundary lines between blocs -- time will tell whether the current conflict will be resolved following the example of the Korean conflict, or, instead, will continue to boil at greater or lesser degree of intensity following the example of the Arab-Israeli one. I will instead concentrate on the “conservative Enlightenment” and the issue of finding the ‘ideology’ most appropriate for Russia in the current conditions.
I do not deny that the desire to overcome religious “enthusiasm” – a desire which was characteristic of representatives of the English and Scottish Enlightenment -- testified, perhaps, to their conservative temperament. Neither will I deny the conservative instincts of specifically John Pocock. However, the “Enlightenment project” itself can in no way be termed conservative. Why? Because the model of society found in the works of Mandeville, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, etc., works in which the self-seeking actions of individuals are miraculously harmonized by the “invisible hand” of the free market, is nothing more than a theoretical description of the newly emerged capitalist reality.
All these authors, far from being alarmed conservatives trying to protect traditions of this or that sort from the invading novelty, are, to the contrary, joyful heralds of this very novelty. But that is not all. The means they chose in order to overcome the religious conflicts generated by the Reformation is a new order of individuals seeking private gain – in other words, the softening effects of ‘le doux commerce’; but this bespeaks precisely a most radical break with the ancient, medieval and Renaissance tradition of moral and political thought, a tradition which had been based on one form or another of virtue and which had stigmatized individual self-interest as a vice. This break with a thousand-year-old tradition engaged in by Mandeville and his Scottish followers, this inversion of individual vices into public profit which they promoted – all this makes of the term “conservative Enlightenment” nothing more than an oxymoron.
It is also noteworthy that the model of a society consisting of selfish individuals brought into harmony by the “invisible hand” of the market, which was formulated in the 18th century as an alternative to the religious “enthusiasm” of the previous century, was itself the product of the secularization of an antecedent religious idea -- namely the concept of divine ‘double predestination.’
In its original form, the concept of divine predestination was formulated by St. Augustine who stated that God actively decided to save some people but not others. This concept was based on the idea of man being fatally marked by original sin, a condition which was insurmountable by any good deeds and intentions of man by himself, as a result of which salvation is absolutely unambiguously defined as solely the result of the action of divine grace sent from above to those destined for salvation in the form of the gift of faith.
The scholastic Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians of the high and late Middle Ages, which was coincident with a certain displacement of St. Augustine, brought good deeds and intentions back into the foreground of the church’s teachings on salvation, thereby bringing new relevance and urgency to the ancient concept of virtue. The same effect of reviving ancient virtue took place on an even larger scale when Renaissance humanism created an alternative to university scholasticism by offering its own educational program based on works by authors from the ancient world.
However, with the onset of the Reformation, Luther reaffirmed the Augustinian principle of salvation “by faith alone” (a faith which is a gift from God, not the result of human actions or desires), and Calvin went on to reinterpret the Augustinian concept of divine predestination: now the Lord will not only actively save some but will just as actively reject others (rather than simply passing them by).
The radical division of humanity into the elect and the reprobate … will subsequently play a significant role in the political culture and foreign policy behavior of England and the United States …
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The radical division of humanity into the elect and the reprobate, which follows from the Calvinist theory of double divine predestination, will subsequently play a significant role in the political culture and foreign policy behavior of England and the United States. And distant echoes of this same concept can be observed in the psychology of “progressively thinking” people today.
If, within the framework of Calvinist and, more broadly, Protestant thought, good deeds and human virtues were “useless” for salvation, the upshot of this shift in perspective could not be other than the destruction of that ideal dimension of man which has a capacity for virtue – a destruction well described by Alasdair MacIntyre in his famous book After Virtue.[3] In stark contrast, the whole raison d’être of ancient, medieval and Renaissance moral and political literature had been precisely to nurture man’s passage into that dimension of the ideal. In contrast to Aristotle's restrained optimism regarding man's ability to grow in virtue, Protestant English and crypto-Protestant French authors of the mid and second half of the 17th century (Hobbes, Pascal) embrace outright pessimism. The tendency now is to accept man in his immanent givenness, in other words, as a being wholly driven by passions and vices, and yet for whom, unexpectedly, there is still a place within the grandiose plan of God.
As Peter Gay notes in his famous history of the Enlightenment, at the turn of the 17th–18th centuries a number of Western European authors drew attention to improvements in the material conditions of life by comparison with the previous period -- improvements which, however, were by no means accompanied by mankind’s moral progress.[4] From this conclusion about the independence of material progress from the moral state of humanity, it was only one additional step to the idea that material progress is actually promoted precisely by human immorality. The French Huguenot Bernard Mandeville, who moved from Holland to England, was the first to take this daring step when he declared that it is individual vice and passion that explain the demand for luxury goods, and which in turn stimulate crafts and manufactures, develop colonial trade; in a word, fill the sails of the ship of public life.
The attitude of delight that overwhelms Mandeville and his Scottish followers when they contemplate how the divine plan -- in other words the market -- leads humanity to a better state not in spite of, but exactly thanks to human vice, this attitude can be called whatever you like except conservative. In content, if not in form, this is a deeply misanthropic religious sectarianism, one which has taken a secularized form but is at the same time in blatant contradiction with the general orientation of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance thought. What is more, it is a contradiction that even John Pocock could not manage to hide, despite all his almost century-long efforts to discover the roots of Atlantic political culture in ancient, medieval or Renaissance republicanism.[5] For Russian conservatives to continue Pocock’s futile efforts would be completely quixotic. It would represent a deliberate, doomed effort to leap over the yawning chasm that opened within the Western intellectual tradition at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.
… why not take as the basis of our modern Russian political discourse that same unhurried reading of ancient and Christian texts which distinguished the Renaissance humanists …
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Why don’t we, instead, build a new ideological synthesis on the basis of a restrained Aristotelian optimism which regards man as a political animal who, in community with others, is capable of realizing the potential for good inherent in them? Why not turn to the Byzantine Church Fathers in search of an alternative to the Augustinian conception of a fatal original sin that devalues human virtues and ultimately leads to the pessimism, cynicism, and misanthropy of Western European modernity? And, finally, why not take as the basis of our modern Russian political discourse that same unhurried reading of ancient and Christian texts which distinguished the Renaissance humanists – a practice which constitutes the essence of true conservatism?
About the author: Victor Taki is a historian and specialist in the history of Russia and south-east Europe as well as a long-time observer and commentator on French political life. He is a lecturer in history at Kings University in Edmonton, Canada.
NOTES
[1] “When I spoke about fundamentalism, I meant a simple thing — that there are certain fundamental values that are, as it were, higher than freedom and which determine, as it were, a reasonable interpretation of freedom.” From a note from B. Mezhuev emailed to Landmarks.
[2] Mezhuev’s first four theses stress the new bloc nature of international politics, the fact of Russia being permanently separate from the Western bloc, and the need at this juncture to define the boundary lines between Russia and the West at the current line of contact between the opposing forces in Ukraine. The fifth thesis states that “Russia is in need of some sort of reasonable – ideally an informal -- ideology, one capable of clarifying its civilizational distinctiveness from both China and the ‘collective West,’ while at the same time not frightening off Russia’s intellectual class … Such an ideology can be found in a conservative Enlightenment, or in a conservative democracy.” Responding to the latter thesis in Russia in Global Politics, Taki writes that “It is necessary to realize that the Enlightenment is the ideological matrix of that very ‘collective West,’ in which Russia simply has no place as a geopolitical and geo-cultural subject. Therefore, any game of Enlightenment on the part of the Russian elites can only end in their intellectual capitulation, which will naturally be followed, sooner or later, by political capitulation. On the contrary, the acquisition of intellectual or philosophical sovereignty (or ‘growing up,’ using the terminology of Immanuel Kant, who is close to Mezhuev) begins with an appeal to the ancient, medieval and Renaissance traditions, unmediated by modern European authors. Examples of such an appeal to the pre-modern tradition were shown in the 20th century by the philosophers Alexei Losev and Georgy Florovsky, and it is their path that modern Russian conservatives need to continue.” For Mezhuev’s views on Kant and ‘conservative Enlightenment,’ see, in English translation, B. Mezhuev, “Conservative Enlightenment as the ‘Heroisation of the Present,” in Kantian Journal, 2023, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 130-158. [ https://journals.kantiana.ru/upload/iblock/847/6_130-158.pdf ]
[3] A. McIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
[4] P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol 2. Knopf, 1969, 3 – 12.
[5] Most notable in J.G. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975). The failure of this attempt is convincingly demonstrated in a recent study by James Hankins: J. Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019).