Political scientist JON ASKONAS explains ‘Why Conservatism Failed’ in an essay published in Compact on 7 October 2022. By conservatism Askonas refers to an umbrella term that covers post-enlightenment currents of social and political thought which hold that, in human affairs, wisdom, time-honoured cultural traditions and emergent orders are preferrable to rationality, science and technocracy;1 progressivism denotes the opposite.2 Conservatism’s failure is not due to intellectual inferiority, Askonas writes. Rather, modern technology renders tradition — any tradition — unviable. In a pre-modern world, upholding tradition does not have merely symbolic or sentimental value; above all, upholding tradition is pragmatic. When certain sets of practices yield tangible rewards more consistently than others, those practices become codified as tradition and an entire cultural-institutional edifice is constructed in order to perpetuate them. Economic stasis provides incentives for cultural-institutional stasis: the knowledge and rituals inherited from long-dead ancestors are as serviceable now as they were then. When modern techno-scientific advancement enters the picture, it transforms the material base of culture so radically that established cultural practices become inapplicable, virtually overnight. Resource allocation becomes vastly more efficient, making industry vastly more profitable. Social dislocation, deracination and disruption become endemic in a modern dynamic economy. This makes a more flexible frame of mind with regard to cultural tradition more adaptive than staid traditionalism. The social class that is charged with cultural guardianship might continue to preach to to the same tune as before but the old incentive structure no longer obtains. The transformation of agriculture provides an apt illustration of Askonas’s thesis.
Until fairly recently, land productivity had depended on the careful application of crop rotation and animal husbandry. Back-breaking toil and ‘care and attention to the land’ were materially rewarded. A bootstrapping mentality and the frugal management of resources were not aesthetic choices; survival depended on them. These exigencies produced a model of ‘virtue’ that informed such cultural practices as courtship and family, pedagogy, law, finance — a rural ‘way of life’. After the end of the Second World War, U.S. explosives factories find a commercial channel for their oversupply of ammonium nitrate by repurposing it as fertiliser. The newly available and cheap chemical fteriliser is widely adopted, leading to unprecedented yields and causing a dramatic fall in crop prices. Farmers who stay off the chemical bandwagon are driven to bankruptcy. The new chemical agriculture continues to require back-breaking toil but it has no place for the traditional mixture of crops and animals. Crop rotation is abandoned in favour of monocultures. Farmers are forced to think of the relationship between inputs and outputs in more abstract terms. An understanding of organic chemistry and the ability to navigate bureaucratic channels (ammonium nitrate is tightly regulated) are no longer optional. Higher education becomes de rigeur. The presence of toxic chemicals severely restricts children’s sphere of activity on the farm, so their value as farmhands is greatly reduced. This induces both a reduction in family size and a rural exodus, as post-WWII rural generations head to the city en masse in search of opportunity. Farmhand needs are now mostly harvest-related, which creates demand for a seasonal, itinerant labour force — an economic incentive for low-skill immigration. Thus, the introduction of a single element, ammonium nitrate, causes a whole way of life to unravel. This line of thinking can illuminate other cultural shifts: the post-1960s restyling of marriage would not have been possible without the contraceptive pill; the twenty-first century’s hyper-connectivity and round-the-clock surveillance make it unlikely that civil rights and privacy will retain their twentieth-century forms. As far as Askonas is concerned, in a modern technological context, traditional values have no material leg to stand on; conservative calls for moral rectitude and the obligatory paeans to the ancients can sound rather quaint and hollow. If conservatives wish the survival of certain cultural practices, he says, reverence and exaltation will not suffice; they need to devote their energies to constructing the material foundation on which their cherished ways of life will flourish. The idea of culture as built atop a material base owes most of its currency to KARL MARX, whom Askonas does not neglect to credit. In hyper-partisan times, a card-carrying conservative’s acknowledgement of a progressive icon inspires optimism. Readers, meanwhile, are left to wonder how exactly one might go about engineering a complex social system in a way that ensured the desired cultural outcomes.
LEON KASS provides a textbook conservative defence of wisdom against rationality in ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’ — see post no. 32, ‘The Ghost in the Viscera’; the classic lay-friendly description of the market as emergent order is LEONARD READ’s ‘I, Pencil’ — see post no. 23, ‘Parentless Child’.
Often referred to as liberalism — confusingly, because conservatives that endorse the above tenets are in fact liberal insofar as they champion individual rights and government by consent.