The View From 1776

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The following is a commentary from reader David Airth.

While he and I disagree on many points, he is correct that we use terms like liberal and conservative too loosely.  This is, I believe, a reflection of the poverty of our education and the failure to teach history adequately.

Liberalism, when it originated in the 17th and 18th centuries in England, was a term meaning literally freedom, as in liberty from excessive government restrictions.  John Locke expounded the doctrine in his justification for ousting autocratic James II in 1689.  Under the rubric of liberalism in 1776, Adam Smith wrote his “Wealth of Nations” to advocate laissez-faire economics, while our colonial forebears invoked Locke’s doctrine in our Declaration of Independence.

Today, of course, liberalism has come to mean more or less the opposite: pervasive government regulation, coupled with heavy taxation, to promote the welfare state.

Conservatism similarly has been transformed from Edmund Burke’s respect, in the 1770s and 80s, for tradition and authority, into views ranging from fiscal responsibility to insistence upon legislating morality.

In any case, the following are David Airth’s thoughts on the matter:

When we hear the terms liberalism and conservatism we generally have a cursory idea of what is meant by them. In our rudimentary thinking we know liberalism as the domain of liberals, people who lean to the left in their politics, and conservatism as the domain of conservatives, people who lean to the right. We find them a convenient way of understanding and categorizing our politics. But beyond them being political labels, we really don’t know very much about these doctrines, their origins or functions.

I am fascinated by how loosely we use these terms. We like them because they are demonstrative and expedient terms. What they embody immediately define for us people’s political persuasions and the lay of the political landscape. However, as complex ideas I find they have been over simplified and misused. Most often the terms liberal and conservative are used for shock value. Rarely are they seen as the symbiotic and interwoven mechanisms of an extremely sophisticated political system, the one we dwell in, Democracy.

In the beginning all politics were conservative. That’s because humankind’s fundamental instincts are conservative. Conservatism implies an adherence to tradition and a desire not to change. Change is inconvenient and painful. We would sooner not do it if we didn’t have to. Hanging on to tradition and not changing things preserves the status quo and instills a sense of security. This conservative attitude was reflected in the first political systems humankind devised. One of the earliest conservative political systems was the Church and the culture of governance it spawned to preserve itself. Communism was another conservative system.

However, humankind could not live or thrive by conservatism alone. Humankind had individual needs and aspirations which required some flexibility in human governance. Flexibility, though, requires change, something that didn’t come naturally to conservatives. In fact they were unsympathetic to it. An inherent need humankind had and wanted to fulfill was that of individual freedom and recognition. Conservatives, though, were reluctant to fulfill this need for fear of loosing power and authority. They knew that free people would complain and demand accountability. So they were not inclined to fulfilling that need. Nonetheless, people began demanding it.

Sometime during Europe’s Reformation and Enlightenment period, from the 15th to the 18th century, things began to change. A swell began to build among the lay people demanding more flexibility from the conservative ruling class. There was a chorus of voices, particularly those of philosophers, urging the governing elite to loosen its grip, allowing its constituents to participate in their own governance. One philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704), urged that people should also be free to peruse their own self-interests, something that had been thwarted. What he was talking about was the idea of liberty, individual liberation from the confines of the Church and state.

The demand for liberty was the beginning of liberalism. Liberty meant a measure of freedom from the state, like one having the right to own property and one’s labour or making one’s own decisions about worship or having the right to move about freely. In order to bestow liberty on individuals the governing elite had to change their ways, reform and become more flexible and yes, liberal. Liberty, then, is a product of liberalism and a liberal disposition.

Somewhere along the way the idea of liberty became synonymous with conservatism, not liberalism, the doctrine which originally made it possible. Conservatives were now the libertarians. In this new context conservatives view themselves as the upholders of liberty and liberals are those who are anti-libertarian, as conservative once were.

This role reversal highlights a symbiotic relationship that exists between these two doctrines: Conservatives, after a period of reflection and digestion, claim for themselves the best ideas that liberals have formulated and worked hard to entrench. Take for instance, the emancipation of women and their right to vote. Conservatives originally were against women’s emancipation. However, after a period of time, enlightened conservatives accepted this right as gospel and mainstream. Affirmative action was another liberal issue conservatives had problems with. Conservatives opposed affirmative action at the outset, but as the years passed and the subject matured they came around to the understanding that it was important for a healthy society. Science, the bestower of the technologies which support society, is also a liberal endeavour which conservatives were once against.

One point I am trying to make here is that liberals are the ones who instigate new thinking and new solutions to social questions while conservatives are generally the ones who enshrine them. Most of us are a bit of both. One thing I think you can take away from this is that it takes two to tango, two to create a workable system. Without liberals we would not have the new ideas and solutions that are needed to deal with a changing world and without conservatives we would not have the consolidators and protecters of the worthy changes liberals come up with.

I will now reveal my bias, though not an alarming one. It is one that the reader may have to puzzle over. It’s this, that the modern political world exists in the context of liberalism. In other words, conservatism exist in the context of liberalism, not the other way around. Liberalism is the wedge behind which all politics follow. If it were the other way around we wouldn’t have a modern world. Nor, I am sure, would we be the multifaceted and tolerant society we are today. Nor would we be a Democracy.

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