Andreas Kinneging

I mentioned in a post below Andreas Kinneging, a Dutch law professor and the philosophical leader of Holland's small conservative movement. Here's a marvelously lucid essay he's written about why he is a conservative. Excerpt:

The short answer is that I am a conservative because conservatism provides the most accurate, the truest outlook on life. It renders the best picture of the condition humaine and is hence most helpful in answering the eternal question how to live and how to live together.

[snip]

As a result of this, classical thought was incorporated into Christianity and became an integrated part of it. Hence, St. Augustine, for instance, is as much in the Platonic as he is in the Biblical tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas is both Christian and Aristotelian. Something similar can be said of most Christian thinkers up until our own time. In their work, the spirit of ancient pagan thought--the spirit of the gentleman--and Christianity--the spirit of religion--became one and the same. This combination became the European-- later the Western--spirit. It is the spirit of the Christian gentleman. That is the historical truth Burke wanted to remind his readers of. It is this spirit, it seems to me, that the true conservative wants to conserve. Conservatism is--or should be--a defense of the ideal of the Christian gentleman (including its female counterpart, the Christian lady), against the newfangled ideals of man that came to the fore in the Enlightenment and Romanticism and dominate the world of today.

What were these new ideals? What are the spiritual adversaries of conservatism? First of all, there is the Enlightenment view of man, going back to Hobbes and today influentially set forth in quasi-sophisticated mathematical formulae by economists. It sees man as an animal governed by its desires, whose felicity wholly consists in running after and acquiring whatever it desires. The self as something beyond the desires disappears. Reason becomes "the slave of the passions," i.e., the desires.

It cannot be sufficiently stressed what a turnabout this was in comparison with the traditional view. Whereas the ideal of the Christian gentleman was based on the belief that a man could temper and, if necessary, kill his desires, and that letting oneself be ruled by one's desires was the height of dishonorableness, the Enlightenment argued that chasing after one's desires was not only "no sin," but also the very purpose of life. Thus, the traditional ethos of self-denial and self-transcendence was replaced with the opposite ethos of self-assertion and indulgence in the desires.

The implications of this new ethos are manifold and weighty. And as the Enlightenment view, which was initially shared by only a few radicals, gradually began to take the place of the older tradition of the Christian gentleman, the implications have more and more materialized and have changed the face of the earth. The most important of these implications is the idea that the world should be improved, i.e., brought more in harmony with man's desires. (From the point of view of the tradition this constitutes a rebellion against the nature of things. It is not the world that is the problem, but man's desires.) This spirit of improvement, as we might call it, is behind both modern technology and the introduction of market-forces in all segments of society. Technology and the market are so much in demand and so highly regarded, because they, especially when combined, are the most effective means yet found of catering to man's desires. [Emphasis mine -- RD]

Ask yourself, in light of the boldface lines above, to what extent the American conservative movement can be called "conservative," or is it just the name under which right-wing liberals do business? As ever, Alasdair MacIntyre's point is worth reflecting on:

Liberalism is often successful in preempting the debate . . . so that [objections to it] appear to have become debates within liberalism. . . . So-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.