Humility Revisited: On Being Conservative

T he English philosopher Michael Oakeshott grew up amid the ferment of British progressivism. Born in 1901, he was the son of a civil servant and Fabian Society member. His sister married Gilbert Slater, a social reformer. His aunt, Grace Oakeshott, was a women’s rights activist who famously faked her own death to abscond with a lover to New Zealand. Oakeshott read history at Cambridge, taking political science options, before studying theology and German literature. By the 1930s, he had developed a distaste for political theories that proposed to remake the world from supposedly rational assumptions or in the mode of science, concluding that “the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral.” This conviction runs like a spine through his challenging early philosophical book, Experience and Its Modes, which he published at age 31.

After the war, he turned to essays more directly critical of the United Kingdom’s political drift, though nobody would have mistaken him for a partisan. “I am a member of no political party. I vote — if I have to vote — for the party which is likely to do the least harm. To that extent, I am a Tory,” he is reported by his biographer to have said. Oakeshott’s essays are elegant and elegiac. He was known for prose at once ornamental and precise, rich with allusion yet accessible. His 1956 essay “On Being Conservative” defines conservatism itself as a grateful disposition toward one’s inheritance and circumstances rather than as a political program. It reads like Solomon translated by Victorians:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties are preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and enlarge is less important than to keep, to cultivate, and to enjoy; the grief of loss is more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. For some, this is a deliberate choice; in others, it is a disposition that appears in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated.

Conservatism is thus defined as humility and gratitude, on one hand, for living in propitious circumstances, and as an acute consciousness of hubris and fragility: the painful knowledge of how quickly and how often ambition leads to shipwreck.

Assessing the essay 40 years after its publication, the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote, “It was beautifully written, subtle in its argument, delicate in its perceptions, and full of sentences and paragraphs that merit the attention of anthologists, perhaps even centuries, to come.” It had landed on his desk 40 years earlier, as an over-the-transom submission to Encounter magazine, which he edited.

Of course, Kristol promptly rejected it:

I forget what disingenuous circumlocutions I invented for that letter — probably something about its being both too abstract and too specifically British in its frame of reference for our journal. But the truth is that, while I admired the essay immensely, I did not really like it. Which is another way of saying that I disagreed with it.

Kristol’s stated recollection is that he did not then know why he disagreed with it, but with experience and hindsight, he determined it was a difference of nationality and religion. Kristol explained:

I was American, Michael was English. I was then in the earliest stages of intellectual pregnancy with those dispositions that later emerged as neoconservatism. And American neoconservatism is very different from the kind of ideal English conservatism that Oakeshott was celebrating so brilliantly.

Kristol went on to argue that, as a Jew (and added that even if he were Christian), he could not have an attitude so focused on the present as the secular Oakeshott. “Our scriptures and our daily prayer book link us to the past and to the future with an intensity lacking in Oakeshott’s vision,” he writes. “And of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.”

But these claims don’t quite hold up. Kristol, by his own admission, was “non-observant.” He respected religion more than practiced it. In his judgment of Oakeshott, he is sectarian without being truly orthodox. The scriptural view of man, and any theology founded upon the doctrine of original sin, puts redemptive action in the hands of God, not humanity. Oakeshott’s skepticism of human ambition is amply confirmed in our scriptures, from the Tower of Babel to the pretensions of Roman governors.

Kristol’s objection remains genuine and perhaps is national, but it’s founded more properly in the part of himself — the liberal part — that truly appends the “neo” in “neoconservative.” Kristol puts stock in the creedalism of America and describes assimilation as a kind of religious conversion. Oakeshott warns against “living by precept” and argues that statesmanship stands upon unstated traditions. Oakeshott holds that “the morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals.” He could never have conjured in himself — or maintained the distinctly neoconservative faith in — the power of ideals to conquer history.

Perhaps ironically, in distinguishing himself from Oakeshott, Kristol allied himself with American populism, identifying it as a feature bequeathed to us by our Constitution. “Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it,” he observed acutely. He saw in it a potential “corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and entrepreneurial politics of our democratic elites.”

True enough. But we have seen the full flowering of populist conservatism two decades after these words were written. Kristol was right that it has served as a corrective to elites whose ideology led them to neglect the border or to overzealously pursue foreign affairs. But populists are as vulnerable to magical thinking as ideologized elites, and just as prone to rash action. If trade policy was too utopian before Trump, it is now too impatient and impermanent under conservative populism. Here, Oakeshott’s essay and approach are as needed as ever.

Oakeshott’s skepticism is not a surrender to cynicism but a preservation of humility. His refusal to bow before Big Ideas — before “History” conceived as destiny — protects us from the worst excesses of overconfident leaders intent on redesigning lives without knowledge or respect for what binds people together. That humility is precisely what our politics needs: the willingness to say “I do not know,” to respect boundaries, and to allow error and learning — rather than to charge blindly into utopian schemes backed by hawkers of “expertise.”

If the aim of politics is not perpetual revolution, or preparing humanity for redemptive action, but is instead the steady tending of a garden — nourishing what grows, weeding what dies, respecting what survives — then it’s Oakeshott’s method that deserves renewal. Oakeshott’s quiet, tenacious skepticism stands, vindicated by the debris of anything pretending to be a conservative orthodoxy — a philosophical hospitality to experience, a belief that the unknown is not a threat to be eradicated but a space for the everyday wisdom of a free people. “The contribution of conservatism, then, is to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down,” he writes. It is time, again, to guard against enthusiasms, even when they disguise themselves as a national creed.