Ignorance is bliss—so they say—and I suspect much of that has to do with a certain unassuming, ignorant confidence about the world around us. The more we learn, the more we realize how much we still don’t know. When we know very little, it can be much easier deceiving ourselves into thinking we know about all there is to know about some individual or concept.

Since 2016 I have been slowly and painstakingly working my way through Russell Kirk’s

Now here I am, nearly four years later, producing podcasts and blog posts and immersing myself in conservative ideas and arguments. I feel significantly less ignorant yet, I must confess, all the more ill-equipped to take another stab at this central concept of conservative thought: As

“The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”

The full implications of this idea—not to mention the arguments in favor or disapproving of this view or the thorny business of trying to agree upon a working definition of “moral order”, “human nature”, or “permanent truths”—is precisely what makes this so challenging to untangle. But untangle we must for, if we ever hope to understand conservatism, we must first understand the foundation conservatism rests upon.

Adding to the confusion is the multitude of ways in which this concept has been explained and the various labels that have been attributed to this central idea. What Kirk calls an enduring moral order has gone by many other names from law to norm to authority to divine truth to natural law to sacred law to God’s law to many others. Throughout this series, I’ll simply refer to the idea as “order” and attempt to parse through instances where I’m quoting someone who seems to have a slightly different idea or word in mind.

Material and Immaterial Laws

I believe Kirk still had this notion of an enduring moral order in mind when he wrote of “law” and “norm” in

And because it’s outside of the material world, it cannot be studied or measured or defended through material means. We can observe the law of gravity each time we miss a step or lose our grip on a plate of food and we can discern certain truths about gravity through the scientific method. But we can’t do the same for concepts like justice or love or courage. If we are going to get on knowing anything about virtues, we must come by this knowledge by some other means than tools used to understand the material world.

But while there may be obvious differences between the order of the material and the immaterial realms, they are alike in three important ways: First, our ability to understand them is finite. We have certain tools at our disposal to learn more about the material world around us, but no scientist worth their salt would claim we are ever capable of fully understanding all there is to know about the material world in some exhaustive sense. Science is self-correcting and ever-learning, it is not capable of perfect knowledge. Our ability to comprehend, or agree upon, aspects of the immaterial moral order is even more limited. While tools like reason, tradition, intuition, and claims of revelation may help, much of the moral order is truly inscrutable.

Second—as Kirk tells us—we don’t create or destroy order. True, we might “defy” in some sense the law of gravity by building contraptions that fly, but this doesn’t alter the existence of gravity. It simply means we’ve found some way to work around it. In much the same way, the immaterial order may be employed in all kinds of interesting ways, but we can no more create virtue or morality than we can will gravity out of existence.

The third way material and immaterial order is similar is that they both have a cause and effect relationship, though this relationship is much more direct for material order and opaque for immaterial order. The cause and effect relationship for breaking the law of gravity is obvious. If gravity foretells that my plate full of food will fall when I loosen my grip on my way back to the table from the buffet, we can easily see the cause and effect relationship at work. What’s not so easily observed—indeed, what’s quite literally unknowable in most instances—are the consequences of breaking humanity’s enduring moral order.

The term Kirk used instead of cause-and-effect was “influence”. The serious conservative does not mean to imply that violating or trifling with the moral order has an immediate, predictable, measurable, and equitable effect. Perhaps in some cosmic, transcendent sense we could say that violators will be prosecuted in a balanced way. But in our temporal existence it is easily observable that two people can behave in immoral ways and reap radically different effects. It is better here to speak of the consequences of grating against the moral order. If Kirk is right—if there exists “law for man”—then the fact that consequences are sure to follow a breach in the moral order is more important than our capacity for measuring those consequences.

If we hope to build a society that’s functional, we must observe the order made for humanity. Our world may be imperfect and even imperfectible. But the building can never be any stronger than its foundation; we can only hope to make progress if we first build upon the perfect bedrock of order.

While much nuance and disagreement exist at the peripheries of the moral order, as we move closer to the center reasonable humans have an innate sense of something beginning to take shape. Kirk

The Foundation of All Good Things

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of order. It’s not some idea relegated to trivial conversations amongst people with a lot of time on their hands, it is quite literally the glue that holds reality together. “Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos,”

Edmund Burke

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we can explore further down those paths we need to step back and take inventory of where this leaves us. If Kirk’s assertion of the existence of an enduring moral order is true, we’re faced with an abundance of questions, such as:

• Can we define this moral order, or at least discern it? If so, how?
• What is the relationship between societal order and the order within each individual in society?
• Where does this order come from? Is it spiritual in nature?
• What political and legal implications does a moral order impose?
• Doesn’t the flirtation with ideas of a moral order quickly descend into authoritarian theocracy? How does the conservative guard against that?
• What implications does this have for politics or the state? Or is this a matter of faith that should be left out of political considerations altogether?
• What is the relationship between order and liberty? Are these ideas in conflict or can they be reconciled?

All that and more I hope to address in the weeks ahead. But first, let’s talk about how we might discern order and what order would have us to do. That is where we’ll pick things up in Part 2.

Versatile author, stand-up comedian, and podcaster Andrew Heaton joins Josh to untangle the complex web of models and metrics for identifying someone’s political persuasions. Both Andrew and Josh feel uncomfortable with the simply Left/Right scale—and it’s not just because they’re chary of adopting the political paradigm of dead Frenchmen. No political identification model is perfect, but Andrew and Josh attempt to weigh the merits of some of the more perfectible models.

Also discussed: What puts the “OK” in Oklahoma, Heaton’s eventful journey from Goldwater Republican to eventually landing somewhere on a spectrum between George Will and Andrew Yang, the commonality of those who feel alienated from political tribalism, and why Andrew doesn’t want to make America great again by fighting trade wars with China.

About Andrew Heaton

From Heaton’s website

Andrew Heaton is a comedian, author, and political satirist. He’s the host of

As a UCB-trained sketch writer and improviser Andrew Heaton comprises half of the comedy duo

As a political comedian Andrew Heaton has entertained numerous think tanks and advocacy groups, student associations, and sinister political action committees. He’s a regular at Electoral Dysfunction at the People’s Improv Theater in New York, and the Totally Dishonest Media Show at Stand Up New York. He hosted the award-winning series

Andrew Heaton is the author of the best-selling work of political satire Laughter is Better Than Communism, and two funny paranormal novels:

You can follow Heaton on Twitter @MightyHeaton

I

While we discussed

“…a passionate rejection of the status quo—its institutions and the way of life associated with these institutions. It rejects everything that exists because it wishes to create everything anew—a new social order, a new set of economic arrangements, a new political entity, a new kind of human being. It aims to solve not merely the political problem of the particular political community, at that particular moment, but every other problem that vexes humanity.”

The French Revolution had been referenced by conservatives for decades as the archetype of such a rebellion against things as they were. But the Twentieth Century would provide even more startling exemplars in the forms of the fascist and communist revolutionaries who wished to smash all that had come before to clear the way for their New Order or promised workers’ paradise.

I am not trying to suggest that radicals are Nazis. I mean only that the disposition of the radical is bent on destruction—however innocently that destruction may be marketed—and that destruction opens the door for tyranny. The blog

“What truly makes a lot of radical thought dangerous is that it only knows what it hates in society, and generally does not have a clear concept of what it intends to put in its place. When people are zealously charging forward at high speeds with no real sense of where they will end up, they can end up in the worst of places. This mentality is of great value to the authoritarian; what he desires above all is flaming passion with no clarity or particular direction. This allows him to lead them wherever he wills. In other words, it leads to unbridled power. Only clear intentions can rein in power.”

Republican Virtues and Radical Vices

Kristol contrasts these violent, tyrannical, and often failed radical revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the American Revolution of the eighteenth century. And Kristol further credits the steady handedness of the American Founding Fathers with steering the people away from a mob mentality of a rebellion into a productive revolution. “A mob is not simply a physical presence but also, and above everything else, a state of mind,” continues Kristol, “It is, to be precise, that state of mind which lacks all those qualities that, in the opinion of the Founding Fathers, added up to republican morality: steadiness of character, deliberativeness of mind, and a mild predisposition to subordinate one’s own special interests to the public interest.”

None of these traits sound characteristic of the true radical. These republican virtues are mere vices that stand in the way of the radical’s aims. To be a radical is to act, not to contemplate, compromise, or—above all—wait.

Sadly, when someone is fully persuaded their cause is “right” they can justify doing an awful lot of wrong. The rebellious mob mentality of the radical has resorted to thievery, terrorism, genocide, and the annihilation of competition all in the name of their righteous cause. “Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorized,” wrote Burke as he described the sad state of affairs of French revolutionaries plundering the treasurers of Church and State in the name of liberté.

“The fresh ruins of France,” lamented Burke, “which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.” The conservative finds many worthy and admirably opponents in the public square. But that is primarily because they are all arguing in the public square and not standing just outside trying to light it on fire. Once the rage of the radical is fully unleashed, carnage will ensue. “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

And rage is the proper way to put it. The mob mentality seizes the otherwise functioning faculties of the radical as they become focused on tearing things apart and lose sight of why they thought it was necessary to do so in the first place. Because radicalism is so focused on the act of change, they easily lose sight of the long-term implications of their destruction. “Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution,” Burke reprimanded, “A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination.” The enraged radical is less interested in “justice” than the punitive weapons employed to bring about justice.

When Revolutions Eat the Revolutionaries

One of the grave historical ironies of radical revolutions are their tendencies to eat their own. For once the long-developed institutions and structures that hold society in check are torn apart, there’s often nothing left to protect the revolutionaries themselves from the unleashed mob. Once the plundering and pillaging begins, it can be hard to put a stop to the process when some of the radicals believe their ends have been achieved. Encouraging disloyalty to those in charge doesn’t engender fidelity to the new masters. Which is yet another reason radical revolution often ends in tyranny: only the tyrant can hold on to power when everything else has been destroyed.

“It is of infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes,” Burke concludes, “Revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.” Burke, of course, is using the term “revolution” in the same sense Kristol describes a “rebellion”. They are both echoing what may sound blatantly obvious when shorn of all the prattling of radical rhetoric: if the house is in need of repair you don’t improve the situation by burning it to the ground. “Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it,”

If the conservative is unsuccessful at thwarting the radical, their next move is to set about the difficult but necessary task of sorting through the charred remains scattered among the ashes to slowly rebuild. And, for posterity’s sake, to gently remind the radicals that things would have been better had they not set the house on fire in the first place.

Versatile author, stand-up comedian, and podcaster Andrew Heaton joins Josh to untangle the complex web of models and metrics for identifying someone’s political persuasions. Both Andrew and Josh feel uncomfortable with the simply Left/Right scale—and it’s not just because they’re chary of adopting the political paradigm of dead Frenchmen. No political identification model is perfect, but Andrew and Josh attempt to weigh the merits of some of the more perfectible models.

Also discussed: What puts the “OK” in Oklahoma, Heaton’s eventful journey from Goldwater Republican to eventually landing somewhere on a spectrum between George Will and Andrew Yang, the commonality of those who feel alienated from political tribalism, and why Andrew doesn’t want to make America great again by fighting trade wars with China.

About Andrew Heaton

From Heaton’s website

Andrew Heaton is a comedian, author, and political satirist. He’s the host of

As a UCB-trained sketch writer and improviser Andrew Heaton comprises half of the comedy duo

As a political comedian Andrew Heaton has entertained numerous think tanks and advocacy groups, student associations, and sinister political action committees. He’s a regular at Electoral Dysfunction at the People’s Improv Theater in New York, and the Totally Dishonest Media Show at Stand Up New York. He hosted the award-winning series

Andrew Heaton is the author of the best-selling work of political satire Laughter is Better Than Communism, and two funny paranormal novels:

You can follow Heaton on Twitter @MightyHeaton

I began this series suggesting that radicalism was the closest we could come to reaching conservatism’s polar opposite. In fact, the entire conservative tradition that began with Edmund Burke’s critique of the radical revolutionaries in his day might be thought of as a sort of continuation of Burke’s efforts. Everywhere radicals go, you can be sure conservatives will be in the midst warning of the dangers of their ideological designs. To modify William F. Buckley’s famous descriptor, the conservative stands athwart the radical’s schemes, yelling “Stop!”

While we discussed last week how there may be instances where both the conservative and radical agree change is warranted, even in these rare circumstances they are likely to disagree sharply on the methods or end-goals of change. In that post I shared how Burke drew a distinction between change (a tool the radical uses to tear apart or burn down the structure in place) and reformation (the conservative’s preferred practice of altering where needed while leaving the integrity of the structure intact). A couple of centuries later, Irving Kristol made a similar observation in drawing a distinction between a rebellion and a revolution. Kristol describes a rebellion as involving:

“…a passionate rejection of the status quo—its institutions and the way of life associated with these institutions. It rejects everything that exists because it wishes to create everything anew—a new social order, a new set of economic arrangements, a new political entity, a new kind of human being. It aims to solve not merely the political problem of the particular political community, at that particular moment, but every other problem that vexes humanity.”

The French Revolution had been referenced by conservatives for decades as the archetype of such a rebellion against things as they were. But the Twentieth Century would provide even more startling exemplars in the forms of the fascist and communist revolutionaries who wished to smash all that had come before to clear the way for their New Order or promised workers’ paradise.

I am not trying to suggest that radicals are Nazis. I mean only that the disposition of the radical is bent on destruction—however innocently that destruction may be marketed—and that destruction opens the door for tyranny. The blog Philosophical Conservatism explains the usefulness of radicalism’s mindset to the tyrant thusly:

“What truly makes a lot of radical thought dangerous is that it only knows what it hates in society, and generally does not have a clear concept of what it intends to put in its place.  When people are zealously charging forward at high speeds with no real sense of where they will end up, they can end up in the worst of places. This mentality is of great value to the authoritarian; what he desires above all is flaming passion with no clarity or particular direction.  This allows him to lead them wherever he wills.  In other words, it leads to unbridled power.  Only clear intentions can rein in power.”

Republican Virtues and Radical Vices

Kristol contrasts these violent, tyrannical, and often failed radical revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the American Revolution of the eighteenth century. And Kristol further credits the steady handedness of the American Founding Fathers with steering the people away from a mob mentality of a rebellion into a productive revolution. “A mob is not simply a physical presence but also, and above everything else, a state of mind,” continues Kristol, “It is, to be precise, that state of mind which lacks all those qualities that, in the opinion of the Founding Fathers, added up to republican morality: steadiness of character, deliberativeness of mind, and a mild predisposition to subordinate one’s own special interests to the public interest.”

None of these traits sound characteristic of the true radical. These republican virtues are mere vices that stand in the way of the radical’s aims. To be a radical is to act, not to contemplate, compromise, or—above all—wait. Yuval Levin observed that Burke was well aware of the radical’s worldview leading to “radical” action. “Burke argues that the failure to see or pursue a middle ground is not an oversight but a prominent feature of the radical worldview of the revolutionaries…Because [radicals] pursue the vindication of a principle, they cannot stop short of total success.” The conservative may yell “stop!” to the radical until he’s blue in the face—but the radical does not stop. Because stopping is more than failure; it’s downright unrighteous.

Sadly, when someone is fully persuaded their cause is “right” they can justify doing an awful lot of wrong. The rebellious mob mentality of the radical has resorted to thievery, terrorism, genocide, and the annihilation of competition all in the name of their righteous cause. “Revolutions are favorable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorized,” wrote Burke as he described the sad state of affairs of French revolutionaries plundering the treasurers of Church and State in the name of liberté.

“The fresh ruins of France,” lamented Burke, “which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.” The conservative finds many worthy and admirably opponents in the public square. But that is primarily because they are all arguing in the public square and not standing just outside trying to light it on fire. Once the rage of the radical is fully unleashed, carnage will ensue. “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

And rage is the proper way to put it. The mob mentality seizes the otherwise functioning faculties of the radical as they become focused on tearing things apart and lose sight of why they thought it was necessary to do so in the first place. Because radicalism is so focused on the act of change, they easily lose sight of the long-term implications of their destruction. “Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution,” Burke reprimanded, “A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination.” The enraged radical is less interested in “justice” than the punitive weapons employed to bring about justice.

When Revolutions Eat the Revolutionaries

One of the grave historical ironies of radical revolutions are their tendencies to eat their own. For once the long-developed institutions and structures that hold society in check are torn apart, there’s often nothing left to protect the revolutionaries themselves from the unleashed mob. Once the plundering and pillaging begins, it can be hard to put a stop to the process when some of the radicals believe their ends have been achieved. Encouraging disloyalty to those in charge doesn’t engender fidelity to the new masters. Which is yet another reason radical revolution often ends in tyranny: only the tyrant can hold on to power when everything else has been destroyed.

“It is of infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes,” Burke concludes, “Revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.” Burke, of course, is using the term “revolution” in the same sense Kristol describes a “rebellion”. They are both echoing what may sound blatantly obvious when shorn of all the prattling of radical rhetoric: if the house is in need of repair you don’t improve the situation by burning it to the ground. “Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it,” echoed Russell Kirk, “they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.”

If the conservative is unsuccessful at thwarting the radical, their next move is to set about the difficult but necessary task of sorting through the charred remains scattered among the ashes to slowly rebuild. And, for posterity’s sake, to gently remind the radicals that things would have been better had they not set the house on fire in the first place.

“Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Since Eliot is often revered as one of the great conservative minds of the twentieth century, it is doubtful he was suggesting here that conservatism is tomfoolery. By implication, if conservatism is too often conservation of the “wrong things” there must still be “right things” worth conserving (or, as Eliot called them, “permanent things”). The first task of the conservative then is not to conserve but to set about identifying those permanent things.

But what of the things that are not worth conserving? Is it possible the radical—in their unceasing quest for revolution—might actually land upon some of those “wrong things” not worth conserving? Conservatives are often criticized of resisting change out of complacency or selfishness or—worse of all—a desire to set the clocks back to some fictitious utopic nostalgia that was never quite as perfect as they seem to have imagined it was nor as capable of reproduction as they believe. In fact, reformation and conservation are closely linked, and sometimes change is necessary to prevent radical change down the road.

“Early reformations are amicable arrangements with a friend in power; late reformations are made under a state of inflammation,” wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. As the title implies, Burke was reflecting on the advents of the French Revolution and how the unwillingness of the French monarch to adopt reforms in the early days of the crisis led to widespread revolt and the monarch’s downfall.

“In that state of things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable,” Burke continues, “They see the abuse and they will see nothing more. They fall into the temper of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill-fame; they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to work by the shortest way: to abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.” The Father of Conservatism was cautioning that an unyielding resistance to change leads, not to conservation, but to chaos. There is a certain window of opportunity to enact thoughtful reformations amicable to a conservative impulse, and the skillful statesman will carefully gauge the populace to determine how much reform is needed to prevent static inaction from shifting to radical revolution.

Radical Conservatives

But let’s take things a step further: sometimes change is warranted not to preserve an institution but to alter its course or—in some extreme cases such as the institution of slavery—to abolish it entirely. If moral decay rots the soul of a nation, if an ever-expanding government erodes the liberties of the people, if a new law is passed that is an offense to common decency and sensibility, if prosperity leads to decadence, complacency, and alienation, the conservative impulse isn’t to simply keep these things as they are but to set things on a better course. Change may be necessary to reverse the decay, limit the government, rescind the law, and find new paths for bolstering vital institutions and communities.

In the tumultuous culture wars of the 1960s conservatives began to recognize the need to change the direction the nation was heading. Philosopher Frank Meyer observed of the era that conservatives “…cannot uncritically follow tradition, for the tradition presented to us is rapidly becoming—thanks to the prevailing intellectual climate, thanks to the schools, thanks to the outpourings of all the agencies that mold opinion and belief—the tradition of a positivism scornful of truth and virtue, the tradition of the collective, the tradition of the untrammeled state.”

“Natural conservatism is a legitimate human characteristic, and in settled times it is conducive to good,” Meyer continues. As we explored in Part 3, the conservative’s viewpoint is often aided by our natural impulse to stick with the devil we know. But “when a revolutionary force shatters the unity and balance of civilization—then conservatism must be of another sort if it is to fulfill its responsibility. It is not and cannot be limited to that uncritical acceptance, that uncomplicated reverence, which is the essence of natural conservatism.”

Journalist M. Stanton Evans remarked that when conservatives say they want to conserve they “…generally have some particular value in mind and must oppose any particular status quo which denies it.” Here again we might invoke Eliot’s permanent things. If conservatism recognizes the value of conserving some things, the conservative must demand change when those things are replaced by cheap knockoffs or threatened by a warped tradition.

“Our Patience Will Achieve More Than Our Force”

Now, it is true that conservatives have long resisted notions that the human species is capable of completely understanding and documenting the full scope of those permanent things. But we take courage in the long tradition of our culture and civilization—not the “short” tradition of the latest political ideology or social movement in vogue—guiding us along the sure path of Providence.  (Exactly how the mechanism of Providence works is a subject for another series). As Meyer put it, “What the conservative is committed to conserve is not simply whatever happen to be the established conditions of a few years or a few decades, but the consensus of his civilization, of his country, as that consensus over centuries has reflected truth derived from the very constitution of being.”

From time to time certain ideas or institutions or opposing forces may trounce the cultural status quo and, while conservatives—generally speaking—oppose cultural status quo trouncings, they are also cognizant sometimes the trouncing leads to cultural flourishing. This can be thought of as a sort of cultural evolution: the vast majority of mutations are inauspicious or even deadly but, every once in a great while, they lead to an actual advancement.  “The granddaddy of all countercultures…was early Christianity itself,” points out Irving Kristol. Though not a Christian himself, Kristol nonetheless recognized the value and importance of Christianity on Western civilization and accounted for it as one of those permanent things meant to be preserved.

From a certain perspective then, the conservative shares the radical’s outlook of out with the old, in with the new or desire to allow ideas to battle it out with one another so that the best ideas may replace the rest. But conservatives differ in drawing upon a much larger supply of trail-and-error that stretches over millennia and a far deeper well of ideas that allow our ancestors to join the debate. The radical is interested in the ideas of the future replacing the ideas of the past. The conservative sees no reason to discount the accumulated wisdom of the past or to take for granted that our ancestors may have been closer to those permanent things than we are. The conservative is far more patient than the radical. As Burke rightly put it, “Our patience will achieve more than our force.”

Back to Burke

Since we’ve worked our way back to Burke, let’s examine another important distinction to make when judging whether change is warranted. As Burke notes—again, with the bloody and chaotic French Revolution in view—it’s not simply enough to establish when change is warranted. We must also take care to understand what we mean by change:

“I knew that there is a manifest marked distinction, which ill men, with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between Change and Reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.”

Perhaps here we can see clearest the difference between the conservative and radical’s notion of change. The conservative’s idea of change is something done to strengthen the integrity of a structure. The radical’s idea of change is to tear the structure down. The conservative looks at a broken culture or corrupted institutions and seeks first to mend what’s broken and restore virtue and honor. The radical simply kills the patient.

Certainly, there are instances where a structure should be torn down (once again, the institution of slavery springs to mind). But the conservative’s prejudice is bent towards keeping in place the structures that have existed for generations as they represent our generational “group effort” at doing life together. Historical knowledge and an abundance of patience will guide the conservative in what structures may be worth tearing down. “Duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery,” wrote Burke. The radical is either unwilling or unable to appreciate the input of those who have come before and presume any change to be an “improvement”.

It is true that prior generations had certain blind spots for what might be universally recognized as wrongheaded or evil today. All generations, to one extent or another, see clearly the defects of others while remaining ignorant of their own shortcomings. Does this mean that the presence of defects—once they are made known to the present generation—are justification enough for radical change?

Thomas Sowell noted that conservatism “treats defects as inevitable, and therefore not in themselves reason for change, unless their magnitudes merit the inevitable costs entailed by change.” If one enters marriage truly expecting their spouse to be perfect, they may divorce may the first sign of a deficiency. Prudence would have us deal with things as they are and not as they ought to be else we risk tearing down what might otherwise be something beautiful out of the misguided notion that we can’t abide any defects.

This does not mean the conservative is complacent. It does, however, speak to the underlying assumption baked into the notion that change is justified the moment we encounter a defect: namely, the unproven idea that defects can be rid through change. The conservative is skeptical—even hostile—to this idea and believes most changes only result in swapping out one defect for another.

This idea can be seen clearly in how one views the American system of self-government. “The founders thought that self-government was a chancy and demanding enterprise and that successful government in a republic was a most difficult business,” wrote Irving Kristol. Here Kristol was acknowledging the Founders’ “conservative” view of self-governance. He then contrasts it with the predominant “radical” view of today: “We, in contrast, believe that republican self-government is an easy affair, that it need only be instituted for it to work on its own, and that when such government falters it must be a consequence of personal incompetence or malfeasance by elected officials.” Certainly, there is room for improvement and discontent with our system of government. But when every election is a harsh rebuke of the previous election (both comprised of the same electorate) what’s broken isn’t the “system” but our worldview.

Edmund Burke beautifully summarized a better attitude than the typical call for radical change in the face of societal defects:

“A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than how he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

While Burke’s wisdom is highly regarded by conservatives in our day, his warnings were not heeded in his. Burke witnessed the destructive power of radical rule in revolutionary France and modern conservatism was born out of an effort to preserve those permanent things left in the wake of this devastation. And while conservatives and radicals may occasionally agree where change is needed, they have more often been bitter foes. For the conservative knows that wherever radicalism goes, destruction and misery is soon to follow. And that is where we’ll pick things up in the fifth and final part of this series.

What is the real purpose of getting an education? And what benefits does a proper education bring to the individual and to society at large? What became of the radically conservative cult(ure) of ATI, Bill Gothard, I Kissed Dating Goodbye courtships, and denim-skirt-wearing coalitions of Christian home schoolers of the 80s and 90s? Does homeschooling have its cultish elements today, or are conservative homeschoolers more…conservative? Aren’t all students just homeschoolers now that COVID-19 has us social distancing from educational facilities?

Saving Elephants host and former homeschooler Josh Lewis is joined by perennial educator and fellow former homeschooler Brooke Medina to answer these questions and many more.

About Brooke Medina

Brooke Medina is a homeschool mother of four and the Director of Communications at Civitas Institute where she manages Civitas’ outward facing platforms, oversees messaging strategy, and handles all press relationships. The North Carolina based Civitas Instituted is a nonprofit policy organization dedicated to removing barriers to freedom so that all North Carolinians can enjoy a better life. Brooke also co-hosts Civitas’ podcast Civitalk, which focuses on drawing connections between civics and culture.

Brooke is a graduate of Regent University, holding a B.A. in Government and a minor in English. She has also completed several programs with the Charles Koch Institute, including the Koch Leaders Program and Koch Communications Fellowship, focusing on the philosophical underpinnings of market-based management and classical liberalism.  She also sits on the board of directors for ReCity Network, a Durham-based non-profit committed to empowering civil society in combating poverty-related problems. Brooke’s writings have been published in outlets such as The Hill, Entrepreneur, Washington Examiner, Daily Signal, FEE, and Intellectual Takeout.

But most importantly, Brooke’s hot takes, insights, and shenanigans on social media are worth following so be sure and check her out on Twitter @Brooke_Medina_