The Consolation of Conservatism
Conservatism is in many respects a pessimistic philosophy. It sees human beings as inherently fallen, and believes that, as a result, all social orders will contain some measure of injustice. Additionally, it claims that humans naturally differ in their basic capacities and attributes: Some are born with more beauty, intelligence, strength, or grit than others. These natural differences will in turn manifest themselves in society, so that those with natural advantages will receive social esteem and recognition for them. Thus, all societies will have their fair share of inequality, whatever efforts are made to mitigate it.
These are harsh truths, and it is understandable to wish that things were otherwise. To borrow from Thomas Sowell, we might desire to correct "not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos...not merely the sins of man, but the oversights of God." Yet we have to face reality as it is, and one of the virtues of the conservative position is that it has always been clear eyed about the limits of political action: It recognizes that we can never achieve complete fairness, and that it is dangerous to teach people that they should hate their own society when it inevitably fails to live up to the standard of perfection.
A couple of observations can be made about the pessimistic character of conservatism. The first is that conservatism faces a perennial temptation, namely that of becoming an ideological defense for an unjust system. It is easy to slip from saying that "no society will ever be perfect" to declaring that "our current society does not admit of any further improvement." It is also easy to slip from the claim that "society will always be unequal in some respects" to asserting that "the inequalities of our society are inevitable and just." Conservatism always runs the risk of wielding its anti-utopian arguments against reasonable and practicable demands for reform, and conservatives need to be aware of this risk in order to avoid it.
Second, the pessimism inherent in conservatism makes, or should make, the concept of consolation key to the worldview as a whole. Utopian philosophies can comfort people with the promise of a world so just that the need for consolation will hardly be felt. As an anti-utopian doctrine, conservatism cannot avail itself of this thought: It must insist that human beings will always need consolation. But conservatism is a more complete and attractive doctrine if it can recognize the harsh realities of life and explain how we might cope with them.
In On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff discussed many of the activities, thoughts, and experiences that have consoled us throughout the centuries. Learning that you are not alone in your suffering; receiving loving attention and care from another person; expressing your despair through writing or other arts; placing your hopes in the future, and believing that society will progress and improve — Ignatieff showed how people have found solace in all these things and more. But to give a proper account of consolation, conservatism needs something more general than a list of the things that bring it about (though that is important too, of course): Conservatism needs to define consolation, identify the main kinds of activities that produce it, and describe the process by which they do so.
Consolation is the emotional state we aim to reach after pondering a harsh truth or undergoing a difficult experience. Consolation allows us to accept reality and be reconciled to it. It does not necessarily take away our grief, resentment, envy, or pain — those might or might not remain — but it somehow manages to soothe them. Consolation is like the closing of a wound: It stops the bleeding, but it might still leave a scar. Consolation allows us to carry on with life, and to throw off a burden that might otherwise be unbearable.
To be consoled is not to be deluded: We are not genuinely comforted if we need to pretend that the tragedy didn't happen, or if we make sense of our pain by placing it into a larger story that we know, ultimately, to be fictional. Nor is consolation the same as distraction: A distraction helps us deal with difficulty by ignoring it. Consolation, in contrast to delusion or distraction, confronts the bitter truth.
Consolation requires engaging in the set of practices that make us reach the emotion. Emotions are the product of activity: We normally have to do or experience something if we want to feel a particular emotion. We cannot just sit there and expect the emotion to magically come into our bodies. If we want to have fun, we participate in a sport or a hobby; if we want to feel accomplished, we go out into the world and, well, contribute something meaningful to it; if we want to feel moved, we watch a movie, or read a poem; and so on. Similarly, if we seek consolation, we will have to participate in consoling activities — in activities whose emotional effect is to soothe us.
Some of the greatest authors in the conservative tradition have sensed the importance of consolation, both for human life and for the conservative worldview. Yet consolation has rarely been the direct subject of sustained reflection among conservatives. This is a crucial oversight. Consolation deserves a place in the pantheon of conservative ideals and values — right alongside religion, family, property, law, freedom, order, and virtue.
RELIGION
The first and perhaps primary place where conservatives have sought consolation is in religion. Several religious ideas are perfectly suited to the task of consolation. It is consoling to think that an omnipotent God cares for us, that our lives form part of His divine plan, and that eternal life awaits us after death. The tragedies and setbacks of ordinary life can be viewed as more transient — and therefore more tolerable — in light of a belief in heaven or Providence.
Religion connects us with a reality that transcends the present moment. This feeling that something larger than oneself exists and matters has always comforted people, for nothing hinders consolation like loneliness. One way religion makes us aware of the links among ourselves, our faith community, and the divine is through rituals. Engaging in rituals reminds us that we are members of a faith that has had adherents in the past and will have them in the future. Most religions also include rites or liturgies expressly designed to help us cope with what is probably the most painful human experience: the deaths of people we love. Such rituals provide assurance that our friends and family are somehow okay, even if they have left this world for another.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke argued that religious consolation is necessary for economic development and public order. He wrote:
Good order is the foundation of all good things. To be enabled to acquire, the people, without being servile, must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must have his reverence, the laws their authority. The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labor to obtain what by labor can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.
Social progress, Burke asserted, both requires and generates inequality. The right to private property allows people to exclude others from using what belongs to them. Economic activity will give great rewards to some and small ones to others, even when both apply themselves faithfully to their work. People need the assurance that the rewards of the next life will be more fairly apportioned, because they know that in this life they aren't. "Of this consolation," Burke went on to say, "whoever deprives them deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation. He that does this is the cruel oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched." Without religious consolation, the poor would lose the motivation to work, and everybody would be worse off as a result.
It's hard not to wince at the way Burke characterized inequality. His manner of writing contained more than a hint of aristocratic snobbery: People "must be...obedient," they must accept "the principles of natural subordination," etc. Someone making his point today would not and should not write in a way that suggests the poor should just know their place. Nevertheless, there is some truth in the idea Burke tried to express. Social progress does generate a measure of inequality and unfairness, even if it makes everybody better off than they would otherwise be, and some people will need to be consoled due to this unfortunate fact.
Yet Burke was wrong to assume that religion must be the sole or the central source of consolation for the disadvantaged. He was wrong, first, because there exist other important sources of consolation. But he was also wrong in a tactical sense. It is unwise for conservatism to place the entire burden of consolation on religion. Apart from the obvious fact that not everyone in the modern world is religious, there is the more troubling fact that not everyone can believe, even when they want to. There are many who seek God and fail to find Him, who feel not consolation but desolation in His absence.
There are also people who convince themselves that they believe in God, but whose faith appears really to depend on their belief that religion is good for society. One suspects that their faith would not survive if they changed their views and came to think that society didn't need religion. This group is not likely to find solace in religion. Religious consolation seems to require genuine belief, or at least a sincere immersion in religious practices and rituals, which will not be available to many of those who do not believe in a more innocent way.
Religion can console honest believers; it might even comfort some of those who believe because they think religion promotes human flourishing. But it cannot reach non-believers — and they need consolation, too. To be complete, then, conservatism does not just need a religious account of consolation: It also needs a secular one.
BEAUTY
A second source of consolation is the experience of beauty. Like so many other fundamental philosophical concepts, beauty is simultaneously difficult to define yet central to everyday life. We have all experienced beauty and called things beautiful, but we would struggle to give a definition of the word if pressed. To see the link between beauty and consolation, however, we need to find some kind of language with which to articulate this unique experience.
In a wonderful little book called Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton argued that beauty has an indispensable subjective component. When we call things "beautiful," we do not merely make a claim about a property they possess; we also attempt to express something about what it feels like to contemplate that object from our first-person perspective. To say that a song or a painting is beautiful is to describe how we experience those objects.
Part of what the experience of the beautiful involves is taking pleasure in the form of an object. The form of an object refers to the system of relations between its features — for instance, between its shapes, words, sounds, or colors. To experience beauty is to behold an object and be pleased by how it is arranged: by how the words of a poem or novel hang together, how the brushstrokes of a painting generate a pattern, and so on.
Some objects of aesthetic attraction play special roles in our lives. The philosopher Nick Riggle wrote that, "the aesthetic objects we love are items that seem to be expressive of, or that embody, features of ourselves or our lives that are important to us." We are strongly attached to certain aesthetic objects because they seem to contain some crucial piece of who we are.
To offer a personal example, my favorite band is called Estopa. The band is from Spain, and is composed of two brothers who sing a genre that combines modern pop and rock with traditional Spanish flamenco. My grandparents are from Spain, and I learned about Estopa from my mother, who liked them as well. Their first album came out in 1999, a year after I was born. I grew up listening to them. Part of why I love the band is because I enjoy their music, of course. But I also feel that much of my life story is entwined with them. When I listen to Estopa, I think of my Spanish family, of the time I've spent in Spain, of my mother, and of my memories as a child listening to them in the car. Riggle astutely observed that the aesthetic objects we love "'speak to [us]' in a special way that other works do not, which brings [us] back to these works again and again, always seeking — and often finding — nuance, insight, rejuvenation." He might have added solace.
Beauty is found in many places. We tend to think of beauty primarily in connection to art, because art — or much of it, at any rate — represents an effort to create beautiful objects. If asked to recall an experience of beauty, many of us would initially think of a work of art. But as Scruton and others have noted, there exist other kinds of beauty. There is natural beauty, which we encounter when we look at certain objects in the natural order. (Think of the patterns on the skins of leopards and cheetahs, or the view from atop a vast mountain range.) There is personal beauty, the beauty we find in how people present themselves — the way they dress, speak, smile, and move. There is everyday beauty, seen, for example, in a well-tended garden, in a home where the colors match and everything is rationally arranged, in an uncluttered bedroom whose bed is made.
These various kinds of beauty yield different types of pleasures, and, perhaps, different forms of consolation. Artistic beauty, especially when it moves us, can engage our deepest sentiments and prove to us that things matter in this universe. Artistic beauty is also a testament to human achievement and human ingenuity, and reflecting on this might motivate us to strive for something better and greater. In their different ways, natural and everyday beauty can reveal that there is a place for us in the world, and that we can make it our own home. Natural beauty often instills in us a sense of awe: We are somehow shocked that nature could have produced such wonderful things for us to contemplate. Everyday beauty gives us a warm, comforting pleasure — the delight that comes from recognizing that we can make our ordinary surroundings agreeable to our senses.
Yet beauty, like religion, cannot satisfy our need for consolation on its own, and that is because we cannot orient our entire lives around beauty. Consider this observation from Scruton: He noted that truly beautiful buildings and monuments — cathedrals, for instance — stand out in part because they exist against a backdrop of more ordinary buildings. Ordinary buildings can be beautiful, too, in their own way: They can be orderly, clean, and provide a sense of home and comfort; but they are not magnificent, in the way a temple or palace can be. Nor should they be. A city where every building was a temple or palace would feel overwhelming and kitsch. It would take on the aspect of fantasy, and nobody would want to live there.
For an analogous reason, people cannot make the pursuit of beauty the center of their lives (which is not to deny that beauty should have a central place in our lives). "People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment," Scruton wrote, "like people who make a constant display of their religious faith." Someone who spends every waking moment enraptured at the Louvre looks ridiculous, like a city composed of temples and palaces. Most true experiences of beauty need to have a special, exalted, and therefore uncommon place in our lives — otherwise they are cheapened.
Beauty and religion have important but limited places in the conservative account of consolation — beauty because it cannot be experienced all the time, religion because not everybody can believe in it. Something else, a third sort of thing, must be at the core of the account.
MUTUAL LOVE AND THE ENDS OF LIFE
Our main hopes for consolation must be placed not in religion or beauty, but in our encounters with other humans. Of course, describing the source of consolation this way is hopelessly vague and therefore practically useless. Human intercourse occurs in several different forms, and many of them are not consoling. War, crime, cruelty, and pettiness all involve social interaction, but they do not console; indeed, they are sometimes the sorts of interactions that push us to seek consolation in the first place. What we have to describe are those forms of personal relations that play a special and positive role in our lives, for it is in those that we'll find consolation.
Friendship, in the sense that Aristotle meant it, is one such relation. Aristotle devoted much of his Nicomachean Ethics to the analysis of philia, which Anglophone translators tend to render as "friendship." But our contemporary notion of friendship differs in some key respects from his conception of philia. We now think of friendships as those voluntary relationships we enter into when, for some reason, we enjoy the company of others, whether it's because they are funny, charming, share our interests, etc. Given that our family relations are not chosen, we tend not to count our family members as friends even if we get along with them. Aristotle's philia, by contrast, included family relations. What Aristotle meant by philia, then, is what we might call relations of mutual goodwill.
For Aristotle, standing in a relation of philia with another involves pursuing the best for each other — that is, pursuing each other's happiness. The Nicomachean Ethics offered a rich and complex account of what happiness consists in; we can simplify matters and say that happiness has two main features, the first more important than the second. Happiness requires virtue (the development of our capacities for thought, action, and feeling) as well as some access to external goods such as fame, beauty, power, esteem, or wealth. Thus, we help our friends be happy by helping them achieve virtue and external success. Caring for someone means pursuing the good, the happiness, of the other.
Aristotle's account surely identified some of the central elements of friendship, but a key dimension was missing: emotional bonds. We could imagine a relationship where two people seek the best for the other but do not feel strongly attached. Many of us might have this kind of relationship with childhood friends. We fondly remember the strong bond we shared in childhood but are aware that time has made us different people, and so even though we care for them and know that they desire our happiness, we no longer crave their presence, nor do we feel quite so emotionally entangled with them.
If philia is an exalted kind of personal relationship, a friendship with mutual goodwill and mutual love is an even higher kind. Not everyone is lucky enough to have many friendships of that kind. But they are the types of friendships we should strive to achieve, for in them we might be able to find a deep satisfaction, and hence consolation. And of course, it is possible to have these sorts of friendships with our family members.
While some forms of friendship are higher than others, lower kinds of friendship can still have value and importance. We might make friends at work or through our hobbies, and even if we don't pursue their happiness or become affectively attached to them in any strong sense, we can still care for them, enjoy interacting with them, and even come to feel that they play a significant (if minor) role in our lives. And we might find some consolation in this, too — just not as much as in richer friendships, which are more fulfilling.
We might also find solace in what Scruton, in works such as The Meaning of Conservatism and How to Be a Conservative, called "autonomous institutions." An autonomous institution, he wrote, is an institution whose "purposes are peculiar to it," and whose "real meaning lies within itself." His definition was a bit obscure, but he meant something roughly like this: Some of the institutions we participate in are inherently valuable to us. These are the kinds of institutions whose projects we care about not just instrumentally, but for their own sake. Autonomous institutions generate the "ends of life," as Scruton put it — the projects we want to pursue for themselves and for no further reason.
In contrast, some forms of activity are only instrumentally valuable to us. We engage in them solely because they help us obtain some other good. Unfulfilling jobs are the paradigmatic example. Many people toil at work not because they find it inherently worthwhile, but because they need to earn an income in order to sustain themselves and enjoy leisure time.
Scruton named sports, churches, certain kinds of work, family, friendship, and education as examples of autonomous institutions. These are the sorts of institutions whose goals we find intrinsically valuable. We can all conceive of doing things solely because they will help us improve at a sport, or give us a piece of knowledge, or benefit the people we love. Autonomous institutions give purpose and direction to our lives. When one is embedded in an autonomous institution, one engages oneself in an ongoing project, and this gives a particular shape to all of one's endeavors.
Most autonomous institutions engage our social nature because the projects they involve are usually shared. Education involves interacting with teachers or students. Many fulfilling jobs require the cooperation of others: A doctor, for instance, relies on a long list of colleagues to achieve the worthwhile end of healing people, among them nurses, scribes, technicians, and medical researchers. In short, the project of health brings its practitioners into contact with many others and provides an opportunity for the formation of human bonds. Something similar is true of the other autonomous institutions Scruton had in mind. And there is solace to be found in autonomous institutions, both because they bring us into contact with others and because they provide us with the most important projects of our lives.
Placing the main burden of consolation on our relations with others might raise a worry. The kinds of personal relations we've considered require certain sacrifices of the self. To develop real friendships or participate in autonomous institutions, we will sometimes need to set aside our own preferences and interests. For if we want our friendships to thrive and the ends of the autonomous institutions we participate in to obtain, we will occasionally have to inconvenience ourselves and put our individual projects on hold. One might therefore think that by making us act altruistically for something outside us, personal relations will cause us to neglect the needs of the self and thus fail to console us.
Personal relations, of course, demand some measure of self-sacrifice. But at the same time, they provide some of the best occasions for self-affirmation and self-fulfillment available to us. We in fact find ourselves affirmed, and our needs met, in and through personal relations. Friendships satisfy our need to be cared for and loved by others; autonomous institutions allow us to develop our talents and put them toward achieving aims we ourselves consider worthwhile.
Moreover, the sacrifices involved in personal relations often enable us to have even more fulfilling experiences. Sacrificing for a friend might cause the friendship itself to evolve and blossom. Your friend, recognizing what you've done, might open up to you, confide in you, care more for you, start to make more sacrifices for you in turn. All of this extra attention and love will satisfy some of your deepest longings, so that the initial sacrifice will come to seem small in comparison to what you ultimately gain from it. Something similar is true of autonomous institutions, which will often benefit us in proportion to the amount of effort we devote to them. A commitment to and concern for others leads not to the erasure, but to the flourishing of the self.
MEANING AND CONSOLATION
A through line connects religion, beauty, autonomous institutions, and relations of mutual love. They are the kinds of things that endow our lives with meaning.
Everyone, whether consciously or unconsciously, has an answer to the question of why it is worth continuing to live at all. Most of us share at least one such reason, namely that we are afraid of dying. But many of us also continue to live because we have set certain ends for ourselves and are emotionally invested in achieving them. They are what we would name, if somebody asked us why we get out of bed in the morning and continue to carry our burdens. They are, in other words, the goals that motivate us to keep going.
If consolation is to work, we need to be able to make a "but nevertheless" sort of claim. I might have lost this, but nevertheless, I have that; human life might often be tragic, but nevertheless, I have much to live for. Our sources of meaning and our sources of consolation turn out to be the same activities considered through different perspectives.
Two conclusions, one pessimistic and one optimistic, immediately follow. On the one hand, human beings will be inconsolable if we cannot find ways to make our lives meaningful. On the other, so long as we have reasons to continue living, we might be able to find consolation.
The sources of suffering are endless. Sometimes we suffer from a specific traumatic event, such as the death of a loved one; at other times, we ache from something more general and to some degree ineffable, what the philosopher Eva Weber-Guskar called "existential misfortune — suffering from the world, from how it is, from human life as such." Conservatism needs to have something to say to wounded souls, and thankfully, it does. When someone suffers, conservatism can provide encouragement: Look to those places where you've found meaning, and reimmerse yourself in them.