Tag Archives: conservatism

What Newman really stood for

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Newman

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img_0009I don’t have a lot to add here, which in fact, surprised me. On first read, I thought I’d have a wall of text of my own with a much shorter quote. But as I read through it a few times, I found it less and less necessary to pick it apart. But it is still important. There’s something here that speaks to me as a conservative both in the church (although neither Rome nor Canterbury) and as a politically aware American conservative.

I wrote the book Newman on Vatican II for two reasons. First, I hoped to settle once and for all the question that always hangs around Newman: was he a conservative or a liberal theologian? Once Newman has been canonised – which is likely to be soon now that he has been beatified – it is certain that he will be declared a Doctor of the Church, and the question therefore becomes all the more pressing.

The reason why this question comes so regularly to the fore is that it is all too easy to quote Newman selectively and out of context, especially since he expresses himself with such vigorous distinctness and trenchancy.

For example, one can quote his forthright statement in the Apologia that dogma was the “fundamental principle” of his religion – “I know no other religion”, or his insistence in the speech he made on being made a cardinal that “for 30, 40, 50 years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion” – and conclude from these two uncompromising statements that Newman was extremely conservative and traditionalist.

On the other hand, one might quote Newman’s famous words, “I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards”; or his downright assertion: “Theology is the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system” – and conclude that Newman was a forerunner of the liberal, “spirit of Vatican II” kind of theologian who justifies dissent from Church teachings and advocates a parallel magisterium of the theologians.

The truth is that Newman was neither simply conservative nor liberal. He is best described as a conservative radical or reformer. This is true both of his Anglican and his Catholic periods. For example, his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, was clearly aimed at their contemporary equivalent, liberal Anglicans and Protestants, in cahoots with the Whig government that was threatening to force reforms on the Church of England. And yet the conservative editors of the theological library for which the book was intended were alarmed by the radicalism of several of Newman’s ideas. Similarly, the last chapter of the Apologia on the one hand unequivocally upholds the authority of the magisterium, but on the other unequivocally defends the legitimate freedom of theologians.

Well, OK, but I think the author misses something in his definition of conservative. Conservatives usually are quite willing to change things, that need to be changed, it’s the principles that we cling to. Maybe that’s why, Catholic or Protestant, we admire Newman so.

Newman’s conservative, as well as radical and reforming, theological stance was consistent with his view that the Church “changes … in order to remain the same”. In other words, he would have said the Church changed with Vatican II in order to remain the same, not to be different. To test whether a change was a development or a corruption, he proposed seven notes, which have been routinely dismissed by his commentators but to which he held fast, and which beautifully illuminate how the most controversial of the conciliar documents, Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, was certainly a major change but a change in continuity.

via What Newman really stood for – CatholicHerald.co.uk

There is a discussion of the seven notes here, I won’t go into them here, or we’ll have a book, but I will list them for you.

  • The First Note: Preservation of Type
  • The Second Note: Continuity of Principles
  • The Third Note: Assimilative Power
  • The Fourth Note: Logical Sequence
  • The Fifth Note: Anticipation of Its Future
  • The Sixth Note: Conservative Action on Its Past
  • The Seventh Note: Chronic Vigor

I have read the link, but have not digested it yet, but on first reading, it strikes me as a very viable set of rough principles in accommodating changes. Or at least I think so, which may be why I’m a blogger and someday (fairly soon) Newman will be a Doctor of the Church.

And in truth, I find them just as persuasive in a political context, perhaps especially the American one, which features unchanging dogma (so to speak) of its own, and still must always change.

Conservatism

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith

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Latterly, we have taken politics more seriously here than hithertofore, but in the end, politics is a second order activity. As the third Marquis of Salisbury once said: ‘God is love and the world is what it is. Explain that?’ The answer is that we are a fallen species. At best we can produce Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and St. Francis; at worse, we produce Attila, Tamur the Lame and Hitler. We have the instincts of angels, and of demons. Too often pleasure lies along the last of these; too often our society encourages that.

Politics can cure relatively few of our ills. At best there are some good people there who wish to make a difference to the lives of their fellows; the problem comes when they take the short cut of using the resources of others to fulfil that purpose. The intention is good, but the State is not a person and it is generally a mistake to allow its cold charity to replace the instincts of the human heart. It is best if politicians remember they are merely instruments in God’s hand and no not imagine they are that hand, or even God himself.

It is easy to stand on the margins and heckle. In my time I have been involved in active politics, and found the experience tiring, unpleasant and ultimately unproductive; perhaps a decade was not enough? It felt like two, and by the end a good shower was necessary.

I am leery of criticising politicians on an individual basis. They do something our society needs, and they do something I would not do. Even when active, it was as an organiser, not a practitioner; wooing votes was not something I could do for myself.

In the US, as in Britain, we have a new version of an old breed of politician – the visionary. It is true that without vision the people perish; it is also true that visions are dangerous things; visionaries more so. When Blair was elected in 1997 I wrote a piece for a national newspaper saying that not even the Archangel Gabriel would be able to fulfil the promises made; so it proved.

People want to be told things are going to be all right in the end; children always want a good night story which ends well. That is not how life is. It is easy, tempting and inevitable that I should end by saying we need a Churchill. But we ought to recall that for the whole of the 1930s he was ignored and in the wilderness. The new democracy did not wish to be lectured or told that all was not going to be well. It wanted to believe that there would be ‘peace in our time’; it wanted to believe that Hitler was not evil in human form; it wanted, and got, its good night story. It also reaped the whirlwind.

‘Blood, toils, tears and sweat’, that was what Churchill promised us in 1940. That same democracy which had wanted pretty lies, woke up and took the truth on the chin. Our politicians are wrong to underestimate our capacity for hearing the truth spoken; as they are to underestimate our need for fairy stories.

Compassionate Conservatism?

15 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in Politics

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“When we take the big calls we will think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws we will listen not to the mighty, but to you. When it comes to taxes we will prioritise not the wealthy, but you. When it comes to opportunity we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few, we will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

So Theresa May in her first speech as Prime Minister, generally to great scepticism from the liberal media. It may be that the liberal media’s narrative of ‘posh boy Tories’ grinding the poor into the dust is so ingrained that it cannot accommodate such words from a  Conservative Premier; it may be that it is simply as sceptical of such words from the political Right as it is credulous when the political Left uses them; or it may simply be that too many journalists are so historically ignorant that they have never heard of Disraeli, Joe Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan and ‘One Nation’ Conservatism. But it is there is the DNA of the Conservative Party, and many of the reforms which have benefitted the wider electorate have come from Conservative sources. It was the Tory Shaftesbury who persuaded the Tory Peel to enact legislation to restrict the hours people could work in factories and to ban children working down the mines – the liberal objected to such restrictions on the freedom of people. It was Disraeli’s government which brought in legislation on food purity and working hours – the Liberals did not want to interfere with the market. It was Joe Chamberlain who wanted to bring in tariffs to protect home industries, and Liberals who wanted free trade.

Mrs May belongs, to the clear discomfort of Thatcherite purists, to that Tory tradition which sees a role for the State in preventing inequalities of wealth growing to the point at which they become dangerous for democratic consent; which sees that alongside welfare reform, you still need welfare; and which seeds education as important in providing life chances for the poorest. It isn’t that the Thatcherite tradition does not see these things, it is that is often gives the impression that it believes in untrammeled ‘freedom’ first. As the Referendum debate seems to have illustrated, there are too many in our society for whom the word ‘freedom’ has a hollow ring. What does freedom mean when you can’t afford to feed or house your family because house prices are beyond your reach and wages low? Where is the freedom of choice if your educational opportunities have been limited by your social class? We can debate the causes of the decline of social mobility, but in the meantime it exists and seems to be worsening. If ‘the many’ in a democratic polity feel hard done by, they will not, forever, take the ‘few’ telling them that that’s the way things are for ever.

If a majority of people had felt the EU was theirs and had done something for them, if they had felt ownership of it, it would not have been necessary for the last Prime Minister to try to coerce them into voting for it by ‘operation fear’. If a positive case was made, many of us missed it. The Referendum became an opportunity for ‘the many’ to tell the political elite they were hurting, and the EU became the scapegoat for all those hurts. It seems Mrs May has picked up on that message. The extent to which her rhetorical commitments can be translated into practice at a time when, thanks to Brexit, the economic conditions will be unstable, is open to doubt. But at least she realises that a different rhetoric is needed. Austerity is all very well, but taken too far for too long, and in a climate where the very rich seem to be getting even richer, and in an economy where the bankers who crashed it walk away scot-free, something more is needed. If Mrs May can provide it, she will confound the sceptics and establish herself as the woman of the hour. If not – well let us hope we don’t have to go there.

Reflections of an heretic.

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Blogging, Faith

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Saint_John_ApostleThere are reasons for preserving anonymity when blogging (not that my identity is very deeply concealed from those with eyes to see), and one of them is that British Higher Education is not the most tolerant of environments.  Of course, officially it is very tolerant, but in that liberal way which is intolerant of that of which it disapproves. As a known and practising Conservative and a Catholic, not to mention as an elderly white heterosexual male, I present rather a target for those who disapprove of any or all of these.

This is not really much of a change, whatever one might be tempted to say. It is the Conservative and the Christian parts of it which have always caused a problem. Whilst no one has ever asked one of my colleagues whether their leftist views might have some influence upon the way they teach urbanisation and industrialisation in the UK, or on their view of American history, I have been asked, and not infrequently, whether my Conservatism effects my teaching of history. The answer, of course, is that it does, just as the leftist views of most of my colleagues do; the difference is they deny it and therefore are unconscious of doing so; I don’t, and am.  That only one of my students across a period of 37 years is a Conservative MP, indicates how useless I am as a propagandist; but then, aware as I am of my bias, I do the best I can to own up to it. I like to tell students that if I have not offended their favourite sacred cow by the las seminar or lecture, they must let me know and I will oblige.

I do not find that the students mind; quite the opposite, they appreciate my honesty with them. I can, of course, and do, argue the other side, but I make no secret of the fact that the worst Government of the last fifty years in the UK was that of Ted Heath (yes, he was a Conservative, so he claimed), or the fact that I think the NHS is the last remnant of Stalinist planning.

It is, my students tell me, unusual to find a professor who will talk to them about Christianity. I make no secret of my beliefs; the large crucifix in my office gives it away, although I was once asked by a nice young man why I had a man on a stick on the wall (ah, the result of so many years of compulsory education)?

I take the view that my students have views and will share them with me, and as we are all adults, I will return the compliment. When we are talking about the Arians in fourth century it is hard not to point to what Newman wrote about suddenly realising that he was a semi-Arian.

But as I approach the end of a long career (I shall retire in a few years) I cannot say that I find the climate even as accepting as it was back when I started in the late 1970s. There is an intolerance which is different from what it was back then. I could have a good old row with the old Socialist Workers, and we would give and take as we could, but none of us would have dreamed of reporting anyone for ‘hate speech’ or being politically incorrect. For all our vast differences, my leftist colleagues and I shared a commitment to freedom of speech. That is all but gone now, not because it is actively banned, but because of the fear of being sued or reported.  It was, I suspect, like this behind the Iron Curtain.

Well, I am old now, and I have had a good run for my money. But I should be wary of advising anyone not of leftist views to enter the Humanities in UK Universities.  Still, given the composition of most appointment committees, there’s no need to fear that anyone of any other view would be appointed.

Swivel-eyed loons?

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Faith, Politics

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fallenminister_mainI am most grateful to the excellent Francis Phillips for thinking my piece on Conservative modernisers was worth referring to. In the light of the recent controversy over one of Mr Cameron’s inner circles referring to party activists as ‘swivel-eyed loons‘, it seems more relevant than ever.  I do not believe the weasel-worded denials. Anyone familiar with the way some MPs talk about their activists will be as unsurprised as I am. In some ways it is inevitable: MPs should hear some of the things we say about them!

Some commentators are talking about this Government being like John Major’s in the nineties; that is a poor comparison. A better one would be with Peel’s administration from 1841 to 1845.

Then, we had the spectacle of a parvenu old Etonian (second generation money) of strong executive instincts doing what he felt had to be done to do with what the times called ‘the march of mind’. So, factory legislation, liberalization towards Catholicism, and finally repeal of the Corn Laws, all things Peel knew his party opposed, but all things he knew would be good for them to pass. He knew better than the ‘backwoodsmen’ They threw him out, broke the party, and were out of power for thirty years, even if they occasionally held office. The price Peel paid for not cultivating his party was a heavy one. What is remarkable, and where the comparison with Cameron is right, is that Peel did not even try to reason with or to persuade his party – he rode rough-shod over some of its deepest beliefs.

Disraeli, who did not really care about the Corn Laws one way or the other, argued that a party leader owed a duty to at least listen to those whose votes he needed. Peel disagreed. Brought up in the executive tradition of Pitt, he did what he thought was right. But by Peel’s time party mattered in a way it had not half a century earlier. Now it matters a great deal more. Where, in the 1840s one could argue, with plausibility that MPs were often local worthies who owed their seat to local influence, now they owe them to their party label.

I have worked for the Conservative Party for several decades. I did not campaign for gay marriage, and if I had been told that my party was committed to it, I would not have campaigned for it; my conscience as a Catholic would not have allowed me to do that. I did believe that Mr Cameron would be on the whole a good thing, a Baldwin de nos jours. It seems he was really Peel.

He and his senior colleagues may well believe that people like me are old and out of touch with modern currents of thought. That, of course, could be why we support the Conservative Party; if we thought otherwise we might be members of another Party. It is unwise for a Conservative leader to show his contempt for those who vote for his party; it is not, in the end, his party. He has come, he will go, but the Party is bigger than him and will be here when he is gone.

Conservatism and extinction

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Politics

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_39465912_chamberlain203A senior Conservative Minister, Francis Maude, whose father, Angus, was a Minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s Government and one of those who modernised the Conservative Party after its 1945 defeat, and who has been at the forefront of recent attempts to ‘detoxify’ the Conservative Party, has warned that the ‘Conservative Party must modernise of face extinction.’  His views are worth analysing as they point to the malaise which afflicts conservative politics in the UK and the USA.

Maude warns that the party risks “electoral oblivion” if it failed to keep pace with new “social norms”. It has to be, he tells us, a genuinely ‘contemporary party’ if it is to succeed electorally.  ‘We can’t’, he said, .look like we want to turn the clock back to an imagined golden era. “We should not assume that society will be willing to conform to our own expectations if they’re out of kilter with the mainstream,” he said.’ He went on to conclude that:  “If we fail to keep pace – fail to understand and influence the spirit of the age – we will be rightly punished by the electorate.”

My response would be to ask him in what degree such a conservative party differed from the Labour or the Liberal-Democratic parties? His answer would relate to economic policy, tax rates, welfare reform and the like; but he misses, as all modernisers do, the point: these things are means, not ends. If a Conservative Party is not willing to make the case for prevailing social norms then what is its point?  What sort of society does this Conservative want? He doesn’t know, he’s happy to go with whatever flow is going – as long as he is in power.

This is a natural point of view for a politician, who earns a better living if he is in power; but it marks a dangerous division between him and many of those who vote Conservative. It may well be that his own electoral prospects will vanish down the gap he opens up.

There is an assumption here that there are no real norms, no standards other than those of the market, and that all that matters is success in electoral and financial terms.  Were those views widely shared then there would probably be no Conservative voters.  Most people, including myself, vote Conservative because we wish to keep the best of what is. We are sensible enough to know that change happens, but we wish to make it as difficult as possible, to ensure that only essential change happens. The itchy fingers of liberals need a balm, and we are it.

But what are we to make of a Conservative Party which brings in a bill to legalise same-sex marriage?  There was no evidence that anyone much wanted it, and even in the manifesto, the furthest the party went was to say it would consult on the issue. The consultation has shown that many people do not want it. But our Conservative leaders will bring it in any way. That way they show how ‘modern’ they are.

Well, it may be that they win some new voters that way. But are these new voters fiscal conservatives?  When push comes to shove will they really vote for a party they have always hated?  On the other hand there are those, of whom I am one, who have worked and and voted for the Conservative Party for decades. They will not be getting my vote. If that brings in a Socialist Government all well and good. I expect Socialists and liberals to want to move with the times and the new social norms, and would rather they did it than so-called Conservatives.

In the end, as the cynic said, it does not matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.

A Happy 2013 to all Jessica’s readers!

No man talk of comfort.

10 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Faith, Politics

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Conservatism is not a comfortable political creed. In its world-view, politicians are like policemen – they would be unnecessary if people behaved as they ought. We ought to look out each for the other; we ought to give of our charity to others; we ought not to hoard wealth; the list could stretch on to the crack of doom; we do not do those things we ought to do, and we do those which we know we ought not to do: there is no health in us.

At the heart of conservatism is a deep pessimism about the human condition. There is nothing so ghastly that someone somewhere will not do it; nothing so depraved that mankind will not have tried it; nothing so abhorrent to commonsense that some fool will not argue for it. Those who believe that politics can ameliorate the human condition will despair – or resort to wishful thinking.

Liberals think every problem was born into the world with a twin called solution, and that the job of politicians is to bring the missing twins back together. I think this a delusion; many problems have no human solution. You are not going to stop greed, violence, adultery, lying and murder this side of the Last Trump. All revolutions change is the identity of the oppressed and the oppressor. Orwell was right – all animals are equal and some are more equal than others.

I do not understand advanced economics; I am in good company, economists, despite their claims to the contrary, do not understand it either. Few, if any, predicted the crash of 2008. I did, and I took my money out of the stock market in 2007 and sold my second home. That was not because I understand economics, it was because I am an historian. Whenever the stock market becomes the subject of water-cooler gossip it is time to get out. Joe Public is the last resort of the fraudulent stock dealer. If it looks to good to be true, it is.

Jess quoted Kipling on the Gods of the Copybook Headings. It is a favourite text of mine:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Kipling was a conservative. Whatever man says, there are eternal verities this side of Judgement.

Does that make me gloomy? No. It makes me unsurprised at the crimes, follies and wickedness of mankind. It also reminds me why the King of Glory hung on that Cross on Calvary. By no other means could we be saved from our sins. No Christian is a pessimist. All shall be changed, in the twinkling of an eye, in a moment. At that point there will be no conservatives save those sinners so attached to their sins they refuse to leave them for Glory.