Once a month, The duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
With the arrival of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, combined with the climate crisis, more and more people have the feeling that, in the balance between gains and losses due to change, the weight of the latter is heavy to carry for the future.
We know very well that we risk losing what we consider important, for example biodiversity, certain traditions that define identity, creative faculties and stable points of reference between fiction and truth. These losses will perhaps have significant consequences on our sense of the present, which is becoming more and more elusive, and certainly on our relationship with the world.
How many of us are there, looking to the future, with the imperative of having to change a system intertwined by crises? We want change, something new, something never seen before. “There is a positive bias in favor of what has not yet been tried. We readily assume that all change is, in some way, for the better, and we easily convince ourselves that all the consequences of our innovative activity are themselves improvements or, at least, a reasonable price to pay for what we want. we want. »
These words were not spoken a few years ago, but in the middle of the 20e century by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990). It was 1956 when he gave a lecture to students at Swansea University in Wales.
This conference will give rise to an essay entitled On Being Conservativefirst published in 1962 in a collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. In 2011, a French translation (From conservatism) was published by Éditions du Félin, allowing the French-speaking public to discover an English philosopher and political theorist who is little known and little read today.
Indeed, who is Michael Oakeshott? From 1950 he held the chair of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a position he held until his retirement in 1968, after which he devoted himself to writing his major works which synthesize his political thought, Michael Okeashott is a political thinker whose reading slightly shakes us up, we who are more familiar with the progressive heritage of the Enlightenment and political rationalism.
Backwards
Because it must be admitted, Oakeshott can seem “reverse”, and his conservative skepticism is an attitude rarely defended in the current of North American political liberalism.
Despite the richness of his thought, it is not the political theorist that I wish to approach, but the philosopher, who focused on an attitude which, because it is not fashionable, is perhaps all in all original and relevant. It is about our disposition towards conservatism.
Immediately, the contrarian curator risks being defined as a “reactionary,” someone resistant to change, and, as Oakeshott says, will feel an “unwelcome discomfort,” as if he were the caretaker of a museum which exposes what will one day become outdated.
We immediately think that a conservative individual is one of those who constantly say that everything was better before, that he is a great nostalgic lover, a static individual. As a result, such an individual would be very easily labeled within a set of beliefs (religious or not) or doctrines. A conservationist !
However, there is a difference between calling yourself conservative from a political or ideological point of view and the disposition toward conservatism that we all may have to varying degrees and which manifests itself in one way or another in the face of change. Michael Oakeshott is relevant here because he is primarily interested in this “attitude” and his purpose is “to analyze this disposition as it appears in the character of contemporaries rather than transposing it into the form of general principles.
Oakeshott is a radical empiricist who bases his hypotheses on the facts he observes, from which he wishes, remaining in a skeptical posture regarding any fixed form of “human nature” (against a conservatism à la Edmund Burke, for example) , identify the main points.
Familiarity
What are the general features of the disposition toward conservatism? Certainly not an idolatry of the heritage of the past, but a first and fundamental love of the “present”. Here we touch on what is perhaps the cornerstone of the disposition towards conservatism, which I would rephrase as follows: in certain things or for certain situations, prefer what is rather than desire what is possible.
What is present is not only something known, it is also something that is “familiar” to us. Familiarity with states of affairs is what contributes to the disposition towards conservatism bringing into play the value of this familiarity in the face of the risks of its loss in the face of change or innovation. Far from the idea of having to love the present at all costs, which sometimes can be unbearable or involve lesser risks of loss. It’s about appreciating the “known” rather than desiring the unknown at all costs.
But what to do with the inevitable change in a world in the making? Against rupture, the individual disposed to conservatism will favor continuity. Because “being conservative does not simply mean being hostile to change […] ; it is also a way of adapting to changes, an activity imposed on everyone. Because change is a threat to identity and all change is a sign of extinction. But the identity of an individual (and that of a community) is nothing other than an uninterrupted repetition of contingencies which all depend on circumstances and which only make sense through their degree of familiarity.
We must not understand the concept of identity as a “fortress” behind which we protect ourselves from the threats of change, but as the place of the individual or the community, which recognizes itself thanks to the familiar baggage of habits, rites, names that it preserves, while being open to the constant changes that occur in a complex and diverse world.
Friendship
Furthermore, Oakshott makes an important distinction between “change”, which is of the order of what is “undergoed” (contingency), and “innovation”, which is a change necessarily involving the idea of improvement . Any innovation without sufficient improvement to counterbalance the loss of what was familiar before its creation (for example, innovation for certain tools) is therefore immediately criticized by the individual disposed to conservatism.
We must here recall how certain tools which persist in the habits of project managers and in the professions remain effective not because they are new or constantly adapted to different projects, but because they are mastered by their users, who have perfected their techniques thanks to the in-depth knowledge they have.
Finally, no one is obliged to call themselves purely conservative, and I would say that it is important to qualify the disposition towards conservatism by recalling a few situations in which it appears stronger and in an essential way.
There are activities that we do and human relationships that we maintain with the aim of producing something. Any activity carried out with a view to an end external to itself is of this order, for example the purchase of a good, or the salary received for work carried out solely for remuneration. However, all activities which emphasize the means as much as the end, such as purchasing meat from the local butcher despite its higher prices, but with whom we have the pleasure of conversation and whose products we know well , are activities where we have a conservative attitude.
Angling, as Oakeshott points out, is a great example of an activity where the means compete with the end, because we derive pleasure from the simple act of doing it. Finally, there is one thing which is strictly in the order of the disposition towards conservatism, without any idea of usefulness or progressive attitude, and that is friendship. “Friends do not worry about what we might do to each other, but only about each other’s pleasure; and the condition of this pleasure is the unconditional acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire for change and improvement. »
If we experience pleasure in being around a person, it is not because we want to change them, but perhaps because they gradually allow us to change ourselves by improving ourselves while remaining who we are, in the familiarity of an enduring relationship.
Conservatism is not an attitude to hide or demonize. What Oakeshott’s thinking allows us to see is that, faced with our reflexes to wipe the slate clean, and to get us out of the ruts of the ideology of innovation at all costs, we could favor the idea of continuity to remain in a familiar world.
In a time troubled by the dizziness of change, I suggest that it would be good to revalue it and to assume that we are perhaps all, just a little bit, attached to certain things that we do not want to change.
To suggest a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected].