Beyond Reason – Part 5 (The Tyranny of Reason)

Let us consider where we’ve come so far:

In Part 1 we talked about how many people who lived during the Age of Reason were of the opinion that mankind was entering a golden era in which the superstitious dogmas and doctrines of the past would give way to a pure pursuit of reason. Thus, humans would live in harmony as their political leaders relied upon their superior reasoning to chart a prosperous, equitable, and peaceful future.

In Part 2 we discovered how much of a killjoy Edmund Burke could be as he dared to challenge to this newfound faith in human reason. He offered instead an alternative tool: prescription, which put individual reason behind respect for authority, traditions, customs, norms, and institutions. Prescription is one of the biggest reasons conservatives are often unenthusiastic about trying bold innovations in the economy, law, family structure, or ancient institutions. They’d much prefer to take a slow, contemplative path towards progress.

But in Part 3 we saw how prescription is also concerned with where we’re going and not merely how we get there. For prescription, which helps bind us to prior generations and anchor us to the transcendent, offers us the ability to hold to permanent things of value in an ever-changing world. The conservative view of progress does not mean that yesterday’s conservatives eventually will become today’s progressives because conservatives and progressives are ultimately moving in opposite directions.

Finally, in Part 4, we explored the numerous benefits to the individual and society in following prescription. Instead of relying upon a select group of experts to direct complex things such as language, law, and morality, prescription communicates habits and norms through traditions and institutions so effectively and efficiently that even fools can become wise as society benefits from the efforts of all those who have come before.

Burke’s Critics

Burke feared an overreliance on the individual’s ability to reason their way through political problems would lead to all kinds of trouble. He insisted prescription was a safer, more trustworthy alternative because it had stood the test of time. Was he successful in persuading his Enlightenment-era contemporaries? Not exactly.

Enlightenment thinkers from England to France to America scoffed at this antiquated approach to statecraft. Of course prescription was the “safer” bet; that’s all that had ever been tried before. But the Age of Reason was all about taking humanity far beyond where it had been before, which is why everywhere the Enlightenment spread so did the rumblings of revolution. As Yuval Levin put it, “The age of revolutions understood itself as advancing the cause of reason in political life.” And those who participated in this great cause hadn’t patience for oldfangled idealists like Burke. Let’s hear what they had to say:

“Everything that bears the imprint of time must inspire distrust more than respect…[it is] only by meditation that we can arrive at any general truths in the science of man.”

~Nicolas de Condorcet

“Reason is the proper instrument, and the sufficient instrument for regulating the actions of mankind…If we employ our rational faculties, we cannot fail of thus conquering our erroneous propensities.”

~William Godwin

“The philosophers having no particular interest to defend, can only speak up in favor of reason and the public interest.”

~Voltaire

“The best and most natural arrangement [is] for the wisest to govern the multitude.”

~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The greatest happiness of a nation is realized when those who govern agree with those who instruct it.”

~Jean le Rond d'Alembert

“It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.”

~Thomas Paine

Ouch.

The Horrors of Limitless Reason

To be fair, Burke hadn’t minced words in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France where he strongly criticized the French revolutionaries who had wholeheartedly embraced this new approach to politics. Burke accused their innovations of potentially leading to far greater evils than the abuses of power that existed in the French monarch they intended to smash.

As horrid as abuses of European monarchies were, they paled in comparison to what was to come. “Old-fashioned grievances—moved by local or national loyalties or material necessities—have their natural bounds,” wrote Levin. “Old-fashioned despotism—moved by a naked desire for power on the part of a charismatic tyrant—cannot readily mask its excesses.” In spite of the horror, these old systems possessed some limiting principle upon its leaders from maintaining good relations with local lords to operating within the confines of what was religiously expected.

“But a mob moved by a theory has no natural stopping point and cannot easily be assuaged, and leaders claiming to advance a truth obtained by philosophical speculation do not fit the familiar profile of the tyrant,” continues Levin. “The ancient tyrants could only wish to get away with what the modern speculative revolutionaries can achieve.” Twentieth century political ideologies such as fascism and communism had no such limitations. By demanding everything submit to reason, they gladly destroyed anything perceived as a challenge to the presuppositions their ideology had been built upon.

Levin concludes, “An overreliance on theory may unleash extremism and immoderation by unmooring politics from the polity. Because [radicals] pursue the vindication of a principle, they cannot stop short of total success.” As we’ve seen throughout this series, part of Burke’s objection comes from what he believed to be a misunderstanding of the purpose of politics. Politics were never intended to be the place where intellectuals could work out their (often untested) theories on a hapless population. Rather, politics was intended to provide for the common good, prosperity, and stability of the nation-state so that the population could go about the business of working out higher purposes and pursuits in their own lives.

Inevitably, when people are set free to pursue lives of purpose, some of them are going to do it all wrong. Or, at least, in a manner which you or I may strongly detest. But what happens when they pursue lives of purpose that don’t fall within the guidelines of what can be agreed upon using reason alone? This notion deeply concerned economist Friedrich Hayek:

“The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.”

In the end, a politics of pure reason rejects every thing and every one who cannot be explained or understood through the narrow lens of reason. In overvaluing reason, we undervalue so much that serves society well. Here are three brief examples:

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Experience

Yuval Levin uses the arguments of Thomas Paine—who was quoted earlier—to contrast Burke’s reliance on prescription: “[Paine] argues that every individual is capable of employing his own reason to discern the truth or falsehood of a political question, so that no reliance on the past or on collective reasoning is required. In this way, again, Paine believes that every individual has the capacity to begin from scratch, rather than beginning where others have left off.” This is the purest form of those who hold that reason alone is the means to truth. If reason is all we need, then anyone is capable of arriving at the “right” answer to a political question all by themselves.

What gets in the way of people getting to the “right” answers then isn’t some limitation on their part so much as the distortions of all those needless cultural traditions that get in the way. What’s more, those who have gained experience in politics and statecraft are the least likely to arrive at the “right” answers because they’ve been marinated in the traditions they’ve inhabited to gain this experience. If all that is required is reason, then what counts isn’t experience but sheer intelligence. For surely those who are smart enough are the most capable of reasoning well.

“Articulated youth, idealistic and trained in the latest and most advanced forms of knowledge, as knowledge is conceived in the [progressive] vision, are a great hope for the future to those with that vision. So are intellectuals,” explains Thomas Sowell, “Neither is viewed in this way in the [conservative] vision. Where knowledge is more expansively defined and consequently more widely distributed, as in the [progressive] vision, intellectuals have no commanding advantage over the common man.” Notice here how this belief can naturally slide into tyranny. If reason can get us to the “right” answers, and if the most intelligent among us are the best at using their reason, then surely the intelligent are best suited to rule everyone else.

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Tradition

As noted above, the belief that reason is the primary or only means to truth makes cultural traditions—the very thing prescription calls for to aid us in finding the truth—nothing more than cumbersome roadblocks on our journey to societal progression. “In [progressive] vision, where much of the malaise of the world is due to existing institutions and existing beliefs, those least habituated to those institutions and beliefs are readily seen as especially valuable for making needed social change,” writes Thomas Sowell.

Notice here again how the temptation for those who fancy themselves the smartest among us to rule is always lurking. But notice to what stands in the way of “needed social change”: institutions. Those modes of associations from the church to the family to the local bowling league make it difficult to institute societal change because these institutions were built on the very society that needs changing.

Even if it is acknowledged that tradition and institutions are the best means for past generations to instill the wisdom of lessons learned, of what use is that in a world where reason can better guide us than some long-dead sage or prophet? That information may have been useful at some distant point in the past, but if we hope to make much progress we have to find ways to progress past the past.

And since tradition calls us back to the past, it must be torn apart to make way for the superhighway of Reason to bring about Progress.

When We Overvalue Reason, We Undervalue Authority and Revelation

“In the matter of the earth’s circumference, nearly all of us are much better off if we simply accept the ‘traditional’ or ‘authoritative’ calculation,” wrote Russell Kirk. That does not mean that truth becomes whatever an authority says it is. Even in the case of divine revelation we don’t entirely forgo our critical thinking skills in evaluating the truth of a matter. We might ask if we correctly understood what was revealed. Or, in the case of a prophet or religious leader claiming to speak on behalf of God, we might rightly question whether we believe this to be so.

Prescription doesn’t ask us to blindly follow every authoritative answer or religious doctrine. Instead, prescription insists that authoritative answers and religious doctrines stand a far better chance at ascertaining the truth because they are not dependent on our meager ability to reason well.

Those who rely on reason alone soon find themselves turning against all competing authorities and revelations that dare to question their capacity to come by the truth for themselves. “That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science…is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in His works, and is the true theology,” wrote Thomas Paine. For Paine, no authoritative or revelatory claim had any right to assert itself over his reason. His “religion” then was reduced to his faith in what science could show him through reason, and traditional revelation was at enmity with his modern faith. “The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”

Reason without a faith that extends beyond our own capacity to reason is circular nonsense. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out long ago, “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

The Gift of Prescription

Without prescription, humanity undervalues the experience, tradition, authority, and revelation that connects us to the wisdom of generations past and points the way forward toward a better world. Russell Kirk summarized it best: “By trial and error, by revelation, by the insights of men of genius, mankind has acquired, slowly and painfully, over thousands of years, a knowledge of human nature and of the civil social order which no one individual possibly can supplant by private rationality.” Wouldn’t it be a pity if we discarded the precious gift of prescription just to follow the feebleness of our own reasoning?

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Beyond Reason – Part 4 (How Prescription Makes Us Wiser)

Years ago, a friend asked if I knew of any verses in the King James translation of the Bible that warned against gossiping. They asked me because I’d grown up in a Free Holiness church where only the King James translation was read. Yet I was surprised to learn the word gossip didn’t appear. Instead, the good King’s English used the word talebearer to signify one who engages in idle, possibly malicious talk.

Did You Hear What Happened to Gossip?

I later discovered this was because the King James Bible was written in 1611, and people did not come to use the word gossip as idle, possibly malicious talk until a few decades later. The word gossip was in use, it just had a different meaning (and spelling). Gossip comes from an Old English word: godsibb. A godsibb was a godfather or godmother who acted as a sponsor at a baptism who was close to the person being baptized and their family and friends. Since the word carried a sense of closeness to familiar acquaintances, it eventually began to be used more to describe close relations. That is, a godsibb was a close friend or neighbor.

By the 1560s, the century before the King James Bible was written, godsibb changed to gossip. By now, it was most commonly used to mean a woman’s female friends who were invited to be present at the birth of her child. Since there is much waiting involved in childbirth, a woman’s gossip would pass the time by talking about familiar matters—as women are wont to do. By the 1800s the word had more to do with the kind of talk women engage in when they gather into groups than it had to do with the reason they’d gathered in the first place. As such, gossip reached its present meaning: to talk about the affairs of others.

It’s no small wonder that the original meaning of the Old English word godsibb—that of a godfather/godmother who sponsored a person’s baptism and was close to their friends and family—fell out of use centuries ago. How likely would you need a word for that sort of thing in your vocabulary? Even those who practice faiths that call for baptismal sponsorship aren’t likely to do so in the same cultural context of someone who’s close-knit with your family, friends, and community. The nature of how we relate to one another has changed significantly since the Middle Ages.

And I suspect that if the word gossip still meant a group of women who got together and talked idly about other people it would be used with a bit more discretion—for those intending to be politically correct—and as social commentary on the characteristics of women—for those intending to be politically incorrect. In other words, gossip would be akin to a word like mansplaining—a word that’s understood to be a slander on a person’s sex and not human nature in general.

Who Assigns the Meaning of Words?

How then did we come by this modern understanding of the word gossip? How is it that the word describes common behaviors easily recognizable and understood that work in our current cultural context without carrying around the baggage of the meanings it held in the past? Was this the work of a savvy linguist? Did a group of cultural historians determine precisely when the old godfather/godmother meaning was no longer useful and opt for an upgraded meaning? Were health experts consulted on when it would no longer make sense to associate childbirth an advent attended exclusively by women? Did a central authority mandate these changes be made as we passed from one century to the next?

Of course not. The evolution of the word gossip, much like the evolution of almost all the words we know, was not directed by any one person at any one time for any one reason. It was the product of a slow, painful process that involved all English speakers in some respect, even though almost none of them were aware of the role they played. And what has resulted in this vast group effort is a language so complex, beautiful, descriptive, and fitting to the culture from which it derives that some even earn a PhD in the English language itself.

This phenomenon of spontaneous evolution is not limited to the language we speak. The laws that govern us, the family that begat us, the markets we buy and sell goods and services in, and even the traditions we inherited are all part of a vast group effort among many generations who contribute to these endeavors just as they go about their daily business, many of whom never give a thought to the matter.

Conservative thinkers have long observed how the laws of a free society can take on a life of their own. “Common law…do not, in detail, have their origin in a list that some person or persons sat down and ‘drew up’,” wrote Willmoore Kendall, “They have been hammered out in the courts of law over long centuries and reflect the accumulated experience of the English-speaking peoples with the vexed question of how to prevent miscarriages of justice.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way, “The development of our law has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a planet, each generation taking the next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth.”

Brilliant Fools

This is prescription in action. This is Burke’s notion that far more knowledge and invaluable wisdom are transmitted not by experts or sages but by the inherent value embedded in our culture, norms, and traditions. As Burke tells it, “The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts rightly.” Prescription provides a path for ordinary, even foolish, people to craft a beautiful language, enact just laws, uphold moral and auspicious traditions, and produce vibrant markets.

This allegiance to prescription does not mean the conservative denies certain people have greater knowledge, skills, experience, or innate wisdom than most. Expertise is immensely valuable. But its value is of a very narrow sort. An expert in cabinetry can tell us all kinds of important and interesting things about cabinets. But it’s doubtful they’d know the precise cabinet in terms of size, quality, color, and various other features I happened to be looking for last Tuesday, nor could they have predicted where such a cabinet should be sent or how much I’d be willing to pay for one. And yet the free market provided to me precisely what I was after at a price both I and the cabinet maker found agreeable.

The ability of the free market to produce goods and services at prices people are willing to pay has long been observed by capitalists as yet another area where we are advantaged by people indirectly making a difference by behaving in their own interests. “Practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation,” wrote Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

How Prescription Transmits Knowledge

As complexity increases, so does the need for skills, knowledge, and experience to grapple with the complexity. Thus, we recognize that an expert, or someone with experience in the subject matter, or a person who just happens to be highly intelligent, is likely to do better against some average person in matters of complexity. But some complexities are so vast, or subject to change, or lacking in obtainable data, or of a certain nature that no individual (or even computer in certain instances) could ever hope to possess the knowledge or expertise required to navigate it. But the population at large—legions upon legions of those “average people”—coupled with the wisdom of our ancestors passed down through the generations, can produce a sort of brainpower strong enough to work through the complexities. Thomas Sowell explained it best:

“Any individual’s own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions. A complex society and its progress are therefore possible only because of numerous social arrangements which transmit and coordinate knowledge from a tremendous range of contemporaries, as well as from the even more vast number of those from generations past. Knowledge as conceived in the [conservative] vision is predominantly experience—transmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices which indicate costs, scarcities, and preferences, to traditions which evolve from the day-to-day experiences of millions in each generation, winnowing out in Darwinian competition what works from what does not work.”

Therefore, prescription greatly enhances our ability to navigate the complexities of an advanced society via two means: 1) rather than rely upon the brainpower of the few gifted and knowledgeable experts, we can instead transmit information over a highly sophisticated web of institutions, customs, and norms that involve all of us. And 2) rather than limit our knowledge to the generation that just happens to be standing around, we can instead learn from the past successes and failures of our ancestors by staying within these traditional institutions, customs, and norms. Sowell continues by stressing that in the conservative’s view “where knowledge was a multiplicity of experience too complex for explicit articulation, it was distilled over the generations in cultural processes and traits so deeply embedded as to be virtually unconscious reflexes—widely shared. This was, in Burke’s words, ‘wisdom without reflection.’”

Any culture comes prepackaged with all sorts of embedded wisdom. Sometimes this wisdom is traceable back to some moment or great moral teacher or movement that helps explain its practical use and value. Often it is not. Or at least it may not be evident without a great deal of “reflection”. “It is not simply that individuals rationally choose what works from what does not work,” explains Sowell, “but also—and more fundamentally—that the competition of institutions and whole societies leads to a general survival of more effective collections of cultural traits, even if neither the winners nor the losers rationally understand what was better or worse about one set or the other.”

I doubt most people know the etymology of gossip. Yet that does not prevent them from adding this word to their vocabulary. Most of us came by this word—like most words—completely ignorant to the mindboggling complexities and evolutions it went through to arrive at our doorstep free of charge. Would we be better off if we only spoke a language provided to us by “experts”? I doubt it.

What’s true for language applies just as strongly to politics. “The absence of clear guidance from the past is not a reason to rely on the unaided reason of the individual alone or to look to naked theory for standards,” warns Yuval Levin, “Instead, it is a reason to desire collective deliberation and collective action in politics.” Prescription is not universally accepted, just as it was contested in Burke’s day. In the final post in this series—Part 5—we’ll turn our attention to those who insisted all this foolishness about prescription was simply getting in the way of letting the true experts get things done.

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Episode 45 - America's Greatest (and Worst) Presidents - Part 3

Who were America’s Greatest Presidents? Which Presidents had the most lasting impacts that shaped the country in ways that are clearly visible today? What about those Presidents whose blunders, incompetence, or weakness left the nation worse off?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by frequent guest Bob Burch as they work their way through the American Presidents and dissect their legacy—whether great, terrible, or somewhere in-between. Since this is an enormous topic it’s broken up into three episodes. In Part 1 covered Presidents George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. In Part 2 Josh and Bob picked things up with Andrew Johnson through Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in Part 3 Josh and Bob conclude with Harry S. Truman through Jimmy Carter (the last of the Presidents to serve before Millennials were born).

LISTEN HERE

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Beyond Reason – Part 3 (Does it Matter Where We’re Going?)

Some claim that today’s conservatives are nothing more than yesterday’s liberals—that conservatism is always on the defensive and fighting an uphill battle before eventually succumbing to the Left’s understanding of equality, or civil rights, or entitlements, or what have you. Now, there is some truth to this idea as conservatives do acknowledge that change or some sense of progression is necessary even to conserve the institutions and traditions of society.

But this raises the question: is conservatism ultimately progressivism with patience or—to put it more negatively—someone who is hopelessly behind the times? The answer, I believe, lies in what we mean by conservative. If we mean the natural impulse to keep things as they are then this understanding of conservatism may be an apt description. But if we mean something deeper—such as a worldview that has some notion of fixed standards or permanent things, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s term—then conservatism is destined to take us somewhere altogether different than Leftist ideologies.

Human Nature > Human Reasoning

In this series we’re exploring the conservative’s principle of prescription. Now, prescription is a method of knowing and of progressing. But it’s more than just a method for it points us towards some fixed standard in harmony with our nature. “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasoning but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part,” wrote 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke. As we’ve explored throughout this series, it was Burke’s great anti-innovationist innovation of prescription that conservatives use to this day to counter much of the political Left’s reliance on reason alone.

Burke was not speaking against reason but was warning that reason must be put in her proper place—which is in submission to human nature. For it is only by properly ordering our reason to obey imagination and virtue that we have any hope of discovering the deeper truths embedded in our culture and passed down from one generation to the next. This was of particular concern to Burke in the business of politics.

Politics of the Practical

To the conservative, politics is pragmatic, not speculative; it’s less of a science to be handled by experts in the field employing their intelligence, knowledge, and reasoning than it is an art that operates within general principles but allows for a wide range of possibilities to be guided by gifted artists who humbly admit they don’t fully comprehend the full extent of their work. For while there is a dash of mystery involved—as we’ll discuss in Part 4—the conservative always seeks to ground politics in something practical and not mystical, theoretical, spiritual, or philosophical.

“Our ability to know the practical consequences of a particular policy far exceeds our ability to ascertain the truth of a philosophical claim,” wrote Yuval Levin in his book The Great Debate, “In politics, therefore, we almost always ought to judge by effects and not by speculation.” Let us consider the socialist and Marxist motto of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. That’s a fine sentiment, and it may serve us well if we attempted to apply this notion to our own lives. But how do we apply such a general idea to politics? How do we measure abilities and needs? How do we ensure that the allocation of resources, time, talent, wealth, and knowledge are distributed adequately, fairly, justly, efficiently, and effectively? How do we monitor progress or identify weaknesses? How do we guard against waste, fraud, and abuse? How do we enforce these ideas without those put in charge using their power to become our masters?

“Theory often ignores circumstances and particulars crucial to the success of policy and the happiness of society,” warns Levin, “Theory is general and universal, but politics must always be very particular.” This does not mean that universal principles are of no use, or even that they are secondary to the practicality of politics. Levin continues, “Politics is not a branch of philosophy, in an express search for truth or its application, but is rather in the business of producing good practical outcomes, which help point to higher truth but not directly.”

In this manner the conservative is always on guard against political ideas that are too abstract, speculative, theoretical, and universal. But that does not mean the conservative denies the truth found in some of these ideas. Politics must strike a careful balance of remaining gravely practical and pragmatic while always keeping those “higher truths” Levin alluded to in the periphery as a sort of guidepost between extremities.

Standing Between the Rationalist and the Empiricist

In insisting that politics be adjusted to “human nature” and not “human reasoning”, Burke was not making an anti-intellectual case against general principles or the use of reasoning in politics or abstract ideas. Rather, he was offering guidance on how to use our ability to reason. In this manner, Burke sought a middle ground in the debate between rationalism and empiricism of his time.

The rationalist held that what mattered most were ideas obtained through reasoning while the empiricist trusted in what could be learned through the senses and inductive reasoning. When taken to their extremes, the rationalist argued that innate ideas were the starting point of all knowledge while the empiricists believed that no ideas were ever truly innate. John Locke, the father of classical liberalism, was among the most famous of the empiricists. He developed his theories of liberty championed by conservatives today via empirical means.

It might be tempting then to suppose that Burke’s conservatism joins forces with Locke’s empiricism as Burke was famously hostile to the various abstract ideas that were offered by political theorists of his day. Burke wanted politics to be governed by empirical evidence and not some metaphysician’s latest theory. But Burke also saw the danger in a purely empirical view as Russell Kirk explains:

“Conservatism is empirical only in the sense that conservatives respect the wisdom of the species and think that history, the recorded experience of mankind, should be constantly consulted by the statesmen. Yet mere practical experience, ‘empiricism’ in the sense of being guided simply by yesterday’s pains or pleasures, is not enough for the conservative, who believes that we can apply our knowledge of the remote or the immediate past with prudence only if we are guided by some general principles, which have been laid down for us over the centuries by prophets and philosophers. Burke broke with Locke’s empiricism.”

As Burke himself explained it, “I do not put abstract ideas wholly out of any question; because I well know that under that name I should dismiss principles, and that without the guide and light of sound well understood principles, all reasoning in politics, as in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details, without the means of drawing out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion.” Conservatives aren’t against ideas reached through reasoning—far from it!—but they use these ideas to guide politics, not to replace politics.

Progressing with Prescription

The conservative argues that prescription is what helps us keep ideas, reason, and politics in their proper lanes. By channeling political change through the wisdom of our ancestors we might hope to make some progress towards our ideas of things like justice, liberty, and equality. Prescription provides us with an almost Darwinian model for change, because the institutions, customs, norms, prejudices, and traditions handed down to us were part of a slow, painful process of trial and error. Though not perfect, this model is a group effort over many generations that’s less prone to error than the pontificating of a lone political theorist. In this way, society itself becomes a reflection of what our culture collectively believes society ought to be. This does not mean we always get it right—obviously—but that our greatest hope in achieving some sense of progress will come by holding faithful to the surviving ideas of the past as we press forward.

We began with this post by questioning whether conservatism was simply yesterday’s progressivism. That is, do conservatives simply want society to progress slowly, or do they have some sense of what direction would truly be progress? Does it matter where we’re going or only how we get there? The answer is that both where we’re going and how we get there matter very much to the conservative. But that there is no simple answer to where we’re going for that can only be discerned through a careful study of prescription.

In fact, the conservative would say that even those who don’t fully comprehend where we’re going can nonetheless be leading us in the right direction so long as they follow a prescriptive path. And that is where we’ll turn in Part 4.

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Episode 44 - America's Greatest (and Worst) Presidents - Part 2

Who were America’s Greatest Presidents? Which Presidents had the most lasting impacts that shaped the country in ways that are clearly visible today? What about those Presidents whose blunders, incompetence, or weakness left the nation worse off?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by frequent guest Bob Burch as they work their way through the American Presidents and dissect their legacy—whether great, terrible, or somewhere in-between. Since this is an enormous topic it’s broken up into three episodes. Part 1 covered Presidents George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. In Part 2 Josh and Bob pick things up with Andrew Johnson through Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in Part 3, in next week's episode, Josh and Bob conclude with Harry S. Truman through Jimmy Carter (the last of the Presidents to serve before Millennials were born).

LISTEN HERE

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Beyond Reason – Part 2 (Burke’s Anti-Innovationist Innovation)

William F. Buckley famously defined a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘STOP’!” By that definition, few have embraced a conservative impulse better than Edmund Burke.

Burke lived during the tumultuous time of the French revolution. The revolutionaries prided themselves on tearing down the old French monarch built on history, tradition, and religious faith and erecting a republic built on reason alone. As we saw in Part 1, The Enlightenment was viewed by many to be the Age of Reason. And Enlightenment ideas soon produced disciples eager to restructure their nation on these exciting new innovations.

“The age of revolutions understood itself as advancing the cause of reason in political life,” wrote Yuval Levin in his book The Great Debate. French radicals rejoiced that humanity was entering a new age in which even the common person would enjoy liberté, égalité, fraternité ("liberty, equality, fraternity"). Surely history was on their side. For only the tiny minority who stood to lose their unequal positions of power and wealth would be opposed to reason. Who else could possibly justify opposing reason?

Burke’s Great Anti-Innovationist Innovation: Prescription

It was precisely this attitude of the inevitable progress of human reason that Burke fiercely opposed. I want to emphasize that it was not reason Burke opposed—something we’ll talk about more in Part 3—but the innovative notion that taught reason alone could justify breaking apart all the wisdom, traditions, knowledge, customs, and institutions that had come before. In response to the innovators, Burke offered his great anti-innovationist innovation: prescription.

While Burke didn’t coin the term prescription he did introduce it as a counterpoint to the call to build all things upon the foundation of reason. Levin wrote of Burke that he used “the term to describe the means by which practices and institutions that have long served society well are given the benefit of the doubt against innovations that might undermine them and are used as patterns and models for political life.” This may sound mundane, but its implications are surprisingly profound.

While the innovators were convinced that the best possible society could be arranged by only the best and brightest with the purest of intentions, Burke’s call to prescription was a warning that no mere group of humans would ever be wise enough, or good enough to succeed. “Prescription…means…respecting and preserving the political order as it has been handed down and even according it reverence.” Levin continues, “Prescription thus beings in a kind of humble gratitude.” Prescription teaches that it takes more than the individual’s reason. The sort of wisdom that shapes a good society requires the virtues of gratitude and humility. And what might gratitude and humility teach us?

An Attitude of Gratitude

Gratitude cultivates a respect for the past that teaches us to learn from those who have gone before us. It also prevents us from tearing apart the society built by our ancestors in search of some unattainable utopia. Developing gratitude does not mean we become complacent. It does not mean we are forever content with the way things are, but that we begin with the things we are grateful for before asking how they might be made better.

Since the conservative’s mandate is to conserve, the first step in that process is to identify what is worth conserving, not what should be torn apart. A worldview or political ideology that cannot be defined without stating what it stands against is not rooted in gratitude. In fact, it’s not rooted in anything and will ultimately self-destruct.

Jonah Goldberg, cofounder of The Dispatch says that gratitude defines the very essence of conservatism: “The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context. Conservatism is gratitude.” In his book Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg makes “a plea for gratitude for what we've got”. Marian Tupy, senior editor for HumanProgress.org, assisted Jonah in finding demonstrable ways in which we have much to be thankful for. His organization provides data on a myriad of ways in which our lives are profoundly better now than at any other point in history. From longevity to material goods to overall wealth, our world has never had it better.

But if we don’t know how to put our current situation into a proper historical context, we run the risk of tearing down the good we have in hopes of reaching for something better. Gratitude is an excellent buttress against this temptation and it teaches us what to hold on to as we strive towards excellence.

A Heart of Humility

In Scripture, Proverbs 11:2 (the book of wisdom) admonishes “when pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” The religious, political, philosophical, and cultural traditions of the West have often taught that there exists a strong link between humility and wisdom. And this is a wisdom that extends beyond our capacity to reason, for both the individual and our entire species are fallible.

Humility keeps us from thinking too highly of ourselves so that we can anchor our reason to what is both possible and true, not to what is fanciful and self-centered. This is a particularly important quality in politics, as Yuval Levin explains: “Because building a working political arrangement is extremely difficult, we who inherit one such arrangement should be grateful for it even when we cannot fully understand the sources of its success.”

Humility in politics helps us to admit that we may not know the answers. But just as importantly, it helps us to admit that, even when we can have some confidence in adopting the wisdom of the past, we may still not fully comprehend why we are doing so. Humility doesn’t mean accepting traditions without question. But it does mean respecting those traditions enough to seek out why they were established in the first place, and to be resistant to letting them go unless and until we fully understand why it would be better to let them go.

“Even when we as individuals cannot readily perceive the significance of the wisdom inherent in our cultural capital, the very fact of its having come down to us with the reverence and regard of previous generations should cause us to take seriously as a standard to guide our actions and inquiries, or at least to give it a very significant benefit of the doubt,” wrote Yuval Levin. Edmund Burke showed how this might be applied on a personal level: “If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.” This task, both on a personal and national level, can only be accomplished by the humble.

Does Prescription Mean Opposing All Change?

There is a temptation to over-simplify Burke’s anti-innovationist innovation of prescription to suppose that conservatives are simply opposed to all change. It may be true that a natural and unthinking conservative disposition detests change, but a truer conservative impulse embraces certain changes. Why? Because, whether we like it or not, change is a permanent facet of reality, and in order to conserve we must be willing and able to change. If we never changed, we’d ultimately lose the very things we are trying to conserve.

What prescription demands is not opposition to change, but a penchant for gradual, deliberative, and careful change. Even more importantly, prescription insists that we change the substance of a thing before we take the radical step of changing its form. This means that prescription tells us that while there are rare instances where radical steps like war, revolution, and societal upheaval may be necessary, they should never be attempted without first exhausting reforms that work within the system. And that is because “the system”—no matter how corrupted or imbecilic—was a group endeavor that was built slowly over time.

This is particularly important when it comes to the form of government and the laws that govern a people. Human relationships and society are so complex that it would be impossible for anyone to truly comprehend all of the ways in which radical change is going to impact the nation, to say nothing of each individual! “The authority of the law depends on its stability and that people build their lives around certain assumptions that should not be disrupted needlessly,” writes Levin. Change may be good and needful, but even good and needful change will prove disruptive and must be handled with care.

Paper Audits

A few years before I began working for the State Auditor’s Office, a prior administration implemented “paperless audits”—a near-universal practice now in auditing firms where the auditor’s working papers, reports, and supporting documentation are stored electronically rather than in large, paper binders. The implementation took place almost immediately after someone from the administrative staff informed everyone that, from this day forward, we were going paperless.

There was no transition period, no training, no new paperless software, and no established network of employees to turn to if someone had questions. As you might imagine, it was a complete disaster, and the entire project was abandoned a short time later. The problem wasn’t that paperless audits were a bad idea, but that the change mandated had no appreciation for the complexities of the paper-based culture that had developed over many decades across a complex network of audits, clients, and employees.

Shortly after I started, I began to work on a new plan to implement a paperless process. It was anything but easy. Most people don’t particularly like change, but when you add to that the disastrous attempt in the past and the bureaucratic nature of a state agency, there were plenty who were not only opposed but downright hostile to the idea of giving it another try.

I developed a seventeen-point plan (no joke!) for what would need to happen to get us from here to there. It included multiple hurdles from doing paperless audits myself to better understand the challenges in implementing them in the organization, working with IT to find ways to improve our wireless and internet connectivity issues in rural Oklahoma counties, gradually developing forms and templates for the other auditors to use that were versatile in both a paper and paperless environment, and developing reports on the various ways in which paperless audits would ultimately benefit us, to name but a few!

And this was hardly a solo activity. Over time, as the momentum began to shift towards a paperless-friendly culture, I had the help and support of administration and various groups were formed to determine what software we should use, what hardware would be procured and what resources would be used, how a paperless process would be strategically implemented, and what policies and procedures must be developed. We assessed the willingness and ability of each district office to implement a paperless process and used it to create a timeline of which offices would go “paperless” when.

When everything was finally in place, I spent the better part of a month traveling to our various district offices, conducting training on how to use the new software and what a paperless process would look like. And that was just the beginning. Years later there is still much work to be done to continuously cultivate a culture of tech-savvy auditors, respond to individual and group challenges, and develop templates, processes, and forms that address the ever-evolving world of auditing.

The transition from a paper to paperless office was ultimately beneficial and even essential in the audit industry. The change was good, but the implementation, considerations, challenges, and complexities that surrounded that change required a good deal of prescriptive application to avoid the failure of the past. That prescription required us to understand our culture, the imbedded wisdom in the way we’d “always done things” and how to ultimately connect the old with the new to keep our office equipped to meet the growing demands of our industry. This is the chief role of prescription. As Levin explains, prescription aims to “ground the new in the old, to make change into extension, and so to provide for continuity and stability so that problems are addressed while the overall order is not unduly disturbed.”

Does Prescription Mean Accepting All Change?

But there is another way in which we may be tempted to over-simply Burke’s anti-innovationist innovation of prescription: the notion that, in the end, all that matters to a conservative is that change happens slowly and follows a prescription-approved procedure. If that’s all there were to prescription, then how are we to distinguish good changes from bad changes once they’ve become the established “norm”? Supposing the State Auditor decided we were better off under the old paper-based audits; would it be fitting and proper to make that change so long as it was done in a prescriptive manner?

Surely the conservative must believe in something fixed and permanent—some ideal to strive towards that allows us to measure “progress” and evaluate the appropriateness of change. Prescription is not a one-sided tool that cares only about the means of change and has nothing to say about the ends. In fact, one of Burke’s chief concerns with those of his era demanding we rely on reason alone was precisely that such thinking put us at risk of ignoring deeper truths that were only discoverable through prescription. And that is where we’ll turn in Part 3.

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Episode 43 - America's Greatest (and Worst) Presidents - Part 1

Who were America’s Greatest Presidents? Which Presidents had the most lasting impacts that shaped the country in ways that are clearly visible today? What about those Presidents whose blunders, incompetence, or weakness left the nation worse off?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by frequent guest Bob Burch as they work their way through the American Presidents and dissect their legacy—whether great, terrible, or somewhere in-between. Since this is an enormous topic it’s broken up into two episodes. Part 1 covers Presidents George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. In Part 2 Josh and Bob pick things up with Andrew Johnson through the Presidents of the modern age.

LISTEN HERE

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Beyond Reason – Part 1

During the eighteenth century there emerged an explosion of intellectual, philosophical, political, and economic ideas that swept across the Western world collectively referred to as The Enlightenment. These ideas led to unprecedented breakthroughs in science, the emergence of the free market, revolutions and political upheaval, and massive shifts in how people thought about the concepts of God, the role of the church and state, society, and the individual.

It would be an understatement to say that this was an exciting time to be alive. Nearly every prejudice, presupposition, institution, and idea were being pulled apart, questioned, reconstructed, or discarded. Systems of government that had endured for a millennia were giving way to radical new ideas of the rights of the individual, the equality of all people, and the shared humanity of us all. Some began to see The Enlightenment as the Age of Reason where humans would finally rid themselves of the ancient religious superstitions and the barbaric hierarchy of slavery and monarchy and would enter a new age where reason ruled supreme.

But to suggest that the Age of Reason contained some cohesive set of ideas that everyone could agree on would be like saying the Age of Trumpis an era of bipartisanship. Some may have believed that reason was inevitably progressing history, but others were skeptical or even opposed to this idea. As William F. Buckley once famously quipped, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘STOP’!” And in the Age of Reason conservatives were yelling “STOP” as loudly as they could.

But why would a conservative oppose reason? There are plenty of things the progressive calls progress that conservatives understandably oppose—collectivism, equality of outcomes, the loss of cultural traditions, expanding state control—but what could possibly be wrong with a call to reason? In fact, don’t conservatives often accuse progressives of being over-reliant on their emotions instead of reason?

The answer lies in what we mean by reason. As Thomas Sowell put it:

“Reason has at least two very different meanings. One is a cause-and-effect meaning: There is a reason why water expands when it freezes into ice, even though most of us who are not physicists do not know what that reason is—and at one time, no one knew the reason. The other meaning of reason is articulated specification of causation or logic: When it is demanded that individuals or society justify their actions before the bar of reason, this is what is meant. The more constrained one’s vision of human capabilities and potential, the greater the difference between these two meanings. Everything may have a cause and yet human beings may be unable to specify what it is.”

From this vantage point we see that conservatives are not opposed to reason but they are skeptical of humanity’s capacity for employing reason sufficiently or intentionally in certain situations or fields. Reason might be an appropriately sufficient tool in the field of philosophy or science, but can the same be said of the field of politics?

“Many of the greatest challenges a statesman must confront arise from the less rational elements of the human character,” writes author and political analyst Yuval Levin, “Governing is, of course, a rational activity, and political thought must certainly be guided by some general principles, but it’s a mistake to assume that effective principles can be drawn from abstract premises rather than actual experience. The general must be derived from the particular, not the other way around.” Reason is an excellent tool for deriving general principles; but it isn’t well suited for studying the nuances of highly specific situations.

The conservative does not believe we can govern well using reason alone because politics is more than applying general principles derived from reasoning. Throughout his book, The Great Debate, Yuval Levin uses British statesman Edmund Burke to illustrate this point: “Burke believes that the attempt to apply what he calls metaphysical methods in politics confuses politicians and citizens about the purpose of politics—leading them to think that governing is about proving a point rather than advancing the interests and happiness of a nation.”

What then does the conservative believe is required beyond reason to govern well? Again, Levin turns to Burke: “If the premises of Enlightenment liberalism are inadequate, and if the resulting faith in modern reason is unjustified, what is the alternative organizing principle of, and the appropriate means for thinking about, political change? Burke’s answer…is prescription—Burke’s great anti-innovationist innovation.”

Just what is prescription and how does it take us beyond reason? That is what we’ll be exploring throughout this series, beginning with Part 2 next week.

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