The Only Bulwark Against Nihilism

Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order
by Daniel J. Mahoney
ISI Books, 2010, 208 pages, $54

This book by an American political scientist begins with a 1966 quote by the Hungarian-British political philosopher Michael Polanyi which helps explain why John Howard was so successful a prime minister. Polanyi stated in The Tacit Dimension:

I believe that the new self-determination of man can be saved from destroying itself only by recognising its own limits in an authoritative traditional framework which upholds it. Tom Paine could proclaim the rights of each generation to determine its institutions anew, since the range of his demands was in fact very modest. He unquestionably accepted the continuity of culture and of the order of private property as the framework of self-determination. Today the ideas of Tom Paine can be saved from self-destruction only by a conscious reaffirmation of traditional continuity. Paine’s ideal of unlimited gradual progress can be saved from destruction only by the kind of traditionalism taught by Paine’s opponent, Edmund Burke.

John Howard’s vision of the Liberal Party, which he articulated in many speeches and in his valuable autobiography, Lazarus Rising, is that the party is the bearer of both Australia’s liberal and conservative traditions. Daniel Mahoney argues convincingly that the history of the last century has shown this combination to lead to the best possible political order.

This book reminds us of truths articulated by some of mankind’s finest philosophical and political minds. It shows that open-ended political projects, aiming at human perfectibility and without a limiting and moderating framework of unchanging values (such as is provided by, to give the most obvious example, traditional religion) carry with them their own destruction. (It is no coincidence that the last two popes, both first-class intellects, identified moral relativism as the greatest enemy of modern civilisation and of human happiness and fulfilment.)

Mahoney argues that we need a reaffirmation of conservative-framed liberalism, whose great exemplars include Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Raymond Aron, and the “noble” Ronald Reagan. I would include Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and, on the more modest stage he was given to walk, John Howard.

These were men whose political vision was liberal in the sense of being anti-totalitarian, but accepted the need for restraint and rules, particularly moral rules. They were all, I think, religious believers. (Churchill, like some of the American founding fathers, was a deist.)

This has also been the essential message of all the great political novels of the twentieth century, including Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon. Australia has not had a great tradition of anti-totalitarian literature, or literature of “ordered liberty”, at least in creative fiction, but one major poem on the subject has been James McAuley’s masterly “Letter to John Dryden”:

Fare forward, fellow-travelling liberal
For ever dancing to some alien song,
And everything by turns but nothing long! …
The law of Moses said it very clearly:
Man cannot live by Oslo lunches merely …

The alternative of unrestrained liberality, taken to its logical conclusion, is Stalinist Russia, the Third Reich or North Korea. Mahoney’s immediate present concern is unspoken but plainly implied: the hijacking of the American Democrat Party, the party of Kennedy and Truman, by radical extremists whose attitude to traditional values seems to be that they should be quickly and thoroughly destroyed.

Mahoney writes eloquently of Churchill, one of his champions of these basic values:

Through his thought and deed, this humane anti-totalitarian encouraged citizens of modern democracies to draw precious civic and spiritual resources from a tradition of civilization that is broader and deeper than the “rights of man”.

Edmund Burke, nominally a Whig, of course defined this argument for the conservative underpinnings of a liberal order by his whole political life: he supported the American Revolution because it was undertaken from a profoundly conservative conception of ancient liberties, and supported justice for Ireland and India for similar reasons. He predicted the French Revolution would turn into a bloodbath, because it denied, and sought to abolish, those foundations upon which society rested. The Russian and Chinese revolutions destroyed societies which might have evolved into liberal-conservative orders.

These are not original arguments—they are the product of a line of thought stretching back to the ancient world—but they seem in need of restating today, when in both America and Britain we see political power in the hands of men either hostile to the preservation of conservative traditions or at best indifferent to them. (British Tory Minister Michael Gove is now trying to prevent satirical films which ridicule British patriotism such as Blackadder Goes Forth and Oh! What a Lovely War being set on school curricula as historical documentaries. One of the advisers in the making of Oh! What a Lovely War has since been revealed as a Soviet agent.) Mahoney also examines why liberal order without conservative foundations—such as the Russian provisional government of 1917 and the Weimar Republic—had no strength to defend themselves. One is reminded of Colm Brogan’s description of inter-war French schoolteachers who “taught by the light of mature and tolerant wisdom” which left their pupils believing in nothing in particular and played a great part in allowing Nazi Germany to conquer the country in a month.

It is ominous that, where the founding fathers of the United States claimed that certain truths were self-evident, and therefore unchangeable, that men were endowed by their Creator with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, President Barack Obama should have written in The Audacity of Hope: “Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth …”

The sump-intellectual French radicals of 1968 had, among other infantile slogans, “There are no such things as facts!” Can one imagine a Robert Menzies or a John Howard subscribing to this villainy-justifying drivel? As the pseudo-Nietzschean Lord Ivywood says in G.K. Chesterton’s astonishingly prophetic early novel The Flying Inn: “I see the breaking of barriers. Beyond that I see nothing.” (Like Nietzsche, Lord Ivywood finally goes mad.)

In Australia the greatest liberal conservative has obviously been Robert Menzies, on whom John Howard modelled his own political outlook. It was the liberal Menzies who resolutely declared war on Nazi Germany while Labor was still pacifist and opposed to the war effort (even opposing conscription for home defence).

Naturally Menzies was hated by the proto-totalitarian Manning Clark, who claimed Menzies, in opposing Hitler, had demonstrated a “fatal flaw”, “prostituted his great talents to the service of a corrupt and doomed society” and displayed “arrogance and allegiance to the ‘Old Dead Tree’”. Further, according to Clark, “He lacked the one precious gift of reading the direction of the River of Life.” The context makes it plain that the only possible meaning for these passages is that Clark, writing in 1987 (that is, forty-two years after the end of the Second World War and the opening of the extermination camps), saw Nazi Germany as representing the River of Life, which presumably Menzies should have joined. It is a neat clinical picture of the state of mind absolutely toxic to liberal conservatism.

By contrast, John Howard, who as a student in London watched Churchill’s funeral, has recalled listening to Menzies’s broadcast at the time, and his pride in Menzies’s “deep sense of history”.

Mahoney cites, and masterfully analyses, Solzhenitsyn’s critiques of orders which explicitly or implicitly reject the sovereignty of nature or God, or “any authority outside the human will”. He follows Solzhenitsyn’s point that the reason so many Western intellectuals became infatuated with communism was that they had nothing to set against it. Communism and liberal humanism, both looking to anthropocentric political orders, with nothing beyond man, were cousins. There is an eloquent defence here of Solzhenitsyn against the latter-day caricature of him as a primitive, authoritarian Slavophile. In fact, the restraints Solzhenitsyn prescribes for society seem no different from those of conventional Christianity.

This book complements, though from a more political angle, Peter Kreeft’s dialogue Socrates Meets Descartes (2007). It is unfortunate that in America “liberal” has come to mean left-wing. This makes the idea of a conservatively-framed liberalism sound in America like a contradiction in terms and makes it much harder to advocate.

This book, beautifully written, is a most valuable resource, which should be regarded as a vital requirement for a modern education in the humanities, for every political science and political philosophy course and in every theological college and seminary. It gives an enhanced understanding of the best of our political institutions and brilliantly diagnoses and warns against current political pathologies.

Hal G.P. Colebatch’s book Australia’s Secret War was published recently by Quadrant Books.