CONSERVATISM

An assessment of conservative ideas about the relationship between ethics, science, and technology must begin with a brief discussion of conservatism itself. Unlike liberalism, fascism, or communism, conservatism cannot be identified with a particular conception of the ideal society. In its broadest meaning, conservatism means simply "adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried," as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Cooper Institute speech (Lincoln 1989, p. 122). If this definition is accepted, one can be "conservative" about almost anything that has lasted a long time.

In Europe and North America over the last few centuries, however, conservatism has been associated with a defense of classical liberalism in politics and economics against first the radicalism of the French Revolution and then against socialism, Communism, fascism, and Nazism. In making this defense, conservatism has also accepted and supported the achievements of science and technology so closely identified with liberalism and capitalism. European and North American conservatism since the French Revolution is thus an inherently paradoxical enterprise, because some of the key institutions it seeks to conserve, including science and technology, are themselves generators of change. Conservatives primarily interested in economics are more likely to welcome such change than religious and cultural conservatives. Conservatism nevertheless sharply differs from the philosophical liberalism of thinkers such as John Dewey or John Rawls in that all conservatives, whatever their primary interest, insist there are sources of moral authority beyond the liberal consensus. These include revealed religion, natural law, and the insights derived from humanistic study. Science, conservatives believe, cannot answer fundamental questions about the meaning of life, nor can technology resolve the most important ethical dilemmas.

Limited Criticism of Science and Technology

Because of its emphasis on the limits of knowledge that science can make available and the benefits technology may confer, conservatism is often mistakenly associated with the wholesale condemnation of technology associated with Romanticism and also promoted by radical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse who, in One-Dimensional Man (1964), views technology as a form of social control and domination. The Southern Agrarians, a group of poets and writers who defended the traditions of the U.S. South, including racial segregation, in I'll Take My Stand (1930), were writing as romantics rather than conservatives when they objected to technology itself, as when Andrew Lytle proclaimed "a war to the death between technology and the ordinary human functions of living" (p. 202) and argued that the South "should dread industrialism like a pizen snake" (p. 234). The most influential heir of the Agrarians, Richard Weaver (1910–1963), adopted a more representative conservative viewpoint when, in Visions of Order (1964), he criticized not science itself but "barbarism nourished by ... scientistic fallacies" (p. 151) and "pseudoscientific images of man" (p. 153).

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) went further in defending science when he asserted in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) that "liberal democracy based on technical knowledge is the highest type of public life hitherto known" (p. 52). Yet mainstream twentieth century conservatives in England and the United States shared his belief that the key issue was to find a way to maintain the real achievements of liberal democracies in the face of totalitarianism, just as conservatives in the twenty-first century seek to guard those achievements against the threats posed by new political and religious fanaticisms. Ortega believed that totalitarian regimes were made possible by the rise of the "mass-man" who felt only "radical ingratitude" toward the developments in science and technology that "has made possible the ease of his existence" (p.
58).The masses do not grasp that the devices they take for granted are really "marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight" (p. 60). Ortega believed scientists could scarcely avoid becoming mass-persons themselves, because the specialization required by modern science made it impossible for individual scientific workers to understand science as a whole and thus achieve comprehensive vision of the universe. At the same time Ortega warned that attempts to return to a pre-industrial way of life would be suicidal.

Limited Authority of Science and Technology

Western conservatism has accepted the authority of the physical and biological sciences within their own sphere, but has sharply questioned the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human beings. Edmund Burke's description of the moving spirits of the French Revolution in his Reflections (1790) indicts not scientists but pseudo-scientists: "sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators" (p. 170). An American admirer of Burke, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), based his New Humanism on the distinction between what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "law for man, and law for thing" in his "Ode, Inscribed to W.
H. Channing." The neglect of that distinction, Babbitt argued in his first book Literature and the American College (1908), leads to an intellectual climate in which "Man himself and the products of his spirit, language, and literature, are treated not as having a law of their own, but as things; as entirely subject to the same methods that have won for science such triumphs over phenomenal nature" (p. 86). Babbitt summed up his views in a short 1930 essay, "What I Believe." Although he objects when "the pseudo-scientist claims for physical science a hegemony to which it is not entitled" (p. 11), he also disclaims the romantic condemnation of intellect itself. For Babbitt the exaltation of feeling unrestrained by thought and the exaltation of mechanical efficiency for its own sake are merely two sides of the same coin. He counters what he considers the dominant trend of the age with a call for a "positive and critical humanism" (p. 14) based on a reaffirmation of "the truths of the inner life" (p. 18).

Contradictions

George Santayana (1863–1952) argued in "The Genteel Tradition at Bay" (1931) that Babbitt's New Humanism was only the last gasp of a genteel tradition that neither expressed nor understood what was truly dynamic in American society. Santayana had described the United States in "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" (1911) as a "country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generations" (p. 39). Scientific and especially technological developments were an expression of the younger generation, while religion, philosophy and the arts were under the control of the "hereditary spirit" (p. 39) of the genteel tradition. The contrast between the two mentalities could be symbolized by the difference between two characteristic products of American architecture: the "sky-scraper" (p. 40) and the "reproduction of the colonial mansion" (p. 40). A philosopher, Santayana intimated, should understand that the new society could not be judged according to the criteria of the genteel tradition but must be accepted on its merits and judged on its own terms.

In Reason in Science (1906) Santayana criticized the "school of political conservatives" (p. 307) who insist on retaining the language of "theology and metaphysics"(p. 307) rather than that of science because of the loss of social stability that might ensue. Such "sensitive conservatism" (p. 307) is "entangled in a pathetic delusion" (p. 307) ; it is "conservatism in a shipwreck"
(p. 307). Santayana himself was more than ready to acknowledge the validity of science, which he considered "common knowledge extended and refined"
(p. 393). He criticized the critique of science by idealist metaphysicians around the beginning of the twentieth century on grounds that seem applicable to the postmodernist critique of science at the beginning of the twenty-first. It is hardly convincing, observes Santayana, "when science is systematically disparaged in favour of a method that is merely disintegrating and incapable of establishing a single positive truth"
(p. 312).

Russell Kirk (1918–1994) admired both Babbitt and Santayana and included both in his seminal The Conservative Mind (1953). In an essay on "Civilization Without Religion" (1996) Kirk goes further than Babbitt and disagrees with Santayana in arguing that the decline of European and North American civilization could be averted only by a "restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine" (p. 15). Even Kirk, however, is careful to criticize not science but rather a scientistic misunderstanding of the implications of science. According to Kirk, "the principal cause of the loss of the idea of the holy is the attitude called scientism" (p. 11). It is scientism, not science, that takes it as proved that "men and women are naked apes merely; that the ends of existence are production and consumption merely; that happiness is the gratification of sensual impulses; and that concepts of the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting are mere exploded superstitions" (p. 11). In an essay titled "Humane Learning in the Age of the Computer" (1996), Kirk argues that technology can never replace the flesh-and-blood teacher, but he does so in the name not only of the humanities but also of science, worrying that "if facility in operating computers tends to be emphasized at the expense of serious study of physics and mathematics, the springs of the scientific imagination may dry up" (p. 122).

Critique of Scientism

In "Science and the Studies of Man," a contribution to an anthology on Scientism and Values (1960), Eliseo Vivas makes a representative conservative argument when he criticizes the "so-called behavioral sciences"
(p. 50) for attempting to adopt the methods and assume the prestige of chemistry and physics. Vivas does not deny and indeed insists on the validity of scientific method when applied in physics and biology, but he rejects the idea that "the only valid knowledge is scientific" (p. 50). Like most other conservatives, Vivas believes that "there is philosophical knowledge of a substantive nature and that there is moral and religious knowledge and, in a qualified sense, even aesthetic knowledge" (p. 50). Vivas argues that the attempt to study human beings and their institutions according to the methods of the natural sciences results not in science but in scientism.

The distinction between science and scientism was not, of course, noted only by conservatives. The prestige of science among radicals and militant reformers, however, made it difficult for them to draw a line with the clarity and firmness of conservatism, even when they wanted to do so. The appeal of Dewey's pragmatism, for example, was closely linked to his proposals to use scientific techniques to reform human society. Likewise two of the outstanding examples of scientism in the twentieth century, Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, appealed to those who wished to either radically change or destroy bourgeois society. Both used the vocabulary of science, and both attracted adherents by claiming the authority of science.

Though the influence of Marxism was vastly more destructive, both used their prestige to challenge and undermine the traditional moral principles at the heart of conservatism. By the twenty-first century the fraudulence of both has been revealed for all but the willfully blind to see. Other versions of scientism remain, however, including the attempt to use the prestige of the theory of biological evolution to shape a secularist philosophy of human nature and view of the universe.

The Conservative Middle Ground

In opposing repudiation of the concept of truth by postmodernist skepticism, conservatism in the twenty-first century has made common cause with the natural sciences in defending knowledge that is objective and universally true. Conservatives have opposed attempts to formulate a feminist science or any version of science based on ethnicity. Likewise conservatives have criticized the characterization of technology as in itself demonic as claimed by some environmental radicals.

In response to the development of biotechnology, however, conservatives such as Leon Kass have continued to be guided by traditional moral principles such as the sanctity of innocent human life and human dignity. Sometimes this has led them to oppose some new uses of medical technology, such as those involved in stem cell research. The same principle of the sanctity of life has also led conservatives to object to the withdrawal of technological support from patients without their consent, whether at the behest of the state or others. Conservatism in the twenty-first century, as earlier, continues to affirm the relevance and validity of traditional ethical principles in evaluating the moral implications of new developments in science and technology, whatever those might be.

In 1932 Winston Churchill observed that "while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement" (p. 279). As a true conservative, however, Churchill believed that what was required was not "progress" in thought but rather he believed it "above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions"
(p. 279).

JAMES SEATON

SEE ALSO Agrarianism;Capitalism;Democracy;Liberalism;Marxism;Ortega y Gasset, José;President's Council on Bioethics;Scientism;Totalitarianism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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