An unfortunate outgrowth of human intelligence, ideology is a deadly and pernicious force. Capable of unraveling the rationality of even the most discipline mind, it can enslave the wills of millions, chaining them to beliefs that have no truck with reasonableness or compassion, all while convincing these shackled minds that its creeds, its methods, and its objectives are not only perfectly acceptable, but absolutely necessary. Such groupthink has repeatedly, over countless centuries, riven our world, throwing it into darkness and chaos from which generations are needed to recover. But just how do we distinguish ideology from rational argument? How do we avoid having our ideas and our beliefs captured by dogma? Dr. O'Hara demonstrates wonderfully well in his fascinating, if somewhat dense, treatise.
What is conservatism and just what does it stand for? Is it the big-C Conservatism, championed by American Republicans, that advocates for the exportation of democracy, even at the point of a gun; that exemplifies as virtuous the values of big business, no matter the cost in morality; and that uses its patriotic bent to agitate for the strongest possible national defense, regardless of the relative powers of its enemies? Or is it the small-c conservatism that believes in incremental change, that acknowledges that our understanding of ourselves and our world is limited, and that holds with no sacred cows but the openness of ones mind to any fact regardless of how painful or inconvenient?
Strongly contending that conservatism is, in fact, the latter, not the former, Dr. O'Hara argues that two guiding principles should direct small-c conservatism. The first of these is the Knowledge Principle, the belief that society is too complex and too individualistic to allow for anyone, or any computer, to develop a clear understanding of what it wants, what it needs, or even what it should have. The second of these is the Change Principle, the notion that, having established that outcomes cannot always be known, innovation, from government on down, must be adopted cautiously. For wholesale change is invariably disruptive to existing traditions and institutions. And that if we cannot know society, then we cannot know if the change will be to the good. And if we cannot know the change will be to the good, then we must be cautious with its implementation to limit the risk of destroying what is good and functional in the name of nothing more than change.
Conservatism is fascinating work. While Dr. O'Hara, a senior fellow at the University of Southampton, is occasionally laborious with his prose, relying on opaque, philosophic constructs to support some of his contentions, he is, in the main, an engaging guide into the land of small-c conservatism. After clearly stating his two founding principles, he leads the reader on a tour through the ideological minefields of partisan politics and the structure of government to demonstrate that many of the worlds socioeconomic problems can be reasoned through by an adherence to some basic points of logic. Like any good argument, made with reason rather than ideological bias, Dr. O'Hara makes his case convincingly. For he reasonably points out that our existing values and systems are important to us, that, within reason, we know they function, and that to abandon them for uncertainty is, to say the least, risky. Logical points all...
For all its appeal, though, Dr. O'Hara's conservatism leaves a lot to be desired. For we cannot simply accept as fact that society is unknowable. To accept such a premise is to cease working towards making it knowable. And given that understanding society would undoubtedly help us improve it, this seems shortsighted. Should we just disregard oceans of scientific data just because we can't be sure how to weight it, or how definitively to act based upon it? Should we not trawl that ocean for useful conclusions that can then be put to good use? Secondly, though the author argues that small-c conservatives are not opposed to change, it seems to me that slow change is little more than a euphemism for stagnancy. Yes, Dr. O'Hara lays out how small-c conservatives would implement change, beginning with pilot projects that are increasingly scaled up until they have been proven to be valid on a wide enough scale to be legislated. But what if these piloted notions fail for extraneous reasons? What if, like so many things in our world, they are sabotaged by powerful people adverse to what the projects propose?
Dr. O'Hara's conservatism is quite appealing and there can be no doubt that it would be a significant improvement upon the big-c Conservatism so often practiced in our world. But I wonder. While Dr. O'Hara's ideal society is slowly, methodically changing for the better, what if nearby societies are ambitiously changing, transformatively changing, creating a dynamism that always keeps them ahead of the conservative land? An engaging if somewhat monotonous journey... (3/5 Stars)
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