Why we need gardeners: Brian Lee Crowley for Law & Liberty

In modern liberal democracies, progressivism and conservatism are usually considered antagonists. Upon closer inspection, though, both names are historically and lexicographically wrong. As I argued in my last book, there is a crying need to reimagine the two casts of mind at the heart of modern politics, even if neither corresponds precisely to any major political party.

No one has better drawn the distinction between these two types of mind than Michael Oakeshott, the late English political thinker. In the essay that gave the title to the collection in the Liberty Fund edition of Rationalism in Politics, he wrote:

At bottom the Rationalist stands (he always stands for something) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of “reason.” … He is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his “reason”; optimistic, because the rationalist never doubts the power of his “reason,” when properly applied, to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. … He is something also of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself.

Of the alternative, traditionalist cast of mind, by contrast, Oakeshott had this to say:

To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, … the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Many of us can easily make the transition from Oakeshott’s contrast between the rationalist and the traditionalist to today’s opposition of progressivism to conservatism. But it is perhaps important to clarify right away that Oakeshott is not saying that the traditionalist is irrational. It would not be accurate to say that he or she does not believe in the power of the human mind to understand and solve humanity’s problems. On the contrary, he is saying that when we engage in the project of “inventing” institutions from so-called “first principles,” when we consult only our own experience and knowledge in seeking to solve our problems, the answers we come up with are bound to be less effective and less suited to the character and dispositions of the people called to live under them than the answers that have grown up over generations of careful and controlled experimentation that values the affection in which the tried and true and familiar is held by the population. This contrast between the “grown” and the “invented” or “designed” is, for me, the key one.

Let me make a small digression and offer a practical example of what is at stake: The late Norman Barry, a British professor of political thought, told me he knew of two American universities built near one another at roughly the same time. In the first, the rationalist designers laid out a campus that looked spectacular from the air, with lovely landscaping and curving symmetrical pathways that gave the whole a pleasing aspect—at least from 30,000 feet. To do so, however, those pathways had to follow routes that were inconvenient and awkward for those on the ground who were using them to get to where they needed to go, which is actually the purpose of pathways. The campus became a battleground between authorities trying to get people to respect their utopian but impractical “first principles” or “invented” design and the students who were late and needed to get to class.

The other campus, under the authority of traditionalists, took a different tack. They built their buildings but held off landscaping for a year or two so that they could observe where students actually wanted to go and the paths that they trod to get there. Once established, the university simply paved over the paths and landscaped around them. The result was not so nice to look at from the air, but resulted in a harmonious relationship between the authorities and those who were trying to get from their dorm to the lecture hall and then the cafeteria. Put another way, the pathways on the campus “grew” out of the needs and experiences of those who had to use them.

Those who think of society more as a garden than a machine might be called “gardeners.” They see humans as autonomous beings whose choices and actions allow the unfurling of their character over time, not as dials to be twiddled. For gardeners, therefore, grown institutions are, on the whole, more effective and held in higher esteem than invented ones. Gardeners in nature are mindful of the fact that while they certainly wish to put their stamp on their garden, they are very far indeed from being in total control. They are only one participant among many, not master of all the others. They must make their peace with the effects of predators, of climate, of weather, of soil, of nutrients, and of the life cycle and characteristics of the plants they seek to cultivate. Gardeners know that they can create the conditions in which a garden will flourish, but they cannot overmaster the natural processes on which they depend; you cannot make flowers grow faster by pulling on them.

The alternative to the gardening metaphor is that of the engineers or designer. Designers believe that institutions derive their legitimacy from their conformity to some set of abstract first principles, such as, say, that all authority derives from “the people” or that “democracy” must always trump established interests, or that perfect equality of outcome is the ideal social arrangement.

They further believe that the worth of institutions can be determined by how their results conform to an abstract pattern that they find aesthetically pleasing. Thus an economy that does not produce identical outcomes for men and women, or whose income distribution is too “skewed” or whose distribution of jobs among ethnic groups is not as these “designing minds” think it ought to be, or a city that is “too” dispersed or “too” reliant on cars instead of transit, or a voting system that “underrepresents” certain groups relative to their weight in the population, is an arrangement that is morally suspect and subject to correction or preferably wholesale replacement by something “better.”

The traditionalist gardener, by contrast, thinks human action does not proceed from abstract first principles, but from messy and very un-theoretical practical experience of what works and has passed the test of time and is acquiesced in by the population regardless of how “quaint” or “inefficient” it appears to those who value only abstractions and not practical success.

Marxism or radical feminism or Chavismo or progressivism or any of the other fashionable critiques of liberal capitalism start from theoretical premises: society is corrupt because of inequality or sexism or colonialism and because it does not measure up in theory, it must be discarded and replaced with one “designed” to eliminate the evil du jour.

But what our society’s critics do not realize is that those who think the liberal-capitalist order worth defending are not engaged in the same enterprise as they are.

Liberal capitalism was not “designed” by anyone. There is no presiding designing genius, no Karl Marx, no Vladimir Lenin, no Betty Friedan, no Malcolm X, no Franz Fanon, no Mao Zedong, no Michel Foucault. The society we have inherited grew up out of the experience of uncounted generations of those who went before us. The job of gardeners is therefore not to theorize, but to untangle and interpret, to understand not to design, to respect the seasons and the nature of the garden’s residents, to create the conditions in which the garden can flourish. We gardeners seek to understand why society works, because a society that works as well as ours is indeed a rare jewel in human experience, and certainly one not to be tossed aside because some academic scribbler who can’t even remember to keep his university office hours or pick up his dry cleaning thinks he can redesign society from the ground up based on his superior insights and understandings.

The people who liberal-capitalism’s opponents therefore think of as its founders or designers, the Edmund Burkes, the Adam Smiths, the David Humes, the F. A. Hayeks, the Milton Freidmans, are nothing of the sort. They are the ones who realized that the practical workings of our social order, designed by no one, nonetheless required defenders against the onslaught of the theoreticians. There is and can be no “return to first principles” because this approach isn’t based on first principles.

This idea that institutions and behaviours might not have been designed by anyone, that they are not the result of theorising, that they have not been imposed by the will of those in authority but have grown incrementally out of experience is completely foreign to the progressive mindset, but is the central understanding of gardeners.

The gardeners’ mindset is guided, not by a central idea or policy, but by two emotional dispositions. They are first and foremost grateful for what we as a society have; one might even say that we love the peculiar and unique institutions, history, experiences, and behaviours that constitute our liberal-democracies because all of these have made us who we are. Second, gardeners are humble about the ability of present-day men and women to substitute their own necessarily limited knowledge and experience for that embodied in the institutions, traditions, and culture of which we are the inheritors.

Theory is not the yardstick by which our past and our institutions should be measured; rather they should be measured by the practical success they confer on those who use them.

There are five lessons I draw for those who are struggling with how to respond to the march of progressivism.

First: The traditions of a free and ordered society are not self-evident, but are subtle and complex.

Second: Those ideas and traditions must be defended against their opponents—and chief amongst these are ignorance and apathy.

Third: Conservatism is not a deduction from first principles; whatever principles it has are deductions from human experience as tested and shaped by time. Talking about a return to “first principles” of conservatism is to adopt the designer mentality of our adversaries. Whatever it is we are defending, it is not first principles.

Fourth: The ideas and traditions that underpin our freedom and that make the burden of order light and tolerable must be teased out and defended afresh in each generation in a language suited to that generation and with reference to the issues that preoccupy that generation. Adam Smith defeated mercantilism and Edmund Burke dissected the dangers of the French Revolution, and in so doing did great service to mankind. It is now our job to carry that conversation into our own era.

Fifth: Good ideas are not eternally rooted in human consciousness but must be learned afresh by each person, and the human mind is made such that if you do not ensure that it is fed with a diet of sound ideas, tested by experience, bad ideas will rush in and fill the vacuum. And the ideas we should focus on are not those of technocratic expertise and political management, but rather those of gratitude, love, affection, and humility.

It may not seem like it, but that is a radical proposition in the original meaning of “radical”—to “return to the roots” of genuine conservatism. And it has the singular advantage that while it does not work in theory, it works beautifully in practice.