In 2010, The Intercollegiate Review published my article on "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." I argued that while metaphysical conservatism views human social order as grounded in a transcendent realm of cosmic design, evolutionary conservatism is empiricist in viewing human social order as grounded in common human experience as shaped by human nature, human custom, and human judgment. I explained how that conflict had arisen in the history of conservative thought beginning with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, in which one could see the tension between Burke's metaphysical conservatism and his evolutionary conservatism. I indicated what was at stake between those two positions, and I defended the evolutionary side of this dispute. I concluded with a practical illustration of the moral implications of this debate as applied to the American moral controversy over slavery.
In some previous posts, I have defended my argument in that article against some critics. But I now see that I was mistaken about one point. I thought that Russell Kirk had adopted the metaphysical side of Burke's conservatism and ignored the evolutionary side that would support a Darwinian conservatism. Now I see that Kirk's writings actually show the same tension between the metaphysical and the evolutionary that first arose in Burke's Reflections. This thought came to me as I pondered the presentations at the Kirk Center conference on Kirk and Scruton.
KIRK AND THE PERMANENT THINGS
Kirk stated the metaphysical and religious version of conservatism in 1953 in The Conservative Mind. The first canon of conservative thought, he declared, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead." Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature." In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order." In all of his formulations, he connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design." Opposed to such conservative thinking were "those scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to undermine the first principles of conservative order" (Kirk 1985: 8-11; 1982: xv). Here in the early Kirk, we see the common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative order by denying the religious belief in a transcendent metaphysical order.
But then, in Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, Kirk showed how enduring norms for human life, which he called "the permanent things," could be grounded empirically in human experience--human nature, human custom, and human judgment--without any necessary appeal to a metaphysical moral cosmology. Previously, I had thought that Kirk understood the "permanent things" to be eternal things that therefore depended on a transcendent eternal order in which human nature was an unchanging eternal essence created by God. Against this, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not eternal is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments. I had not noticed that in the Enemies of the Permanent Things, Kirk had identified the permanent things as "enduring standards" set by an enduring human nature as the ground for "a law of nature." The permanent things are "patterns or rules which recognize the enduring nature of certain moral and social qualities." Moreover, the norms vary for each species of life: "the norm for the wasp or the snake is not the norm for man" (Kirk 2016: 1, 3, 151).
That this allows for an evolutionary conservatism is particularly clear in one section of the Enemies of the Permanent Things with the title "The Doors of Normative Perception" (2016: 23-29). The reader of this section should notice the crucial influence on Kirk of two authors C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) and David Hume ("Of the Standard of Taste" and The Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding). Kirk cites Hume three times in this short section. This is remarkable because Kirk identifies Hume as the "most formidable of skeptics" (6), and therefore Kirk's reasoning here is compatible with a Humean skepticism that denies religious metaphysics and affirms an evolutionary conception of human nature and the world. Similarly, in Lewis's Abolition of Man, Lewis is clear that his argument for a natural moral law should be persuasive with skeptics because it does not require any belief in the supernatural.
Kirk says there are "three doors of normative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer" (23). But while Kirk himself "embraces the transcendent truth of revelation," he chooses not to appeal to revelation in this book because he addresses himself "to doubters, as well as to the converted." Moreover, Kirk observes that revelation is not a reliable source of knowledge for most human beings because "direct revelation" has been "extremely rare." Most of the time what is presented as "divine wisdom" has come through "very human prophets" or seers who have not had a direct revelation. Apparently, Moses had a direct revelation when God spoke to him through the burning bush. But Moses was the only one who heard the words. When people who claim to have had a direct revelation try to express what God told them, most of what they say is "inexpressible in language, and almost unthinkable in thought" (24). So revelation is a source for understanding the permanent things that is incomprehensible to skeptics or unbelievers.
Custom is a better source. To understand custom, Kirk relies on Hume. He paraphrases a passage from Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (Hume 1985: 241):
In morals and taste, says Hume, we govern ourselves by custom--that is, by the habits of the human race. The standards of morality are shown to us by study of the story of mankind, and the arbiters of those standards are men of strong sense and delicate sentiments, whose impressions force themselves upon the wills of their fellowmen (24).
He also quotes from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1902: 5.1.36) about how custom is "the great guide of life." Custom constitutes "an immemorial empiricism" (26).
But how did this "folk wisdom" embodied in custom come into being? Kirk suggests:
The answer may be that at the beginnings of civil social order, some individuals--men whose names have perished--discovered the truths that we now call custom and common sense. Hume's men of strong sense and delicate sentiment, or their primitive forerunners, presumably existed when man was becoming true man, and their insights were impressed upon their primitive fellows. . . . So it may be with the practices and beliefs which we call custom and common sense: originally these may have been the intuitions or the empirical conclusions of gifted individuals, who were emulated by the common man" (26-27).
Notice that Kirk suggests that human nature had to evolve from a primitive state "when man was becoming true man." Notice also that customary norms arose as "empirical conclusions of gifted individuals." Kirk goes on to explain that these are "empirical conclusions" about human nature. "By definition, human nature is constant. Because of that constancy, men of vision are able to describe the norms, the rules, for mankind" (29).
This suggests human evolution at three levels--human nature, human custom, and human judgment. Human nature evolves from a prehuman condition. Then human custom evolves as "gifted individuals" judge the norms or rules that best conform to that evolved human nature. This three-leveled evolutionary analysis is even clearer in Lewis's Abolition of Man.
LEWIS AND THE TAO
Here I borrow some material from some previous posts.
Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).
The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).
Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:
Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).
At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.
At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).
If you lay this alongside what Kirk says about "The Doors of Normative Perception," you'll see a coincidence of thought that shows Kirk was following the same line of reasoning.
THE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION OF THE PERMANENT THINGS
The three-leveled evolutionary analysis of norms presented by Kirk and Lewis corresponds to what I have argued for on this blog--and in various articles and books--the Darwinian evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.
Moral norms are rooted in the twenty natural desires of our genetically evolved human nature: a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, freedom from oppressive domination, courage in war, health, beauty, property, language and storytelling, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious transcendence, and intellectual understanding. And if the good is the desirable, the best social order can be judged to be the one that secures the widest satisfaction of those natural desires. When Kirk gives examples of norms--"a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude" (7)--they correspond to some of the natural desires.
The full expression of these moral norms has come through the human cultural evolution of moral tradition. To understand this, we need an evolutionary science of cultural group selection. This is what Kirk identifies as the cultural history of custom or tradition.
But then that cultural evolution ultimately depends on the evolution of human individuality because culture is driven by the agency of individuals who formulate the social norms for their cultural groups. We need to understand the evolved personality and life history of those individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion. Consider, for instance, how the cultural history of the United States was altered by the dominant individuals in the American Continental Congress that drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence, or those in the Constitutional Convention who drafted and promoted the Constitution of 1787. What we need here is an agent-based evolutionary theory of how individual agents create, maintain, and modify group functional culture. We need to understand how, as Kirk says, culture is "the creation of a talented little minority, over centuries" (51).
We need what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" that would develop an interdisciplinary science that would explain the evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment as part of a comprehensive science of nature as a whole.
That would give us a science of the permanent things.
