O is for Oakeshott

Conservatism versus rationalism

I can’t remember how I came to reading Oakeshott, or who suggested it, but the first book review I ever published was of his collection of essays on education, over thirty years ago. He lived from 1901 to 1990, and represented a very English form of philosophical idealism and conservatism. To this day he retains his followers, small in number but very dedicated. I wouldn’t quite put myself in that circle, but I have learned some important things from him.

Here is what might be his most famous passage, from “On Being Conservative”:

To be a conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer 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. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate, and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated.

A disposition then; not a philosophy or a theory. It is not about nostalgia for some lost past, real or imaginary, but accepting the present for what it is. Older people are bound to be more conservative because they have more that they have come to value as parts of their lives, and have maybe had the experience of aiming at that utopian bliss but finding that it cost more than it won.

The example I would give my students is of my favourite walk in the forest (I am headed there later, with my dog, the morning I am writing this, it turns out). It has become a part of who I am. And if the Forest Service said “We are going to redirect this trail: it will be better than the old one in many respects - nicer vistas from the hill crests and such” I would be unhappy. I don’t doubt their expertise, and if they were starting from scratch the proposed new trail might indeed be the best option. But I like this one, it’s the one I know, the one I’ve photographed, the one where I have followed the changing seasons.

I regret the closing of the local coffee shop I liked, even if there are lots of other nice ones in town; this one was my coffee shop.

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin says when you take the fuzz off the peach conservatism is really about one single thing: preserving existing hierarchies on behalf of the privileged. Oakeshott’s “disposition” to wear old tweed jackets and have a pint with the neighbours at the local pub is just a cover for something far more insidious. But I don’t agree - there is something more to Oakeshott’s conservatism. After all, if a Marxist like G.A. Cohen can write an essay on “Rescuing Conservatism” (in Finding Oneself in the Other) which has the same basic premise as Oakeshott’s - that there are some things and institutions we value not because they are the best imaginable, but because they are ours - then there has to be something more to it.

Cohen has the caveat that the things we wish to conserve because they have become over time a part of our lives, and who we are, must be just. No one oppressed by current institutions ought to be expected to see value in conserving them.

But Cohen goes on to say that he believes everyone has at least some things about which they have conservative attachments, so to say someone has a “conservative disposition” would be to say they have more than the usual amount and degree of such attachments. But these can be attachments to things about our world that are generous, institutions that work for the benefit of the least well off.

There might not be many Red Tories left (though I can say for a fact there is at least one), but it is a coherent way of thinking about the world.

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I would talk to my Arts Administration students about conservatism. There are pressures in the high-arts world to innovate, “engage new technology”, “re-imagine”, as all this is thought to be the magic that will attract the youngs to your symphony concerts and art museums. I’m not sure there’s much evidence of this (cf. churches). But in all the “re-imagining” there might be something being lost, the traditions and rituals around attending the arts that many people have adopted as a part of that world. Everything needs balance, must be pragmatic, of course. But do think about your seventy-five year olds as well as the twenty-five year olds. And if the thought is, well, the seventy-five year olds, odds are, don’t have a lot of years left anyway, then it’s maybe time to rethink what you are trying to achieve.

An example: art museums are allowed to sell paintings, to “deaccession”, but only under the rule that any funds generated will be used to buy new art - you cannot sell paintings to pay off debt or to give the management staff raises. A curator new to the museum might think “We have a lot of this sort of painting but not so much of that, we ought to do some deaccessioning and purchasing.” Maybe. But the value of the work that would be put up for sale is not just the auction value. It might be the value to people who have gone to this local museum for decades, and who are attached to knowing that when they visit, they will see this particular work. There might be a value in the existing collection that goes beyond the estimated sales price to people who have no such attachment.

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The other idea Oakeshott is most known for has great relevance to today’s political situation, and the arts as well. This is his critique of rationalism.

Suppose you wanted to become a great pastry chef. How would you go about it? If you had money to spare, you could buy what seem to be regarded as the very best books about making pastries, and study them all. With even more money, you could outfit your kitchen with all the very best gear. And you would order from specialty shops the finest ingredients, not just relying on what happens to be in your local Kroger. Well, are you now a great pastry chef? It’s unlikely. Because there are important things - the most important things - about being a pastry chef that cannot be learned from books, even really good books. You have to practice, practice, practice, and you will want to gain this practice in the bakery of an experienced and talented pastry chef. You’ll need to be able to watch someone at work (no, YouTube doesn’t count), and in turn have them watch you, as you get your hands dusty with flour. And eventually, if you stick with it, you might become pretty good. You need the tacit knowledge that cannot be written in a book, or explained in a conversation. If you do become a great chef, and a friend says over the phone, “right, tell me how to make pain au chocolat like you do”, you won’t be able to do it, because it is not a thing that can be fully explained in that way.

I think most people get this - if you want to be a great chef, or ceramicist, or motorcycle repair person, you need to try your hands at the work, in a setting with experienced practitioners, to get the hang of it.

In the essay “Rationalism in Politics” (along with “On Being Conservative” found in this collection) Oakeshott says that politics is a practical activity, one with a large amount of tacit knowledge necessary to do it well. Rationalism is the mindset of dismissing the importance of tacit knowledge specific to an activity, in favor of thinking one can easily import knowledge from other fields (“I’m a businessman, and we can just run government like a business!”), or from simply theorizing about politics and then trying to put the results of that theorizing into practice. Oakeshott’s primary villain in his writings is Jeremy Bentham; I don’t think he ever had the chance to meet Mr. Tyson.

I spent a couple of years on leave from academia to work as a policy advisor to the Cabinet of the Province of Saskatchewan. I had a PhD in Economics, and so at least knew something about one aspect of the world. But what I found pretty quickly, working in an office with very experienced hands in the public service, was that I didn’t know much about the activity of government at all - how information is gained and shared and processed, what considerations matter and which ones not so much, how priorities are set, what are the dynamics between the executive - i.e. the Premier and his Cabinet - and the legislature, what constitute salient issues in various segments of the public, how relations between line departments work, the qualities of a well-crafted two-page briefing note, and on and on and on. I learned an awful lot in those few years, and still when I went back to university teaching felt like I was a rookie.

And that’s why people who have experience in government are tearing their hair out at Elon Musk, who outdoes even Jeremy Bentham in his Rationalism. For him, there is no such thing as tacit knowledge in government, whether in policy or in administrative processes. Thus, any one person in the bureaucracy (and I do not use bureaucracy as a pejorative - it’s just how governments work) can be replaced by any other (if not, God help us, by “AI”), so why not make them all loyalists to Trump/Musk? An incalculable amount of expertise is being fired or driven away, on the assumption, held without evidence, that all you need in government are smart people, or people with personal loyalty to the President, but not experienced people. “Tear down this fence; I don’t see the point in it.”

In my experience the United States already suffers from having so many senior positions in civil service being political appointees rather than career public servants - when I worked in Saskatchewan many senior civil servants retained important positions when the party in power changed; they knew how things worked. And the goal in DC right now seems to be to make this one hundred times worse. It will not lead to better government, more efficient government, a government more responsive to public needs. It is an experiment being carried out by a man with a huge sense of his own intelligence, and nothing at stake.

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Oakeshott held that you cannot just take knowledge from one field and seamlessly carry it to another. A great scientist might be a very mediocre business manager; a politician might work out to be a highly incompetent university president.

Oakeshott writes about artists in “The Claims of Politics” (1939) (first published in Scrutiny, then appearing in this collection. I wrote about the essay for the Journal of Aesthetic Education - as always, if you are interested but can’t find a copy, just let me know). At issue, and it was an important one in 1939, was whether it was incumbent upon the art world to take overt political positions - F.R. Leavis was under pressure for his journal Scrutiny to take something of an official politics, and so he invited eight different public intellectuals to write an answer, and Oakeshott was one of them.

His views on the arts and politics are informed first by what he thinks is the true nature of art, and in this he follows Collingwood (whose Principles of Art was effusively praised by Oakeshott in a review) - art is the expression of emotion from artist to audience through media that cannot be reduced to simple prose. And second what he thinks of politics: a practical activity of governing, based on traditions and tacit knowledge of how governing works, but without guidance from any grand abstract political theory:

Political activity may have given us the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.

As a result, it is a mistake for the artist (or the arts presenter, whether a museum, theatre, or, in the case for which he had been invited to write, a literary review) to aim at political goals - politics is not about anything that the artist, as artist, can contribute to. It is additionally a mistake because it draws the artist away from what she actually can do:

To ask a poet and the artist to provide a programme for political or other social action, or an incentive or an inspiration for such action, is to require them to be false to their own genius and to deprive society of a necessary service.

It’s not that artists shouldn’t care about politics, or engage in political activity as citizens, alongside teachers and barbers and bus drivers. Or that their art cannot have a political setting; we would lose a lot of great art if we thought otherwise. It’s that there is no clear way for them through their talents as artists to have useful input into political activity - they have no special insights into difficult policy questions, and neither do they possess the tacit knowledge of how governments actually go about trying to address urgent issues, to “provide a programme.” Take part in democratic life, of course. But artists do not have a special role in politics - please spare me talk of “creative problem-solvers” - above what other ordinary citizens have.

Great artists have something of much more importance to give. And if one were to say, “but we are in a political crisis now!”, I’d remind that Oakeshott’s essay was published in September, 1939.