A time for social counter-reform | Dan Mikhaylov — Orthodox Conservatives
It would be a gross understatement to posit that we live a period of social upheaval and fragmentation. Christians across Britain will be alarmed by the plummeting church attendance and the nationwide divorce rate — that, while on a welcome decline, remains higher than the corresponding figures in Germany and Italy. In contrast, the nation’s teenage pregnancy rate is the in Western Europe. This complements the dire reality that increasingly more students are dropping out of higher education to find their professional prospects severely impaired as a result of these choices.
And we have not even alluded to what is common knowledge; the intersectional brainwashing in classrooms and lecture halls with campaigns to rebuke and demonise the magnificent past, preserved in British street names and museum collections, and the cultural palette we cherish. This hardly merits explanation — images of Churchill’s vandalised statue speak for themselves here.
Clearly, conservatives should not afford to sit idly, twitching their thumbs and cowering from these problems in their comfortable, reclusive ivory towers. The vast majority of us simply have nowhere to hide.
We are exposed to these consequences of socio-cultural implosion in the streets and at work, and cannot be ignorant or turn a blind eye to this process of internal disfigurement. Rather than be implicit, it seems all the more ostensible and impossible to evade. Therefore, our action must also be explicit, and not implicit, to safeguard what remains of Britain’s social cohesion, to reverse the tide. At this stage, two options are available to traditionalists: intransigent insistence on the past, and pragmatic counter-reform.
Undoing the change of the wrong kind rather than generically resisting it
This is where reactionary politics fails us; it looks to the past in lieu of the present for inspiration. On the contrary, conservatives do not repudiate change, whatever their creed. This unites One Nation Tories with Thatcherites, republicans with monarchists, and rural conservatives with their urban peers. And this is what fundamentally distinguishes us from obscurantists, namely the Savoyard philosopher, Joseph de Maistre. Like Edmund Burke, he presented his political vision against the background of the tumultuous French Revolution, yet his ideas overtly diverge from conservatism.
To him, change, especially revolutionary change, was tantamount to God’s punishment. In his publication, Considerations on France (1796), the Catholic scholar assumed that revolution is not a mere aberration but signals that humanity has gone astray, and proposed this be remedied by restoring the union between the altar and the throne — in other words, between the monarchy and the Church. Rulers were to rediscover their pre-Reformation ties to religious professionals, thereby supplanting modernity with the status-quo-ante. To progressive reform, de Maistre ascribed neither value nor space. Nothing could be more different from what Burke espoused.
Certainly, the mere fact that we approve of progressive change does not presuppose that we must accept all of it. Quite the opposite. Change, as Burke himself has acknowledged , can be both beneficial and pernicious in relation to the social fabric. By this logic, reform exists to promote beneficial innovation, whereas counter-reform contains the harmful one. Given the social decrepitude many of us are observing, applying the latter notion becomes essential. After all, our problems will not disappear on their own.
What is counter-reform?
Counter-reform as a term is difficult to explain to a British audience. British conservatism deviates considerably from its European counterparts in both content and history. Unlike France, the UK did not experience a direct revolution that uprooted the country’s traditions or institutions that inspired radical policies, whose aftermath would incentivise counter-revolutionary movements to overwrite or mitigate them. Equally, as much as the local Whigs such as Charles James Fox felt enamoured with the French Revolution, British intellectuals did not worship it, like their Russian counterparts did. As a result, there was no need for the British crown to reassert itself by virtue of autocratic counter-reform or pass curative measures to soften earlier liberal legislation in the light of national security concerns.
Despite this, counter-reform may objectively be defined. In this article, we take it to mean any social reform designed to affect the public order to the extent necessary to spread the values of what we interpret to be the good life. And, consequently amplify the number of people observing this good life that comes from a common conception of it. This, in turn, denotes a flexible amalgamation of lifestyles, concatenated by shared emphases on such communal virtues as discipline, meritocracy, and familial piety amongst numerous others. Moreover, it is important to clarify that counter-reform should strive less to nullify the existing legislation, and more to redetermine its applications to real-life scenarios. Remember that our principal goal is not returning to the past, but despoiling those reforms that have already been implemented of their potentially harmful side-effects. By undoing change altogether, humanity will fall victim to extreme uncertainty as repealing legislation does not necessarily do away with its historical impact and could witness us ending up stuck between the sad present and the distorted version of the past that painstakingly digresses from what we would have wanted to bring back. At the most basic level, it will influence and guide social change in such a way that both reinforces its foundations and restricts the scope of anything that has hitherto diluted or weakened them.
A modern history of political counter-reform
Now that we have outlined what social counter-reform implies in our context, it is imperative to note that while counter-reform was not as drastic in Britain, it did, nonetheless, take place.
As sociologist William H. Swatos and historian Michael Hill purport, the emergence of Methodism has prevented the rise of public revolutionaries. According to the former, “Methodist enthusiasm transformed men, summoning them to assert rational control over their own lives…providing in its system of mutual discipline, the psychological security necessary for…liberal ideas to become internalised”. Thus, Methodism helped dissuade radicalism, and may be seen as an example of organic counter-reform. This is particularly true when we examine its practice of temperance and the rejection of gambling.
Elsewhere in Europe, especially in Russia and France, counter-reform was even more obvious from the political viewpoint. In France, this phenomenon has several founding fathers: Hugues de Lamennais , François de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald to name a few. However, the last one stands out the most. This beacon of French traditionalism introduced the formula of constant application , whereby all relations, which define man and determine social, economic, religious, and moral matters, have causes, means, and effects. In the state, power constitutes the cause, ministers — the means, and subjects — the effects. Meanwhile, the family is disentangled into the father, the mother, and their children. Since these are inherently connected, the scholar affirmed, “ experimenting with the family is reckless madness “. By disrupting the family, mankind risks subverting the bespoke incubator of human personhood and resultantly undermining the very foundations of statehood.
Arguably, this does not sound too dissimilar from our advocacy. Akin to this Frenchman, many of us call for state intervention to protect the integrity of families. Likewise, we coincide in our critique of modernity. He also his contemporaries’ demonisation of paternal authority, their mockery of motherhood, and the sale of “obscene books…that teach the child things that nature does not reveal to the grown man” and nudity. He linked social degradation to attacks on tradition and irreligiosity. Evidently, the malaise he addressed was somewhat identical to what our generation faces, whence counter-reform seems viable in the modern context.
Contrastingly, Russian counter-reformist thinking was top-down and sown into the local administrative framework by Emperor Alexander III and his advisor Konstantin Pobedonostsev in the 1880s. This approach also differed from the French one, insofar as it involved economic as well as social change. Certainly, our policies’ gamut need not emulate this entirely. Pobedonostsev’s undemocratic conviction that democracy is an “insupportable dictatorship of the vulgar crowd” expressed in his Reflections of a Russian Statesman (1898) is likewise alien to the British political mindset.
However, his in vis inertiae, or the force of inactivity, merits our attention. More specifically, he argued that the optimal impediment to the violence that reforms inevitably bring about resides in freezing the country’s cultural ideals and inculcating them in the population through government policy. This, he opined, guarantees social cohesion and unity. His pledge to respect and fortify tradition meshes well with how the British retain trust in, and approvingly speak of, the Queen, and practise such idiosyncratically British activities as cricket and afternoon tea. All in all, the United Kingdom is a land where the past matters, and is venerated. Hence, counter-reforms to sustain this appreciation of the British culture will not be damaging the country’s social fabric.
Moreover, just as Pobedonostsev never cancelled any of the liberal reforms by the previous Czar, Alexander II, so we do not have to overawe previous legislation. Alternatively, we should focus on correcting their profuse social applications. His regime also restored political stability in the Empire, and did not side-line improvements to the status-quo. Thus, the authorities banned the redemption payments levied on peasants and pioneered a system of universal and progressive taxation. For the first time, the nobility had to pay their share, chiefly on communitarian grounds. The justification was that the aristocracy and the peasantry were equal before God and the monarch, and had to contribute to the treasury. Once again, this is not dissimilar from One Nation Conservatism and the concomitant notion that we should collectively strive to make Britain bloom and prosper, irrespective of our ethnicity, religion, or class.
In this article, both case-studies that we have elucidated belong to the nineteenth century but nevertheless expose the selfsame social realities that we encounter in today’s world. Both Bonald and Pobedonostsev were leery of the possibility that what was so near and dear to their hearts would decompose due to blinkered, short-sighted reform, and demanded explicit action. Their principles are indisputably perennial as well. Protecting the institution of family, since it matters to the people as well as to the state, and containing the counter-cultural liberal policies’ excesses to keep our society healthy are not incompatible with British conservatism either.
Future
To reiterate our earlier statement, conservatives should not reject change but deprive it of any potentially harmful by-products. Preferring to look backwards instead of forwards is the reactionaries’ purview. Thus, counter-reform has to materialise in forward-looking legislation, which entails demarcating the limits of the existing policies rather than abolishing these policies altogether. Good life cannot be cultivated by time-travelling, (not only because this concept itself mutates with time, albeit at an inferior rate to the one which zealous social progressives are distorting our society through politics and public discourse), but also because the past is elusive. Humanity does not reside in a fictional video game universe which allows you to return to an older saved game. When we undo reforms, we cannot immediately undo their profound influence on how we think and behave as a collective. Either way, behavioural changes would still necessitate counter-reform.
Pobedonostsev seemingly understood this. A pragmatist to the bone, he had specific objectives whenever pushing for counter-reform. For example, the 1880s restrictions on the trial by jury represented a deliberate attempt to tighten the grip around the judicial system at a time when domestic terrorism was widespread and when the erstwhile ruler, Alexander II, had been brutally assassinated. Certainly, he could have repealed the 1864 legal reform authorising the aforementioned institution’s creation, all the more because it was the murdered Czar, who had so munificently sanctioned it for his subjects. But the statesman did not, perhaps knowing that extirpating something that had been around for more than ten years might further compromise the fragile social fabric.
Modern Britain should too embrace this attitude. Our counter-reform should be passed with the intent of correcting the scope of the existing legal framework. Among other things, this could mean introducing further restrictions on who qualifies for a divorce or what paperwork one submits to finalise this procedure, while providing or encouraging, at the very least, counselling services. Similarly, our counter-reform can be progressive: just as there were ways to strengthen social cohesion without going backwards in the old days, there must be additional mechanisms for our generation to employ. Whether it is a new holiday, commemorating the feats of the past, or a fiscal law, along the lines of Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend , the tools to consider are plentiful.
The conservative idée fixe is not that change is inherently malicious. Had this been the case, Disraeli would have never chosen to enfranchise the urban male working class in the 1867 Representation of the People Act . Nor is there any doubt about Stanley Baldwin’s expansion of the national old-age pension scheme . The Conservative Party, and the conservative movement at large, place their trust in beneficial change.
However, we shun socially injurious change, and should under no circumstances surrender to it if it manages to secure support in our legislative institutions or the press. Counter-reform is precisely what we need to impugn destructive liberalising reforms. Its proven record in both Europe and the United Kingdom, coupled with Britain’s visible socio-cultural demise, are convincing arguments in favour of using it. The self-induced destruction of our traditions warrants an equally explicit response and cannot be fought with reactionary proposals — these unequivocally loathe change per se. To the noble cause of protecting the good life, pragmatic counter-reform is the more natural ally.
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Originally published at https://www.orthodoxconservatives.uk on August 1, 2020.