The Age of the Conservative

To declare oneself a conservative is certainly not a fashionable or popular act. Conservatives are old fogeys, killjoys, bores, simply not w...

To declare oneself a conservative is certainly not a fashionable or popular act. Conservatives are old fogeys, killjoys, bores, simply not with it. In a demographically young country, radical views in politics, economics and aesthetics take a dominant position. Conservatism as a way of looking at life and the world is a lonely perch for sure.

In contemporary Indian politics, the counterpoint to leftist radicalism is not conservatism, but right-wing radicalism. Leftist thinkers want to overturn the economic and political structure. They want extreme revolutionary change in 8220;class relations8221; whatever that means and would further assault our system of property rights. The political right wants to re-create a 8220;glorious past8221; whatever that means and jettison the recent past or pasts. A conservative opposes both these points of view. He or she is a gradualist at heart. Radical surgery is a definite no-no. It all starts with a less than sanguine view of the human condition. A conservative is disdainful of the very idea that a future utopia is ever possible with or without a revolution. There is a symmetrical scepticism regarding the past. There never was a glorious utopia in the past. The oft-repeated maxim is that even Periclean Athens had slavery and was pretty down on women8217;s rights. So if you were a slave or a woman, your admiration for the glories of ancient Athens must perforce have been limited.

Conservatives are most distrustful of demagogues who promise to create 8220;heaven on earth8221; if given power. We hold it to be a self-evident truth that heaven cannot be created on earth. We also hold it to be an obvious corollary that the rascal who promises heaven on earth is most likely to make the world a 8220;hellish place8221; for his subjects they would be subjects by then, not citizens. The totalitarian ideologues of the fascist and communist movements promised rosy outcomes for their followers, but ended up as creators of egregious tyrannies. For the conservative, that result was both obvious and inevitable.

The human condition is fundamentally tragic. 8220;All problems8221; can never be eliminated. Does that mean that conservatives believe no change is possible or desirable? To the contrary. Change is inevitable and for the conservative, gradual change is welcome, desirable. The emphasis is on 8220;gradual8221;. Disraeli, the greatest of conservative politicians, summed it up, 8220;while embracing change, conservatives wish to preserve the best of our inheritance8221;.

Abrupt change that involves complete jettisoning of the past is something conservatives dread. Like all good rules, this too has exceptions. Sometimes, in extremely rare circumstances, there is a case for abrupt change. An example would be Lincoln fighting a civil war in order to take on the entrenched institution of slavery or of Bentinck banning sati by decree. Remember Disraeli refers to preserving the 8220;best8221; of our inheritance; he makes no case for the 8220;worst8221;.

The problems faced by a Lincoln or a Bentinck come rarely in history. More often than not, gradual change preserving the best in our past is the way to go. As an aside, Hamilton, that arch conservative, eliminated slavery in New York 80 years before the civil war by embarking on the 8220;orderly8221; action of compensating slave-owners with cash and bonds. While the slave-owners of New York state were sensible and hence came out financially ahead, the slave-owners of the American south were stupid and obstinate and had to be broken in a war. This left a trail of bitterness in the south which was absent from New York, again justifying the case for gradual, orderly change.

Conservatives are believers in the individual as the appropriate unit of human pursuits. The collective in any form is viewed with extreme suspicion and distaste. The collective identity and the search for collective solution have no attraction for conservatives. An individual needs to be considered just as an individual, not as a member of a race, religion, ethnic group or 8220;volk8221; of any kind. In the debate on reservations, for instance, conservatives would be solidly against them. An apocryphal story that would appeal to conservatives is that of the brilliant African-American surgeon who would have made it with no help from affirmative action, but who now gets clubbed together with less able 8220;quota8221; candidates. The injustice to the individual resonates with the conservative. The idea that one individual can be treated unjustly by way of example, the individual who loses a place to a less deserving quota candidate in order to make up for a collective sense of grievance for past injustices to a group is, in the eyes of the conservative, a complete perversion of what the word 8220;justice8221; stands for.

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As an extension of this preference for the individual over the collective, the conservative prefers voluntary social action to government actions. An interventionist state will sooner or later become a tyrant state. A minimalist state is always the preferred option. Utilitarians may oppose government intervention because it is inefficient and make a case for private initiative because it is efficient. The conservative argument goes beyond the efficiency debate. Voluntary individual action free markets represent one but by no means the only setting for such action is preferable from the perspective of historical experience and the moral imperative in terms of defending individual freedoms from statist tyrannies.

Conservatives do, however, separate themselves from libertarian anarchists. They are for a 8220;minimalist8221; state8230;not for 8220;no state8221;. A minimalist state that is focused on gradual change with an accent on preserving the best of the past. A minimalist state which treats its citizens as individuals, not as members of collective groups, a minimalist state that makes no promises of instant utopias, but which acknowledges that small incremental changes can and do benefit us, a state that is based on the principle of the protection of individual liberty, a state that protects voluntary human activity for example, markets and regulates such activity in a minimalist way. If such a state were to exist, you would have the conservative version of utopia8230;utopia with inevitable flaws!

The writer is chairman/CEO of MphasiS, a company in the IT/BPO space. He is also, currently, chairman of NASSCOM. These are his personal views