An author should always be sensitive to ironies, personal and otherwise. I will therefore acknowledge from the outset that this essay is a reaction to Mr. Ken Boessenkool and Mr. Sean Speer’s excellent essay endorsing what I take to be a reactionary political philosophy. This was published in Policy Options on December 1st as “How Harper’s Philosophy Transformed Canada for the Better.”
Throughout, they maintain that many of Mr. Harper’s policies did not stem from political opportunism or mindless partisan zeal as some of his opponents have claimed. Rather, the Conservative Government’s agenda reflected a deeply considered and coherent political philosophy that has its roots in Mr. Harper’s complex intellectual biography. Mr. Boessekool and Mr. Speer argue that Mr. Harper’s different experiences, especially his early encounters with the work Burke and Hayek, led the former Prime Minister to adopt a “fusionist” political philosophy as the most appropriate for Canada. On the authors’ reading, fusionists such as Mr. Harper believe that the free market and small government must be combined with morally social upright policies that promote the individual virtues of citizens.
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Here it might be helpful to invoke an indicatory statement cited by as summarizing the pith of Mr. Harper’s political philosophy. It appeared in his 2003 remarks to Civitas:
“What is the “conservative coalition” of ideas?….two distinctive elements have long been identifiable […]. Properly speaking, they are called classical or enlightenment liberalism and classical or Burkean conservatism. The one called “economic conservatism” does indeed come from classical liberalism. Its primary value is individual freedom, and to that end it stresses private enterprise, free trade, religious toleration, limited government and the rule of law. The other philosophy is Burkean conservatism. Its primary value is social order. It stresses respect for custom and traditions (religious traditions above all), voluntary association, and personal self-restraint reinforced by moral and legal sanctions on behaviour.”
In the remainder of their essay, the authors trace how this “fusionist” political philosophy impacted the various policies of Mr. Harper’s government. This includes the Harper Government’s approach to finance, trade, foreign policy, and criminal justice.
There is no space here to unpack all the complex themes brought up in Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Speer’s essay. Needless to say, as proponents of “fusionism,” they admire Mr. Harper’s legacy and the political philosophy they believed underpinned the Conservative era. What I take issue with is their agreement with a fundamental tenant of the “fusionist” political philosophy; namely the self-aggrandizing belief that it is fighting against the technocratic nihilism of our “progressive” modern era. This belief is best summarized by again invoking Mr. Harper’s remarks in Civitas:
“Conservatives need to reassess our understanding of the modern Left. It has moved beyond old socialistic morality or even moral relativism to something much darker. It has become a moral nihilism – the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality, a post-Marxism with deep resentments, even hatreds, of the norms of free and democratic western civilization. This descent into nihilism should not be surprising because moral relativism simply cannot be sustained as a guiding philosophy.”
I have no doubt that many thoughtful Conservatives would agree with the sentiment behind this statement, particularly when articulating their disagreement with the “modern Left.” As one might expect, I disagree with this interpretation of “Left” political philosophy. Indeed, I’m not even sure what it means precisely. Do Mr. Harper and his supporters mean to denigrate the post-modern Left of Foucault and Derrida, or the liberal-egalitarian tradition of Rawls and Dworkin? Perhaps they meant to take issue with relativism in Althusser’s “scientific” Marxism? Or the capabilities approach to human freedom pioneered by Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen? In the future, it would be “virtuous” of Mr. Boessekool and Mr. Speer to pay more attention to the diversity of their intellectual opponents.
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My main criticism is not with this point however. It is with the belief that conservatism is somehow a barrier against modern “nihilism,” which Mr. Harper oddly associates with the “modern Left.” This belief was not articulated systematically by either Burke or Hayek, but may find some support by drawing on the work of theorists such as Alasdair Macintyre (himself not a dyed in the wool Conservative) and Allan Bloom, who believe that the Western tradition needs to be saved if we are to avoid an impending collapse into relativism and nihilism.
Firstly, it is not clear that relativism and nihilism can be conflated in the way Mr. Harper (or the authors) believe. Indeed, a belief in the value of tradition in itself, for the “history” of our “ancestors” as the authors puts it, might be just as much of an impetus towards adopting a relativistic position as any “Left” political philosophy. One need only look at the work of Michael Walzer. Personally, I find relativism a dreadful bore, while accepting that nihilism poses a fundamental philosophical challenge to any universalist ethics. Relativism and nihilism are conceptually distinct challenges, and should not be crudely conflated.
But more importantly, a reactionary Conservative politics can be diagnosed as a symptom of modern nihilism just as much as the evils of technocracy. It is hard not to look at Mr. Harper’s government-led push to resuscitate an pop-interest in Canada’s history, its technocratic fixation on creating and targeting various electoral groups, its decision to adopt a moral rather than an empirical (or “un-sociological”) approach to crime (so much for realism), its admiration for Canada and concurrent disinterest in many of its parliamentary institutions and traditions, and its post-modern fascination with political optics as so many fitful and reactionary attempts to deliver a Hollywood style remake of old fashioned values given a new veneer. One might try to defend this by appeal to Haper’s “incrementalist” approach to politics. Perhaps his Conservative shift couldn’t realistically have brought about any other way. But this ignores the dilemma at the heart of any reactionary politics; that it is first and foremost a reaction to change. It would not exist without the phenomena it seeks to counteract and often poorly understands. Indeed, during the dying days of the Harper regime it was hard not to see the Government’s growing paranoia about its many ideological enemies as a tacit acknowledgement that many of its proponents existed in no small part to oppose. A political party which truly believed in the traditions it upheld would likely have adopted a much more strident tone consistent with a belief in the bright future in store for its values.
Here one must look a little deeper. Nietzsche was the great analyst of nihilism, and condemned liberal progressives and reactionary politicians in the same breath for good reason. Where the former implausibly believed one could ground moral beliefs in the egoistic preferences of the individual, the latter felt that traditional beliefs could be held to once the metaphysical foundation for them had fallen apart. Nietzsche was, of course, discussing how many Conservative politicians held to the values of Judeo-Christian “Western” civilization even in the admitted absence of a plausible philosophical justification. The authors invoke the coherence of Mr. Harper’s philosophy throughout his essay, but on this they are largely silent. No justification is given for why the values Mr. Harper invokes against relativism are “objectively” true, beyond their aesthetic appeal to the Conservative minded.
Yet this philosophical question is the heart of the matter. Political preferences are not metaphysical truths. There is all the difference in the world between believing that the world is objectively ordered according to the values articulated in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and believing that it would be desirable for people to believe that the world is ordered so. Mr. Harper and his proponents seem to believe the latter, without recognizing the Nietzschian point that this becomes morally untenable without a metaphysical foundation to back it up. Worse, as Kierkegaard (himself a devout Christian) observed, this belief in a Christendom without Christianity makes hypocrites of us all. This is why a reactionary politics can be just as nihilistic as the “progressive” movements it seeks to destroy. They can be movements of sound and fury which signify not much else, and here we come full circle, than the egoistic aesthetic preferences of the individuals who make them up.
This argument, of course, is not intended to undermine many of Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Speer’s otherwise salient points. Their well-reasoned essay deserves to be widely read. But we should be deeply skeptical of their judgement on the coherence of Mr. Harper’s political philosophy.
