“Today the Enlightenment and Romanticism are our civil religions, the first primarily in our public life and the second in our private life.”

The short answer is that I am a conservative because conservatism provides the most accurate, the truest outlook on life. It renders the best picture of the condition humaine and is hence most helpful in answering the eternal question how to live and how to live together. Obviously, this answer is not very enlightening, since it remains abstract. It says hardly anything at all. To make myself clear I must go into what the conservative notions of life and the human condition signify. This, I am afraid, will make the answer substantially longer. But that cannot be changed. Our need of lengthy expositions on life and the human condition is itself an important feature of the human condition. Unlike the animals, we cannot do without them. So here it is, the long answer.

Conservatism aims to conserve. But what? Some believe that conservatism vindicates custom and tradition per se, whatever they may prescribe, because the fact that they have become customs and tradition proves that they work, that they are useful. Conservatism thus becomes a kind of down-to-earth, skeptical anti-utopianism, favoring muddling through, piecemeal reform, and decentralized trial and error. This view, which we find for instance in Michael Oakeshott, goes back to David Hume.¹ I have no quarrel with the wisdom of what is being argued here, but it seems to me that this cautious attitude, resulting from a Socratic self-awareness of ignorance and fallibility, is merely one aspect of conservatism, and not the most important one.

But does not Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France turned him into the informal patron-saint of conservatism, stand squarely in this skeptical, anti-utopian line of thought? Aren’t the Reflections one long panegyric on custom and tradition? Yes, they are, but of certain specific customs and traditions, not of custom and tradition in general. What specific customs and traditions? The ancient constitution? The rights of Englishmen? The Church of England? The peerage? In a sense, yes. But to Burke these things were not estimable in themselves. They were estimable as particular expressions of two spiritual traditions, which were not so much English or British, as European.

Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion.²

The spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion; these European traditions and the customs that originated in them are what Burke defends, in the face of an all-out attack on both of them by the French revolutionaries. It seems to me that that is precisely what constitutes conservatism. Conservatism is the vindication of the spirit of the gentleman and the spirit of religion vis-à-vis another, modern spirit that has arisen in the last centuries, the spirit of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.