Grasshoppers and cattle
Jonathan Benthall
If, as seems likely, Britain is experiencing a general reaction towards what may loosely be called conservatism, one would expect the phenomenon to be spread consistently across different sectors of our national life. In several different fields—party politics, education, and the fine arts—there can be little doubt about what is happening. In the intellectual and academic world the situation is rather more clouded. Until the late 1960s, the orthodoxy in our universities was a liberal progressivism, admittedly rather abashed by the illiberal tendencies of some of the acknowledged masters of twentiethcentury literature. Towards the early 1970s, few young intellectuals and academics can have been wholly untouched by the prevailing currents of left-wing fervour; and it is now true that many of the most impressive studies coming from the academic presses, in various disciplines, are strongly influenced by theoretical Marxism. For Marxism gives such writers a sturdy dogmatic framework susceptible to unlimited casuistry.
Meanwhile, the role of `right-wing intellectual' has been out of favour, and hence available (for want of competition) to second-rate minds possessed of the timely virtue of not caring if they were branded as fascists or elitists. It might seem that the conservative wing of our intellectual life is marked by bankruptcy and weakness and that if fascism does succeed in dominating our society again in a new form (as appears all too possible) one reason will have been this apparent bankruptcy of conservatism.
Even those who do not share a commitment to the notion of a revival of conservatism in Britain must surely wish—in the interests of the general level of debate—that the intellectual right wing should be peopled by first-rate intellects able to hold their own in any company, rather than by posturing nostalgics or by xenophobic demagogues.
In fact, we do not have far to look to find considerable resources on the conservative wing. A revival of conservative modes of thought will surely emphasise and illuminate, above all, the positive aspects of tradition and responsible authority, declaring that these are essential to meaningful human life and cannot be reduced to forms of 'mystification,' as Marxists seek to do. On this view, the creative arts are essentially conservative because dependent on acceptance of artistic conventions or genres and hence on a respect for authority and continuity that must accompany a respect for genres. Great art is thus closely related to ethnic tradition and to family order. It is, as Edmund Burke wrote of the English state, 'a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.'
Burke will always be a fountainhead of English conservatism (with a small c), but there are more recent writers whom we may regard as contemporary resources. The genius of T. S. Eliot is sufficiently well-known, but sufficiently idiosyncratic and flawed to be easily dismissed. The great critic F. R. Leavis has unfortunately withdrawn in recent years to private battlefields, and may also be belittled, though he is still very influential. It is less easy to dismiss the voice of Donald Davie, surely one of our few really distinguished living poets, who explicitly sets out and defends (in his Thomas Hardy and British Poetry) his commitment to conservatism in politics and to 'rigid' forms of art—that is, art hewn in a traditional and obdurate medium. Another powerful conservative voice is that of the late Adrian Stokes, whose writings show that he was particularly wedded to three forms of art, all thoroughly traditional: painting of the nude, stone carving of all kinds, and the classical ballet. It was of the Diaghilev ballet that he wrote profoundly:
'It belongs to the beneficence of all great art that the ideal world it reveals is offered to us, not as something withdrawn or sacrosanct, but as something familiar.'
An anthology of Stokes's writings, which, are often obscure but sometimes revelatory, has been published by Penguin under the title The Image in Form.
Though the social sciences are usually associated with the left today, there are some scholars who do not fit this pattern; and one very influential social anthropologist, Mary Douglas, is a declared conservative. Social anthropologists all face the challenge of cultural relativism, the disturbing insight that nearly everything in our world which we take for granted as 'natural' and inevitable, right and proper, is in fact culturally contingent. Some social anthropologists try to 'live through' this perception of relativism by maintaining ironic or critical positions towards the conventions and assumptions of their own society. Professor Douglas shares with Burke a knowledge of
the mysterious depth of the process of socialisation, but sharpened by an anthropologist's knowledge of its fragile contingency. A thoroughgoing theoretical relativism seems to have led her not to a rejection, but to a heightened appreciation of the traditions and rituals available to her which in her case happen to include Irish Catholicism—just because it is only the traditions which you are reared in that can ever be real for you. In her stimulating book Natural Symbols she defends the 'Bog Irish,' with their superstitious attachment to Latin Mass and fish on Fridays, against the wouldbe reforms introduced by middle-class bishops.
Are these writers fascists? It is true that the history of conservative thinking is tainted by fascism, as the history of socialism is tainted by Stalinism. The history of the reactions of intellectuals during the 'twenties and 'thirties to right-wing and left-wing political movements is very instructive, but is now a matter of history. The conservatism of the,three writers I have mentioned—Davie, Stokes and Douglas—is surely a protection against fascism, as is the conservatism of Burke.
Are they elitists? Yes, no doubt, and this is a charge that must be taken on the chin. It is a charge usually designed to try and drag everyone down to the same level of mediocrity. But the more genuine and praiseworthy forms of conservative thought are also characteristically marked by their trust in the quiet common sense of the majority. As Burke colourfully put it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:
'The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other, makes You imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a general mark of acq uiescence in their opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grashoPPers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, PraY do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field: that of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.'
It is very difficult these days to be a con' servative ruminant, and the three writers whom I have cited (though very different from each other) all share a sense of this, difficulty. One difficulty is that the analytical tools of the New Left are—within limits—• so sharply devastating. But the consequences of belittling tradition are so patently disastrous that intellectual conservatism is Or: tainly due for a revival. The British oak that Burke wrote of is now a mere threadbare backdrop; but perhaps a conservative reviv.: al will be accompanied by a revival of Britisn identity and self-respect.
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