In mainstream journalism, the term socially conservative is generally used to denote something negative, a negative reaction to what have become our ‘socially liberal’ norms. But the true essence of social conservatism is in fact a positive affirmation of enduring human values. So, in this essay, I weave a little social conservatism tapestry out of a warp of philosophical reflections on the essence of those values, interwoven with a weft of some examples of hyper-liberalism’s foolish abandonment of them.
My title is borrowed from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy franchise, created by British comic writer Douglas Adams. Adams would probably have self-identified as a Progressive but - from his great Hitchhiker’s vault of absurdist quotes - I’ll pinch one that neatly encapsulates the worst of the socially liberal mentality, its prioritisation of ‘sounds nice’ over ‘actually true’: "I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.”
Socially conservative values are beautifully encapsulated in T S Eliot’s memorable phrase the permanent things. A phrase subsequently adopted by philosopher Russell Kirk in the title of his seminal Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in1969. Another succinct encapsulation – often cited by conservative thinkers - is this one from philosopher Michael Oakshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”: “To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Oakshott also observed that: “A universal preoccupation with rights...... is fatal to the public peace & individual happiness.” I myself have argued in this essay that imagining that there are political solutions to all our discontents is one of Progressivism’s great delusions.
Social conservatives tend towards the grown-up end of the demographic spectrum. Most are likely to have had their schooling before the curriculum incorporated lessons on how most white people are bad. How then to account for those legions of Lefties currently at the helm of all Western institutions.... nominally mature but trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence and thus destined to be full of nonsense from cradle to grave? T S Eliot famously proffered this answer: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" (Burnt Norton). Also, that: “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them ..... Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” (The Cocktail Party)
The kind of people he was talking about are the kind that many of us would like to give a metaphorical kick up the ass and tell to get over themselves. If, for example, you were an employee of the Guardian in November 2024, on the morning after the night the Bad Orange Man drove old Wokesy down, you were offered trauma counselling. Poor you! But you’d have got no sympathy from social conservatives who - on that same awful night - were simply indifferent to the plight of ashen-faced celebrity A-listers preparing to take flight to one of their overseas mansions.
If social conservatives had their way, thespians and other ‘celebrities’ would stay in their lane; ie the entertainment lane (acting or cooking or whatever) and spare us their swerving off into the celebrity-narcissist political one. A Shakespeare play with an all trans and non-binary cast is, for example, precisely the kind of ‘brave’, ‘ground-breaking’ cultural statement that they’d give a miss, noting that transgender sexual dysphoria was, until very recently, of interest to about 0.01% of the population.
In this Substack I don’t generally deal with current news items but I interrupt this essay to bring you news just in from The Spectator: “The BBC has been playing a blinder. When the [Israel/Iran] conflict began, it decided that its audience would be well served by having the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall give his thoughts on the matter. At the weekend HFW (as he’s known in the Middle East) treated BBC1 viewers to his opinion ..... ”
Hope springs eternal though..... apparently some of the teenagers of today are getting the idea that Woke is for ugly people.
Cleaving to The Permanent Things: Before I get on to Modernity’s two biggest fields of attack on the permanent things - its obsessions with something it likes to call ‘sexual liberation’ and something it likes to call ‘diversity’ - I want to touch on a field that gets far less attention but is arguably even more corrosive.
I am talking here of a cultural revolution presciently foreseen in the 1960s by American social theorist Philip Rieff in his The Triumph of the Therapeutic. The ‘therapeutic’ cultural revolution that Rieff foresaw (he called it an anti-cultural revolution) is a complex concept that has not seeped into public consciousness in the way that its off-springs (like the ‘sexual revolution’) have done.
But to embark on a deep dive into these complexities would result in a different essay from the one I intend here and so I will confine myself to a brief (and imperfect) snapshot. What Rieff was getting at (and later thinkers have further explored) was the huge influence on our culture of the idea that the most important goal in life is nurturing one’s own psychological well-being. At its worst this self-centred approach to life can ultimately be a vacuous one. But it can be a very seductive one. Pretty much everything in our post-60s ‘socially liberal’ culture can – at least in part – be traced back to this source. [In *Note1 below I’ve included links to several articles that I trawled in my researches for this essay.]
This rise of the ‘therapeutic’ mentality is most often viewed by its critics as a malign outcrop Freudianism. But Rieff absolved Freud of blame for the cultural revolution his ideas sparked. He noted Freud’s own very un-progressive scepticism about sub-utopian notions of eliminating our human discontents. As famously expressed in this quote:
“I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would be for me. But you will see for yourself how much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
Being able to discriminate between the real and the wishful, as we journey through life’s challenges, is fundamental to an intelligent maturity both at an individual and a societal scale.
In the wake of this triumph of the therapeutic, the mental health industrial complex has diagnosed all sorts of often acronymed ‘conditions’ that the more reflective among us know would – were our civilisation to face war or other kind of existential crisis – disappear from public consciousness like a puff of wind. Naturally these ‘conditions’ all have expensive public or privately funded therapies on offer. In the words of Austrian satirist Karl Kraus: “Psychoanalysis is that illness for which it regards itself as the cure.”
A line from a radio play I listened to many years ago has stuck forever in my head. The play was a gentle comedy. Two nerdy young men are talking in a bar and one of them is pouring out his agonised tale of emotional woe. The other wants to help and is racking his brains for how to counsel his friend. "Have you ever thought of bottling it up?" is what he eventually comes up with.
The most pervasive triumph of the therapeutic has been the entry into the collective psyche of a supposed deficit of self-love that needs correcting via the embrace of ever more self-esteem. In its original conception, this was an amalgam of self-discipline and self-respect but, in our time, has progressively morphed into various abandonments of those very things.
The Content of Character: A typical social conservative is fine with the fact that the highest human achievement is to be found in both sexes and all races. They are likely to have been pleased about Barack Obama’s rise through the Democratic Party to become president of the USA. And they will be as equally pleased about Kemi Badenoch’s well-deserved rise to leadership of the British Conservative Party as they were about Margaret Thatcher’s. Theirs (contrary to MSM stereotype) is a broad-minded mentality.
But they have no truck with the ‘diversity’ that is, in reality, a kind of small-minded animus against white males ....the kind that middle class Westerners are taught at school and university. And they will be irritated by our pervasive 21st c. manifestations of positive discrimination..... the tv advertising fantasyland wherein Britain is apparently a nation 50%+ black. Also the tv crime dramas where the chief of police is now almost invariably a black woman. They will be irritated that no tv show can be without its large helping of LGTB.
A social conservative will typically view ‘gayness’ as just one small compartment on the streetcar named desire....and will be bemused by Western liberalism’s decades-long obsession with it. They will think that it is not to be sneered at but nor is it to be celebrated and will be heavily under-represented at Gay Pride events. They might be homosexual themselves.... but, crucially, this does not make them want to browbeat the other 90% of humanity into falling into line as just one ‘cisgender’ subgroup among many.
Fact of the matter is that homosexuality will always seem a bit queer to most people; it doesn’t mean they have a ‘phobia’ about it. There is nothing inherently pejorative about the word ‘abnormal’; many of us are abnormal in some ways. There might even be a silver lining to the cloud of one’s inner struggles; you might get to paint a Sistine Chapel ceiling or write a Recherche du Temps Perdu. But this would not be nearly so likely if you were full of self-congratulatory narcissism.
Social conservatives can be a bit unsympathetic towards other kinds of excess self-indulgence. They like to call a spade a spade. I myself can sometimes be ‘guilty’ of this. When I’m people-watching in the supermarket, say, or a tv show, I can find myself thinking things like “if they look like idiots....lime green hair, armful of tattoos, zero dress sense....then they probably are”. And when I see electric buggies, I think to myself: “if you truly are unlucky enough to be disabled from the waist down, I’m really pleased you’ve been provided with an electric cart to ride around the supermarket aisles. But if you’re not then maybe get yourself a walking stick instead?”
When socially liberal becomes ugly this can take many forms. Here are just two examples:
First one...In 2011 the UK Conservative government set up a counter-terrorism agency which they called Prevent. Sounds good. Now - bearing in mind that the UK Civil Service is famously a) useless and b) stuffed full of Lefty ideologues eager to obstruct any conservative policies that the public might have voted for - what would you imagine might be the result? You guessed it...Yes; it decides that thinking any non-white people might be terrorists is ‘racist’ and what it needs to prevent is white people getting angry about the ‘socially liberal’ importation of Islamic jihad .
Second one....What might be the downstream consequences of telling people with already too much of the wrong kind of ‘self esteem’ that they need even more of it? Well one of them is ‘gangsta rap’. In other words: ‘Gimme respec’ for my thuggish and sexually barbarous bravado. All of it lapped up by adoring white college kids with the common sense of a gnat. Regular readers will know that rock music is a big interest of mine. I love the best of the Swing, Tamla, Soul and Disco eras. But then came Rap, which is in my view - perhaps controversially – a malign outcrop (at least in part) of liberal race-guilt-tripping. Trawling through the sheer wanton ugliness of its lyrics – including boasting of the murder and rape of women - it’s easy to become punch drunk. So, since a Bing Crosbyesque accentuating the positive of social conservatism - not the negative of social liberalism - was my intention in this essay, I’ll leave it to just a couple of links in *Note2.
(* Note1) https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-curse-of-modernity/; https://unherd.com/2020/06/the-woke-have-no-vision-of-the-future/; https://publicseminar.org/2018/12/what-is-psychoanalysis/; https://www.theamericanconservative.com/marriage-fertility-the-tribe/
(*Note2) Elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America; N.W.A: Straight outta excuses for misogyny; https://genius.com/Nwa-she-swallowed-it-lyrics
For anyone puzzled by my phrase “the night they drove old Wokesy down”, it’s a borrow from this song by The Band.
Visit Graham's substack: Slouching Towards Bethlehem