OR Staff Note: American conservatives tend to glorify corporate capitalism. This despite a well-known, and inconvenient fact. The behavior of most corporations, if they were people, would get them diagnosed as psychopaths. Corporate internal culture is also frequently toxic, often rewarding the morally worst employees with the highest career advancement. Dr. Kevin Dutton, a prominent British research psychologist, has noted that:
…professions attract the most psychopaths put CEO at the top of the list, followed by lawyer, media professional, salesperson, and surgeon.
It is impossible to serve mammon in a “conservative” manner, if by “conservative” one means to link that term to the Christian moral order.
By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
A fellow named Christian Josi recently took conservatives to task for opposing a rather large solar panel farm in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. His argument boiled down to his belief that private individuals and private businesses contracting to undertake a project in which no one is hurt is the essence of conservatism. In Mr Josi’s own words:
‘The real issue here is does a private company and a private landowner have the right to conduct business on their land with their money – or not? To be clear, Meta is asking for this power from a renewable source. Clearly, this is because Meta has customers all over the U.S. and some of those customers want Meta to use renewable energy. Just because you don’t agree with what Meta wants, that doesn’t mean Meta doesn’t have a right to ask for it. And, what right do you have to block it?
‘ . . . Finally, I suspect that many people in Louisiana are conservatives like me because they believe in this principle: keep government out of people’s lives unless it’s absolutely necessary.
‘In my view, building a solar plant on private property, with private money, for private companies is not an invitation for Big Government to get involved. It shouldn’t be opposed because of how some people, conservative or not, feel about solar panels. Therefore, I urge Iberville Parish to approve this solar plant, and let’s be conservatives because we believe in freedom, not intrusive government intervention’ (thehayride.com).
While that individualist rhetoric will sound pleasing to many ears, it is not essentially conservative but is rather the offspring of Lockean classical liberalism, which seeks to liberate the individual from traditional constraints: Church, family, etc. Ironically, it is precisely this philosophy of individualism, contractualization of all obligations, and the No Harm principle that has given the United States things like federal Supreme Court rulings in favor of sodomy and same-sex marriage, and the proliferation of State laws post-Roe v Wade in favor of abortion at any point in the pregnancy (Massachusetts being just the most recent example).
One of the notable conservative philosophers of recent years, Sir Roger Scruton of England, will help make this distinction clearer.
He would agree that there should be a large amount of room for individual freedom, but this freedom must be constrained by a recognition that the common good of the community ought to be taken into account also. Thus, the free marketplace of goods, ideas, actions, etc., is not the final arbiter of what makes a decision good or bad, conservative or not:
‘Left-wing thinkers often caricature the conservative position as one that advocates the free market at all costs, introducing competition and the profit motive even into the most sacred precincts of communal life. Adam Smith and David Hume made clear, however, that the market, which is the only known solution to the problem of economic co-ordination, itself depends upon the kind of moral order that arises from below, as people take responsibility for their lives, learn to honour their agreements and live in justice and charity with their neighbours. Our rights are also freedoms, and freedom makes sense only among people who are accountable to their neighbours for its misuse’ (roger-scruton.com).
Building a huge solar panel farm in the face of strong opposition from a sizable segment of one’s neighbors is not living in justice and charity with them, and hence is already drifting from the conservative ethos.
But Mr. Scruton goes further, enunciating how environmentalism itself fits within the conservative worldview:
‘Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. For conservatives, environmental politics needs to be rescued from the phony expertise of the scaremongers. But it must also be rescued from the religion of Progress, which urges us to pursue growth at all costs and to turn our beloved country into an array of concrete platforms linked by high-speed railways and surveyed from every hilltop by eerie wind-farms’ (Ibid.).
Mr. Josi’s argument leans very heavily for support on the idea of materialistic Progress – ‘Yet even though this solar field will help spur economic growth and create additional electricity, the Parish Council may reject it. That would be a mistake, and not conservative leadership.’ But as Mr Scruton makes clear, Progress of this sort in and of itself is not necessarily beneficial. There are other principles that must taken into account like stewardship and aesthetics.
Without the ideal of good stewardship of our land, we do not have conservatism but damaging exploitation:
‘Indeed, environmentalism is the quintessential conservative cause, the most vivid instance in the world as we know it, of that partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, which Burke defended as the conservative archetype. Its fundamental aim is not to bring about some radical reordering of society, or the abolition of inherited rights and privileges. It is not, in itself, interested in equality, except between generations, and its attitude to private property is, or ought to be, positive—for it is only private ownership that confers responsibility for the environment as opposed to the unqualified right to exploit it, a right whose effect we saw in the ruined landscapes and poisoned waterways of the former Soviet empire’ (theimaginativeconservative.org).
He goes on to point out how environmentalism blends seamlessly into aesthetics, i.e., the domain of beauty:
‘We discuss the visual transformation of the countryside, the disruption, as I see it, of a long established experience of home, and what this means in the life of the farmer, and the presence, as my leftist friends see it, of the real symbols of modern life, which now stand on the horizon of the farmer’s world, summoning him to the realities which he has avoided for far too long. By disputing tastes in this way we are not just striving for agreement. We are working our way towards a consensual solution to long term problems of settlement: We are discovering the terms on which we might live side by side in a shared environment, and how that environment should look in order that we can put down roots in it. Conceived in this way aesthetic judgement is the primary form of environmental reasoning: It is the way in which human beings incorporate into their present decisions the long-term environmental impact of what they do’ (Ibid.).
But aesthetics goes deeper; it has a spiritual dimension as well. Beauty brings health to the individual soul and thus to society at large. Ugliness does the opposite: It damages the soul and thus the community also. Mr. Scruton uses an episode from Louisiana’s Mother Country of France to illustrate this truth:
‘When Le Corbusier proposed his solution to the problem of Paris, which was to demolish the city and replace it with a park of scattered glass towers and raised walkways, with the proletariat neatly stacked in their boxes and encouraged to take restorative walks from time to time on the trampled grass below, he was expressing a judgement of taste. But he was not just saying, “I like it that way.” He was telling us that that is how it ought to be: He was conveying a vision of human life and its fulfillment, and proposing the forms that gave the best and most lucid expression to that vision. And it is because the city council of Paris was rightly repelled by that vision, on grounds as much moral and spiritual as purely formal, that Le Corbusier’s aesthetic was rejected and Paris saved’ (Ibid.).
Many cities in the United States have not been so wise as Paris to reject the brutalitarian (Benjamin Disraeli’s word) designs of modern architects:
‘And the ecological disaster of the American city stems almost entirely from the fact that—at a certain point—aesthetic principles were abandoned, neighbourhoods were demolished and rebuilt by people who neither lived in them nor looked at them, and building types were adopted on grounds that were never subjected to aesthetic appraisal. The business of building the city was prized free from the constraints contained in aesthetic judgement and surrendered to the utilitarian madness of the bureaucrats’ (Ibid.).
Now that the cities have been thoroughly routed, the green energy scammers are trying their hardest to force the ugly (and therefore soul-damaging) aesthetics of modern solar panels and windmills on the rural parts of Louisiana and other States (this is not to say that there are not small-scale applications of these sorts of things that could be beneficial). But it may yet be the plain folk conservatives in rural parishes and counties like Iberville Parish (the same ones Mr. Josi derides because of their concerns about solar panel farms) who will save their communities from these problematic constructions:
‘Consensual solutions, like the old pattern-books of vernacular architecture, which enabled people to slot their houses into a common street, and to build side by side without offending the neighbor, typify the conservative approach to society. These consensual solutions take the form of traditions, conventions, easy-going ways of accepting one’s lot and making common cause with one’s neighbors. . . . it could be that the middle class, with its plodding adherence to aesthetic norms, might have had the solution to the environmental problem all along, and that it was only the growth of the modern state, with its arrogant schemes and inability to respond to its own massive failures, that has jeopardized our future’ (Ibid.).
Mr. Josi’s solution does not seek a consensual solution, but instead a total surrender of concerned neighbors and citizens to a giant, outside corporation reordering a large swath of their countryside without much dialogue with the long-time residents about the matter. That isn’t conservative, either. The citizens of Iberville Parish, however, can make a good case against Meta’s solar panel farm based on the conservative principles of neighborliness, stewardship, and aesthetics.
The Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church tell us repeatedly that in our neighbor is our salvation. In the post-Orthodox West, more often than not, and especially within the ideology of Americanism, the reigning idea is that our neighbor is an impediment to our ambitions, profits, etc. He is not our salvation but rather a threat, a competitor. The first humanizes him, makes him an object of our love, roots him in our heart. The second dehumanizes him and encourages us to push him out of our way as quickly as possible. If the States are going to move beyond the Lockean selfishness of folks like Mr Josi and those at Meta and return to the more humane practices described by Sir Roger, we must heed once again the Orthodox teachings about how to deal properly with our neighbors.
