[Discussion] Keep The Government Small

[Paksoy, Hb]

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 
Click here for the main page of Bradley Lecture Series <bradley.htm>. 
The Skeptical Conservative 
By Andrew Sullivan
New Republic 
A Bradley Lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute 
November 4, 2002 
[Transcript prepared from a tape recording]
MR. DeMUTH: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the November Bradley Lecture.
I'd like to invite everyone present to come to next month's Bradley Lecture,
which will be on December 9th, when Lionel Tiger of Rutgers will give a
lecture entitled, "The Human Nature Project." 
After a long time and strenuous efforts, we finally got him, Andrew
Sullivan, to lecture in this series. He's here, and so are we. The bare
bones are that Mr. Sullivan received his B.A. in history from Oxford and a
master's and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He has
worked at the New Republic since 1986, when he began work as an intern,
ascended to be associate editor, deputy editor, and was the editor from 1991
to 1996. Still writes for the New Republic as a senior editor, and writes
for many other periodicals as well--the Sunday Times of London, the New York
Times magazine, and many others. 
He is the author of two books, Virtually Normal: An Argument About
Homosexuality, and Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and
Survival. He's preparing a collection of essays on the war at present. 
But the truth about Andrew Sullivan, and the thing to be said, is that he is
one of the great innovative public intellectuals and controversialists in
American life who writes about sex and love and war and history and
contemporary politics and foreign policy and domestic issues of all kinds,
and has become, first and foremost, one of the great bloggers. I'm not even
sure if I've pronounced that correctly. But andrewsullivan.com
<http://andrewsullivan.com/> is a cornucopia of interesting insights into
all manner of contemporary affairs. He is obviously a great surfer as well,
because he always has an enormous cornucopia of interesting articles by
people of all persuasions on every subject, and it's a great place to go in
the morning. 
This innovation of his is quite alarming to publishers and think tank
chieftains everywhere, signaling, as it may, the reemergence of the private
intellectual freed of all of the "services" provided by people such as
myself--people that edit print magazines, and so forth. But he does it with
such aplomb that one can only applaud what he has done, and one can take
solace from the fact that he does it so well that it is probably not widely
replicable. 
His lecture this evening, being it's such a high-toned, fancy place as AEI,
is not on the down-and-dirty political issues or current affairs that are
covered on his blog, but on matters of high philosophy, to which he has
given the title, "The Skeptical Conservative." Please give a warm welcome to
Andrew Sullivan. 
[Applause.] 
MR. SULLIVAN: Thank you very much. I can reassure Chris that there is no
danger of blogging becoming a viable alternative to think tanks. It takes up
more time every day, and I'm becoming more impoverished by the minute. But
it's such fun, I can't really resist it. 
I'm also really honored to be asked to give this lecture and to be here at
this place in front of this audience. I count many of you among my friends
and colleagues and allies and critics, and I don't think I ever have spoken
in front of a more intimidating crowd. Which is why I've picked the topic I
have tonight. I ransacked my mind about what I might know that no one else
will know as much about. I figured I might as well go back to my roots in
political philosophy and dig up my dissertation, think again about the
thought and ideas of one Michael Oakeshott, a name that instills dread in
most American conservatives because they haven't read him but feel they
should have. And if they have read him, or they've read a smattering, they
nod knowingly but never, somehow, offer a remark when you bring up his name.

Why Oakeshott? Why now? It's funny, the only time I met him, which was a
very intimidating moment when I actually took my as-yet uncompleted doctoral
dissertation about him--it's only the second one ever done--and brought it
to him--sent it to him, and then had a meeting with him a month later at his
little cottage in Dorset, it was an unheated--I mean, no central heating; it
had a little coal fire--slate cottage right on the cliffs of Dorset
overlooking the English Channel. It was a bleak but beautiful place. 
We sat there and we discussed heaven and hell and politics and life. And at
the end of it, after a wonderful day, he asked me, unnervingly, as he sent
me on my way, what I planned to do with my life now that I was finishing my
dissertation. And I said, well, I think I might be a journalist. And this
look of dismay came over his face. And in that immortal English
understatement, he just said, "Oh, dear." And then he followed up by saying,
"I think the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder." 
So what on earth would he think of my blogging? 
At the same time, it seems to me that it's especially at moments like this,
when we're about to have an election tomorrow, a very exciting one, and
about to be on the brink of a possible war, that the taking steps back and
asking ourselves more profound and difficult questions about what exactly
politics is about, what exactly a conservative politics should or could be
about, is important. It's precisely when events press upon us with such
urgency that Oakeshott, I think, would argue the need for reflection and
distance. And I want tonight to just delineate three fundamental ideas that
Oakeshott had that I think are particularly powerful today--powerful at any
time and place, but particularly, I think, helpful in understanding our
current predicament. 
I want to start by talking about Oakeshott's understanding of skepticism.
Skepticism as a political philosophy is not at all very consonant with the
American experience. It doesn't seem to be particularly in touch with
anything in terms of contemporary politics, either in this continent or in
Europe. But for Oakeshott, conservatism was fundamentally about, at a deep
level, the skeptical temperament. In this, his clear influence and idol was
Montaigne, another profound skeptic writing, I might add, at a time of acute
religious war. 
Oakeshott's conservatism, his defense of liberal civil society, liberal
constitutionalism--of what many people today would call conservatism but
which strictly speaking is a brand of liberalism--was based not on the
notion that there are some rights of man that we can know for sure, let
alone truths that are self-evident. It wasn't based upon the notion that a
free society generates more wealth or power. It was simply based upon the
notion of the limits of human understanding. 
This radical defense of liberalism on the ground of skepticism can be
described in a certain basic way, which is that we cannot know. As an
empirical matter, as a practical matter, human beings do not know the
consequence of their actions. They cannot see the future. Their information
and data, based on what has happened in the past, is extremely limited. We
operate constantly, as human beings, in a fog--a mental, intellectual,
psychological fog. This is our reality. 
This fog extends not simply to abstract conceptions of what is true or
not--which Oakeshott never fully abandoned, but gradually came to relinquish
in his interests--but practically speaking as well. How do we know that what
we're going to do is produce the results we want? How do we know that a
certain policy is going to bring about the consequences it is designed to
bring about? How do we know, when we start a war, where we will end up in
that war? 
This skepticism leads Oakeshott to two very basic ideas. One is because no
one--no one--has the right to certainty, we should do all that we can to
prevent anyone with that certainty from running our lives. What this means
is that you keep the principles of certainty out of politics. He was
thinking, as Montaigne was thinking at that time, of theocracy. Montaigne
lived in the time of the wars of religion, and tried everything he could
both to uphold the existing norms of Christianity while quietly, bravely,
interestingly, fascinatingly dissenting. 
Oakeshott's defense of a small government, therefore, is not based on what
traditionally conservatives believe it to be based upon. It's based upon the
lack of knowledge of any group of people in knowing what on earth they're
doing. Keep the government small so it can do as little damage as possible.
Whenever certainty arises in public debate, question it, suspect it, doubt
it. And alongside this, a form of government, a form of statesmanship, of
politicking, which deeply understands the limits of its own knowledge, which
moves forward with a sense of judgment, not certainty; by prudence, not
conviction. 
I think when you look at the United States, one sees really a rather
successful attempt to instill this for good. The Constitution of the United
States--liberal constitutions in general--is designed to create permanent
restraint upon any group or any notion that seeks to impose the truth upon
the rest of us. But government itself, even in non-constitutional societies
like the United Kingdom, where the constitution is whatever anybody wants to
decide it is an any particular moment, the ability of governing is
still--the practice of government is still an exercise in restraint,
prudence, caution, doubt. 
I'll read you Oakeshott's own description of exactly what this kind of
politics is about, because I can't approximate what a beautiful stylist he
was and because when you read sentences like this, you realize what
political writing really can be. 
"Into the heat of our engagements," Oakeshott writes, "into the passionate
clash of beliefs, into our enthusiasm for saving the souls of our neighbors
or of all mankind, a government of this sort injects an ingredient not of
reason--how should we expect that?--but of the irony that is prepared to
counteract one vice by another, of the raillery that deflates extravagance
without itself pretending to wisdom, of the mockery that disperses tension,
of inertia and skepticism. 
"Indeed, it might be said"--and I love this point--"do we keep a government
of this sort to do for us the skepticism we have neither the time nor the
inclination to do for ourselves? It is like the cool touch of the mountain
that one feels in the plain even on the hottest day. Or, to leave metaphor
behind, it is like the governor, which by controlling the speed at which its
parts move, keeps an engine from racketing itself to pieces. 
"It is not, then, mere stupid prejudice which disposes a conservative to
take this view of the activity of governing, nor any highfalutin
metaphysical beliefs necessary to provoke it or even make it intelligible.
It is connected merely with the observation that where activity is bent upon
enterprise, the indispensable counterpart is another order of activity bent
upon restraint, which is unavoidably corrupted, indeed altogether abrogated,
when the power assigned to it is used for advancing favorite projects. 
"An umpire who at the same time is one of the players is no umpire. Rules
about which we are not disposed to be conservative are not rules, but
incitements to disorder." There's a classic defense of judicial restraint. 
And then this final remark: "The conjunction of dreaming and ruling
generates tyranny." 
Perhaps it's understandable that this doctrine hasn't really taken root in
America, a place where dreams are constantly remade. But of course,
Oakeshott's point was precisely that those dreams in the populace at large,
the restlessness and vibrancy and enthusiasms and zeal of Americans in
general, above all require the temper and restraint of this cool prudence
and limited government. The two go together. 
Societies require balance. They require one kind of force counteracting
another. There is in Oakeshott a deep Aristotelian sense of the balance of
societies, the middling sort, and the middle ground. Which is why, equally,
he was not an absolutist attacker of the welfare state. He wasn't an
absolutist attacker of what we might call one nation conservatism, or
national greatness conservatism, or all sorts of other projects. He
understood that those tendencies to what he called "enterprise association"
were endemic in the West. He just wanted to raise the possibility of
skepticism to cast doubt upon them, and that equally important is the
imperative to restrain and control. 
Notice his ability to embrace contradictions. A society can be full of
dreams, but its government shouldn't be. In fact, it's government's
avoidance of dreams that allows its people to dream in their own lives and
their own ways even more ambitiously. This is a rather terrifying prospect,
to live without certainty, to live with an eternal contradiction. 
In his famous metaphor, he described political activity in the way that he
might describe practical activity: "In political activity," he wrote, "men
sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbor for shelter nor
floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The
enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel. The sea is both friend and
enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional
manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion." 
The second idea I want to introduce, or stress tonight about Oakeshott picks
up on that last quote--"traditional manner of behavior." I think many people
unfamiliar with Oakeshott think that fundamentally his argument was simply
that tradition counts--do what you've always done, don't rock the boat. But
nothing--nothing--could be further from the truth. 
Oakeshott's understanding of human action, of human conduct and of human
society was radically to embrace autonomy and contingency and the
possibility of change. As you could see on that metaphor of the ship sailing
into the complete unknown, with no harbor, no sky, no bottom of the sea,
it's capable of going anywhere at any time. So where does it get its
guidance? 
And here, you have to understand Oakeshott's theory of history. Oakeshott
spent many years studying history. He's probably best known within the
historiographical profession of coming up with a very radical idea of what
history was all about. 
History certainly was not, as far as Oakeshott was concerned, somehow the
accretion of tradition which one had to continue indefinitely. This man was
not in any sense a Tory. What he wanted to do, and perhaps the best way of
explaining it, is to describe a theory of history, and indeed a theory of
actual current human events, practical life, which as far as possible
rejected determinism--determinism in all its forms, specifically Marxian
determinism, but also Weberian, Durkheimian--any notion that society and
what happens next is determined by what has gone before. 
What he wants to theorize is a succession of events which are both unique
and related to each other, and he wants to do this without an understanding
of luck, causation, similarity, correlation, or analogy. Think about that.
He's basically denying himself the ability to link one historical event with
one that follows it, almost every single mode of criticism or analysis that
human beings have ever used to understand why one thing happens after
another. 
His solution, in his essay on The Theoretical Understanding of Human
Conduct, is merely to restate the problem. He writes, "A contingent
relationship in the full sense, however, is a sequential relationship of
intelligent individual occurrences where what comes after is recognized to
be conditional on what went before not merely because before-and-after
cannot be reversed, nor, of course, because what went before is recognized
as a causal condition, or because they're functionally related, but because
they touch and, in touching, identify themselves as belonging together and
as composing an intelligible continuity of conditionally dependent
occurrences." 
The key concept here, alive with skepticism, is "contingency," the notion
that any human event can produce any other human event, and the freedom or
autonomy of individual human beings to make the world anew. "Touch" here
means the absence of interval, or the lack of any intermediary which is not
itself an occurrence, such as a law or a function. And there's also no
priority in the way such events encounter each other. There's no teleology,
no pattern, no destination. "Contingency" is thus defined as the space
between events. It's a vacuum. Nothing external to the events links them,
yet they are related. 
It's not an easy concept to understand. And I grappled with it for many
months. 
The image that he uses to describe what he means by this is a dry wall. Dry
walls are best known, I guess, in northern England--although they may exist
in this country as well--where farmers would delineate their property from
another farm by building walls made up of boulders and stones and rocks.
They would use no mortar. They would build it entirely on the basis of the
shapes of the stones and rocks themselves, until they built a credible and
coherent wall. 
There was no plan to begin with. There was no particular pattern by the end.
But it was a wall. "The stones--that is, the antecedent events"--I'm quoting
him--"which compose the wall--that is, the subsequent event--are joined and
held together not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes. And the wall here
has no premeditated design. It is what the components, in touching,
constitute." 
The other analogy he uses is a story, the way a story's plot develops. He
says--and I'm talking about the kind of stories that one tells one's
children, making it up as you go along; you haven't planned this out in
advance. 
"A story," he says, "has no overall meaning, and is occurrences understood
in terms of the meaning they acquire from their evidential contingent
relationships. And the teller of such a story has no message for those who
listen, other than the intelligibility with which he purports to have
endowed the occurrences concerned by putting them into a story." 
What this relationship really is--and it still puzzles people-- Maybe what
it's not is clearer than what it is. It allows for a greater contingency
between human events than any other account can muster, and in this way
closely dovetails with Oakeshott's advocacy of extemporaneous practical
life, which was a major subplot of his Rationalism and Essays. 
Oakeshott was a bit of a bohemian. He loved pursuing his own interests
wherever they led him. He was always seen with some beautiful woman on his
arm. He came from the days when sexual harassment wasn't even thought of,
let alone policed. He went on trips throughout Europe without anything in
his pocket but a little amount of money and would sleep by the hedge rows,
going from village to village, seeing what he found, living as he wanted to.

To seize each moment, to delight in it, and pursue its informations with the
fullest degree of autonomy and least trace of heteronomy is perhaps the best
way to understand Oakeshott's view of how you deal with the contingencies of
history and the contingencies of life. To see "how it will turn out." It is
a response to contingency Oakeshott wishes to affirm in each practical
event. And the paradox of a still-lingering presence of tradition in
contingency and the inevitable weight of heteronomy within autonomous agency
might be seen as most successfully resolved in Oakeshott's writings by the
temperament he associates with poetic experience. 
This is not to say the point of contingency in history is that human beings
can do anything they want. It isn't to say that one event can lead to
absolutely anything. It isn't to say that one is living life in order to
lose oneself at every minute. As we've seen, such loss of self is inimical
to Oakeshott's understanding of practical agency. Rather, paradoxically,
what Oakeshott's trying to say is that by acquiescing in contingency, by
understanding we have no control, by knowing that we cannot know what will
come next, by playing into that knowledge, maximizing it, only then are we,
paradoxically, led to strengthen our autonomy. 
Oakeshott says at one point in the Rationalism essays that a man's identity,
"is not a fortress into which we may retire, and the only means we have of
defending it--that is, ourselves--against the hostile forces of change is in
the open field of our experience." 
Far from being someone that crouched under the defense of tradition, he said
history is a complete series of contingencies. Go out there, join it. Know
its randomness, know its potential. Let go a little, and you will master it
better than those who want to impose an order upon it which isn't there. You
gain more control by letting go. Human beings and human society are so
complex, they change so completely, they are so radically open to change,
the attempt to order it all is a mistake. It will lead you up blind alleys.
And the only sensibility which could allow you to govern politics, and
indeed to live life, is one which lets go of control over the future. 
Facing the open field of experience is the ability to maximize the
contingency in each practical moment. It is to defeat contingency by
accepting its terms of combat. It's a perilous course, and in it our
identity is constantly under threat. But it is, paradoxically, the only way
in which that identity can be defended. 
Conservatism in this understanding does not seek to suppress change, to
dictate the course of a story, insisting on a plot. It recognizes the
mixture of tradition and possibility in events and stresses the contingency
and possibilities in order, paradoxically, to conserve identity more fully
in the face of it. Just as riding a bike fast steadies the balance, so
facing practical life with this attitude steadies the self. 
How precisely does this understanding of practical skill resolve Oakeshott's
paradox of heteronomy within autonomy and tradition within contingency? By
meeting the contingent moment head-on. While we seem to lose ourselves in
heteronomous activity, we end by affirming our autonomy. By fighting against
the weight of tradition in each moment, we conserve our own integrity, our
own personal tradition. And by acquiescing in contingency, by acknowledging
uncertainty, by resting our faith in doubt, we generate a tradition at its
least self-conscious and most spontaneous--Hayek's "spontaneous order" put
in terms of personal conduct. 
And in so doing, we also approximate what Oakeshott understands as peace.
"So far as I understand it," he wrote, "peace is a kind of reconciliation to
mortality, a feeling of permanence in transience, either reached after
frustration and pain or seized intuitively in youth." He loved the young. He
loved their sense of endless possibility. He loved their sense of play. He
just thought they should never be allowed anywhere near government. 
So, too, I think he would love American life and vibrancy and urgency, its
experiments, its radicalism, its constant churning. He just wouldn't want to
see it replicated in government. He said once, "I'm a conservative in
government because I'm a radical in every other human activity. The only way
in which we maximize the possibilities of human beings to invent themselves
and reinvent themselves, pursue their own ideas and models and desires, is
when we make sure the government is strong enough and firm enough to
maintain a society which allows such freedom to exist. That requires
sobriety, judgment, prudence." 
The final point I want to make, that Oakeshott makes, is about character. I
think all three of these concepts--skepticism, contingency, and
character--are related, and in Oakeshott's work they form a rather beautiful
triangle. 
By "character," I don't mean what many contemporary American conservatives
understand, which is living up to a certain set notion of what virtuous
activity is--a good character is one which abides and obeys certain moral
rules; a bad character is one that doesn't. I don't think Oakeshott would
have disagreed necessarily with that. He was not a moral relativist; he was
a moral skeptic--and there is a difference. What he was more interested in
was the possibility of the development of human personality and human
character that free societies generate. 
He loved Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne. He loved the Renaissance and the
Reformation because at that point, as he saw it, a new birth of humankind
was born--the possibility of someone being themselves fully, exploring their
own personality fully. And he believed that only, once separation of church
and state had occurred, only when real freedom was accorded individuals to
pursue their own ends was the full flowering and flourishing of human
possibility imaginable. 
And how he delighted in it. In all the odd and quirky characters you find in
Shakespeare--from Falstaff to Bushy, from Benedik all the way through to
Hamlet, Macbeth--he saw that what Shakespeare was showing the world what a
free society could create--not in terms of projects or goals or
abstractions, but in terms of the human beings that are allowed to flourish
with all their idiosyncracies and faults and character traits. 
This was for Oakeshott a wonder to behold. Every person he met was a
character, or at least a potential character. And he saw the point of
liberal democracy as giving individuals the ability to more fully become
themselves, to ripen and mature in all their idiosyncracy and difference. It
required a very--somewhat even Nietzschean understanding of self-creation.
And there is something very modern about Oakeshott's philosophy in this
sense. 
Here is his description of what this kind of self-creation of character,
this kind of self-reliant individual, this kind of person that flourishes in
a free society, and doesn't flourish in other forms of society, is like.
Notice how Oakeshott would argue, in fact, that what regimes are does
matter. If you live in a theocratic state where only some thoughts are
allowed and many thoughts are forbidden, the possibility for human beings
developing in their lives particular diversity of character and
idiosyncratic forms of living is much lower than in a free society where
government's not trying to tell them what to do. 
Similarly, if government becomes so powerful in its attempt to look after
its citizens, to take care of them, to therapize them, so, too, then, the
individual ability of human beings to be themselves, however ornery and
difficult and cranky that might be, is inhibited. And Oakeshott wanted
variety. And he loved human difference. 
He wrote, "This disposition, or quality of character, is not to be
understood as surrender to so-called subjective will or as a relapse into an
effortless indulgence of inclination or as the canonization of 'conscience.'
It is a difficult achievement. The self here is a substantive personality,
the outcome of an education, whose resources are collected in
self-understanding. And conduct is recognized as the adventure in which this
cultivated self deploys its resources, discloses and enacts itself in
response to its contingent situations, and both acquires and confirms its
autonomy." 
That's a word you'll see throughout Oakeshott's writing, this word
"adventure." It's his favorite word. Because all of life, he wants to argue,
is an adventure. Let's see how this will turn out. Let's see what I can
become. Let's see what I can make of my life. Let's great life and its
difficulties and exigencies and unpredictable nature as an adventure. 
But nor does the experience of this disposition, he would argue, imply the
worship of nonconformity, the devotion to arbitrary so-called
self-expression, or a resolution to be different at all costs. The conduct
it prompts is not composed of unconditional choices, and it doesn't require
indifference to moral or prudential practices or aversion from any but
self-made rules. It is composed of actions and utterances which reflect the
contingent sentiments, affections, and beliefs this particular self has made
its own, performed in its own subscriptions to practices whose resources it
has also made its own. 
The autonomy of such a self and the independence, originality of such
conduct lies not at all in an unconcern for the conditions which specify the
arts of agency. Nor, again, does this disposition forbid association in a
cooperative undertaking, to pursue with others a common purpose. What it
requires is that such association shall be in terms of continuous choices to
be associated, which reflect the self-understanding of the persons
concerned. That's an Oakeshottian understanding of community, in which every
member of it continuously chooses to be part of it. You can see the Hayekian
spontaneity in this model of human association. 
In short, what is postulated and emphasized here a collective personality
autonomous on account of its self-understanding and its command of resources
it has made its own. And the half of this self-understanding is knowing its
own limits. It's another typically Oakeshottian moment. He will give you
this wonderful description of adventure, and then he will correct it
half-way through, or you've got to--it doesn't mean getting rid of all
morality--and then he will kick you at the very end in the stomach with a
sentence like, "But the most important thing about knowing who you are is
knowing what you're not and what you can't do." There is adventure and joy,
but also sobriety. There is enormous complexity in his thought. 
He goes on, revealingly I think, in which he says, "A character in which
this disposition is strong may exhibit it in a masterful egoism, almost as
careless of the concerns of some others as it is of their opinions, and a
disdain of the consequences or recognition, and a compelling versatility of
response or in a gracious or impatient intrusion into the affairs of the
less well endowed. 
"But of course, since what we are considering is intelligent conduct,
there's nothing whatever to identify this disposition with merely
self-gratification. Such a character may display it habitually or only on
important occasions, but he will always be a somewhat finicky chooser,
insisting upon doing things his own way. In his capacity for taking
initiative whilst others are laboriously marshalling their resources or
seeking supporters, and in his ability to take responsibility upon himself
and 'to go about his business as if he had not a friend in the world,' as
Halifax portrays him, he may be recognized as a useful character to have
about the place. Possessing more than others, he can afford to lose more
without becoming destitute. He is more likely to perish in some quixotic
adventure than to die in bed. But either way, he will have a death of his
own, as he has a life of his own." 
It's a beautiful evocation, really, of what liberal society is trying to do.
It is trying to allow and encourage and nourish and nurture the ability of
us all to live our own--our own--lives, to take responsibility for them, to
take joy in them, to embrace the adventure of them, and to cherish the
freedom that makes them possible. 
And then he talks about what the opposite of that might be, and I think
that's why it's worth thinking about, particularly at this moment. 
He goes on, "Or this disposition may express itself in a modest and
unaggressive self-reliance, in a man's acquiescence in his own capacity for
self-enactment, whatever it may be, and even, quite humbly, in a man's
knowing how to belong to himself and a preference for being related to
others in these terms. And it may go along with an undismayed
acknowledgement and admiration of superiority of others, an aristocratic
recognition of one's own unimportance and a humility devoid of humiliation. 
"On the other hand, one who understands himself to be the messenger of a
god, to be illuminated from above, or to be the voice of destiny, who denies
having any thoughts of his own to give meaning to what he does or says, and
thus absolves himself from all responsibility for his actions and
utterances, is a character of a different sort. He has resigned the
character of a human being and has contracted out of the conversation of
mankind. He is either an angel or a lunatic." 
Those who renounce the possibility of living one's own life, of becoming
oneself, of making one's own choices, of creating one's own adventure in
life cannot be a part of the conversation of mankind. That conversation is
premised upon freedom that the West gives us, the freedom that limited
government gives us, the freedom that separation of church and state gives
us. Those people who flew into the World Trade Center were either angels or
lunatics. They didn't understand, they do not understand, the entire project
that we are about. They do not understand the possibility of human beings
deciding their own destiny for themselves are not in enslavement to a god
that all must obey. 
What I think modern conservatives sometimes miss in their legitimate calls
for morality and the need for human beings as personalities and as people to
live up to certain moral norms is also the joy of character, or personality,
of the things that make us love another person. We don't always love another
person because he or she is virtuous. We sometimes love another person
because of their faults. We love them because of their idiosyncracies. And
yet it takes, often, until the memorial service before we actually
acknowledge this particular reality. 
And Oakeshott saw that love of humanity in all its difference as one of the
critical projects of a liberal political order. He looked around at people
and saw them as things to be cherished, in contrast to those who would look
at human beings and see them as something to be corrected or corralled or
instructed or uplifted or informed. 
This is the real conservative definition of diversity. It's not enough to
argue against the numbing and awful group-think of using the word
"diversity" to mean people of a certain race or people of a certain
ethnicity or opportunity of a certain gender or sexual orientation. Yes, one
should resist that, but at the same time one must point out the real
diversity, which is the joyous variety of humankind, the beautiful
difference that exists in our culture and the ability to cherish difference
without being panicked by the possibility of inequality. This is also deeply
embedded in what Oakeshott is trying to say. 
I guess by now it's pretty clear why I think he's important today. We're
about to engage in a war whose end we do not know. We are engaged in a
massive conflict whose consequences we cannot tell. And although it may be
right--and I believe it is right--to wage that war, we would be foolish to
wage it without thorough skepticism and doubt about its aims, its means, its
methods, and its prosecution. 
Similarly, we should understand that human events are contingent. The world
changes dramatically. All it is are human beings thinking, getting up in the
morning, reconstructing their lives each day. That's all it is. And the
power of thought and ideas and action to change the way things happen is
quite dramatic. There is nothing in the past that determines the
future--nothing. And the key is to deploy our autonomy in the present in a
way that recognizes its limitations, to maximize the possibilities of the
future. Oakeshott's phrase of this is "to pursue the intimations of the
present." You can't be done with it altogether, but it's a starting-off
point, not an ending place. 
And lastly, I think, to look at our society not in terms of abstraction, not
in terms of the slogans of freedom, liberty, or equality, but in terms of
the people it produces, in terms of the fantastic energy you see all across
this country, an energy combined with self-reliance, the quirkiness, the
marginalized, the difficult, the ornery, the people who live as if they did
not have a friend in the world, the people who are reinventing this society
as we speak--in new technologies, in new books, in new films, in new
speeches, in new relationships, in new ways of living together. 
This is--this is--the real fruit of the West: its people and their
difference. And Oakeshott's grasp of that and his rootedness in the great
enlightened tradition--not of the Enlightenment, but of Montaigne and
Shakespeare--shows why in fact he's more important today, perhaps, than he
ever was in his lifetime. 
Thank you. 
[Applause.] 
MR. SULLIVAN: Well, I am required, and indeed eager, to take your questions
about what I have just [sound fails]. And I'm also eager and happy to take
any other questions within [inaudible]. So I'm happy to answer questions on
anything, in fact. Yes? 
QUESTION: What kind of relationships--you cannot put responsibility to your
own autonomous development as the highest goal. You can't be a parent and
have that as a goal. You can't be partners in certain enterprises, be a
loyal partner in the long term, and have that as your goal. I don't--your
vision does not--I don't know where family falls in your vision, or the free
submission of the individuals to what they believe are God's laws. I mean,
it's true--that's still an act of freedom, as is loyalty that you have
within a family. But you have to yield part of that first--that autonomy
of-- Of what? 
MR. SULLIVAN: Yes, well, let me take those two points. First, the family.
And I'm reminded of Emerson, actually, and of Relationships. I think it was
Emerson who said the whole point of relationship is to be more fully
yourself, that you discover more parts of yourself by being joined to
another. The notion of fusing yourself with another person and using
yourself in that context is not something that I would endorse or, I think,
Oakeshott or Emerson would have argued. 
I think you can--the point of going into a relationship--a married
relationship or another form of long-term relationship--is precisely to
explore how you are in such a relationship. And I think paradoxically it may
mean that you have to give up yourself to re-find yourself in that
circumstance--re-find yourself again as a member of a partner. But it's
yourself. You're never fused. You will die alone. Your life will be yours;
it will not be anybody's else. But it will be--well, you will die and leave
them behind as well. 
Now, you can, of course, create and guide other human beings and enrich them
in that way. And certainly Oakeshott understood that it was that precise
relationship between human beings that would enrich and bring out the
individual characteristics of each person. And the kind of person that lived
in a relationship would, I think, definitely emerge as a different
personality. But that doesn't mean to say that it's a superior personality
to the one who doesn't do that, who seeks out another form of
self-realization. 
He's radically indifferent to the varieties of human personality and how
they could be created. He certainly respects those. But family life is not
something that he's particularly interested in, and for good reason. I think
he had six wives. He was about to made a--he was about to be given an
honorary knighthood, which should have been done years ago. But the week
before he was about to get it, he was caught having sex on the beach by a
policeman with his latest wife and was therefore regarded as not fit for the
honors of Tory England. 
The second point about religious faith, I think Oakeshott understood that.
He was very respectful of that, the possibility of the individual deciding
their actual destiny involves giving up themselves to something else. Except
I think he found it pretty abhorrent. I think he found it to be a denial of
one's humanity. He was a Christian, but in a very convoluted way. 
I remember once when I was talking to him about Christianity, which we
talked about for an hour-and we talked about salvation--his main problem
with Christianity was the whole possibility of salvation. After all, he said
to me, looking me straight in the eye, he said, after all, who would want to
be saved? The world would end. All of the complexities and joys of
misunderstandings and communications and idiosyncracies and failures that is
part of man's fall would disappear into this blinding whiteness of
uniformity. And it terrified him. 
So he liked the idea of God creating man to have a jolly conversation with
them, going on forever and ever. The idea that all these things would
somehow all be resolved, all these contradictions resolved in heavenly bliss
was something that filled him with absolute horror. That's why he was, I
think, an Anglican. As a friend of mine once put it, he was an Anglican
because he believed the Church of England was a bulwark against religion.
And if so, we have achieved that in the United Kingdom. 
The woman right back there. Yes? 
QUESTION: I like these little side notes you're dropping in as you answer
the questions. Now that we know that he had six wives, I can see more
meaning in the term that he saw life as an adventure. 
MR. SULLIVAN: And that's just counting the wives. 
QUESTION: I'm sure. You know, I really liked your talk and I was following
right along with it as a fine description of a democracy in a liberal
society at peace. But I frankly was quite confused when you started to apply
these thoughts to a society at war. In point of fact, as this nation gears
up for war, or as Britain did in World War Two, or any of the great
conflicts, doesn't government really have to emphasize exactly the opposite
of everything you're saying? Government has to step up to the plate, say,
yes, we understand cause and effect, we understand the course of history,
we're purposeful. You have to emphasize shared sentiments among people, not
the endless diversity of individuals, combine them into a bulwark. 
I wonder if Oakeshott spoke at all in the application of his views to a
democracy defending itself. I think I could forgive him possibly for saying
family life was a prison, but not for leaving the country undefended, to be
taken over by others-- 
MR. SULLIVAN: Well, let me correct you, because he never said family life
was a prison at all. If that's what you've inferred, it's wrong. I think he
saw it as one wonderful avenue for human self-realization, an important
feature of it. 
He was absolutely extremely concerned with war, and he understood that it
was sometimes necessary. He fought himself in the Second World War and
received great honors for doing so. But at the same time, throughout the war
he wrote about philosophy, he wrote about freedom. He saw, in the Second
World War in the United Kingdom, for example, the awful legacy of that war,
which was the mobilization of the entire society into a socialist system. He
understood that war is a terrible danger to liberty and to freedom. 
But he was the one that said that such things had to happen, and did happen.
He wasn't one of those people that say I believe in civil association--what
he understood as a free society--regardless. He understood that human beings
also needed from time to time, for all sorts of reasons, to corral
themselves together to seek common ends to achieve communal purposes. And
war is obviously the most extreme version of that. He just loathed it. And
he would ask us in waging it not to fall prey to its temptations--to believe
the government knows best always, to believe that what we're fighting for is
victory rather than the ability to go back to peace. 
But democracies should not love war, and they don't. All he was doing and
all I'm saying is that as we go into war, as we fight a war, we should
remember what the system is we're trying to defend. Especially this war,
which is clearly a war between liberal democracy and a theocracy. And that's
an important clarification. 
So he understood war had to happen in '41. He understood its importance. But
he was also aware, once that war was over, how the state had grown so
powerful and was able to steal vast amounts of the economy, to coopt vast
amounts of enterprise and industry, to use that communal purpose for malign
and ultimately stultifying ends. 
There is no essay more acerbic in Oakeshott's corpus than an attack on the
BBC in the 1940s, when it was at its zenith of, sort of, public control and
the ability to tell the English what they really should think--you know,
NPRism, the notion that the government-funded organ should somehow do you
good. He found this repulsive even in the 1940s, when it was at its peak.
And he deserves credit for seeing through it when it was at its apex. 
Stanley, you've been-- 
QUESTION: Thanks, Andrew. Loved the talk. And it's so helpful in, you know,
just helping to understand your thought. 
That last question was exactly my question, so now I get to follow up. I
thought your answer was very interesting, but I guess my reaction to it is
that--my sense is that Oakeshott took for granted that the family would be
there, that religion would be there, that war would be there, and he saw his
task as a critic, a necessary critic. But it just strikes me that if he were
alive now--maybe it would be all the same if he were alive now, but at the
present moment, it's easier to imagine that family, religion, the kind of
society that can gather itself for war can't be taken for granted anymore. 
So, you know, it just seems like there's something missing from his
philosophy, that instead of seeing things as a balance between these
collective requirements and the necessity of an individualist critique, he's
taken one side with the thought that, well, we can take for granted that all
of that other stuff exists. But we can't take that for granted, and it
strikes me that's one of our problems now. 
MR. SULLIVAN: First of all, he was very clear--and if you read his long
discourses on what he called enterprise association, which is the notion
that a society is basically a bunch of people who are gathered around a
common purpose and seek their purpose and personal meaning in the pursuit of
those common goals--is a perfectly respectable and important in European
civil society. In fact, it is indispensable, he would argue, to the West.
His goal was to attempt to resuscitate and to throw new emphasis on the
alternative tradition of civil association, which he regarded as deeply
threatened, as I think it still is by many other forces. 
I think he believed--I see no reason at the very end of his life he believed
anything differently than he did at the beginning of his life--and he lived
through the '70s and '80s. I don't think he ever thought the religious
impulse would die out; it hasn't. If anything, it's more powerful today than
it's ever been in the last couple of centuries. 
And I think he believed that the family also was a dynamic institution. It
could change. He is not a natural rights, natural law figure. He is not
saying there is one model for the family that is right and natural and has
always been the case and that any society that deviates from that is doomed.
He's saying, first of all, historically that's silly and not true; and
secondly, we don't know. Again, skepticism. We don't know. 
In fact, if society emerges and evolves in a certain fashion, as if forces
seem to be quite strong in that position, how do we know the society isn't
telling us something? How do we know it isn't wiser than we are? He would
look at contemporary American society and see the reconstitution of the
family and the family unit as something interesting, first of all, not
something that someone should marshall and rally the forces of the state to
corral or stop. 
In that sense, you know, he's a bit of Burkean. But I think he's a more
radical Burkean than Burke. As I try to argue, the notion of contingency in
human events, which I think is at the core of his philosophy, implies a
remaking of all sorts of things. In other words, there is some--there's
certainly a distance from notions of natural law or natural right in his
writings, which is why a conservatism that is not rooted in those traditions
is so novel and interesting. 
And for me, it was such a revelation, because it was precisely when I was,
you know, growing up and trying to think through these issues, that one came
across someone who was able to defend a liberal society on conservative
grounds--skepticism, contingency, lack of system--and come to fully defend
liberalism and, I think, defend liberalism from its internal enemies--from
liberals who don't even understand their own tradition--and from
traditionalist conservatives, with whom he was never comfortable. 
I mean, imagine telling William Bennett that you don't want to be saved. I
mean, it's a little--it's a different perspective. 
Yes, sir? 
QUESTION: Excellent, stimulating talk. And I think that tacitly he's
assuming there exists a society that's a government that is permanent, free,
into which all the individuals can do this contingency and associate and
create. Edison created whole loads of things which affect our lives, but he
also acted within the capitalist system and used his companies and so on. 
The analogy I'm trying to say is that democratic societies are fragile. They
can be cracked, as we saw in the Weimar Republic. And what he leaves out of
his philosophy is tradition, values, leadership, and memory. 
Whenever you--if anyone here wanted to enrich their lives, they could follow
Oakeshott. But if you want to lead, you might do as Oliver Wendell Holmes
did all the time--call on the traditions of the strains of memory, what the
society did in the past, what heroes did. And to lead, you cannot lead as a
totally autonomous creative, even if you are, you know, credibly
intelligent. And I think he tacitly assumes that somehow this democratic
society in which the individual can flourish will exist without tradition,
values, leadership, and memory. 
MR. SULLIVAN: Let me address that. I differ, partly because I think that he
in fact assumed that the society that exists and is functioning well,
inasfar as it is allowing freedom, is a delicate achievement, as you would
put it, a cultural achievement of the European state, essentially, and
America, and a historically rare achievement. And he wants to defend that. 
Leadership for him is an interesting concept, I think because he's obviously
very interested in what makes a good leader, what makes a good statesman,
what makes a good politician. And I think he would absolutely understand
that such a leader would have to at some point evoke history--sometimes a
fake history, sometimes a true history, a myth of some sort to corral
support. He understood that that was part of it. 
But what he also understood was that at some point--one thinks of the
present moment--the point he was fundamentally trying to make was that no
statesman or governor can--there is no book anywhere, not even the Bible,
not Machiavelli, nothing, to tell a statesman at any particular moment in
time what he should or should not do, that there are many competing sources
of advice, there are many possible agendas. 
But you cannot dispense with what he would call and what I also call
"prudential judgment," the ability to know how to deal with a certain
situation. Which doesn't come from reading a lot about it, doesn't come from
being extremely smart about it; it doesn't come from having encyclopedic
knowledge about it, because we all live with limited knowledge. It comes
from some skill, some human skill that is very hard to grasp, very hard to
identify and isolate, that is called judgment. And this notion of judgment,
which escapes and eludes any philosophy, is something that we've found in
all sorts of people in all sorts of times. And we're lucky if we happen to
have leaders who have that sense of judgment. 
Again, it is not the same--again, it's a very--it flies in the face of what
some liberals understand, which is that if you're smart enough, you can do
anything; if you're smart enough, you can know what it is to fashion a
sculpture. Or his great example is the wheelwright in ancient China, who
would know just by the feel of making a wheel whether the wheel he had made
was exactly right. And he was asked to write a book, because he was a genius
wheelwright, this guy. How do you make a wheel as good as that? He said,
I'll write it, if you want, and tell you exactly what to do. But everything
I really know will die with me; that everything I really understand will
die--there was a part of human nature, of human judgment, which is not
reducible to those abstractions. Values, whatever that means. It's an
ongoing, permanent process with real human beings in real time. 
So then Oakeshott, I think, could understand and appreciate someone like
George W., not as, you know, a great intellect--although I don't think he's
stupid, by any means--but as someone who seems to have a feel for the
situation and to grasp what's going on. Churchill wasn't that much
smarter--although he was a brilliant man--wasn't that much smarter than lots
of other people in England at the time. But he had a sense, some intuitive
grasp. There's, again, a little Aristotle in this. There's a little
great-souled figure coming through in his understanding of character. 
Yes? Sorry, I didn't see where you are. 
QUESTION: Thank you. You said some very nice things about America and its
freedoms and its energy and so forth. At the same time, you've used the term
"the West," which suggests that there is really no distinction in those
terms between the United States and Europe. And yet, we're involved in a lot
of very difficult controversies with Europe today and some people suggest
that it may really have something to do with American exceptionalism, that
these are very different cultures. Is it a single culture which is energetic
and overflowing with individual energy, as you suggest, or is there some
difference between the United States and Western Europe? 
MR. SULLIVAN: Absolutely a difference, and the difference is in part, as I
was trying to say at the end, that I think one of conditions Oakeshott
understood for the flourishing of character and exuberance and energy and
difference was restricting the power of the state, was delineating the power
of state away from the therapeutic model, away from a caretaking model, away
from a collectivist model; that those models inhibited human experimentation
and human development. 
However, as a simple matter of fact, the principles and underlying arguments
and constructions in this country are European in origin. And one of
Oakeshott's wonderful contributions--as someone who was educated in Germany,
spoke every European language, was saturated in European culture, and loved
Europe--was to delineate a European liberalism which has indeed gone lost,
the liberalism of Constante [sp], Humboldt, Mill, in which I think he would
understand the possibility of a wonderful European Union, which was a very
different looking thing than the social-welfaristic contraption the
Europeans now have to labor under. 
I see--and England, of course, is the halfway house. I think that England
today--and I'll speak of England, because I don't know about Scotland or
Wales--is a far more creative and interesting culture than it was 20 years
ago. Some of what it produces is crap; some of what it produces is really
interesting and fun. But it's certainly alive. And that life is part of what
Oakeshott was talking about, the kind of society which allows that to
happen. And I think part of that also, in England, is a very English
appreciation of the eccentric or the different. It's a very tolerant social
culture, which rescues it from some of the bad effects of socialism that
still inhere in it. 
So I think he would say there is a difference in America and the rest of the
West, and I think he'd put Britain somewhere in between. But he would not
give up on the notion that Europe has its own liberal tradition and could be
rescued from its own statist temptations. 
I'll have just one more. Yes, at the very back. 
QUESTION: The thing that strikes me the most remarkably is in making some
mental comparisons between what you're presenting versus the way that the
pope sees the exact same issues, and I think he's attempting to enter into
the exact same project and yet comes out with an entirely different process.
And so I'm going to try in a very brief way to kind of summarize what I
understand what that is and see how you would compare what we're talking
about here. 
For one thing, I'm relying on Evangelium Vitae and, to some extent,
Veritatis Splendor--and by memory here, too--but the pope is attempting to
reintroduce liberals to the idea of liberalism, to reintroduce them to the
idea of the individual. And he has a very existentialist kind of philosophy
in all of this stuff. But he finds the grounding point the individual
dignity, and finds that grounded in the mystery of the relationship of
individual people to God. And it's that exact relationship with God that
gives them the mystery, dignity that makes each individual so special and
unique. And it's in relationship with others that one really fully realizes
one's self and reaches that great, full extension of one's individuality. 
So that is a remarkably strikingly different analysis of what this is all
about, and yet, it seems to me, attempting the same project; that is, to
find the ground, the conservative ground, as you say, to defend liberal
values. I'm wondering how you compare those. 
MR. SULLIVAN: The difference is that someone who had dignity often might
require someone else to recognize that dignity and to care for that dignity,
that it invokes a relationship of the state to the person of caretaker and
guarantor, whereas Oakeshott was much more interested in self-reliance and
self-creation. Also, Oakeshott did not have within his thought the same
natural law premises that the current Holy Father does, however overladen it
is with phenomenology and all the rest of it. 
And of course, Oakeshott is also radically indifferent to what people make
of their lives, as a political matter. And I think as a matter of
sensibility, I think he'd rather like the rascals and the rogues and the bad
guys. I think he would find them--I don't--he doesn't have that moralistic
streak within him. He has a deeply skeptical streak. Which, again, I think I
would distinguish from relativism. It's not that Oakeshott doesn't argue or
believe that truth is impossible, it doesn't exist; it's simply beyond our
knowledge as human beings. 
Now, the pope would agree, except that he's been blessed with a revelation
of something, which we can then figure out. And Oakeshott says, well, until
that's revealed to me, I can't engage in that conversation. But more
importantly, that basing politics on such a revelation, fusing the political
sphere with divine revelation is tyranny, is generating tyranny. And
therefore I think Oakeshott would be an absolutely dogged opponent of any
attempt to blur the line between church and state, and would regard the way
in which that has now become part of contemporary conservatism as a
deformation of the conservative project. 
Well, thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. 
[Applause.]
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
Click here for the main page of Bradley Lecture Series <bradley.htm>.