Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
One of the obvious problems facing our present moment is the false skew that politicization creates in what probably ought to be relatively straightforward issues. Current platform allegiance becomes elevated over moral philosophy, common sense, even over the past meaning and traditions of the political view in question. One of the issues that has been most warped by this political overlay is that of environmental conservation, and Roger Scruton masterfully tackles this muddied but vital topic in his underrated volume Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. Scruton’s thoughts on environmental preservation, localization and capitalistic innovation vs. protectivism are wise and measured, well worth the time of anyone who feels at home with neither the anti-human silliness or raw greed of the extremes being trumpeted in the public square. But what makes this work worth its place in Selections is less the problem that it addresses than the solution it proposes. We’ve talked about Little Platoons before, consider this the intermediate course.
As a classical conservative, Scruton’s clear-headed plea for a rational and careful approach to genuine environmental threats offers genuinely unique observations and balanced commentary. But it is in his examination of conservatism’s historical toolbox to handle civic problems that his thinking truly shines. We face numerous large-scale complicated problems that reach their tentacles into our daily lives and neighborhoods. This is leaving aside, of course, the Twitter-only problems that seem to dissipate from reality as soon as we shut off our phone. When faced with real challenges in a world where solid institutions seem to be transforming into gauzy wishes, we are tempted to either despair of any potential solutions or radicalize ourselves into single-issue activists. Scruton refocuses the issues around our personal responsibilities and personal potential to contribute, deftly deflating the rings of doomposting and Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt that spring up to entrap us whenever we contemplate action. All we can really do is…well, do what we can.
Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy.
~ Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy
In the first place, Scruton argues, we must identify our goal. And before we set out to tilt at the windmills of our collective misfortunes, we need to decide what, exactly, we are trying to save. To Scruton, the world is not full of daily innovations in moral possibility and unprecedented leaps in societal potential. In the tradition of Burke, he sees a world populated with a limited and precious number of truths, truths which have been handed by our ancestors and which we owe steward for our children. This scarcity mindset is actually the bedrock of conservation thought: there is only one Earth that we’re aware of. We don’t get another, so how are we supposed to take care of this one? The questions apply across problem types and scales also. You have only one family, and despite the postmodern insistence on shaping other social institutions to fit, it really is the only one you’ll get. There is only one metaphysical reality, and as I was told as an undergraduate theology enjoyer, you really aren’t going to end up a true innovator in that space. The thought process of conservation is how to care for, preserve and enhance the precious few True Things that we have. Do you have a clear and transcendent vision of the Reality you are endeavoring to protect? If not, you are liable to fall into the trap of aimless antiquarian grumpiness. Love of home is the natural ground of our efforts to regulate and protect of our world. Get to know your home, whether we are discussing a physical place or the metaphysical and philosophical world you inhabit.
Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.
~ Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy
Next Scruton carefully places guardrails around our response to the problems and threats we see to the world we seek to protect. The all-or-nothing activism culture we currently inhabit fails to effectively address the real problems it confronts,. and often creates damaging unintended consequences as well. This is because single-issue activism has no need to overly bother with the world as it is, at home and in your backyard and in your town. Pure ideology is damaging because of its freedom to live disconnected from the local realities it tries to impact. The problems we confront are complex, resulting from the interaction of endless overlapping systems, corporations, personalities. We will be disappointed if we content ourselves with parachuting into problems in their context, lobbing slogans and go-fast managerial schemes, and exfiltrating before the consequences arrive. Wise solutions will be deliberate ones, taking the situation fully in hand and attempting a balanced approach. Conservation is the moral opposite of revolution, and seeks to protect itself from many of revolution’s ills. When we start off with good intentions but find ourselves worsening the problem we set out to solve with our solutions, we need to admit that the problem might be our meddling. The answer isn’t abandonment of the problem and the responsibility we bear for the situation. In fact, more responsibility is exactly what is needed.
Scruton’s vision of conservation is not just selfish nimbyism, or backwards-looking nostalgia. It focuses on what we have, specifically with a desire to preserve our resources of any kind for those we may never meet. It exists as a bracing shot of confrontational agency in a world that relocates the onus of action back onto us. Nobody is coming to save your history, your country or the lake in your town. Don’t rely on some government agency or self-appointed adult with a desk and a nametag to take away your God-given calling to care for what you have. Those who live in community are able, perhaps uniquely able, to self-regulate and manage the problems their own lives create by taking responsibility, weighing risks and effects with wisdom, and binding each other by laws protecting common goods and resources. Effectively, we are being called here to limit our wants and interests in the service of the resources we hold in trust from our ancestors and for our descendants. To return to ecological examples, if the road through my neighborhood is covered in litter, I bear some responsibility for its state, whether through tossing plastic bags or allowing the bags to sit uncollected. The only realistic solution, or perhaps the easiest and most reliable solution, is for me and some of my neighbors to clean it up. Larger scales require more organization, but Scruton argues persuasively that bottom-up approaches are not only possible, but potentially the only feasible options to pursue.
Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name? Whence comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation?
~ Frank Herbert, Children of Dune
The reason every ministry volunteer and DAO operator should be reading this book is Scruton says out loud a lot of truths we often prefer to skirt in this discussion. The commons is a hard problem, and human nature isn’t our friend. Things aren’t going to be magically fixed by the Invisible Hand of the Market on the one hand or Big Brother on the other. Centralized authorities seem to fail us time and time again, sometimes spectacularly so. And most people are happy to just keep on getting whatever they can from the world around them while giving as little as possible back in real costs to themselves. Whether we are discussing denominational structures or protocol treasuries or keeping your waterway clean, the issues are the same. And of course the venerable conservative scholar dithers around in the weeds a bit too much, with digressions on global warming science and the intricacies of the European Union that aren’t as useful to a general audience. But there are glimmers of steel hidden in the staid discussions of historic national parks law and Burkean civic duty. The reality is, if we want to build something great, we have to confront our own selfishness, and the selfishness of others.
The marriage didn’t get stale, the civil discourse didn’t get poisonous, the ocean didn’t get filled with plastic. We did it, you and me. All of our little choices and our small corners we cut. Systems, institutions and other mythical beasts are just big collections of people, making bad decisions. If we see something broken, the only thing we can do is start working. If it’s too heavy for us to lift, then we need to gather people who are looking to preserve the same things we are.
Thus says the Lord: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears, for there is a reward for your work, declares the Lord, and they shall come back from the land of the enemy. There is hope for your future, declares the Lord, and your children shall come back to their own country...Set up road markers for yourself; make yourself guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went. Return, O virgin Israel, return to these your cities.”
~ Jeremiah 31:16-17, 21
Our choices, the places we spend our money and stake our tokens and give our attention, matter. We seem to be entering a period of hard years, where liquidity won’t be easy and common goods are eaten up or lie fallow, where trusted leaders falter and shared spaces crumble into disrepair. It’s up to us. We can wait for someone else to post something helpful to the Discord, or offer to host the home Bible study, or contribute funds even when the treasury is too tiny to be useful. Or we can do our bit, and wait for someone else to come along and be encouraged by our start. And when we inevitably realize we’ve been adding to the entropy in our system, we can repent. Lots to do, friend. Lend a hand.