Custom, habit, and social change: Michael Oakeshott’s conservatism

Michael Oakeshott with pipe

A “latent wisdom” exists in long-established customs and institutions—or so says the Burkean conservative. The benefits surface far in time and space from the practices that cause them, through hidden and indirect mechanisms. They were unseen, Burke warned, by the French Revolutionaries, who were further blinded by principles for reorganizing moral and political life that they could defend with abstract arguments, but had never tested in the field of real human life. Since Burke was a politician writing pamphlets, he never attempted a systematic overview of the form of moral life he held in such high esteem. Such an attempt may be found in Michael Oakeshott’s essay “The Tower of Babel.”

What is wanted is not a careful dissection of one society’s customs, but a balloon’s-height sense of what societies built around customary behavior have in common. Oakeshott speaks of a form of moral life that is “a habit of affection and behavior” rather than “a habit of reflective thought.” In it,

the current situations of a normal life are met, not by consciously applying to ourselves a rule of behavior, nor by conduct recognized as the expression of a moral idea, but by acting in accordance with a certain habit of behavior.

If some moral philosophers urge the counting of costs and benefits, and others, an awareness of the universal human rights that block or demand action, Oakeshott speaks of conduct that “is as nearly as possible [done] without reflection.”

It sounds, sometimes, like Oakeshott is describing people who do what they were brought up to do, for no further reason. It’s hard to see much virtue in that. In a longer description, Oakeshott says of those inhabiting this form of life that, while they lack

the ability to explain [their] actions in abstract terms, or defend them as emanation of moral principles,

they nevertheless have

the power to act appropriately and without hesitation, doubt or difficulty.

So an Oakeshottian lifeguard who saves a drowning child can say afterward that he acted because the child’s life was in danger. Pointing to facts about one’s situation that justify one’s act is not yet to state or to appeal to an abstract moral principle. An action done “without reflection” need not be an action done without a reason. What must be absent is deliberation about how some general moral theory or moral ideal applies to the case at hand.

If it is a caricature to accuse (sophisticated, philosophical) conservatives of wanting everything to stay as it is, or of wanting to reset reality to some past golden age, then such conservatives need to explain what they think does justify social or institutional change. Oakeshott asserts that

this form of moral life is capable of change...Indeed, no traditional way of behaviour, no traditional skill, ever remains fixed; its history is one of continuous change.

His draws an analogy to the mode of change exhibited by a “living language.” Some new way of speaking, exploiting existing flexibility in grammar or lexicon, originates as a local response to evolving local conditions. If useful more generally, it spreads through the population. This is not stasis, and if “habits of moral conduct show no revolutionary changes,” it is “because they are never at rest.”

The Oakeshottean conservative appears to have no substantive views about how society should be organized: about what should be encouraged and what should be frowned upon. Drug legalization; gay marriage; if these are instituted through the process of “continuous change” he describes, and once instituted they persist, he should have no objection.

Oakeshott contrasts this form of moral life with another, a “morality of ideals.” In it, “action will spring from a judgment concerning the rule or end to be applied.” He also says that no society can perfectly inhabit one of these forms to the exclusion of the other. But in any society one of them will tend to predominate. When the morality of habit dominates, moral life is more stable, more capable of “self-modification,” and less prone to catastrophic revolutions. Why this should be so, I was not entirely sure. At one point Oakeshott writes, of the alternative scheme where a “morality of the pursuit of moral ideals” is dominant, that it cannot

stand on its own feet. In such a morality, that which has power to rescue from superstition is given the task of generating human behaviour—a task which, in fact, it cannot per­ form. And it is only to be expected that a morality of this sort will be subject to sudden and ignominious collapse.

Pick a species (flamingo, whatever) and picture the space of possible design-plans for that species as a fitness landscape: hills are plans well-adapted to their environment, while in the valleys the poorly-adapted plans skulk and sulk. At any time the species occupies one point in the landscape, but through the process of natural selection, the species explores the local terrain, and moves incrementally upward, increasing its fitness.

Oakeshott’s preferred mode of social change is like that. Small changes to habits and customs are tried, and those that make things overall-better are retained. Whatever the virtues of this process, with natural selection it shares a vice. The species, or society, may get stuck at a “bad equilibrium”: a local maximum, the top of a small hill, separated by a deep valley from a much higher peak. If small changes could only make things worse, still great injustice may exist, and things could be much better, if large, sweeping changes were possible. One wants to know what Oakeshott the conservative anti-revolutionary thinks about actual revolutions; in the essay being discussed, he does not say.

Early on Abraham Lincoln hoped for the gradual elimination of slavery from the United States, as it encountered barriers against its spread and incentives against its continuation. It was a conservative approach to ending slavery. It did not happen and it’s not clear that it could have. The power of those in power to fight change was too great. Instead, a shock, total war aimed at overthrowing the slave order, motivated by a moral ideal and abstract principles of equality and freedom, was required. Indeed, when radical Republicans learned that Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction “would preserve much of the South’s old ruling class in power,” they deemed it “unacceptable”:

They insisted that simply to abolish slavery without also destroying the economic and political structure of the old order would merely convert black people from slaves to landless serfs and leave the political power of the planter class untouched.¹

They were right. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones in Spielberg’s Lincoln) held that, instead, reconstruction must

revolutionize Southern institutions, habits, and manners...The foundations of the institutions...must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.

If the Civil War was a second American revolution, who was its Edmund Burke? Jefferson Davis wrote, speaking for the Confederacy, “We are not revolutionists, we are resisting revolution...We are conservative.” Not good company.

So does this prove Burke and Oakeshott wrong? Or would they agree that sometimes a revolution is necessary? Oakeshott elsewhere called ancien régime France a “bankrupt social and political system”—a very unBurkean thought. He also held that a society organized only around evolving habits and customs can “degenerate into superstition,” or face a crisis, and when it does, it has “little power of recovery.” A society devoted to moral principles and ideals is also prone to breakdown and revolution—as above, “sudden and ignominious collapse.” Better able to weather crises is a society adjoining a sense of moral principle to a life of custom and habit, while keeping the former subordinate to the latter—Oakeshott’s ideal. But no society mixing principles and habits in the right proportion has existed, Oakeshott thought, since Christianity and Classical Greece arrived on the scene. It seems, then, that the necessity of various revolutions—in an historical and a moral sense—far from falsifying Oakeshott’s theory, is something his theory predicts. But if you’ve fallen down a well, a historico-philosophical analysis of why it couldn’t be avoided is of only mild interest. What you want is a rope and a plan. When the inevitable crisis comes, how are we to go about re-founding a stable and more just social order, without a reign of terror or an intervening century of continued subjugation? Does the Oakeshottean conservative even try to answer this question?

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See also: Conservatism as Skeptical Solution to Life; Edmund Burke and the Limits of Pragmatism.

1. All non-Oakeshott quotes from McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom.