Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

A reader responded to a post from last week by suggesting that ‘skeptical conservatism has long been reduced to a distant pipe dream, surpassed by reality.’ He did so, not in a hostile mood, but as a part of a general query expressing a considered resignation concerning the ubiquity of teleocratic forms in contemporary western politics. Other conservatives, skeptics, and suchlike have made similar observations in the past few decades. For example, Mel Bradford decided that he could no longer call himself a conservative because he didn’t see much worth conserving in contemporary political and cultural life, and he issued a book of essays entitled ‘The Reactionary Imperative’ to signal this rejection.

I’m doubtful that things are all that desperate. I think that most people are conservative or skeptical in the general sense of the term about things that they love or cherish. We are wary of radical alterations of character in our spouses, parents, and children because we love them as they are, and we are suspicious of significant changes in our routines or habitual activities because we are used to doing things in a particular way. Oakeshott notes that this disposition expresses ‘not, Verweile doch,, du bist so schön, but, Stay with me because I am attached to you.’ This general conservatism might explain why old people have a tendency to be rather critical of novelty. They have seen most of the things which they held dear change or disappear during their lives, and often feel out of place in the world.

This type of conservative skepticism is unlikely to disappear from our lives, given the chaos that an unmitigated alteration of settled habits necessarily produces. However, it is possible that certain attitudes or dispositions about human activity might change and, in so changing, make nomocratic skepticism about politics a less convincing idea for many people. If the mass of humanity in the west decides that it prefers a warm servility to the uncertainty of individual choice and responsibility, then it will most assuredly get it. I’m not sure that the modern individual has traded his moral inheritance for a mess of government-issue pottage yet, but it could come to pass.

Nomocratic skepticism is an appropriate attitude to take toward a particular conception of the state as a nomocratic institution, and if that understanding of the state became so tenuous and rare that it was nowhere manifest in the actual institutions of government, then it would certainly be an anachronism, as it does not pretend to appeal to any metaphysical claims about the natural law or the transcendent order of things. However, I don’t think that we’ve come to that point yet. There are plenty of individuals in the US, Canada, Western Europe, and even in the non-European states who are suspicious of the socialization of all human activities under even the most seemingly benign regime (St. Barack, please forgive me). In fact, despite my apprehensions about Mr. Obama, his decisions to retain Mr. Gates as Secretary of Defense and to make Mr. Jones his National Security Advisor seem steps in the right direction (i.e. toward the more humble and more realistic foreign policy which we were promised by the unfortunate Mr. Bush).

What other evidence is there? Here in Canada, there has been vehement opposition to the inclusion of the National Socialist Party, I mean the Bloc Quebecois, in the new left-of-center coalition, and there is a surprising amount of outrage at the whole possibility of the coalition government taking charge. In the US, although the financial meltdown has emboldened the old teleocratic left, the inability of the government to effect any kind of improvement (despite daily injections of newly printed greenbacks) has skeptics like me looking forward to the further discrediting of large-scale government direction of the economy. And, most importantly, the west still speaks in the language of moral individualism, even when it betrays an almost invincible ignorance of what that language entails. So, I don’t find that there is any need to despair, though I won’t hold my breath waiting for a truly skeptical political party to emerge, at least in part because most of the statesmen and philosophers who I admire (Halifax, Hume, Oakeshott, Gadamer) were just as skeptical about the usefulness of modern ideological political parties as they were about ideological politics in general.