THE RECENT PROTESTS against the Labour government’s Covid-19 policies represent a major setback for the conservative cause. The intermingling of so many ideological threads has produced an unedifying tangle. On display has been a hot mess of claims and conspiracies which reasonable citizens are at serious risk of misconstruing for conservatism per se. Conservatives are not racists and misogynists, nor are they Nazis and anti-Semites. But, if a movement is judged by the company it keeps, then conservatism will be judged as the unashamed ally of all these political distempers. Should this eventuate, a centre-left government of extraordinary ineptitude, and leaning dangerously towards “progressive authoritarianism”, will be permitted to escape the electorate’s judgement scot-free.
At the core of the conservative belief system is the idea of order. Human society is understood by conservatives to be a dangerously volatile collection of competing ideas and interests. As such, the priority of every wise political leader is to prevent society from tearing itself apart. The maintenance of order has always been humanity’s most successful survival strategy.
It is the contention of conservatives that the best means of maintaining order is by the creation and preservation of hierarchies. Their not unreasonable contention, given multiple examples, across multiple species, of this principle in action, is that hierarchy represents the natural order of things. The weak are subordinate to the strong. The female is subordinate to the male. The immature are subordinate to the mature. Conservatives argue that while change cannot be prevented, it can – and should – be constrained. A top dog may be challenged and replaced, but the position of top dog, itself, is not subject to revision.
If conservatism is to enjoy any kind of moral legitimacy however, then hierarchy, and the order it brings, cannot be left bespattered in the blood and gore of force majeure. Those who occupy the top positions in the social hierarchy must be worthy of them. To tame the monopolists of violence it has long been considered advisable to have them accept that they owe allegiance to a spiritual hierarchy infinitely more powerful than their own. A spiritual hierarchy presided over by a “top dog” with the power to punish them, horribly, for all eternity.
To infuse hierarchy with morality, conservatism is required to embrace the ideal of rule by aristos – the best. Aristocracy may operate on the basis of bloodlines, working from the (oft disproved) assumption that the strength and wisdom of a parent is hereditary. Alternatively, it may be reproduced through a process of deliberate selection: whereby the leader is chosen from among his peers, functioning collectively as an oligarchy.
Obviously, the social order preserved through the principle of hierarchy cannot endure if it is unable to secure for those occupying its lower levels, a life of relative security, prosperity and happiness. Ensuring that those at the bottom are content is the most obvious proof that society is, indeed, ruled by the best.
The existence and preservation of this political feedback loop is really the only reason conservatives allowed themselves to be persuaded to accept the introduction of representative democracy. To begin with, regular elections are a much less bloody form of performance review than history’s traditional means of indicating that the best are falling down on the job: rebellion and revolution.
These upheavals, though generally unsuccessful, almost always took an awful toll on the aristocracy. Representative democracy had the not inconsiderable advantage of keeping the aristos alive to fight another day. Through the emergence of political parties, it also forced the lower orders to embrace the principle of hierarchy. This achieved, there was really nothing left to fear from representative democracy: Top Dog-ism – also known as “the orderly circulation of elites” – was safe.
The historical force that inflicted near mortal blows upon conservatism was not socialism, as many right-wingers might suppose, but capitalism. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels so rightly observed in The Communist Manifesto (1848), capitalism’s effect upon social hierarchy and order was roughly analogous to sulphuric acid:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
“Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
And what, exactly, were humanity’s “real relations” with its own kind? The answer to that question was thought to be contained in the theories of Mr Charles Darwin. Like all the other places in Nature, human society was a place where “the survival of the fittest” was the only principle that mattered. To prove they were the best, those at the top of the capitalist hierarchy needed only one thing: money. All the rest were mere reiterations of the new capitalist order’s core logic: wealth, increasing wealth, all the time. From William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” to Elon Musk’s antiseptic technological paradise: real power means never having to say you’re sorry.
To the genuine conservative, however, humility and hierarchy are intimately bound up with one another. The whole intellectual system is founded on the notion that human beings are their own worst enemies, and that struggle, far from driving the social organism forward, merely hastens its disintegration. In hierarchies that work, power flows up – as well as down. It is what keeps them working. Without capitalism there would have been no socialism. Having brought socialism into existence, however, capitalism was then forced to embrace fascism to prevent the socialists from winning. Order and capitalism are mutually exclusive.
All those angry people marching through the streets of Wellington seemed to have only one common enemy – the strong state. But, as all genuine conservatives understand, a strong state is absolutely crucial: not only to the maintenance of order, but also to the preservation of hierarchy.
Trust in the people at the top is non-negotiable. In the middle of a global pandemic, that means trusting the best medical scientists. Trust in the best is what enabled the modern world to conquer deadly communicable diseases such as smallpox and polio.
Who, then, is responsible for undermining the faith of those at the bottom in the judgement of those at the top? There is only one right answer to that question: Mark Zuckerberg. The social-media universe, over which Zuckerberg’s “Meta” presides, operates on the mathematical certainty of algorithmic disintegration. It does not bring people together, it drives them apart – on purpose.
Social media destroys hierarchy. It enables the stupidest person in society to believe that he is, in fact, the cleverest. It elevates the worst to the same level as the best. In short: social media destroys order.
That’s what frightened so many New Zealanders. Last Tuesday’s protest offered them a flesh-and-blood vision of their nation’s social disintegration. It evoked the biblical story of Babel, in which, on account of humanity’s attempt to subvert the spiritual hierarchy, by building a tower to Heaven, God decided to stage an intervention:
“Look! They are one people with the same language for all of them, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they have a mind to do will be impossible for them! Come on! Let’s go down there and confuse their language, so that they won’t understand each other’s speech.”
Had his name been Zuckerberg, God could hardly have done a better job of destroying humanity’s unity and power. And Zuckerberg, himself, could hardly have done a better job than these, his rabbit-holed victims, of destroying the appeal of conservative politics.