In ” Marriage and the Law of Tradition ,” a new posting on Public Discourse, R. J. Snell recounts the reasons St. Thomas gives authority to tradition.
St. Thomas viewed the laws of society (a notion that encompassed written laws as well as social norms) as subject to rational scrutiny. We should assess the justice of laws insofar as they accord with the natural law.
Snell reminds readers, however, that St. Thomas saw social innovation—even reasonable social innovations that improved laws—as an intrinsic harm. “The mere change of law,” St. Thomas wrote, “is of itself prejudicial to the common good.”
The harm is obvious if we think about it. Our obedience to laws rests more in habit than reason. We tend to conform, because we largely trust and accept the authority of existing norms. Changes disrupt our habits and throw our trust into doubt. Pushed to an extreme, our law-abiding impulse can be weakened, in which case the actual justice of new and improved laws counts for little, because laws we don’t obey lack the power to promote justice.
Edmund Burke recognized the same basic dynamic when he observed that social change has the effect of undermining the majesty of law. The passage of time burnishes social norms, and the longer they hold sway, the more they seem to participate in deep and lasting truths.
Neither St. Thomas nor Edmund Burke advocate social stasis. But as St. Thomas points out, a reasonable social activist must weigh the intrinsic harm of change against the possible benefits of change. Of course glaring injustices should be remedied, even if the majesty of settled law is compromised. And sometimes incremental changes can be enacted that correct less dramatic injustices, but do so while minimizing the social effects of change. This was Burke’s favored approach.
It’s easy to see how an enthusiasm for justice can lead one to discount the harm of change. But unfortunately the modern political imagination is not merely imprudently hasty. It is positively in love with revolution, imagining that social change, far from an intrinsic harm to the body politic, is a cure-all.
I call myself a conservative because I recoil from the harms done by promiscuous social change in recent decades. Our capitalist system puts a great deal of life into play, often ripping up our childhood neighborhoods to build shiny new building, luring us away to interesting jobs in far away places, and generally acting as a solvent on the forces of communal permanence. Modern men and women are, therefore, vulnerable to a feeling of disoriented homelessness. In such a context, changes of laws and social norms lead to an even greater atomization of society.
We want to be part of something that has at least intimations of permanence. This is the basic human impulse that leads to clannish loyalties, nationalism, and other forms of intense social solidarity. Religious faith obviously completes or perfects this impulse, but it does not exhaust it. We generally want permanence in family and community as well as in our religious lives.
This anthropological need explains some of the extremism of the modern era. Atomized and fluid societies tend to re-solidify, and they often do so around ideological fantasies of permanent—the thousand year Reich, for example. The end result is often inhumanity.
In the modern era, a true conservatism has been and is a genuine humanism, because it counts as precious the many finite forms of permanence—social mores, national institutions, legal principles—that satisfy our basic human need. True, conservatism can go wrong when it turns these finite forms into idols, or when it imagines permanence to be the single or even supreme human good.
Moreover, one can never find a formula by which to solve the hard questions of when permanence—patria in the great French political trinity—needs to be sacrificed to the social goods of freedom and equality. But permanence—which is to my mind the great and powerful powerful engine of social solidarity—must be accounted for; otherwise, it ends up returning in perverse forms that compromise both freedom and equality.
