Beyond Conservatism

When the Reception Proves the Point

Yesterday, Aporia kindly published this essay, which is a revised and expanded version of one published on this Substack earlier this year.

The piece makes three core arguments. First, the roots of the conservative worldview lie in prejudice and affective attachment, not in reason, system, or ideology. Second, the modern public sphere and its discourse of procedural liberalism force conservatives to abandon its roots in favour of universal, abstract arguments. Third, moving beyond managerial conservatism means reclaiming the core values that give conservatism its meaning and coherence. These are the same values that underpin civilizational continuity and organic order.

Because the essay argues for a fundamentally different approach to political engagement, it necessarily unfolds at a high level of abstraction. The comments on the Aporia article showed that this approach did not resonate with some readers.

Whatever the flaws with the argument I made, I was struck by how often it was not engaged on its own terms. Instead, many sought to translate it into more familiar argumentative currencies: either an empirical frame (focusing directly on race and associated traits) or an accessibility frame (simplifying into a more journalistic style so everyone ‘gets it’). This itself was revealing, because both approaches exemplify the same procedural idioms which the essay critiques.

The most articulate critiques still urged me to justify prejudice and tradition in empirical or adaptive terms — to show they ‘work’ by measurable standards, and to treat those standards as the highest ground from which to defend them. This is exactly the reflex I am describing: the belief that an attachment has standing only if it can be re-licensed through the public procedures of rational-empirical validation. My argument is not that rationality and evidence are useless, but that granting them a monopoly over legitimacy is itself a concession to the managerial frame. Once we accept that only adaptive or proven traditions deserve preservation, we have already placed the fate of our form of life in the hands of those who control the definition of what counts as adaptive or proven.

This is less about misunderstanding the kind of approach I am advocating than it is a revelation of the structural resistance to it, even within right-wing thought. It shows that the procedural capture of the Western mind runs so deep that even sympathetic readers remain inside the architecture of managerial liberalism, instinctively pulling the discussion back into its approved rationalist forms. But (and this is the entire point of the project I am developing) this reflex is precisely what has brought us to the civilizational brink.

Symbolic and metaphysical language is not an exotic flourish. It is the only register capable of disrupting managerial discourse and breaking out of the procedural public sphere. Speaking in this register is not evasive or ornamental. It is the first step in reclaiming sovereignty.