In defence of prejudice
Re-discovering affective conservatism
This is the first in a series of essays exploring how liberal rationalism shapes discourse in the modern West, constraining thought and expression within an ideological framework that is fundamentally at odds with the pre-rational, affective foundations of conservatism.
Conservatism’s opponents take satisfaction in pointing out it’s less sophisticated theoretically than rationalist systems like liberalism or Marxism. But this doesn’t make those systems better: it simply reflects the fact that while they’re constructed from abstract principles which emphasise systematization, conservatism arises from an instinctive attachment to customs, traditions, and inherited ways of life. It’s often more akin to an attitude than an ideology.
There are of course innumerable works articulating conservatism as a coherent and credible philosophy. Many of these date from the second half of the twentieth century, when conservatism underwent significant intellectualization, partly under the influence of former leftists who founded the neoconservative movement. This process gave rise to many valuable books, arguments, and insights, and made it easier for conservative elites to compete with liberals and leftists in public debate.
Yet this strategy came at a cost. Conservatives who resisted framing their beliefs in rationalist terms were increasingly excluded from mainstream discourse, even though their values were often closer to those of ordinary conservative voters.
Over time, this divergence created a rift. As conservative elites adapted to liberal media norms, they grew increasingly detached from the core of conservatism – its emotional, affective allegiance to inherited traditions, values, and identities. This resulted in a widening gap between elites and their base, culminating in open voter revolts and the rise of populist-right parties on both sides of the Atlantic and across Europe.
It’s a familiar refrain on the dissident right that conservative and liberal elites converge on the issues that matter most, and therefore comprise two wings of a so-called ‘uniparty’. But if this similarity does reflect shared values, it’s not because conservative elites are bad people, or traitors to the cause (or at least, that’s not the only reason). More fundamentally, it results from a structural asymmetry within the media and politics itself.
The philosopher Oswald Spengler observed this over a century ago in The Decline of the West. Spengler described how liberal democracy inexorably dismantled the organic bonds of nobility, estate, and tradition which had previously underpinned Western governance, replacing them with mass parties built around programmes, rhetoric, and universalist ideologies. A new elite arose that, from its inception, was versed in these new methods. Liberalism - the default party of bourgeois modernity - henceforth set the terms of engagement within the new framework. Conservatives became trapped in a game where they must master its tools or perish, therefore being ‘bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois’.
Ever since, political debate in the West - and especially in the Anglosphere - has been inherently structured according to rationalist and universalist principles. This structure inevitably pushes conservatives toward liberal modes of argument, making it difficult to articulate their core attachments to inherited identities and ways of life.
Even without liberal bias in the bureaucracy and civil service, modern politics and media therefore favour ideologies like liberalism and socialism. These thrive in a culture of party politics where persuasion hinges on linguistic concepts and abstract principles that can be easily summarised and applied systematically. By contrast, the conservative attachment to identity, tradition, custom, and ancestral values is not quickly or easily articulated in rationalist terms.
Conservatives often find themselves at odds with the prevailing modes of public debate because the roots of their philosophy resist systematization. Instead, they lie in what Edmund Burke called ‘prejudice’: the unspoken wisdom of lived experience. This does not mean prejudice in the widely-used pejorative sense of crass discrimination, but our intuitive attachment to customs, traditions, ideas, symbols, places, and people. American conservative Russell Kirk accordingly explained that ‘prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.’
Seen in this way, prejudice can be taken as a form of latent wisdom which distils the habits and preferences of our peers and forebears, and which expresses our social nature and relationship to the social organism. It’s related to the tacit knowledge described by philosopher Michael Oakeshott as a customary or traditional way of doing things, which cannot be explicitly taught or learned, but ‘acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practising it.’
As with the gestures of a master craftsman, most of these habits or preferences are not random, even if their origin or purpose seems opaque. Burke understood this as part of the divine plan, and Kirk later intoned ‘that Providence, acting through the medium of human trial and error, has developed every hoary habit for some important purpose’. Yet one does not have to believe in such lofty reasons to feel the importance of prejudice. For most people, affective attachment provides its own justification. Most people don’t need to believe in Providence to support a sports team, or love their children. They just do.
If we understand prejudice in this way, then everyone, as the Romantic writer Charles Lamb put it, is ‘a bundle of prejudices – made up of likings and dislikings – the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies.’ For the same reason, all peoples tend to be naturally conservative, until their settled preferences and aversions get broken up or disrupted by change and dislocation. Perhaps the classic example is Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which uprooted traditional communities and eroded established ways of life, leading many contemporaries to predict widespread social unrest. Their fears were largely vindicated, as the upheaval gave rise to modes of political agitation and social conflict that have proven to be characteristic of modernity, and arguably persisted in various forms ever since.
While conservatism has adapted to rationalist frameworks, it has struggled to address the profound societal changes wrought by modernity’s relentless push towards abstraction and individual autonomy. Over the past fifty years, these shifts have placed traditional attachments to family, religion, and community under unprecedented strain, with many individuals untethered from the structures that once provided belonging and purpose. Technological change, from the pill to social media, has accelerated these trends, transforming behaviour in ways that often prioritise convenience and efficiency over intimacy and community. In pursuit of personal freedom and self-actualization, many have found themselves disconnected from the shared traditions and relationships that once anchored social life. This erosion of collective bonds has fostered a pervasive sense of fragmentation, leaving individuals to navigate a world increasingly defined by isolation and depersonalization.
One prophet of this depersonalized world, in which individuals are treated as fungible and interchangeable, is the much-maligned French writer Renaud Camus. His concept of ‘replacism’ critiques modernity’s relentless homogenization of cultural, social, and demographic norms. While routinely dismissed as a conspiracy theory in mainstream discourse, there appears to be growing appreciation on the intellectual right that Camus’s analysis helps explain a broader phenomenon: the systematic displacement of inherited traditions and identities in favour of globalized, standardised, and ostensibly rational alternatives.
Though replacism is frequently associated with migration and demographic change, its scope is far wider (eloquently explored in this series of essays by Mary Harrington). It describes a civilizational trend in which inherited ways of life are undermined by homogenized consumerism, technocratic governance, and market-driven efficiency.
Camus captures modernity’s characteristic tendency to replace the particular and meaningful with the universal and functional. This leads to an unmooring of individuals from their historical and affective attachments to place, heritage, and identity. Seen through this lens, replacism emerges less as a paranoid reaction to demographic change than a critique of modernity’s entire epistemological framework. It exposes the degree to which modern life erodes the foundations of belonging, fragmenting communities and fostering alienation. And whether or not one accepts Camus’s terminology, his diagnosis speaks to a real anxiety: the displacement of the cultural and social structures that once provided individuals with a sense of rootedness.
This process helps account for the transformation of conservatism itself. Just as replacism exchanges deep-rooted identities for interchangeable, universal forms, liberal-rationalist discourse forces conservatism to abandon its instinctive, affective foundations in favour of abstract, programmatic arguments. By accepting these terms of engagement, conservatives unwittingly participate in the replacement of their own worldview, transforming an ethos of belonging, tradition, and prejudice into something that must justify itself in the language of reason and utility. This is why conservative arguments increasingly resemble liberal ones: not merely out of ideological drift, but because liberal modernity structures the very language in which political legitimacy is contested. The same depersonalizing forces that erase historical particularity thereby also pressure conservatism to become a shadow of liberalism, defending tradition only insofar as it can be rationally justified rather than embracing it as an intrinsic good.
Yet, while replacism sometimes feels inexorable, it continues to encounter resistance. Human nature is not easily altered, and emotional attachments to home, family, community, and nation stubbornly persist, even amid widespread social change. This enduring need for belonging helps explain the rise of populist and nationalist movements across the Western world. Such movements typically promise to preserve the objects of our affective attachments and restore social cohesion. While establishment conservatives turn away aghast, those of us who are not in thrall to liberal rationalism can recognise this as a natural, even inevitable, expression of human nature: a deep-seated longing that stems from the attachments undermined by modernity.
Yet how can we defend cherished attachments in a world increasingly shaped by the forces of change and dislocation? And in which even naming emotional attachments to traditional institutions or identities can lead to social opprobrium or worse?
The challenge is particularly acute because conservative elites, compelled to engage with liberalism on rationalist terms, have turned their backs on intuition, tradition, and the wisdom of inherited prejudice. Finding a way forward demands that we renew our understanding of prejudice not as an obstacle to progress but as the emotional and cultural foundation of a meaningful life.
In this light, prejudice – properly understood – emerges not as an anachronism but as a counterweight to the centrifugal forces of modernity. It is the intuitive knowledge that binds us to each other and to the larger social fabric, and which enables societies to endure in the face of change. The task of a new conservative elite will be to articulate this wisdom in a way that resonates with contemporary audiences. This can and should include appeals to nostalgia. But it must also offer a vision of hope as to how traditional attachments can survive and flourish in an uncertain future.
Spengler predicted that Western man would eventually outgrow his veneration of reason and his faith in party programmes. What had once been the mark of progress would come to seem an outmoded relic of an exhausted age. In time, he argued, the over-rationalized politics of the modern West would give way to a ‘Second Religiousness’: a spiritual revival mirroring the faith that had shaped Western civilization in its springtime. He foresaw generations marked by ‘a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger,’ who would seek meaning not in the sterile ‘steel-bright concepts’ of reason and progress, but in the ineffable and eternal.
Already, we can discern signs of this ‘spiritual hunger’ in the restless search for meaning and certainty amid the dislocation and fragmentation of modernity. This impulse compels us to articulate and reclaim the wisdom of prejudice: not merely as an obstacle to change, but as a source of purpose, continuity, and belonging in an increasingly disoriented world.
More essays in this series are coming soon.
Edit: Part 2 Render Unto Caesar: Language Games and the Rise of Post-Rational Politics
Part 3 The War for Attachment: The End of Rational Delusion and the Return of Organic Order