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If it wasn't so true, it might be funnier.

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If you are a �liberal� you favor abortion and you support homosexual marriage. You want to see prayer banned from public gatherings and you think all Scripture � including the Ten Commandments, which form the basis of our system of law � should be removed from the public square. You believe that condemning certain deviant behavior should be a crime.

If you are a �liberal� you think that government can make better decisions and spend your money more wisely than you. You believe that legislation can dramatically improve the fortunes of all Americans. You think that taxpayers should foot the bill for many who either don�t want to work or can�t work as a result of their destructive lifestyles.

A �liberal� today takes comfort in the knowledge that even if America�s citizens, legislators, and Constitution get it wrong, somewhere there�s an unelected judge that will make it right. Especially in the Supreme Court, which to the Liberal exceeds the authority of the Constitution.

Furthermore, the majority of liberals think that the United States is responsible for most of the conflict, poverty, pollution, and hardship in the world. You believe that America should place itself under the supervision and direction of the United Nations, functioning not as a sovereign nation but as a member of the collective.

And most concerning of all, if you are a liberal, you are convinced that religion has caused most of our problems and should either be banned or tightly controlled.

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�Conservatives� predominantly believe that life is given by God and begins at conception. They believe it is therefore sacred and to be revered and preserved at all cost. You think that our basic rights are granted by God Himself � not by governments of men or human courts � and therefore cannot be denied without penalty. �Conservatives� believe that our nation was founded by Christians on Judeo-Christian principles � that those principles and values have enabled our nation to become strong and prosperous.

If you are a Conservative you probably are convinced that it is not only our right to worship without interference, but that it is our obligation to publicly remind ourselves from whence our strength and blessings flow.

As a Conservative, you understand that marriage is a sacred institution designed by God to be the union of one man and one woman. You think that when society condones and sanctions deviant behavior, destructive lifestyles and moral depravity, it degrades and weakens our nation.

A �Conservative� believes in the power and the rights of the individual, the family and the private sector to create and preserve wealth. You believe that our earned wealth is to enhance our lives. You are confident that government should play an important role in protecting the nation, supplying common essential services, and providing a safety net for the weaker and less fortunate in our midst. It should, however, be our servant and not our master.

Finally, if you are a Conservative you probably believe that God raised up the United States of America and continues to bless her because she honors Him. You believe that we owe our allegiance to her, not to a cartel of nations that are determined to see her humiliated and hobbled.

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The object of this essay is to consider the character and pedigree of the most remarkable intellectual fashion of post-Renaissance Europe. The Rationalism with which I am concerned is modern Rationalism. No doubt its surface reflects the light of rationalisms of a more distant past, but in its depth there is a quality exclusively its own, and it is this quality that I propose to consider, and to consider mainly in its impact upon European politics. What I call Rationalism in politics is not, of course, the only (and it is certainly not the most fruitful) fashion in modern European political thinking. But it is a strong and a lively manner of thinking which, finding support in its filiation with so much else that is strong in the intellectual composition of contemporary Europe, has come to colour the ideas, not merely of one, but of all political persuasions, and to flow over every party line. By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflectively, almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist.

The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think., difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a reason' common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument: set up on his door is the precept of Parmenides--judge by rational argument. But besides this, which gives the Rationalist a touch of intellectual equalitarianism, he is something also of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself.

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He has no sense of the cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a formula: the past is significant to him only as an encumbrance He has none of that negative capability (which Keats attributed to Shakespeare), the power of accepting the mysteries and uncertainties of experience without any irritable search for order and distinctness, only the capability of subjugating experience; he has no aptitude for that close and detailed appreciation of what actually presents itself which Lichtenberg called negative enthusiasm, but only the power of recognizing the large outline which a general theory imposes upon events.

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Despite an occasional nod to Edmund Burke or Friedrich Hayek, most American conservatives actively engaged in political life are singularly uninterested in attaining clarity about the character of conservatism as an intellectual movement.

This should not surprise us, since conservatism entails the rejection of abstract and doctrinaire theoretical approaches to political life. But it was Burke himself who tried to persuade the gentlemen of his day and party that they must defend themselves and political decency in general against theoretical currents that undermined the integrity of "sound practice." So conservatives, who have a distaste for political theories, must nonetheless theorize about politics. Here we arrive at a paradox that Jerry Z. Muller's anthology of conservative thought richly highlights: conservatism is that theory which aims to protect sound practice against corrosive and corrupting theory. It is a political philosophy deeply suspicious of "metaphysical" or "literary" politics.

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Muller is undoubtedly correct to distinguish conservatism both from orthodoxy and from a radical conservatism that aims to uproot liberal civilization in the name of vitalistic and nationalist values. But, in my view, he understates the important connections that persist between conservatism and orthodoxy. By "orthodoxy" I mean any political-philosophical approach that admits the possibility and necessity of theoretical metaphysics and philosophical ethics rooted in a reflection on the "nature" of things. Muller is right to emphasize the conservative critique of rationalism and the strongly historicist or anti-universalist character of many conservative thinkers. He is also right to raise the question of whether the conservative emphasis on the utility of institutions and social practices does not ultimately undermine belief in "the truth of existing institutions, or indeed in the idea of truth as such." But that objection to historicist conservatism was raised, as Muller notes, by Leo Strauss, certainly a conservative thinker, at least in the sense that classical political philosophy is a major source of modern conservatism. By overemphasizing the historicist and utilitarian character of conservative thought, Muller inevitably is forced to downplay an equally fundamental conservative theme: the critique of moral and philosophical relativism in the name of a permanent order of things.

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In a remarkable review of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics in the English journal Philosophy (January 1965) that ought to be read by all self-described conservatives, Kolnai wrote:

The concept of "nature" has been artificially overworked by metaphysicians of various kinds, but there is something unreal and artificial also in the studied negation of the natural order of things. And this very observation, for what it may be worth, has, I think, a conservative rather than a subversive point.

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Further, he believes in argument as the technique and operation of reason'; the truth of an opinion and the 'rational' ground (not the use) of an institution is all that matters to him. Consequently, much of his political activity consists in bringing the social, political, legal and institutional inheritance of his society before the tribunal of his intellect; and the rest is rational administration, 'reason' exercising an uncontrolled jurisdiction over the circumstances of the case. To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny. And his disposition makes both destruction and creation easier for him to understand and engage in, than acceptance or reform. To patch up, to repair (that is, to do anything which requires a patient knowledge of the material), he regards as waste of time: and he always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient.

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Every science, every art, every practical activity requiring skill of any sort, indeed every human activity whatsoever, involves knowledge. And, universally, this knowledge is of two sorts, both of which are always involved in any actual activity. It is not, I think, making too much of it to call them two sorts of knowledge, because (though in fact they do not exist separately) there are certain important differences between them. The first sort of knowledge I will call technical knowledge or knowledge of technique. In every art and science, and in every practical activity, a technique is involved. In many activities this technical knowledge is formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice; but whether or not it is, or has been, precisely formulated, its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation, although special skill and insight may be required to give it that formulation. [3] The technique (or part of it) of driving a motor car on English roads is to be found in the Highway Code, the technique of cookery is contained in the cookery book, and the technique of discovery in natural science or in history is in their rules of research, of observation and verification. The second sort of knowledge I will call practical, because it exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) cannot be formulated in rules. This does not mean, however, that it is an esoteric sort of knowledge. It means only that the method by which it may be shared and becomes common knowledge is not the method of formulated doctrine. And if we consider it from this point of view, it would not, I think, be misleading to speak of it as traditional knowledge. In every activity this sort of knowledge is also involved; the mastery of any skill, the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible without it.

These two sorts of knowledge, then, distinguishable but inseparable, are the twin components of the knowledge involved in every concrete human activity. In a practical art, such as cookery, nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to the good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in the cookery book; technique and what I have called practical knowledge combine to make skill in cookery wherever it exists. And the same is true of the fine arts, of painting, of music, of poetry; a high degree of technical knowledge, even where it is both subtle and ready, is one thing; the ability to create a work of art, the ability to compose something with real music qualities, the ability to write a great sonnet, is another, and requires, in addition to technique, this other sort of knowledge. Again, these two sorts of knowledge are involved in any genuinely scientific activity. [4] The natural scientist will certainly make use of the rules of observation and verification that belong to his technique, but these rules remain only one of the components of his knowledge; advance in scientific discovery was never achieved merely by following the rules. [5] The same situation may be observed also in religion. It would, I think, be excessively liberal to call a man a Christian who was wholly ignorant of the technical side of Christianity, who knew nothing of creed or formulary, but it would be even more absurd to maintain that even the readiest knowledge of creed and catechism ever constituted the whole of the knowledge that belongs to a Christian. And what is true of cookery, of painting, of natural science and of religion, is no less true of politics: the knowledge involved in political activity is both technical and practica1. [6] Indeed, as in all arts which have men as their plastic material, arts such as medicine, industrial management, diplomacy, and the art of military command, the knowledge involved in political activity is pre-eminently of this dual character. Nor, in these arts, is it correct to say that whereas technique will tell a man (for example, a doctor) what to do, it is practice which tells him how to do it--the 'bed-side manner', the appreciation of the individual with whom he has to deal.

Even in the what, and above all in diagnosis, there lies already this dualism of technique and practice: there is no knowledge which is not 'know how'. Nor, again, does the distinction between technical and practical knowledge coincide with the distinction between a knowledge of means and a knowledge of ends, though on occasion it may appear to do so. In short, nowhere, and pre-eminently not in political activity, can technical knowledge be separated from practical knowledge, and nowhere can they be considered identical with one another or able to take the place of one another. [7]

Now, what concerns us are the differences between these two sorts of knowledge; and the important differences are those which manifest themselves in the divergent ways in which these sorts of knowledge can be expressed and in the divergent ways in which they can be learned or acquired.

Technical knowledge, we have seen, is susceptible of formulation in rules, principles, directions, maxims -- comprehensively, in propositions. It is possible to write down technical knowledge in a book. Consequently, it does not surprise us that when an artist writes about his art, he writes only about the technique of his art. This is so, not because he is ignorant of what may be called aesthetic element, or thinks it unimportant, but because what he has to say about that he has said already (if he is a painter) in his pictures, and he knows no other way of saying it. And the same is true when a religious man writes about his religion [8]; or a cook about cookery.

And it may be observed that this character of being susceptible of precise formulation gives to technical knowledge at least the appearance of certainty: it appears to be possible to be certain about a technique. On the other hand, it is a characteristic of practical knowledge that it is not susceptible of formulation of this kind. Its normal expression is in a customary or traditional way of doing things, or, simply, in practice. And this gives it the appearance of imprecision and consequently of uncertainty, of being a matter of opinion, of probability rather than truth. It is, indeed, a knowledge that is expressed in taste or connoisseurship, lacking rigidity and ready for the impress of the mind of the learner.

Technical knowledge can be learned from a book; it can be learned in a correspondence course. Moreover, much of it can be learned by heart, repeated by rote, and applied mechanically: the logic of the syllogism is a technique of this kind. Technical knowledge, in short, can be both taught and learned in the simplest meanings of these words. On the other hand, practical knowledge can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master--not because the master can teach it (he cannot), but because it can be acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practising it. In the arts and in natural science what normally happens is that the pupil, in being taught and in learning the technique from his master, discovers himself to have acquired also another sort of knowledge than merely technical knowledge, without it ever having been precisely imparted and often without being able to say precisely what it is. Thus a pianist acquires artistry as well as technique, a chess-player style and insight into the game as well as a knowledge of the moves, and a scientist acquires (among other things) the sort of judgment which tells him when his technique is leading him astray and the connoisseurship which enables him to distinguish the profitable from the unprofitable directions to explore.

Now, as I understand it, Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge. The Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in any human activity is technical knowledge, and that what I have called practical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience which would be negligible if it were not positively mischievous. The sovereignty of reason: for the Rationalist, means the sovereignty of technique.

The heart of the matter is the pre-occupation of the Rationalist with certainty. Technique and certainty are, for him, inseparably joined because certain knowledge is, for him, knowledge which does not require to look beyond itself for its certainty; knowledge, that is, which not only ends with certainty but begins with certainty and is certain throughout. And this is precisely what technical knowledge appears to be.

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For example, the superiority of an ideology over a tradition of thought lies in its appearance of being self-contained. It can be taught best to those whose minds are empty; and if it is to be taught to one who already believes something, the first step of the teacher must be to administer a purge, to make certain that all prejudices and preconceptions are removed, to lay his foundation upon the unshakable rock of absolute ignorance. In short, technical knowledge appears to be the only kind of knowledge which satisfies the standard of certainty which the Rationalist has chosen.

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The new and politically inexperienced social classes which, during the last four centuries, have risen to the exercise of political initiative and authority, have been provided for in the same sort of way as Machiavelli provided for the new prince of the sixteenth century. None of these classes had time to acquire a political education before it came to power: each needed a crib, a political doctrine, to take the place of a habit of political behaviour. Some of these writings are genuine works of political vulgarization: they do not altogether deny the existence or worth of a political tradition (they are written by men of real political education), but they are abridgments of a tradition, rationalizations purporting to elicit the 'truth' of a tradition and to exhibit it in a set of abstract principles, but from which, nevertheless, the full significance of the tradition inevitably escapes. This is pre-eminently so of Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, which was as popular, as long-lived and as valuable a political crib as that greatest of all cribs to a religion, Paley's Evidences of Christianity. But there are other writers, like Bentham or Godwin, who, pursuing the common project of providing for the political inexperience of succeeding generations, cover up all trace of the political habit and tradition of their society with a purely speculative idea: these belong to the strictest sect of Rationalism. But, so far as authority is concerned, nothing in this field can compare with the work of Marx and Engels. European politics without these writers would still have been deeply involved in Rationalism, but beyond question they are the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms--as well they might be, for it was composed for the instruction of a less politically educated class than any other that has ever come to have the illusion of exercising political power. And no fault can be found with the mechanical manner in which this greatest of all political cribs has been learned and used by those for whom it was written. No other technique has so imposed itself upon the world as if it were concrete knowledge; none has created so vast an intellectual proletariat with nothing but its technique to lose. [30]

The early history of the United States of America is an instructive chapter in the history of the politics of Rationalism. The situation of a society called upon without much notice to exercise political initiative on its own account is similar to that of an individual or a social class rising not fully prepared to the exercise of political power; in general, its needs are the same as theirs. And the similarity is even closer when the independence of the society concerned begins with an admitted illegality, a specific and express rejection of a tradition. which consequently can be defended only by an appeal to something which is itself thought not to depend upon tradition. Nor, in the case of the American colonists, was this the whole of the pressure which forced their revolution into the pattern of Rationalism.

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I do not think that any or all of the writers whom I have mentioned are responsible for our predicament. They are the servants of circumstances which they have helped to perpetuate (on occasion they may be observed giving another turn to the screw), but which they did not create. And it is not to be supposed that they would always have approved of the use made of their books. Nor, again, am I concerned with genuinely philosophical writing about politics; in so far as that has either promoted or retarded the tendency to Rationalism in politics, it has always been through a misunderstanding of its design, which is not to recommend conduct but to explain it. To explore the relations between politics and eternity is one thing: it is something different, and less commendable, for a practical politician to find the intricacy of the world of time and contingency so unmanageable that he is bewitched by the offer of a quick escape into the bogus eternity of an ideology. Nor, finally, do I think we owe our predicament to the place which the natural sciences and the manner of thinking connected with them has come to take in our civilization. This simple diagnosis of the situation has been much put about, but I think it is mistaken. That the influence of the genuine natural scientist is not necessarily on the side of Rationalism follows from the view I have taken of the character of any kind of concrete knowledge.

No doubt there are scientists deeply involved in the rationalist attitude, but they are mistaken when they think that the rationalist and the scientific points of view necessarily coincide. The trouble is that when the scientist steps outside his own field he often carries with him only his technique, and this at once allies him with the forces of Rationalism. [34] In short, I think the great prestige of the natural sciences has, in fact, been used to fasten the rationalist disposition of mind more firmly upon us, but that this is the work, not of the genuine scientist as such, but of the scientist who is a Rationalist in spite of his science.

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Nevertheless, when he is not arrogant or sanctimonious, the Rationalist can appear a not unsympathetic character. He wants so much to be right. But unfortunately he will never quite succeed. He began too late and on the wrong foot. His knowledge will never be more than half-knowledge, and consequently he will never be more than half-right. [35] Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he is bewildered by a tradition and a habit of behaviour of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him. And he conceives a contempt for what he does not understand; habit and custom appear bad in themselves, a kind of nescience of behaviour. And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics. Consequently, the Rationalist is a dangerous and expensive character to have in control of affairs, and he does most damage, not when he fails to master the situation (his politics, of course, are always in terms of mastering situations and surmounting crises), but when he appears to be successful; for the price we pay for each of his apparent successes is a firmer hold of the intellectual fashion of Rationalism upon the whole life of society.

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From the earliest days of his emergence, the Rationalist has taken an ominous interest in education. He has a respect for 'brains', a great belief in training them, and is determined that cleverness shall be encouraged and shall receive its reward of power. But what is this education in which the Rationalist believes? It is certainly not an initiation into the moral and intellectual habits and achievements of his society, an entry into the partnership between present and past, a sharing of concrete knowledge; for the Rationalist, all this would be an education in nescience, both valueless and mischievous. It is a training in technique, a training, that is, in the half of knowledge which can be learnt from books when they are used as cribs. And the Rationalist's affected interest in education escapes the suspicion of being a mere subterfuge for imposing himself more firmly on society, only because it is clear that he is as deluded as his pupils. He sincerely believes that a training in technical knowledge is the only education worth while, because he is moved by the faith that there is no knowledge, in the proper sense, except technical knowledge. He believes that a training in 'public administration' is the surest defence against the flattery of a demagogue and the lies of a dictator.

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To an opponent of Rationalism these are local, though not negligible, defeats, and, taken separately, the loss incurred in each may not be irreparable. At least an institution like a University has a positive power of defending itself, if it will use it. But there is a victory which the Rationalist has already won on another front from which recovery will be more difficult because, while the Rationalist knows it to be a victory, his opponent hardly recognizes it as a defeat. I mean the circumvention and appropriation by the rationalist disposition of mind of the whole field of morality and moral education. The morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals, and the appropriate form of moral education is by precept, by the presentation and explanation of moral principles. This is presented as a higher morality (the morality of the free man: there is no end to the clap-trap) than that of habit, the unselfconscious following of a tradition of moral behaviour; but, in fact, it is merely morality reduced to a technique, to be acquired by training in an ideology rather than an education in behaviour. In morality, as in everything else, the Rationalist aims to begin by getting rid of inherited nescience and then to fill the blank nothingness of an open mind with the items of certain knowledge which he abstracts from his personal experience, and which he believes to be approved by the common 'reason' of mankind. [40]

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This conception of American conservatism does not contradict the famous thesis of Louis Hartz, who argued that the political culture of the United States was deeply and indelibly marked by what in Europe was called liberalism. As Hartz himself stressed, what American conservatives sought to conserve was a rather liberal society, grounded in contract, the market, and limited government. The "prejudices" of Americans � the unarticulated assumptions and habitual reactions bequeathed by their collective historical experience � were liberal, as Edmund Burke had explained to his countrymen in 1775, in what remains among the most illuminating portraits of the peculiarities of American political culture. Many of the governmental forms adopted in 1776 were continuous with the past: they were colonial institutions without the King and the British Parliament, both of which had long seemed distant to the inhabitants of the new United States. Much that seemed radical in eighteenth-century Europe was taken for granted by Americans. The notion of a written constitution, which was a radical conception in Europe, was perceived by Americans as continuous with a past in which political institutions had long been based upon agreements such as the Mayflower Compact and the Plantation Covenants of New England towns.

A heritage of self-government combined with a suspicion of governmental power predisposed the Americans for representative and constitutional government. In contrast to Jefferson's perorations on universal, natural rights, some American founders were aware that the success of their revolution was grounded in particular historical experience. One prominent figure in the early republic, Gouverneur Morris, who served as American ambassador to France in 1789, wrote of the French, "They want an American constitution, without realizing they have not Americans to uphold it" � an observation which precedes Joseph de Maistre's more famous critique of the efficacy of written constitutions.

There were conservative and nonconservative elements in the American founding. In many ways the Declaration of Independence and its author, Thomas Jefferson, are paradigmatic of the nonconservative elements of the founding: rationalist, universalistic, populist, suspicious of federal government power and of nonagrarian commercial development. The more conservative elements of the founding are represented by the Constitution and by the authors of the Federalist Papers, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and above all, James Madison. It was to Jefferson that the more populist and antigovernment currents in subsequent American political life would look, while more conservative currents, beginning with the Whigs in the first half of the nineteenth century, looked to Madison as their forebear.

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I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the **** up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been�rather charmingly, I thought�referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

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This is the problem with many liberals -- they've been indoctrinated with (Green) liberal principles from an early age and have picked up Green's implicit reaction to Blue and Orange excesses, but have never experienced nor even reflected on what might be good and healthy in those levels, which are where "conservative" principles reside.