CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
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a conservative writer once called them-are certainly no more "in–
compatible" than the Ten Commandments. No,
if
the argument from
Incompatibility is really to be effective, then it must show that the
principles of the Left are incompatible in a far stronger sense, in
that on most issues or on most serious issues the deliverance of one
principle is likely to conflict with the deliverance of some other prin–
ciple. This, however, the argument never does: and it doesn't, I
suspect, because it can't. It is indeed at this stage worth remembering
that this argument as turned in an anti-liberal direction received its
finest, its classic formulation from the two greatest liberals of the
great Age of Liberalism, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.
They however did not jump to the conclusion that liberalism was
wrong: the only moral they drew was that liberals should be care–
ful. Surely here, as so often elsewhere, they were dead right.
If
this is so, then it is to the other two arguments in the right–
wing armory, to what I have called the Argument from Knowledge
and the Argument from Ignorance, that we should turn in our search
for a revived conservatism. Is there anything in the contemporary vi–
cissitudes of these two arguments that suggests that new life or energy
has been injected into the cause that uses them? Has either of them
been given a new slant or twist, been in any way overhauled or re–
fitted, so as to be peculiarly adapted to modern conditions?
Here, at the outset, we come up against a rather unexpected
fact: unexpected in itself and in the way it divides the conservatism
of modern Britain from that of modern America. In Britain today
there is no conservative intellectual of any stature or influence who
would rest
his
objection to the doctrines of the Left on the brighter
vision of some alternative society. The ground of British conservatism
today-by which of course I mean the open and visible ground-is
skepticism and empiricism, not faith or reason. The Argument from
Ignorance is in, the Argument from Knowledge is out. All of which
must seem very strange to an American conservative who would
naturally expect to find the traditional views that he clings to, clung
to nowhere with so much tenacity and sense of inner conviction as
in the traditional lands. Strange-and also somewhat disconcerting.
For if in New England people find it beneficial and soothing and
somehow
relevant
to dream of old England, why is it that in old
