SUFFICIENCY:

The Skeptical Conservative (Andrew Sullivan, November 4, 2002 , Bradley Lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute)

"A story," he says, "has no overall meaning, and is occurrences understood in terms of the meaning they acquire from their evidential contingent relationships. And the teller of such a story has no message for those who listen, other than the intelligibility with which he purports to have endowed the occurrences concerned by putting them into a story."

What this relationship really is--and it still puzzles people-- Maybe what it's not is clearer than what it is. It allows for a greater contingency between human events than any other account can muster, and in this way closely dovetails with Oakeshott's advocacy of extemporaneous practical life, which was a major subplot of his Rationalism and Essays.

Oakeshott was a bit of a bohemian. He loved pursuing his own interests wherever they led him. He was always seen with some beautiful woman on his arm. He came from the days when sexual harassment wasn't even thought of, let alone policed. He went on trips throughout Europe without anything in his pocket but a little amount of money and would sleep by the hedge rows, going from village to village, seeing what he found, living as he wanted to.

To seize each moment, to delight in it, and pursue its informations with the fullest degree of autonomy and least trace of heteronomy is perhaps the best way to understand Oakeshott's view of how you deal with the contingencies of history and the contingencies of life. To see "how it will turn out." It is a response to contingency Oakeshott wishes to affirm in each practical event. And the paradox of a still-lingering presence of tradition in contingency and the inevitable weight of heteronomy within autonomous agency might be seen as most successfully resolved in Oakeshott's writings by the temperament he associates with poetic experience.

This is not to say the point of contingency in history is that human beings can do anything they want. It isn't to say that one event can lead to absolutely anything. It isn't to say that one is living life in order to lose oneself at every minute. As we've seen, such loss of self is inimical to Oakeshott's understanding of practical agency. Rather, paradoxically, what Oakeshott's trying to say is that by acquiescing in contingency, by understanding we have no control, by knowing that we cannot know what will come next, by playing into that knowledge, maximizing it, only then are we, paradoxically, led to strengthen our autonomy.

Oakeshott says at one point in the Rationalism essays that a man's identity, "is not a fortress into which we may retire, and the only means we have of defending it--that is, ourselves--against the hostile forces of change is in the open field of our experience."

Far from being someone that crouched under the defense of tradition, he said history is a complete series of contingencies. Go out there, join it. Know its randomness, know its potential. Let go a little, and you will master it better than those who want to impose an order upon it which isn't there. You gain more control by letting go. Human beings and human society are so complex, they change so completely, they are so radically open to change, the attempt to order it all is a mistake. It will lead you up blind alleys. And the only sensibility which could allow you to govern politics, and indeed to live life, is one which lets go of control over the future.

Facing the open field of experience is the ability to maximize the contingency in each practical moment. It is to defeat contingency by accepting its terms of combat. It's a perilous course, and in it our identity is constantly under threat. But it is, paradoxically, the only way in which that identity can be defended.

Conservatism in this understanding does not seek to suppress change, to dictate the course of a story, insisting on a plot. It recognizes the mixture of tradition and possibility in events and stresses the contingency and possibilities in order, paradoxically, to conserve identity more fully in the face of it. Just as riding a bike fast steadies the balance, so facing practical life with this attitude steadies the self.

Barry Meislin sent this one a while ago, but I'd been dilly-dallying over a Rationalism in Politics review, so just read it now. Oakeshott's essay is available on-line and you really should read it, if you haven't. If I understand aright what Mr. Sullivan is saying here, it seems he's trying to co-opt Oakeshott as an advocate for wide-open experimentation in personal behavior. One wonders if this doesn't go a bit too far. From what I've read, Oakeshott would certainly have said that someone's personal and private life was none of anybody's business, but that seems quite a different thing than actual advocacy. It also seems hard to square with his statement in On Being Conservative:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is ont itself chosen or specifically cultivated.

Of course, Mr. Sullivan wrote his doctoral dissertation on Oakeshott and even met the man, so he deserves some deference. Still, he seems to be reading into Oakeshott's philosophy that which he desires to be there. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2003 6:34 AM