Oakeshott, the Masai, and Resilience under conditions of Social Extinction

Lately I have been such a fan-boy of Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) here that I have been tempted to write a ‘why I am not a conservative’ piece just to figure out where we disagree. I won’t do that (now), but what follows may give a sense of my admiration and ambivalence about his work.

One of Oakeshott’s most beautiful papers is “on being conservative” (1956), which originates in a lecture. I have wondered whether I should aggressively mention it to the people that enthusiastically have recently suggested G.A. Cohen’s “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value” to me. (I am happy to return my analytic union card at the recycle site we have set up.)

Anyway, I’ll quote a passage that illustrates my sources of ambivalence. (The page number is from the Liberty Fund edition of Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.)

Moreover, to be conservative is not merely to be averse from change (which may be an idiosyncrasy); it is also a manner of accommodating ourselves to changes, an activity imposed upon all men. For, change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction. But a man’s identity (or that of a community) is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies, each at the mercy of circumstance and each significant in proportion to its familiarity. It 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; by throwing our weight upon the foot which for the time being is most firmly placed, by cleaving to whatever familiarities are not immediately threatened and thus assimilating what is new without it becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. The Masai, when they were moved from their old country to the present Masaid reserve in Kenya, took with them the names of their hills and plains and rivers and gave them to the hills and plains and rivers of the new country. And it is by some such subterfuge of conservatism that every man or people compelled to suffer a notable change avoids the shame of extinction.—p. 410

As an aside, if one reads enough Oakeshott one gets the decided sense he is lukewarm about extending the franchise to women (even after the fact) and does not have much time for feminism as such. Hence, his gendered language is not merely a sign of the times.

The idea that conservatism is a manner of accommodating oneself to inevitable change is fundamental to understanding it as a political disposition. This is orthogonal to one’s ideology or first order political views, although certain politics, say ones that celebrate novelty (some species of liberalism) or revolution (some species of Marxism), are clearly incompatible with it. (Back in 2017, triggered by Haifry & Hazony’s “What is Conservatism?” I have written a bit about this manner as ‘type 1 conservatism.’)

What’s surprising is to see Oakeshott — who starts the essay by conceding that “articulation in the idiom of general ideas” (407) does not come naturally to his kind of conservatism — build his case on a metaphysical (or social ontological) axiom:

• A social [e.g., a man, community, a people, an association] entity’s identity is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies

While (necessarily?) each such such identity has (echoing Spinoza) a kind of conatus that aims at preserving its being, any identity is (echoing Hume) constituted by a bundle of contingencies. In a view like this there are important puzzles lurking with maintaining identity over time (or non-identity) that put the entity in the position that it can accommodate change while maintaining (ahh) unity. Such puzzles are also hinted at through the notion that one can be unrecognizable to oneself; the idea is familiar enough, but hard to state precisely without courting paradox.

Apparently, Oakeshott’s view is that a kind of organic or fluid change in the constituents of an social entity’s identity preserves the sense of identity or self-recognition even if strictly speaking the identity is new. He handles some of the apparent problems with this position by distinguishing between notable changes and minor ones. (To put it in Spinozist terms: a notable change would alter the internal ratio or proportion of motion and rest; a minor change need not. Proportions are fairly robust under some kinds of change.) Again, to formulate this without courting paradox is not so simple, but the position is phenomenologically not wholly unfamiliar. Oakeshott language betrays he is familiar with the metaphysical issues, but he brackets them and I will follow.

The role of ‘rehearsal’ also makes one wonder whether Oakeshott had just read The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, or is expressing a notion that is, as they say, in the air. It’s clearly important for the politically highly salient example he sketches.

Now, between (ca) 1904 and 1911 the British empire defeated the Masai (or Maasai). They were ethnically cleansed from their homelands, and then “were moved into reserves where they could be more easily taxed and controlled, and to make way for” colonial settlers. (One wonders if the Americans learned from the British or vice versa.) I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if something similar was afoot in the 1950s.

When Oakeshott is presenting his paper, Kenya is by no means independent the British are, in fact, battling the so-called Mau Mau uprising/rebellion (which included some Masai). So, lurking here is a topic of high political salience, not to say that from an imperial legacy perspective, the chickens are coming home to roost, and also questions about how to move forward.

As an aside, recently (2013), the British government agreed to compensate “more than 5,000 Kenyans it had tortured and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency.” Such cases are important precedents for recognizing that remedy and compensation are familiar ways of acknowledging what are rightly called ‘historical injustice(s).’ Oakeshott himself is uninterested in exploring remedies for such cases, alas.

There is a sense in which Oakeshott glides over the topic of high political salience. Even so, his use of the Masai is itself notable for not being racist, and exhibiting non-trivial imaginative compassion or fellow-feeling not usually exhibited by imperial-center intellectuals. The Masai’s adaptation to devastating change — they are a worst case scenario — stand in for all of us (notice the universal quantifier): “by some such subterfuge of conservatism that every man or people compelled to suffer a notable change avoids the shame of extinction.” Of course, the pathos of the example is that ‘extinction’ here tracks both genocide and threats against identity.

Before I discuss let me just make explicit the axiom of social phenomenology that Oakeshott is deploying:

• Every change (that is noticeable) is an emblem of extinction; unchosen or compelled major change is a source of shame of extinction.

Victimhood and defeat can be a source of shame. As Oakeshott notes (and modern feminists remind us [I am reflecting on the work of Manon Garcia here]) imposed victimhood, subordination, and defeat are endemic in social life. Again the Masai stand in for all of us; their experience is extreme, but not uncommon. Thus, we all have a survival mechanism that regularly instantiates the conservative disposition. (Benigni’s 1997 film, Life is Beautiful, also explores this disposition under extreme conditions.) And in so far as major forms of social subordination are endemic in social life, we are frequently in a certain sense invited to be dispositional (or type1) conservatives in non-trivial ways. The subterfuge is, in part, that we don’t always notice that our very private adaptation is political.

Before I close, such social subterfuge is not uncommon. One of my favorite examples is illustrated when gay marriage was legalized. For, it exhibited that the old marriage institution treated people unequally and without respect, and all of us (now old-timers), who, while claiming the mantle of egalitarian, at one point or another helped maintain the old institution, subordinated ourselves to a pretty bad arrangement. But by treating the new institution as pretty much identical to the old (as completing it, or revealing its true nature, or celebrating our progressive understanding, etc.), we (recall) participate in a socially useful subterfuge that is very similar to the conservative disposition Oakeshott is describing.

From the perspective of normative theory this all seems perverse, but from the perspective of social theory Oakeshott is on firmer ground. In the example (and reality) the Masai exhibit creative resilience in the context of, what in political and other terms, is a catastrophe. Importantly, by emphasizing their agency (“throwing our weight,” “cleaving,” “giving,” etc.), Oakeshott recognizes that the conservative disposition itself contributes to (encultured) and sensitive worldmaking under conditions of uncertainty and is not merely a noble ‘'no’ against change.