Symposium: A “Sustainable” Conservatism

There is a lot of good stuff in Mark Mitchell’s “Roots, Limits, and Love,” but, in the spirit of his remarks, I’ll limit myself—to a single word, though perhaps his most provocative: “sustainable.”

It’s a shame that that perfectly functional adjective has been coopted by the Left as the byword for its Hybrid Prius obsession. But they’ve won the word, as happens in politics. “Sustainable” is now the umbrella term for every scheme to save the polar bears, to power microwaves with wind turbines, and to fill the pockets of Al Gore with a different type of “green” via half-off carbon indulgences.

But I suspect that Dr. Mitchell is thinking of the word differently.

Take as a non-EPA-certified example of something “unsustainable” the United States’ national debt, currently approaching $17 trillion. Why does every person—man, woman, and newborn babe—owe $53,500, more than the typical household earns in a year? We might address the problem, as Dr. Mitchell suggests, in terms of scale. We might spend less prodigiously if we thought of people not as atomized consumers but as persons—father, son, husband; mother, wife; citizen, employee; featherless bipeds who wear simultaneously a number of hats—or as members of small, natural units: families, local religious communities, towns.

But the problem is also one of time. Community does not exist only horizontally, among households in the same neighborhood. It also exists, as Edmund Burke asserted, vertically: among the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born. It is this “community of souls,” in Russell Kirk’s phrase, that is the impulse to sustainability: We seek to maintain the good things bequeathed to us by generations past, and to bequeath them to generations to come. Sustainability with any substance is predicated on this rich moral vision of a communion of past, present, and future.

The national debt (as only one example) is morally troubling because we have saddled future generations with the consequences of our prodigality. Continuing to neglect that problem is an indication that, despite our supposed concern for the ozone or the rainforests, we really care little about future generations.

Our notion of sustainability has been reduced to car engines and solar lamps. Conservatives would do well to retake that word and restore it.

This article is in response to “Roots, Limits, and Love” and is part of the symposium on “What’s Wrong with Conservatism?”