imperfectibility. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain faults, the
conservatives know. . . . To aim for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we
are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered,
just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering continue to
lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable
order.”
Quinton Hogg, Lord Hailsham, in his classic book on British conservatism,
affirmed that conservative belief that since “man is an imperfect creature with a streak of
evil as well as good in his inmost nature,” a utopian society of perfected human beings is
impossible, and so the best we can strive for is a limited government with a balance of
powers in which “the public good is attained by the interplay of rival forces.”
Darwinian biology confirms these conservative beliefs by explaining how such an
imperfect human nature arose from the evolution of the human species.
By contrast, those on the political left—socialists and welfare-state liberals—have
a utopian vision of human nature as perfectible. They believe that human nature is
largely a social construction that can be perfected by rational social planning. And
although they might believe that Darwin was right about the biological evolution of the
human body, they also believe that the human mind has capacities for rational planning
and cultural change that liberate human society from the constraints of biological nature.
The realist vision of human nature is manifested throughout the history of
conservative thought. Edmund Burke insisted that politics “ought to be adjusted not to
human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no
means the greatest part,” and therefore “there is, by the essential fundamental constitution
4
Russell Kirk, Introduction, in The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk (New York: Penguin
Books, 1982), xvii-xviii.
5
Quinton Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (West Drayton, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1947), 10-11.
3
Convention