Third Shakerism

Sponsored by

Somewhere in your kitchen, you probably have salt and pepper shakers. They might sit on your counter, or possibly on your table. If you’re the fancy type, you might even have bottles for oil and vinegar. If you look at the same type of table set from the 18th century, you’ll find these same things. But among them, you’ll also find something curious—a mysterious third shaker.

What was it used for? The truth is, nobody really knows. Some claim it was for sugar, others for paprika or white pepper. One leading thought is that it might have been for some sort of mustard powder. But at the end of the day, nobody can fully say for certain what these shakers were for. This is because these shakers were so ubiquitous that nobody thought it necessary to document what they’re for. Everyone knew its purpose until no one did.

There are other examples of this phenomenon, such as the mysterious “Roman Dodecahedron” discussed by the great Joe Scott in the video below, or the lost Egyptian city of Punt. One can imagine a Roman soldier chuckling at the thought that nobody knows what his nubby brass dodecahedron was used for—it would be so obvious to him!

These stories tell us something important about how civilizations lose knowledge. The most essential things—the customs and understandings that hold society together—often become invisible precisely because they work so well. We stop noticing them, stop appreciating them, and stop defending them. And that way lies disaster.

The conservative temperament starts with recognizing this reality. Much of what makes our modern civilization possible is inherited wisdom that we don't fully understand. If the goal of science, art, or any field of study is to build upon the discoveries and creations that came before us, the goal of the conservative is to preserve those discoveries and creations as well as their meaning so that future generations don’t have to start from zero.

William F. Buckley famously defined a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” But I think that’s in part because it rolled off the tongue far better than defining one as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘consider the wisdom of your ancestors and make sure you understand the institutions that enabled you to get this far, lest you accidentally destroy them in your desire to make life even better than it is now, thereby undermining your efforts and making it worse.‘“

Conservatism, rightly understood, is not an inhibitor of progress, but an enabler of it. Buckley, a learned and brilliant man, understood this. Progress was not inherently bad; indeed, his home of Manhattan was far better off in the 20th century than in the 19th. Progress! But progress built upon the successes, wisdom, and institutions formed in the blood and toil of the 18th century.

Chesterton's Fence and the Great Relearning

There is a principle with which you will be familiar if you’ve been reading my writing (or really the writing of almost any conservative) for a while called Chesterton’s Fence. In his book The Thing, G.K. Chesterton presents us with a parable:

Do you see where I’m going with this?

What separates the conservative temperament from that of the populist or the radical is not the religious worship of what is old; it is the demand that we understand what is old before discarding it as no longer useful. The reformer plans removal, the radical reaches for dynamite, and the populist denounces it as bourgeois excess. But the conservative asks: "What dangers was this fence built to keep out?"

In The Great Relearning, Tom Wolfe wrote about what he calls “a curious footnote to the psychadelic movement.” Amidst the influx of hippies and free spirits to 1960s San Francisco, local doctors saw a deluge of medieval diseases cropping up. And no, I don’t mean “medieval” as in “hardcore" or “brutal,” but as in literally medieval:

Why did these diseases crop back up all of the sudden after centuries? As Wolfe explains, “The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.” With the ditching of moral and social norms, the hippies also ditched modern hygiene. Starting from zero meant abandoning the codes that said you should wash your body and clothes, that you shouldn’t share toothbrushes with strangers, that you shouldn’t have communal mattresses.

The era of the hippie was one of what Wolfe calls “remedial education.” It was an era of relearning the value of the old mores and folkways. It was an era that led to the resurgence of both political and temperamental conservatism. What fences were torn down were quietly erected again to serve their once-forgotten purpose.

On a short enough timescale like in the 60s and 70s, the old ways can be forgotten and relearned. But what of the long death of knowledge? What of the things that move from ubiquity to obscurity without a word? What about the third shakers?

When Relearning is Impossible

I wrote about Jonah Goldberg’s “Don’t Call this Conservatism” two weeks ago. Two weeks later, it’s still stuck in my head. The most notable passage is this:

After a fire or some other disaster, structures can often be rebuilt quite quickly. When they go up in flames overnight, they tend to leave behind some who remember their form and function. But when termites eat, they do so over the course of decades. That dilapidated fence in the field is consumed in years, not days. And if left unchecked, the termites will wholly and completely disintegrate the structure. By the time anyone remembers why the fence was built in the first place, it will no longer exist. It won’t just be broken or removed; its component parts will simply be gone. Constructing a replacement will have to be done from scratch.

The same goes for our institutions.

Our politics is full of termites who think destruction is a virtue. And it once seemed that the termites primarily infested the Democratic party. The anti-vaxxers were rich Bay Area progressives and the “burn it all down” chants came from the college campus left.

But this termite temperament now pervades the right as well. Progressives once dismissed constitutional limits as obstacles to justice; now self-styled conservatives denounce due process as impediments to presidential power. Where it was and is Democrats who ask “why you need a gun” and see the Second Amendment as an archaic obstacle to security, the Republicans now ask the same of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments:

Our constitutional system is one big Chestertonian institution. The Electoral College, equal Senate representation, lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices, supermajority requirements for amendments, delegation of powers to the states—all of these frustrate radicals who want quick action. And it’s not an impossibility that some might deserve to go. But we should understand their purpose before we start tearing them down.

While it seemed Democrats never grasped this institutional wisdom, Republicans now actively abandon it—or worse, become hostile to it. Look at the Republican embrace of tariffs—a policy that contradicts a century of conservative economic thinking. Or consider how gleefully some now talk about using federal power against political opponents.

Genuine conservatism remains skeptical of concentrated power—whether progressives use it for social engineering or right-wing populists for homogenization. It recognizes that the gravest threat to human flourishing comes from eroding those intermediate institutions that stand between individuals and a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature.

What makes our moment dangerous is the near-total disappearance of people who understand institutional restraint. Joe Manchin's retirement removes one of the few remaining Democrats who valued this approach. Republicans have systematically purged the Cheneys and Kinzingers who put conservative principles over partisan loyalty.

This institutional vandalism isn't just a political problem. It's a crisis of civic understanding. We're losing the institutional memory that makes self-government work. Like that forgotten third shaker, the reasons our founders structured government as they did, why they built in protections and inefficiencies rather than streamlined systems—all of this is fading from public consciousness.Get Free Access to All Articles

The Work of Memory

The conservative temperament is fundamentally about preserving and transmitting hard-won wisdom about human nature and political possibility so that we don’t have to relearn these lessons the hard way. It's not reactionary nostalgia for some imagined golden age, but recognition that most progress is actually recovery—rediscovering truths that have always existed but have since been forgotten.

This is why conservatives are skeptical of grand schemes for human improvement. History is littered with the wreckage of such schemes, each promoted by smart, sincere people convinced they had found the key to human happiness.

The conservative understands that society's most precious inheritance isn't financial wealth or military power, but cultural wisdom—accumulated knowledge of how to live together peacefully, resolve disputes without violence, maintain order without tyranny. This wisdom lives not in abstract principles but in concrete practices and institutions built over the course of generations.

If American democracy has hope, it lies not in one party beating another, but in cultivating this conservative temperament across party lines. We need Democrats who understand that progressive goals work better through patient institutional development than radical transformation. We need Republicans who remember that conservative principles shouldn’t be used as talking points during election time and then discarded as hindrances when in power. Most importantly, we need citizens who understand that preserving self-government requires more than just voting.

Civilizations lose essential knowledge not through dramatic collapse but through simple neglect. This is what Goldberg argues in his book Suicide of the West: Constitutional government, rule of law, peaceful power transfers—these things are more fragile than they appear. They persist not because they're natural or inevitable, but because each generation chooses to preserve them and to safeguard them for the next. And each generation makes this choice because they are taught the value—the use—of these norms and the institutions that sustain them. The value of these institutions is documented so they may be fortified against the eroding tide of history.

The question isn't whether the world will change—change is inevitable. The question is whether we'll let it be changed by beavers or by termites, as guardians of civilization's wisdom or destroyers of its forgotten treasures. Our choice may determine whether future generations understand our democratic institutions or puzzle over their ruins, much as we puzzle over third shakers and dodecahedrons.