One of the more surprising friendships of the early 20^th century was that between one of the world’s most eloquent pessimistic, sceptical conservatives, and one of the world’s most eloquent optimistic radicals. Nevertheless, the relationship between Joseph Conrad and Bertrand Russell was “as intense as passionate love.”

I bring this up because I keep being reminded of Conrad’s deep thought about the human condition, brilliantly described by Russell in the following words. “I felt, though I do not know whether he would have accepted such an image, that he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” So easily did Kurtz sink in ‘Heart of Darkness’.

This thought seems to me to express something very important about conservatism. A concrete, existing, functioning society, however flawed, is intrinsically valuable because of the benefits it provides, and needs to be cared for because it will not take much to destroy. An engineered Utopia is correspondingly less valuable; we do not know it can form a sufficiently strong crust over the “fiery depths”. Criticism and repair of broken societies is of course vital, but politicians need to be extremely careful and risk-averse when they act. And, a fortiori, they need to select carefully what they pronounce to be broken.

As the financial system comes close to meltdown, and unwary banks are sinking into those depths, this is a good moment to reflect on the distinction between conservatism and ‘free market’ liberalism. Normally, followers of these two ideologies have much to connect them, not least their opposition to social engineering. But when, say, Hayek tells us why he is not a conservative, the barbed words he uses to describe conservatives and conservatism – ‘fear’, ‘timid’, ‘complacent’, ‘has no political principles’ – emphasise the distance between the ideologies.

The distress of the financial sector shows exactly why the conservative is timid. When a key social institution collapses, the result is terrifying. The liberal free marketeer is of course correct to point out the importance of poorly-run firms failing, the dangers of moral hazard and so on. But hindsight shows us that the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which certainly highlighted the downside of moral hazard to anyone who cared to watch, sent the financial crisis into a new, more virulent phase.

It is true that market (and social) mechanisms are self-correcting, as Hayek argues. Or to put it in the terms of Russell’s Conradian image, when the solid lava breaks, another crust will form. But that does not mean one should be sanguine about falling into the molten stuff.

Issues that drive a wedge between conservatives and market liberals (immigration is another) are always pretty toxic for the British Conservative Party, which needs to maintain a coalition of the two. The Tories’ uncertain response to the crisis is no surprise; expect those massive poll leads to be wiped out over the next few weeks.