Kepler
Cornell Big Red
Re: Your Political Stance - 2014 Edition
There has been a long and often bitter battle inside conservatism about whether being conservative means suspending social attitudes in amber or trying to get beneath social attitudes to what their source is and why they make sense (and why they can stop making sense one day and need changes). By "long" I mean 300 years and counting, so we're not going it solve it today.
Let's take slavery as something that is distant enough in time that the battles over it can be more easily discussed. There was a self-described "conservative" defense of slavery: we should not uproot our traditions with the dangerous experiment of giving blacks rights; slavery has always been part of the price of civilization; what was good enough for the Founders is good enough for us. There was a self-described "conservative" attack on slavery: slavery is offensive to the American tradition that all men are created equal and it is time to change it; slavery is an intrusion of commerce on the moral realm and we should reassert the primacy of God and restore divine balance.
Because anybody can use a tradition as broad and deep as conservatism (or liberalism) to both attack or defend pretty much any proposition, the second type of conservative seeks for something below "the way it's always been." Political scholars like Russell Kirk have discerned underneath these kinds of apparent contradictions patterns that keep repeating in history. One type of "conservatism" reacts against a change in social practices as ipso facto unnatural, and sees the conservative tradition as trying to keep values from "sliding." The other type of "conservatism" looks at social practices not as ends in themselves but as means to deeper ends. When the means becomes offensive to the end, you modify the means. (Of course, this is also a rigged game, since the type of thinkers who make these distinctions also have their feet planted in the second camp. Reactionaries don't accept the distinction in the first place.)
Let me use gay marriage as the contemporary example. One type of conservative looks at gays and sees their grandfathers' revulsion at an "abomination." For them, gay marriage is in itself a wrong that can not be countenanced. The other type of conservative looks at marriage and says, "this is a good institution for all sorts of reasons -- let's not oppose its spread." Their attitudes towards gay people can change without threatening their underlying devotion to the healthy effect of stable relationships. Although they may themselves simply never be able to wrap their heads around gays as morally equal (after all, few abolitionists saw blacks as actually equal), they at least reach "better to marry than to burn."
"Social conservatism" can be defined either way, and I strongly suspect the reason a person is one or the other type just comes down to autobiographical details. Both are "valid" in the sense of being coherent worldviews that sustain themselves. But that very clash between them has given the more intellectually curious conservative thinkers grist for discussion for the last several centuries.
There has been a long and often bitter battle inside conservatism about whether being conservative means suspending social attitudes in amber or trying to get beneath social attitudes to what their source is and why they make sense (and why they can stop making sense one day and need changes). By "long" I mean 300 years and counting, so we're not going it solve it today.
Let's take slavery as something that is distant enough in time that the battles over it can be more easily discussed. There was a self-described "conservative" defense of slavery: we should not uproot our traditions with the dangerous experiment of giving blacks rights; slavery has always been part of the price of civilization; what was good enough for the Founders is good enough for us. There was a self-described "conservative" attack on slavery: slavery is offensive to the American tradition that all men are created equal and it is time to change it; slavery is an intrusion of commerce on the moral realm and we should reassert the primacy of God and restore divine balance.
Because anybody can use a tradition as broad and deep as conservatism (or liberalism) to both attack or defend pretty much any proposition, the second type of conservative seeks for something below "the way it's always been." Political scholars like Russell Kirk have discerned underneath these kinds of apparent contradictions patterns that keep repeating in history. One type of "conservatism" reacts against a change in social practices as ipso facto unnatural, and sees the conservative tradition as trying to keep values from "sliding." The other type of "conservatism" looks at social practices not as ends in themselves but as means to deeper ends. When the means becomes offensive to the end, you modify the means. (Of course, this is also a rigged game, since the type of thinkers who make these distinctions also have their feet planted in the second camp. Reactionaries don't accept the distinction in the first place.)
Let me use gay marriage as the contemporary example. One type of conservative looks at gays and sees their grandfathers' revulsion at an "abomination." For them, gay marriage is in itself a wrong that can not be countenanced. The other type of conservative looks at marriage and says, "this is a good institution for all sorts of reasons -- let's not oppose its spread." Their attitudes towards gay people can change without threatening their underlying devotion to the healthy effect of stable relationships. Although they may themselves simply never be able to wrap their heads around gays as morally equal (after all, few abolitionists saw blacks as actually equal), they at least reach "better to marry than to burn."
"Social conservatism" can be defined either way, and I strongly suspect the reason a person is one or the other type just comes down to autobiographical details. Both are "valid" in the sense of being coherent worldviews that sustain themselves. But that very clash between them has given the more intellectually curious conservative thinkers grist for discussion for the last several centuries.
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