rolling explaining conservatism

the irony of this is that modern liberalism fits this bill far more than conservatism.

thinking about where all the endless leftist/social-justice person debates about who has the right to comment on certain issues etc fit with this - the idea that (for example) if you are white you will never really understand the lived experience of racism and therefore are not qualified to comment on it, it's not your place to disagree with someone who does have that lived experience, that overarching meta-narratives are problematic because they don't take difference into account- that seems to fit quite well with an anti-hubris, cautious conservatism? but then the flipside is that particular viewpoints are effectively infallible and beyond question if they are based on lived experience? which doesn't fit in with the "human knowledge is always incomplete" bit?

in a lot of these twitter arguments about lived experience and subjectivity etc the ppl on the non-social justice-y side are usually Dawkins-esque, "I can understand the entire universe with my infallible logic" types, which seems a very un-conservative worldview?

I'm trying to map the steps from this worldview that is

individualistic
liberty-centric

to racism and kneejerk anti-multicultural feeling. Other aspects of the worldview tend to be:

traditionalist
focused on dire threats

Partly, the mythology is of a melting pot in which previous generations of immigrants assimilated into a culture of common values. These prior waves did not expect America to conform to them, they conformed to it. More recent immigrants are the bad kind - they won't assimilate and they expect us to change to accommodate them. To a conservative this is not a strengthening kind of immigration, but a contributor to the sense of dire peril.

Some adherents round this out with takimag-style "race realism," which flatters tribal identification while conveniently excusing inequality. They'll turn to Bell Curve justifications for achievement disparities, and construct a fictional historical pastopia in which minorities "knew their place."

not interested in the fake ones like the imminent sharia takeover of american society.

traitor

If this were France I may feel differently.

A general needs to know where best to allocate his resources ya know

XP to soref - i think that refusing to consider new information / allow lived experience to adjust prior expectation is a conservative approach. favoring the status quo or being resistant to change seems to me to line up pretty consistently with the conservative mentality in practice at least if not in theory and the unviersial logic approach is just an attempt to rationalize the morality by making it seem empirical/objective

there's a lot of slippage and mutual causation between different explanatory frameworks here, perhaps including:

1) individual psychology (does it buttress a lifestyle/identity/ego)
2) intellectual coherence (does it tell a convincing story about the world, my life)
3) moral/ethical/religious convictions (is it "good," right, etc.)

I think one can be a conservative due to any of these individually, but obviously they all overlap and mutually reinforce. I'd hesitate to give one priority (and there are others I am missing, I'm sure)

thinking about where all the endless leftist/social-justice person debates about who has the right to comment on certain issues etc fit with this - the idea that (for example) if you are white you will never really understand the lived experience of racism and therefore are not qualified to comment on it, it's not your place to disagree with someone who does have that lived experience, that overarching meta-narratives are problematic because they don't take difference into account- that seems to fit quite well with an anti-hubris, cautious conservatism? but then the flipside is that particular viewpoints are effectively infallible and beyond question if they are based on lived experience? which doesn't fit in with the "human knowledge is always incomplete" bit?

Yeah, as I think art is noting, this sort of leftism is still based in wanting to remake society (adjusting curricula, asking for trigger warnings, modifying language, creating sexual harassment regulations, ...) based on human knowledge, the knowledge and testimony of oppressed peoples. A cautious conservative would be wary of making these kinds of newfangled changes and throwing out centuries of wisdom, etc.

Efficiency of production is of paramount importance, efficiency of accrual is out of investigative bounds, efficiency of public expenditure is of paramount importance, efficiency of private expenditure is none of anybody's business.

there is no universalism but the universalism of capital

the collective identity of a people cannot be established on the basis of "humanity" at large but only through a specific set of ethnic/religious/cultural symbols which integrate belonging and solidarity.

and to abandon that symbolism is to surrender your individual/collective identity to a vast administrative state

this sort of leftism is still based in wanting to remake society

Yeah this returns my mind to darraghmac's post: conservatives do believe that liberals want to reshape society. In this regard, they are pretty much right.

(I know I, personally, would like to remake society so that it could be kinder, fairer, more egalitarian, more inclusive, more compassionate. Government is not a perfect instrument for achieving that, but it is often the only entity that's even trying.)

A cautious conservative would be wary of making these kinds of newfangled changes and throwing out centuries of wisdom, etc.

Yeah, given that racism, sexism, and class inequality are baked into society, those whose preference is to "conserve" long-held societal structures will inevitably find themselves on the side of preserving the bad bits as well as the good ones. The cautiousness of the "cautious conservative" will always lead him to preserve oppression.

This may be because he likes the privilege he has, and doesn't want the new order to take any away. But he might also argue from skepticism: The cure may be worse than the disease (fallibility of human actors, unintended consequences).

Inaction also has unintended consequences.

there is no universalism but the universalism of capital

I think this is basically why I always have a hard time with the way right-wing economics gets framed as "economic liberty/freedom" (even by liberals, often). The idea that unrestricted capitalism provides freedom is only one, very specific conception of "liberty" (and seems to overlook that private ownership of property requires state recognition and enforcement).

aight serious-ish question. what's the benefit of understanding conservatives?

understanding is its own reward

to convert them or make them powerless

understanding is its own reward

― Mordy

well if you insist on believing that you'll never understand conservatism.

The idea that unrestricted capitalism provides freedom is only one, very specific conception of "liberty" (and seems to overlook that private ownership of property requires state recognition and enforcement).

Agreed - however, that one specific conception of liberty is EXACTLY the one meant by contemporary conservatives.

They look (however selectively) to the founders' views on natural rights. Isn't "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is just a PR-savvy twist on Lockeian "life, liberty, and property"?

The Founding White Dudes were pretty clear that the idea of liberty they were interested in involved state recognition and enforcement of property rights, and they had no problem with that. Including, and especially, human property, but I suspect I'm preaching to the choir here.

to convert them or make them powerless

― scattered, smothered, covered, diced and chunked (WilliamC)

and what if you can't convert them, and can make them powerless only by subjugating them?

well if you insist on believing that you'll never understand conservatism.

i don't need to jettison my own values to understand conservatism just like i don't need to start eating human flesh to understand cannibalism

then oh well it was worth a shot, and continue to coexist uneasily xp

xxp there are probably good reasons to protect private property that even contemporary liberals can get on board w/

xxp there are probably good reasons to protect private property that even contemporary liberals can get on board w/

Perhaps, but let's not pretend that it's a question of government vs freedom.

Here's an interesting article that touches on how liberals and conservatives often talk past each other on political issues.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/11/why-is-the-decimation-of-public-schools-a-bad-thing

People therefore interpret political language through ideological lenses. What sounds obviously appalling to one person may seem totally unobjectionable or even desirable to another. People on the left, however, often fail to comprehend this fact. They condemn “marginalization” and “inequality” as if everyone already agrees that those are bad things. (A lot of people don’t.) The same is true of “privilege” and “neoliberalism,” which are treated as self-evidently undesirable even though many people do not know what those things are, let alone share a hatred of them.

don't mean to spam the thread, and i know he's a controversial figure, but i just read this passage from Sloterdijk and i thought it provided a pretty interesting distinction that could be mapped into the difference between liberal and conservative tendencies.

In the era of increasingly nervous encounters between peoples in the second and first millennia BC, there were various attempts to come to terms with the irreducible pluralisms of ethnicities and their religion control systems. At a general level, one can divide these attempts into two opposing blocks of neighborhood policies. On the one side are syncretistic tendencies whose goal is the liberating amalgamation of foreign worlds of peoples and gods. Unifying tendencies of this kind are typical of political theologies such as those attempted in the integration of several ethnicities into an empire and a corresponding higher-level sacred imperial order. In the process, priests of a local cult are retrained as diplomats who can recognize their own gods under the foreign names they bear in other popular cults. The great innovation of this school of thought lies in the discovery that, with intercultural sustainable gods, the inner and the outer converge: what one had taken for a foreign god is revealed, upon closer inspection, as a different guise of one’s own deity. Peoples and cults approach one another as soon as they understand that they have devoted themselves to the same numinous entity under different names. The ecumenically compatible thought model of the one in the many spread among the educated, and the number one became the keyword in educated synthesis…A completely different interpretation of the polyethnic and multicultic situation can be observed in the second block. Here the leading actors respond to the perception of polyethnic existence with a resolute hardening and aggrandizement of their own cult traditions. This tendency to withdraw to what is their own culminates in the refusal to let oneself be compared and to participate in translations. Hence the alternative way out of the inevitable ethnic and cultic comparison invites an escape to singularity. Anyone recommending this strategy for self-preservation amid intercultic competition to a people must also offer the prospect of a great contest: because our god is like no other, our people too will be like no other. Whoever commits to the untranslatable god, the most exclusive of divinities, will be rewarded with endless procreative successes and offspring with long memories. Whoever does not join the confessional community may go under amid the multiplicity, leaving neither traces nor memories behind—biblically put, their name will be struck from the Book of Life.

xxp it sorta is tho, no? who were ppl generally protecting their property against? the gov were the ppl confiscating it basically at will.

if you're pointing out that there's a paradox to have the government guarantee yr right to property against themselves, then you're right. but in historical terms it's not crazy that after dealing w/ monarchies and the church there was a sense that the greatest threat to private property was the overwhelming might of the sovereign.

i mean it seems to me that implicit in this quest for "understanding" is really "how do we make them understand". and maybe you can't. at which point you're dealing with people whose interests are intrinsically hostile to yours and who would probably kill you if they could get away with it. which, honestly, is how a lot of conservatives think of us.

maybe you can "understand" someone as an intellectual exercise, without thinking like them, without trying to envision what they feel on a daily basis, but that's not my approach.

how do we get out of this without mass slaughter? can we?

^_-

I acknowledge the power of the metaquestion, but. Seemstame that a thread question of the form "let us try to understand (thing)" sort of presupposes at least some interest in discussing (thing).

E.g., there has been an "explain the appeal of Dream Theater" thread, primarily concerned with the question implied by the title. One potential response could be exactly one post saying "WHY?" with the next post being "yep, you're right, lock thread." But we would have missed out on fun times.

maybe you can "understand" someone as an intellectual exercise, without thinking like them, without trying to envision what they feel on a daily basis, but that's not my approach.

consider that it is only by understanding someone that you truly understand why you believe what you do - and that those who do not understand conservatism are likely doomed to fall into it themselves as they never understand what they thought they were opposing and end up backing into it as they avoid the fantasy of what they thought it was. i don't think this inoculation effect is the best reason to understand something (which continues to be: for the sake of understanding itself) but if you really feel you need pragmatic reasons to answer this question this might do it for u?

maybe you can't. at which point you're dealing with people whose interests are intrinsically hostile to yours and who would probably kill you if they could get away with it. which, honestly, is how a lot of conservatives think of us.

Isn't that feeling at least somewhat mutual?

Maybe not the killing. But that's prolly just because we're betas and pussies, not skilled with firearms.

if you're pointing out that there's a paradox to have the government guarantee yr right to property against themselves, then you're right. but in historical terms it's not crazy that after dealing w/ monarchies and the church there was a sense that the greatest threat to private property was the overwhelming might of the sovereign.

Yes, the government enforces your right to property against itself but also against other citizens, i.e. your right to own a parcel of land means the government has to restrict someone else's 'liberty' to walk onto your land, eat your bread, etc. Historically, the bourgeoisie were surely fighting both for property rights against the power of the state but also for their ability to use state power to protect the power of property/capital over the propertyless classes? As Puffin notes, in the context of the American Revolution, this also extended to the right to own other human beings.

controversial conservative opinion: private property is good

bringing in slavery muddies the waters i think. there are reasons to think protecting private property is good without simultaneously believing that humans can/should be owned.

I find trying to use Logic and thought-experiments (my personal favourite is Grab World) to headsplode libertarians by forcing them to confront the Awesome Paradox at the heart of their ideology but it's a waste of time imo

CORRECTION:

controversial conservative opinion: private property is good. also, slavery is bad

That link basically says what I was saying. I wasn't arguing that private property is a bad thing in all cases, just that it is just another means of using state power to restrict some people's liberty in order to promote one conception of justice. So, framing left vs right economic positions as an issue of "government vs liberty" is problematic. This is probably undergrad-level poli sci stuff but, eh, it's Spring Break and I'm on the Internet.

right it's definitely not government vs. liberty. that's only if you're a libertarian. if you're a conservative you believe in a government (and in fact the conservative Weltanschauung requires gov in order to prevent the worst crimes of natural man) just a limited government because a broad powerful government can also abrogate freedom. the right size government is one that protects ppl from invaders, and prevents people from killing each other / stealing from each other. i don't think you need to view preventing theft as "restricting some people's liberty in order to promote one conception of justice." it's a pretty foundational crime and only in a particular political context (communism?) does it make sense to even start from a position of "private ownership is unnatural."

Well, what is 'natural' about private property ownership as practised in modern capitalism, beyond basic personal property?

The extent to which it predates modern capitalism and has been guaranteed in legal codes since antiquity. Once you're distinguished between good historical ownership and bad capitalism ownership tho I think the onus is on you to explain where the line lies.

Good points/questions and ones I should definitely try to answer after I get some work done!

soref & flopson otm.

to the extent that modern american conservatism has a coherent underlying ideology, its half religious/cultural, half fiscal/philosophical. the former just want to hand authority over to the bigotries of yesteryear, but the latter often have coherent, (semi-)defensible views. among them that the world is fundamentally unfair, and it's not really the government's place to "fix" that. as others have said, that the "best & brightest" tend to rise to the top in any system, and we all benefit best by restricting them least. that equality of opportunity is a noble goal, but any attempt to legislate our way to an actual equality of outcomes will necessarily verge on tyranny. that government bureaucracies are inherently inefficient and self-serving, once entrenched are all but impossible to dislodge no matter how dysfunctional. that society is profoundly degraded when any reward is attached to non-work, so much so that the inevitable consequences of refusal ("no healthcare for you, no food for your children") are preferable to the cultivation of a persistent underclass dependent on system of entitlements. fundamentally, that "the way things are" in some supposedly "natural state" makes a kind of super-sense that transcends ideology, while the naive, liberal/progressive attempt to pull society away from this towards some pipe-dream engineered utopia is doomed to ruinous failure.

plus racism, yeah. lots and lots of racism.

its its its its it's

XP to mordy re traditional capitalism intersection with conservative ideology - i think a lot about this and especially in the context of how the ideologies will react to increasing cyclical unemployment created by technological advancement over the coming decades. anyway good thoughts above (i especially appreciate when things get back to state of nature)

good list, contenderizer

The abortion thing seems a major difference between US and UK conservatives. No-one gives a flying fuck about abortion over here, save for some headbangers in Northern Ireland (Ulster-Scots, go figure).

Not banning but plenty of Tory MPs have been angling for limits - either to time scales or to who can provide advice.

In the US, I think it has its roots as one of the main ways that the GOP pulled Catholics and Protestants together into the fold, so to speak