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From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ The following is a draft conservatism FAQ that I've been circulating on alt.society.conservatism. It is intended to deal with the more basic questions and objections we hear from critics. It is more abstract than the things net conservatives usually write, which may be either good or bad. I would be grateful for any comments; it has benefited enormously from those I have already received. QUESTIONS 1. Q--What is conservatism? 2. Q--How do conservatives reject both rationalism and irrationalism? 3. Q--Isn't conservatism simply a blend of obstinacy, bigotry, and obscurantism? 4. Q--Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? 5. Q--Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? 6. Q--Why not just accept change? 7. Q--Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show? 8. Q--Isn't conservatism simply about maintaining wealth and power? 9. Q--Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? 10. Q--Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody else? 11. Q--Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values differ? 12. Q--What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing moral values? 13. Q--What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? 14. Q--Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast? 15. Q--Why do conservatives favor say they favor virtue and community but in fact favor laissez-faire capitalism? 16. Q--Why do conservatives always act as if the world is coming to an end? 17. Q--Shouldn't conservatives favor well-established liberal reforms? 18. Q--Wouldn't it be conservative to stay true to the liberal positions that define Americanism? 19. Q--I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I should stay true to liberalism? 20. Q--What's all this stuff about community and tradition when what matters today are interests and perspectives rather than traditions? ANSWERS 1. Q--What is conservatism? A--Recognition of tradition as a source of wisdom greater than that of any individual or faction. Such recognition makes possible coherent action that rejects both irrationalism and the excesses of rationalism. 2. Q--How do conservatives reject both rationalism and irrationalism? A--By recognizing in loyalty to tradition a middle ground between arbitrariness on the one hand and excess reliance on theory on the other. Reason, as orderly thought, helps us develop and put in order what we know but is not our sole or most fundamental source of knowledge. We learn practical things like politics and morals by experience and following what others have done before us, and most of what we learn consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we absorb and work with but couldn't begin to put into words. People don't become good cooks or even good physicists simply by theorizing about what they're doing, and the same is true of becoming good citizens. Our way of learning such things is foreign both to rationalism, which ignores what hasn't been articulated and put in rational form, and to irrationalism, which in despair of perfect rationality embraces arbitrariness. 3. Q--Doesn't talk of "tradition" and "greater wisdom" simply show that conservatism is a blend of obstinacy, bigotry, and obscurantism? A--The answer would be "yes" if it paid to reject the outlook with which we grew up in favor of abstract ideology or inventing something new every time a question arises. Experience shows that it doesn't. Productive thought must rely on tradition and in general accept what it tells us. We can think only from a point of view, and tradition is the means by which we start with a comprehensive and coherent point of view that is connected to the thought and experience of others. If we don't accept that a wisdom superior to our own exists and to some degree is accessible to us and others, there is no point to investigation, thought or discussion. If we do accept that such a wisdom exists, we should presume that people in the past have been no less capable of realizing it than we are and be willing to make use of their efforts. 4. Q--Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? A--Because the world's too complicated and you can't lift yourself by your bootstraps. You can't evaluate political ideas unless you've already accepted a great many attitudes, presumptions and beliefs. The effects of any political proposal are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. So the most reasonable way to approach politics is to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be changed wholesale and to try to make any changes cohere with the principles and practices that make the existing system work as well as it does. 5. Q--If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? A--By rejecting political rationalism conservatism rejects the bureaucratization of society, which is the project of dividing all human affairs into separate compartments controlled by experts and linked by an overall rational scheme designed to maximize some pragmatic goal like economic well-being or control over nature. Academic and other experts and officials in social service agencies are participants in that project and owe their social position and income to it. It should not be surprising that they tend to be unsympathetic to perspectives that reject it. (Whether they are right in doing so and the motives of any particular person are of course separate questions.) 6. Q--Society has always changed, for the better in some ways and for the worse in others. Why not accept it, especially if everything is so complicated and hard to figure out? A--Change has always involved resistance as well as acceptance. Why not accept that? Presumably changes that have to make their way over opposition will be better than changes that are accepted without serious questioning. In addition, modern conservatism is not resistance to change as such, but to change of a peculiarly sweeping sort characteristic of the period beginning with the French Revolution and motivated by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and successor philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism. For example, the family as an institution has changed over time. However, the current left/liberal proposal to abolish all definite institutional structure for the family as an infringement of individual autonomy is different in kind from the sort of thing that has happened in the past. 7. Q--Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show? A--Why? Conservatism is not rejection of all change. Moral habits evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and social arrangements that grow to be too much at odds with the moral life of a people change or disappear. More specifically, the conservative outlook emphasizes community and mutual obligation, both of which slavery denies. It's worth noting that slavery disappeared in Europe long before the modern revolutionary age, and has recently been far more characteristic of radical than conservative regimes. The reason is that radicalism, by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics, destroys reciprocity between the ruling theoreticians and those they govern, and therefore is far more likely than conservatism to lead to gross forms of oppression. 8. Q--Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that the people who currently have wealth and power should keep it? A--The adoption of any political view will promote the private advantage of some people. If political views are to be treated as rationalizations for the interests of existing or would-be elites then that treatment should apply equally to conservatism and all other views. On the other hand, if arguments that political views advance the public good are to be taken into account, then the arguments for conservatism should be considered on their own terms. It's worth noting that movements aiming at social justice typically turn out to be intensely elitist, since the purer and more comprehensive the political principle the smaller the group that can be relied on to understand and apply it correctly. 9. Q--Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? A--That depends on what those words mean. "Racist"--Conservatives consider community loyalty important. The communities people grow up in are generally connected to ethnicity. That's not an accident, because ethnicity is what develops when people live together in accordance with a common way of life for a long time. Accordingly, conservatives think some degree of ethnic loyalty and separateness is OK. "Sexist"--All known societies have engaged in sex-role stereotyping, with men undertaking more responsibility for public affairs and women for home, family, and childcare. There are obvious benefits to stereotyping, since it makes it more likely that individual men and women will complement each other and be able to form functional and stable unions for the rearing of children. Conservatives see no reason to struggle against those benefits, especially in view of the apparent consequences of the weakening of stereotypical obligations between the sexes in recent decades. "Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to reject conduct and patterns of impulse and attitude that don't fit the stereotypes, such as homosexuality. 10. Q--Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody else? A--Conservatives aren't different from other people in that regard. Everyone with a notion of how society should work believes that other people should get with the program he favors. For example, it's turned out to be impossible to comply with the civil rights laws without remaking the internal culture of every significant institution in the country. Such laws are no example of "live and let live". As another example, if Liberal Jack thinks the government should have final responsibility for the well-being of children and wants to implement that responsibility through a tax system that sends people to jail who don't comply, and Conservative Jill thinks the family should have the responsibility and wants to implement it through a well-defined system of sex roles enforced by social obloquy for violators, then both will object to a school textbook entitled _Heather Has Two Mommies Who Get Away with Paying No Taxes_. Liberal Jack would object to the book _Heather's Mommy Stays Home and Her Daddy Goes to his Office Where He Works with Other White Males_, while Conservative Jill would object to other well-known texts. Why should one be considered more intolerant than the other? 11. Q--Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values differ? A--Both liberals and conservatives recognize limits on the degree to which differing personal values can be accommodated. Such limits often arise because many personal values can be realized only by establishing particular sorts of relations with other people, and no society can favor all sorts of relationships equally. No society, for example, can really give equal treatment to a woman who primarily wants to have a career and one who primarily wants to be a mother and homemaker. Institutions that accept the general validity of traditional sex roles will favor the latter at the expense of the former, while institutions that reject sex role stereotypes in favor of individual independence and autonomy will do the reverse. 12. Q--What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing moral values? A--Conservatives typically prefer to rely on informal social sanctions rather than enforcement by government because they think of moral values as determined more by the traditions and feelings of the people than by theory. They believe that government should be run on the assumption that the moral values society relies on are good things and should try to avoid undercutting those values, for example by teaching in the public schools that such values are optional or by supporting those who reject such values explicitly (artists who intend their works to outrage accepted morality) or practically (unwed parents). How much more the government can or should do to promote morality is a matter of circumstance to be determined in accordance with experience. In this connection, as in others, conservatives typically do not have high ambitions for what government can achieve. 13. Q--What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? A--The same as happens in a liberal society to religious and social conservatives and to ethnics who consider their ethnicity important. They live in a social order they may not like dominated by people who may look down on them in which it may be difficult to live as they prefer. In either situation, people on the outs can try to persuade others to their way of thinking, or if that fails to practice the way of life they prefer in private or break off from the larger society and establish their own communities. Such possibilities are more realistic in a conservative society that believes in federalism, local control, and minimal bureaucracy than in a liberal society that idealizes social justice and therefore tries to establish a unitary and homogenous social order in accordance with the demands of theory. An important question is whether alienation from the social order will be more common in a conservative or a liberal society. It seems that it would be more common in a society that emphasizes abstract rather than concrete aspects of moral obligation and seeks universal bureaucratic implementation of theory rather than accepting moral feelings and loyalties that arise over time within particular communities. So it seems likely that a liberal society will have more citizens than a conservative society who feel that their deepest values and loyalties are peripheral to the concerns of the institutions they deal with and therefore feel marginalized. 14. Q--Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast? A--Conservatives do care about what happens to such people. That's why they oppose government programs that multiply the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast by undermining and disrupting the network of social customs and relations that allow people to carry on their lives without being reduced to dependency on a soulless bureaucracy. It is the weak who suffer most from moral chaos. Those who think interventionist liberalism makes the problems such people face less widespread and serious should consider the effects on blacks, women and children of trends of the past 30 years, such as family instability, increased crime, and lower educational achievement, and of the reversal since the late 1960s of the older trend toward less poverty, all coinciding with a period of large increases in social welfare expenditures. They should also consider the increase in charitable giving during the Decade of Greed and its subsequent decline. 15. Q--Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but in fact favor laissez-faire capitalism? Doesn't laissez-faire capitalism promote the opposite? A--Conservatives are not fans of pure laissez-faire capitalism. For example, they are often skeptical of free trade and favor restraints on immigration for the sake of permitting the existence and development of a national community. They have no opposition in principle to the regulation or suppression of businesses that affect the moral order of society, such as prostitution, pornography, and the sale of certain drugs. Conservatives do recognize that an advantage of the market over bureaucracy is that the market (like tradition) reflects people's infinitely various and often unconscious and inarticulate perceptions and goals far better than any formal bureaucratic process could. They believe that the world as a whole can't be administered, and so tend to think that government intervention in markets is likely to cause more problems than it cures. Also, in the United States in 1994 they view economic liberty as one of the traditional liberties of the American people that on the whole has served that people well. In any event, it's not clear laissez-faire need undermine moral community. While social statistics measure such things only very crudely, crime and illegitimacy rates in England fell by about half during the heyday of untrammelled capitalism, from the middle to the end of the 19th century. Also, the effects of a system can be discussed only by reference to practical alternatives. Conservatives do tend to favor free markets when the alternative is expanding bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community. 16. Q--Why do conservatives always act as if the world is coming to an end? People have been saying that for a long time, but things don't seem so bad today. A--The world is still with us, but there have been a great many catastrophes along the way. The history of Marxist regimes displays the results of energetic attempts to implement post-Enlightenment radicalism. Less energetic attempts, such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to the consequences predicted by conservative theory as quickly. However, social trends toward breakdown of affiliations among individuals, centralization of political power in irresponsible elites, and increasing stupidity and brutality in daily life suggest that those consequences will come just the same. Why not worry about it? 17. Q--Many things liberals favor, such as the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws, are now well- established parts of our political arrangements. Shouldn't conservatives favor things that have become so well-established? A--Yes, to the extent they are consistent with the older and more fundamental parts of our social arrangements (such as family, community, and traditional moral standards) and contribute to the over-all functioning of the whole. Unfortunately, the particular things mentioned fail on both points. 18. Q--I was raised to believe in certain substantive liberal positions (the color- and gender-blind ideal, for example) on the grounds that those are the positions good Americans should hold. Wouldn't it be conservative for me to stay true to them? A--Yes, if those are the views the people among whom you grew up really lived by and experience does not drive you to change them. Such a situation can't arise often, because liberal positions (affirmative action is an example) typically are developed centrally and propagated through the mass media and the educational system, are adverse to the connections between people that make community possible, and in any case are less suited to be incorporated into people's informal day-to-day way of life than applied to society as a whole by a bureaucracy. 19. Q--I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I should stay true to liberalism? A--If you were raised an ideological liberal, you were raised to reject tradition and follow reason. How can you feel bound by loyalty to a viewpoint or way of life that does not value loyalty? Similar comments apply to some other views people are raised with, for example the view that career success and self-fulfillment should be valued above all. Such views can not give rise to binding traditions because they contain no principle of loyalty to things that make a decent life in community possible. If you were raised in one of them, the conservative approach would be to look to what it was that the people you grew up with really relied on in their lives, and also to the traditions of the community upon which the group among whom you grew up depended for its existence. 20. Q--What's all this stuff about community and tradition? The groups that matter these days are groups like yuppies, gays, and senior citizens that people join as individuals and are based on interests and perspectives rather than traditions. A--To the extent that is true, can it remain true? When times are good people can follow their own impulses and imagine that they can define themselves as they choose, but when times get hard they have to base what they do on things for which they would be willing to sacrifice. Membership in a group with an identity developed and inculcated through tradition serves the purpose far better than life- style option, career path, or leisure-time activity. One of Bill Clinton's problems as president is that everyone knows he's a yuppie and there's nothing he would die for. At some point that kind of problem becomes decisive. Conservatism doesn't claim to be the philosophy that is always easiest to apply; it just claims that it works long-term and other views offered today don't. -- ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)