The definition of conservatism I like is that systems that produce good things are very hard to create and build and very easy to destroy. Conservatism is just wanted to protect things that work.
Where things go off the rails is when conservatives don’t understand why the system works the way it does and confuses it to be all good because it produces good outcomes. Where opponents of conservatism (revolutionaries?) go off the rails is that they only see the bad in the current system and have failed to understand what the current system was optimized for doing well.
If you don’t understand what an existing system does well, then you lack the qualifications to propose a new system since the new system won’t fix what is broken while simultaneously preserving what is working well.
In either case, whether you are in favor of an existing system or opposed to it, you need to dig deep and reflect on why things are done the way they are because you may be throwing out a kernel of brilliant insight and not know it or you may be correct about thinking that you’re dealing with an onion in the varnish.
I think that definition of conservatism is very generous to conservatives since we often see people who identify themselves as conservatives attempting to change society rather than merely freeze it as it is. However I recognize that figures like G. K. Chesterton have expressed ideas[0] that meet you definition of conservatism:
"So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark." [0]
>In either case, whether you are in favor of an existing system or opposed to it, you need to dig deep and reflect on why things are done the way they are because you may be throwing out a kernel of brilliant insight and not know it or you may be correct about thinking that you’re dealing with an onion in the varnish.
Strong agree. It is unfortunate that so much is cast as being for or against an existing system. We should all want to improve the world. History has shown that resisting all change just results in turning a living system into a decaying one. On the other hand attempting to replace a living system with wholly new living system almost always results in second system syndrome [1]. We should reject both of these approaches and ask what sort of society do we wish to have and how might we get from here to there.
From where I sit the conservative answer to that is that they want a society which enforces strict hierarchies such that each person's role and place is society is pre-determined for them along traditional lines: the peasants work on farms or factories, families ruled by patriarchs, an elite ruling class, everyone obeys the church in their sexual life etc... The traditionalism that the conservatives seek is not the present state of our society, but rather their imagined fantasy of the past. Whereas the society I would like is one is which each individual is given the support to be the best person they can be __as defined by that individual__ (of course within the limits of the resources of the society and such that they aren't harming others). I see the current political divide in the US as a battle between those who wish to move the world closer toward traditionalist morality (conservatives) and those who wish to move the world toward an individualist morality (progressives).
> I think that definition of conservatism is very generous to conservatives since we often see people who identify themselves as conservatives attempting to change society rather than merely freeze it as it is.
Those people aren't conservatives though. The problem is the disconnect between what conservatism as an approach to doing things and capital C Conservatives which is a group identity. The philosophy and the identity are hardly related. It's the exact same with liberals and Liberals. Fewer and fewer self identified capital L Liberals these days hold liberal philosophical positions.
This identitarian present is extremely toxic because the group identity becomes more important that the original axioms that formed the original impetus for forming a coalition in the first place.
The important thing is not to confuse the thinking liberals and conservatives with the non-thinking, following Liberals and Conservatives.
"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." – Lyndon B. Johnson (also there is a similar but different previous quote from Winston Churchill)
While Liberals and Conservatives are two group identities at odds with one another, I would not consider liberalism and conservatism to be at odds with one another. Liberalism is about individual freedom and conservatism is about preserving what works. They are only in conflict on an issue by issue basis when increasing individual freedom is in conflict with preserving something that works. Their are plenty of things that work that don't harm individual freedom and many that do can be modified carefully to increase individual freedom without destroying the benefit of the thing that provides benefit that took a while to build.
Other than that slight disagreement, great contribution. Thanks for the reply.
> From where I sit the conservative answer to that is that they want a society which enforces strict hierarchies such that each person's role and place is society is pre-determined for them along traditional lines:
I would say this is a symptom of what I said about things going off the rails when people no longer understanding why the system evolved as it did in the first place.
I think one of the great dichotomies of our time (and probably any similar time of turmoil) is thinking about things in terms of value to present life versus thinking of things in terms of life over multiple generations. Both are valuable. Do everything in service of future generations and you miss out on living life and do everything for the current generation and you diminish what you could have bequeathed to the next generation.
All these conventions such as hierarchies, places and roles have proven extremely useful for organizing society in the past to accomplish things. A lot of this was limited at the time, especially by communication. Before the advent of the telegram/telephone, a command and control hierarchy made a ton of sense as a scaling solution for a society, especially one in economic and sometimes wartime competition with other societies. It's something that worked and still works in certain contexts. As communication became easier, you needed less command and control hierarchy, but as competition became more fierce between societies, there was still value in centralizing things in competent "deciders" that looked at collected information and made decisions.
A lot of hierarchy has proven for generations to be of value in bequeathing a productive society to the next generation. Sometimes some of it becomes outdated because of innovations like the telegram/telephone and most recently the internet, but there is still value in maintaining that previous hierarchy under you perform a careful migration from the first system to the second system while preserving what the first system did well.
Sadly, most of society are not software engineers like you and I that have had the massive experience of working on massive systems that can be evolved in such short time frames with so much transparency. What we can learn about evolving, replacing, refactoring and migrating systems from large scale software projects can take decades to lifetimes to learn about in systems that are much slower to change as they deal with real world artifacts that can't be switched out with a git patch.
When so much of society lacks the experience working with systems that can be modified so readily and which have much more rapid and accurate observability, logging, metrics and alerts, it's not surprising that in that lack of experience that provides that understanding that some people would cling to possibly outdated ideas like hierarchies and roles.
Where things go off the rails is when conservatives don’t understand why the system works the way it does and confuses it to be all good because it produces good outcomes. Where opponents of conservatism (revolutionaries?) go off the rails is that they only see the bad in the current system and have failed to understand what the current system was optimized for doing well.
If you don’t understand what an existing system does well, then you lack the qualifications to propose a new system since the new system won’t fix what is broken while simultaneously preserving what is working well.
In either case, whether you are in favor of an existing system or opposed to it, you need to dig deep and reflect on why things are done the way they are because you may be throwing out a kernel of brilliant insight and not know it or you may be correct about thinking that you’re dealing with an onion in the varnish.
https://wiki.c2.com/?OnionInTheVarnish
https://wiki.c2.com/?OldRulesWithForgottenReasons