Is Conservatism just NeoTraditionalism these days?

[Gary Childress]

"You're absolutely right. And that's why they will have no Socialism for themselves; but they will impose it on you.'

Indeed that's what has always happened. Socialism from above.

But wait: why is that ALWAYS what has happened?

I'm not sure why it "always" happens, however, one constant in human society seems to be that some tend to do better or be more influential than others in some domains of society. Much the same thing happens with a free market. Some rise to the top and some don't and it doesn't always seem to be the case that those who rise to the top belong there (at least in the views of those who might be negatively impacted by the decisions of those on the top, perhaps).

[promethean75]

"For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, a great many nations (such as Zimbabwe or the Congo) got their liberation from colonialism, then immediately plunged into a series of Socialist experiments that have been ruinous to those countries, even to the present day -- in fact, far more deadly and ruinous than colonialism itself ever was"

So what's happening here is, these third world countries have not experienced an industrial revolution and so the peasant working classes are an unorganized mass of importunity and impotence.

Their economies are so resourceless and without investment opportunity that they can't rely on capitalism and entrepreneuralism to thrust them forward in industry and production.

So infrastructure falls to shit and three quarters of the citizens are working low wage agriculture and livestock jobs if they work at all. This is no environment for a revolution of the marxist type... a type that is possible only after capitalism has been reached and the industrial working class exists. Cattle farmers aren't revolutionaries.

Colonialism brings industry to these counties and then the government is supposed to generate revenue by taxing all the people employed by the businesses created becuz of the stimulus of colonism, and modernize the country with it. In theory, a middle class should emerge if resources are avaliable for capitalism to function. Apparently, in these colonial African countries, there either isn't enough industry to employee everyone, or, nobody is investing there becuz they're such shit countries with corrupt governments.

This is why colonialism didn't do anything but concentrate a few monopolies over the very few industries these barren countries have.... rather then there emerging several competing companies built by the new middle class, in that particular industry. None of this ever happened in those wastelands. The class dynamics have always been the same; small wealthy class, medium-small working class, yuge lower unemployed class.

U need capitalism first, boss. The strenth of working class consciousness as a political entity with some degree of organization and capability, is something owed to capitalism... the force that capitalism made of the working class. That force does not exist in afreeca, nor may it ever.

[Immanuel Can]

When you say those on the left have a "blithe trust in some 'History' to get things right." Can you explain what that means a little more? At first glance I'm not sure what you are referring to. Or what is an example that you have in mind.

Marx, for example, thinks he can "read" future history, and that "the triumph of the proletariat" and "the classless society" are inevitabilities. More recently, think of Obama claiming that his opponents are "on the wrong side of History." How does he know what this "History" demands of people, and what "the right side of History" would be certain to be?

I think I see what you're saying now. I agree. It's a fair point. Claiming that "history" is on one's side is a bit like the notion of "manifest destiny" (a belief that created a lot of injustice, as it turned out). Although, I suppose in some sense "manifest destiny" (as it played out against other peoples who weren't "destined" to become supreme 'civilizers') more or less created the conditions which now cause some to say that history is or isn't on someone's side. It's a kind of backlash in that sense, I suppose.

Well, for Hegel, there was this thing called "Spirit," (Geist) which took care of things. He didn't really mean "God," per se. He meant "History." But Marx, of course, being a strict materialist, would have no such thing in his philosophy: so Marx converted Hegel's metaphysical "Spirit" into what's called "dialectical materialism," the same sort of belief, but absent the metaphysical "god" or "Geist" or "Spirit" concept that would allegedly provide the guarantee, as Hegel saw it, of things going in the right direction.

The problem with secularizing the metaphysical concept, however, is surely obvious: that without there being some "Geist" of History to make sure things went right, we've lost any guarantee at all that things won't go wrong...and savagely wrong, in many cases. Marx's followers retained Marx's naive trust in "History" to supply what had been exorcised with "Geist," and asked no more questions. But your question is one that really, really deserves to be revived: because absent any belief in some benign force directing historical events toward progress and good conclusions, we have no reason at all to suppose that destroying the status quo wholesale will result in anything but suffering and death.

Hence, conservatives are wise at least to ask the Left to explain why it is so optimistic about what it can do by way of destruction. There is, in secular thinking, no "HIstory-Geist" that is going to prevent us from going off the cliff, is there?

[Immanuel Can]

"You're absolutely right. And that's why they will have no Socialism for themselves; but they will impose it on you.'

Indeed that's what has always happened. Socialism from above.

But wait: why is that ALWAYS what has happened?

I'm not sure why it "always" happens,

Well, if you'll excuse me saying so, that is one terrible answer. For if, as we both admit, Socialism always produces the "Socialism from above" that we both deplore, which is really dictatorship and tyranny, then we would be fools, surely, to encourage Socialism, would we not? Why would we want to see "Socialism from above," with all its miseries, murder and failures, imposed on ourselves or others?

Much the same thing happens with a free market. Some rise to the top and some don't and it doesn't always seem to be the case that those who rise to the top belong there (at least in the views of those who might be negatively impacted by the decisions of those on the top, perhaps).

"Much the same"?

Hardly. It's certainly true that any free-market or meritocratic system is imperfect, and that sometimes the wicked prosper or the virtuous suffer; but that is how life is, perhaps, and it may not be possible for us ever to prevent every single case of unjust outcomes. Life is unfair. We don't always get what we deserve, but we aim that we have at least a relatively level playing field from which we can launch our personal projects for success.

But in Socialism-from-above, EVERYBODY is miserable, poor and oppressed. There's NO justice. Why would we push for that?

[Immanuel Can]

While I might not be terribly interested in Conservatism,

Then why are you here? I don't mean that rudely, but that is the topic, after all.

I'm very interested in all the dirty tricks and misinformation that has got way out of control lately. It needs to be pointed out as much as possible, and I wish more people would do it.

Well, we share that concern. However, I think that the two are related. The "dirty tricks and misinformation" in our media are not unrelated to the political polarities currently being promoted, but rather in service of them.

[Harbal]

Who at this site are we supposed to consider a Conservative these days? I don't really see any.

The central thesis of Conservatism - as I always understood it anyway - has been that our traditions and customs are not to be discarded without a care as though they never brought any value. Rather customs and traditions represent the distilled wisdom of the ages and ought to be treated with a modicum of respect and subjected only to well thought out reasonably paced reform.

Thanks for this thoughtful summary.

This is quite a fair way to put the case for conservatism, relatively speaking. One caveat, maybe: it's not that "customs and tradition" are valued because they're old, but because time tends to act as a kind of 'filter,' in which weak and foolish ideas tend to get syphoned out more readily than strong and practical ideas. A conservative believes, for example, that Socrates or Shakespeare can tell us things that matter today; so anytime a new program of reform is proposed, conservatives tend to ask, "How does this fit in with the concepts and ideas that have already proved their durability, practicality and general worth?"

So conservatism isn't really a creed as such; it is rather an impulse to check the past for wisdom, rather than to rush blindly into some proposed "future" that may or may not be good. So the using of the capital "C" implies something that the conservative disposition does not actually represent. It's not an ideological package of some sort: in reality, it's a disposition toward the past, just as you've noted...and today's liberal becomes tomorrow's conservative, unless he/she is committed to the kind of radical past-rejection that typifies ideological Leftism.

Now, there may be such a thing as large-C "Conservatism." But if there is any such, it's manifestly an extreme that, in practice, is rarely found. The Left, however, seems to project its own ideological structure onto conservative voices, and to assume that underneath the reluctance to throw away everything from the past is a sinister desire to maintain the "structures of power" of the present. This is generally not the case among conservatives, as you note: they really tend to be fine with a "reasonably-paced reform," as you so aptly put it.

What Conservatism doesn't traditionally boast of is some plan or engineering that put it together,

Right again.

And in this, it differs quite radically from Leftism. Leftism rejects the past wholesale. It views the past as inevitably flawed, oppressive and regressive, and advocates an unstopping process of perpetual "revolutions." It rushes headlong into a perceived "future" that does not ever come, but does so by a kind of trusting of (large-H) "History," meaning a kind of god-substitute. This "History" is blithely assumed, by Leftism, to be heading inevitably in a direction known only to Leftists (such as "the just society," "the end of History," or "the triumph of the proletariat," to use their terms); so all they feel they have to do is trust the process of History, and things will work out as they ought.

Against this assumed trajectory of "History," the status quo is continually seen, by the Left, as the restrictive force. Thus, all a Leftist feels morally obligated to do is to destroy the past and unseat the present (the "oppressive" order), and "History" will be liberated again to do its benevolent work. So conservatism is seen as a dire enemy, a repressive and oppressive order that holds back the wond'rous "History" from achieving its rightful telos or outcome. Thus, it is very hard for any Leftist to have a reasoned conversation with anybody who exhibits any conservatism: for why would you dialogue with an "oppressor" who controls the "status quo" tyranically, and manages it for his/her own ends? And this is especially exacerbated by the strong Leftist conviction that dialogue is really inauthentic anyway; instead, what it sees in the world is a field of competing "voices," each one vying for power through "the will to power," and each incapable of understanding each other's perspective anyway, since Leftism sees us all as tyrannized products of social conditioning through sex, race, culture, etc.

As you rightly put it, "big plans to do such things being the work of Radicals not Conservatives." The conservative impulse is not a "big plan" sort of thing: instead, it aims at gradual change, with preservation (or conservation) of the gains of the past, rather than radical overthrow of the "structures of power" or "systems of oppression" so much talked-about by the Left.

...the whole value comes from a process of very slow evolution over long periods of time during which the collection of beneficial traditions happened by accident as people, now long dead, discovered without the need for any big plan to do so (big plans to do such things being the work of Radicals not Conservatives). It is supposed to age like a fine wine.

Not quite.

Unlike the Left, the conservatives do not have a blithe trust in some "History" to get things right. Things don't "age like fine wine." Rather, conservatives tend to believe that things have to be managed, and managed deliberately, cautiously and progressively, rather than radically and violently overthrown. The tendency among conservatives is also to point to the failures of history, not just the successes, and to point out that radical, violent change (think the French Revolution, for example) rarely turns out well, because people are fallible, foolish and flawed on many occasions. And this is why conservatism also places such emphasis on things like rights, constitutions, checks-and-balances, logic, rationality, scientific testing, historical knowledge, plain language, and so forth...these are assumed by conservatives to offer some bulwark against foolish, radical impulses that are so prevalent in mankind and so evident in history. (You'll also note that these same things -- rights, constitutions, checks-and-balances, logic, rationality, scientific testing, historical knowledge, plain language -- are all under vigorous seige by the Left today, which proclaims them the false tools of the "oppressors," and instructs us to be very ready to dismiss them all).

The Conservatives on this site don't match that description at all. They mostly want to roll back the clock a really long way, like they don't seem to have noticed how long ago the 1950s actually were.

This is probably the first moment when I see something actually not quite right in your summary. There may be some people who long for the '50s, but I think they're the same people who have forgotten history and become naively nostalgic. They're not really manifesting the conservative disposition, because that dispostion emphasizes the proper knowing and sifting of the past. That's exactly what the '50s dreamers do not do. Their "conservatism," if any they have, is of an unthinking and unserious kind.

But here we come to another reason that conservatism is harder to pin down than Leftism: conservatives, not being ideologically driven but rather committed (for different reasons, perhaps) to a general impulse toward the sifting of the past for wisdom and the controlled progressing of the present, do not form a single ideological group. It's not like the Left, which can trace its entire pattern of thinking back to people like Marcuse and Gramsci, or beyond them to Marx or Nietzsche, and to their founding manifestos. Being an impulse rather than an ideology, conservatives do not mass and mob with the same sort of alacrity that one finds in the Left. Even the most radical "Conservatives" only manage to form small groups, because the interests within the broad scope of conservatism are too diverse, and there is no single ideological package to pull them all together.

For example, my conservatism is confessedly "relgious" in nature: I'm a conservative person because I believe in the Biblical account of human nature and the purpose of things. But many conservative persons are totally unreligious, so their motives are not the same. One might say that Randians, Libertarians, free-marketers, antiquarians, cultural traditionalists, scientists, logicians, nationalists, and so on are all "conservative" in their orientation: but one could hardly say any of them is motivated by "religious" considerations. So there's no pinning the motives of conservatives to one set of simple things, really...everybody within that broad category tends to have his/her own reasons, and to be much more slow than the Left ever is to risk combining these disparate motives into one political movement, and thus of failing properly to "conserve" their own particular concern.

So yes, conservatives are harder to locate. No manifesto, only a rather general and foggy ideological basis (you mentioned Burke and Thatcher, but they are very different individuals, obviously, and neither really consolidated a "large-C" Conservatism out of anything), no central authority, no organizing principle, and only a sort of desire to preserve different aspects of the past tie them together at all. The Left is far easier to trace, because it's really only the Left that is committed to a single core ideology, rather than to a mere general impulse.

So far, so good?

Disgarceful!

[Immanuel Can]

"For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, a great many nations (such as Zimbabwe or the Congo) got their liberation from colonialism, then immediately plunged into a series of Socialist experiments that have been ruinous to those countries, even to the present day -- in fact, far more deadly and ruinous than colonialism itself ever was"

So what's happening here is, these third world countries have not experienced an industrial revolution and so the peasant working classes are an unorganized mass of importunity and impotence.

That's actually not the case. Colonialism itself brought industry to Africa, but the tribalist system of thought seems incapable of taking advantage of it, and the series of Socialist experiments tried in these countries brought them to financial ruin.

But what about Russia and China? What about Venezuela? What about North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Albania and Cuba? The only common feature among these is not race, or resources, or geography, or history, or culture, or language...it's Socialism.

[Gary Childress]

But wait: why is that ALWAYS what has happened?

I'm not sure why it "always" happens,

Well, if you'll excuse me saying so, that is one terrible answer. For if, as we both admit, Socialism always produces the "Socialism from above" that we both deplore, which is really dictatorship and tyranny, then we would be fools, surely, to encourage Socialism, would we not? Why would we want to see "Socialism from above," with all its miseries, murder and failures, imposed on ourselves or others?

Much the same thing happens with a free market. Some rise to the top and some don't and it doesn't always seem to be the case that those who rise to the top belong there (at least in the views of those who might be negatively impacted by the decisions of those on the top, perhaps).

"Much the same"?

Hardly. It's certainly true that any free-market or meritocratic system is imperfect, and that sometimes the wicked prosper or the virtuous suffer; but that is how life is, perhaps, and it may not be possible for us ever to prevent every single case of unjust outcomes. Life is unfair. We don't always get what we deserve, but we aim that we have at least a relatively level playing field from which we can launch our personal projects for success.

But in Socialism-from-above, EVERYBODY is miserable, poor and oppressed. There's NO justice. Why would we push for that?

No one that I've seen in this forum is advocating for "socialism from above", people are advocating for socialism from "below".

[Immanuel Can]

Disgarceful!

I am truly sad to find myself "disgarceful" to you. I will, henceforth, be more "garceful" as often as I can.

[Harbal]

While I might not be terribly interested in Conservatism,

Then why are you here? I don't mean that rudely, but that is the topic, after all.

I am here to promote my conservative values of honesty and truth.

[Immanuel Can]

I'm not sure why it "always" happens,

Well, if you'll excuse me saying so, that is one terrible answer. For if, as we both admit, Socialism always produces the "Socialism from above" that we both deplore, which is really dictatorship and tyranny, then we would be fools, surely, to encourage Socialism, would we not? Why would we want to see "Socialism from above," with all its miseries, murder and failures, imposed on ourselves or others?

Much the same thing happens with a free market. Some rise to the top and some don't and it doesn't always seem to be the case that those who rise to the top belong there (at least in the views of those who might be negatively impacted by the decisions of those on the top, perhaps).

"Much the same"?

Hardly. It's certainly true that any free-market or meritocratic system is imperfect, and that sometimes the wicked prosper or the virtuous suffer; but that is how life is, perhaps, and it may not be possible for us ever to prevent every single case of unjust outcomes. Life is unfair. We don't always get what we deserve, but we aim that we have at least a relatively level playing field from which we can launch our personal projects for success.

But in Socialism-from-above, EVERYBODY is miserable, poor and oppressed. There's NO justice. Why would we push for that?

No one is advocating for "socialism from above", people are advocating for socialism from "below".

But "Socialism-from-above" is all they ever get! And that's the important question we cannot dodge: why does Socialism-from-below always turn out to be dictatorship from above?

And since it does, what sense does it make to advocate something that has abundantly proved itself to be nothing but the straight road to failure, tyranny, murder and economic ruin?

[Harbal]

Disgarceful!

I am truly sad to find myself "disgarceful" to you. I will, henceforth, be more "garceful" as often as I can.

Oxford English Dictionary - Disgarceful: like "disgraceful", but worse.

[Immanuel Can]

Disgarceful!

I am truly sad to find myself "disgarceful" to you. I will, henceforth, be more "garceful" as often as I can.

Oxford English Dictionary - Disgarceful: like "disgraceful", but worse.

As I say, I will try to comport myself with more "garce." As soon as I know what it is.

[Gary Childress]

Well, if you'll excuse me saying so, that is one terrible answer. For if, as we both admit, Socialism always produces the "Socialism from above" that we both deplore, which is really dictatorship and tyranny, then we would be fools, surely, to encourage Socialism, would we not? Why would we want to see "Socialism from above," with all its miseries, murder and failures, imposed on ourselves or others?

"Much the same"?

Hardly. It's certainly true that any free-market or meritocratic system is imperfect, and that sometimes the wicked prosper or the virtuous suffer; but that is how life is, perhaps, and it may not be possible for us ever to prevent every single case of unjust outcomes. Life is unfair. We don't always get what we deserve, but we aim that we have at least a relatively level playing field from which we can launch our personal projects for success.

But in Socialism-from-above, EVERYBODY is miserable, poor and oppressed. There's NO justice. Why would we push for that?

No one is advocating for "socialism from above", people are advocating for socialism from "below".

But "Socialism-from-above" is all they ever get! And that's the important question we cannot dodge: why does Socialism-from-below always turn out to be dictatorship from above?

And since it does, what sense does it make to advocate something that has abundantly proved itself to be nothing but the straight road to failure, tyranny, murder and economic ruin?

As I explained above, the same thing happens with any kind of market. Some will do better than others. I'm sorry you don't like my answer, however, that is pretty much a blatant truth of economics.

[Immanuel Can]

No one is advocating for "socialism from above", people are advocating for socialism from "below".

But "Socialism-from-above" is all they ever get! And that's the important question we cannot dodge: why does Socialism-from-below always turn out to be dictatorship from above?

And since it does, what sense does it make to advocate something that has abundantly proved itself to be nothing but the straight road to failure, tyranny, murder and economic ruin?

As I explained above, the same thing happens with any kind of market.

It doesn't. Is your America a Socialist dictatorship-from-above? If you think it is, you'll have to explain that to me, somehow. I don't see it. It looks like a republic, with democratic institutions...albeit a flawed one. Explain why you think it's "the same thing" as dictatorship.

Some will do better than others. I'm sorry you don't like my answer, however, that is pretty much a blatant truth of economics.

Who said I don't like that answer? I think it's realistic, whether we like it or not. But under Socialism, NOBODY but the dictator and his cronies does "better." So again, why would you and I want that?