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Archive-name: conservatism/faq
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Conservatism FAQ
May 1, 2004 Version
This FAQ, posted monthly, attempts to deal with common questions and
objections regarding conservatism. Additional questions and comments are
welcome. The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American
conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and their
adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs.
A current version of this FAQ can also be obtained by sending the
message "send usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq" by email to
mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu. A hypertext version is available at
http://jkalb.freeshell.org/web/consfaq.html. For further discussion and
relevant links, see the Traditionalist Conservatism Page at
http://jkalb.freeshell.org/web/trad.html.
Questions
1 General principles
1.1 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view?
1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom?
1.3 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to
think?
1.4 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?
1.5 Why can't tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice
as easily as of wisdom?
1.6 How can anyone know his own tradition is the right one?
1.7 What about truth?
1.8 There are conflicting traditions even within a single society. Which
gets treated as "ours?"
2 Tradition and change
2.1 Why not just accept change?
2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who
currently have wealth and power should keep it?
2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been
running the show?
3 Social and cultural issues
3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them?
3.2 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values
differ?
3.3 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody
else?
3.4 What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing
moral values?
3.5 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?
3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others
marginalized in a conservative society?
3.7 What about freedom?
3.8 And justice?
4 Economic issues
4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but favor
laissez-faire capitalism?
4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak,
discouraged, and outcast?
4.3 Shouldn't the government do something for people for whom the usual
support networks don't work?
4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes?
4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative
issue?
5 Conservatism in an age of established liberalism
5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all
good things are in the past?
5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was
and can't be restored?
5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition when the groups
that matter these days are based on interests and perspectives rather
than traditions?
5.4 Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with
social issues liberals?
5.5 How can tradition do anything but endorse the way things happen to
be?
5.6 Shouldn't conservatives favor things that are as well-established as
the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights
laws?
5.7 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I
should stay true to liberalism?
6 The conservative rainbow
6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives?
6.2 What are mainstream conservatives?
6.3 What are neoconservatives?
6.4 What are paleoconservatives?
6.5 What are paleolibertarians?
6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?
6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all
this?
6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of
other countries?
6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?
Answers
1 General Principles
1.1 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view?
Its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond
what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated.
1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom?
It is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and
practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work
and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. It
therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful
in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and
generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive
experience and thought. Through it we know subtle and fundamental
features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our
understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form.
The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on
theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves
clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such
things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned
mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to
know about them consists in habits, attitudes and implicit
presumptions that we couldn't begin to put into words. There is no
means other than tradition to accumulate, conserve and hand on such
things.
Other considerations also support the wisdom of relying on
tradition, if not specifically the wisdom of tradition itself. For
example, tradition typically exists as the common property of a
community whose members are raised in it. Accordingly, it normally
unites more than divides, and is far more likely than theory to
facilitate free and cooperative life in common.
1.3 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to
think?
Conservatives do not reject thought but are skeptical of its
autonomy. They believe that tradition guides and corrects thought,
and so brings it closer to truth, which has no special connection
with any private view.
Truth is not altogether out of reach, but our access to it is
incomplete and often indirect. Since it can not be reduced wholly
to our possession, conservatives are willing to accept it in
whatever form it is available to us. In particular, they recognize
the need to rely on the unarticulated truth implicit in inherited
attitudes and practices. Today this aspect of our connection to
truth is underestimated, and conservatives hope to think better and
know more truly by re-emphasizing it.
1.4 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?
Our knowledge of things like politics and morality is partial and
attained slowly and with difficulty. We can't evaluate political
ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and
attitudes than we could possibly judge critically. The effects of
political proposals are difficult to predict, and as the proposals
become more ambitious their effects become incalculable.
Accordingly, the most reasonable approach to politics is normally
to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be
changed wholesale and try to ensure that any changes cohere with
the principles and practices that make the existing system work as
well as it does.
1.5 Why can't tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice
as easily as of wisdom?
Since tradition is a human thing it may reflect human vices as well
as virtues. The same, of course, is true of relying on autonomous
reason. In this century, anti-traditional theories supported by
intelligent men for reasons thought noble have repeatedly led to
the murder of millions of innocents.
The issue therefore is not whether tradition is perfect but its
appropriate place in human life. To the extent our most consistent
aim is toward what is good, and we err more through ignorance,
oversight and conflicting impulse than through coherent and settled
evil, tradition will benefit us by linking our thoughts and actions
to a steady and comprehensive system in which they can correct each
other. It will secure and refine our acquisitions while hampering
antisocial impulses. To the extent we consistently aim at what is
evil, then tradition can not help us much, but neither can anything
else short of divine intervention.
1.6 There are lots of conflicting traditions. How can anyone know his
own is the right one?
Comprehensive certainty is hard to come by. Our own tradition (like
our own reasoning) might lead us astray where another's would not.
However, such concerns can not justify rejecting our own tradition
unless we have a method transcending it for determining when that
has happened, and in most situations we do not. If experience has
led us astray it will most likely be further experience that sets
us right. The same is true of tradition, which is social
experience.
Putting issues of truth aside, the various parts of a particular
tradition are adjusted to each other in a way that makes it
difficult to abandon one part and substitute something from another
tradition. A French cook will have trouble if he has to rely on
Chinese ingredients and utensils. Issues of coherence and
practicality accordingly make it likely that we will do better
developing the tradition to which we are accustomed than attempting
to adopt large parts of a different one.
1.7 But what about truth?
Most conservatives are confident comprehensive objective truth
exists, but not in the form of a set of propositions with a single
meaning equally demonstrable to all. The world is too big for us to
grasp as a whole in a clear systematic way. We apprehend truth
largely through tradition and in a way that cannot be fully
articulated. Even if some truths can be known with certainty
through reason or revelation, their social acceptance and their
interpretation and application depend on tradition.
1.8 There are conflicting traditions even within a single society. Which
gets treated as "ours?"
The question is less serious than it appears, since it cannot be
discussed without assuming a community of discourse and therefore
an authoritative tradition.
Any collectivity that deliberates and acts has a tradition--a set
of commonly-held habits, attitudes, beliefs and memories that is
reasonably coherent over time--that enables it to do so. A society
consists of those who at least in general accept the authority of a
common tradition. "Our" tradition is therefore the tradition that
has guided and motivated the collective action of the society to
which we belong and give our loyalty, and within which the relevant
discussion is going forward.
It is worth noting that no society is perfectly unified; each has
elites and subordinate societies with their own traditions and
spheres of action. A society may also harbor resident aliens and
dissident or criminal groups. Which groups are treated as
subordinate societies legitimately belonging to the larger one and
which are treated as resident aliens, criminals or foreign
oppressors is itself determined by the traditions that define the
society as a whole and make it what it is.
2 Tradition and Change
2.1 Society has always changed, for the better in some ways and for the
worse in others. Why not accept change, especially if everything is so
complicated and hard to figure out?
Changes have always involved resistance as well as acceptance.
Those that have to make their way over opposition will presumably
be better than those that are accepted without serious questioning.
In addition, conservatism is not rejection of all change as such,
but of intentional change of a peculiarly sweeping sort
characteristic of the period beginning with the French Revolution
and guided by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies
such as liberalism and Marxism. It is recognition that the world is
not our creation, and that there are permanent things that we must
simply accept. For example, the family as an institution has
changed from time to time in conjunction with other social changes.
However, the current left/liberal demand that all definite
institutional structure for the family be abolished as an
infringement of individual autonomy (typically phrased as a demand
for the elimination of sex roles and heterosexism and the
protection of children's rights) is different in kind from anything
in the past, and conservatives believe it must be fought.
2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who
currently have wealth and power should keep it?
Every political view promotes the particular advantage of some
people. If political views are to be treated as rationalizations of
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 particular political views advance
the public good are to be taken seriously, then the arguments for
conservatism should be considered on their merits.
It's worth noting that contemporary liberalism furthers the
interests of the powerful social classes that support it, and that
movements aiming at social justice typically become intensely
elitist because the more comprehensive and abstract a political
principle, the smaller the group that can be relied on to
understand and apply it correctly.
2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been
running the show?
Experience suggests otherwise. Slavery disappeared in Western and
Central Europe long ago without need for self-conscious attempts at
social reconstruction. It lasted much longer in the new and less
conservative societies Europeans founded in America.
While conservatism as such doesn't guarantee there will be no
oppression, neither do attempts at autonomous rational thought. It
has been under radical and not conservative regimes that brutal
forced labor and other gross forms of oppression have made a
comeback in recent times. That is no paradox. Radicalism is far
more compatible than conservatism with tyrannical institutions
because by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics it
destroys reciprocity and mutual accommodation between rulers and
ruled.
In addition, conservatism is not self-contained; its recognition of
existing practice as a standard does not mean denial that there is
any other standard. It recognizes that moral habits evolve with
experience and changing circumstances, that social arrangements
that come to be too much at odds with the moral feelings of a
people change or disappear, and that there are transcendent
standards as well as those that exist as part of the institutions
of a particular people. It recognizes that there can be
improvements as well as corruptions.
Conservatism arose not from a desire to freeze everything exactly
as it is, but from recognition of the necessity of continuity, the
difficulty of forcing society into a preconceived pattern, and the
importance of things, such as mutual personal obligation and
standards of right and wrong not reducible to power and desire, for
which ideologies of the Left have trouble finding a place. Those
recognitions make conservatives more reliable opponents of tyranny
than progressives.
3 Social and Cultural Issues
3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them?
They are habits and attitudes that maintain a society in which
people's most basic loyalties, and the relationships upon which
they rely most fundamentally, are relationships to particular
persons rather than to the state.
Family values are basic to moral life because it is primarily in
relationships with particular persons that are taken with the
utmost seriousness that we find the degree of concrete knowledge
and mutual responsibility that is necessary for our obligations to
others to become realities for us. In addition, the knowledge and
habits necessary for the good life mostly have to do with the
day-to-day activities of ordinary men. Such things lose coherence
if everyday personal relations are unstable and unreliable, as they
will be if law, habits and attitudes do not support stable and
functional family life.
To the extent the necessity of practical reliance on particular
persons is viewed as something oppressive and unequal that the
state should remedy, family values are rejected. Conservatives
oppose that rejection.
3.2 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values
differ?
Liberals, conservatives and others all recognize limits on the
degree to which differing personal values can be accommodated. Such
limits often arise because personal values can be realized only by
establishing particular sorts of relations with other people, and
no society can favor all relationships equally. No society, for
example, can favor equally a woman who primarily wants to have a
career and one who primarily wants to be a mother and homemaker. If
public attitudes presume that it is the man who is primarily
responsible for family support they favor the latter at the expense
of the former; if not, they do the reverse.
3.3 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody
else?
Conservatives aren't different from other people in that regard.
Anyone with a notion of how society should work will believe that
other people should follow the program he favors. For example, if
Liberal Jack thinks the government should be responsible for the
well-being of children and wants to support the arrangement through
a tax system that sends people to jail who don't comply, and
Conservative Jill thinks there should be family responsibility
supported by a system of sex roles enforced by informal social
sanctions, each will want what the public schools teach to be
consistent with his program.
Both will object to a school textbook entitled _Heather Has Two
Mommies Who Get Away with Paying No Taxes Because They Accept
Payment Only in Cash_. Liberal Jack will object to the book
_Heather's Mommy Stays Home and Her Daddy Goes to the Office_,
while Conservative Jill will object to other well-known texts. Even
Libertarian Jerry might have some problems with _Heather and Her
Whole Family Organize to Fight for Daycare and against Welfare
Reductions_. There is no obvious reason to consider any of the
three more tolerant than the others.
At present, the issue of social tolerance comes up most often in
connection with sexual morality. For a discussion from a
conservative perspective, see the Sexual Morality FAQ,
http://jkalb.freeshell.org/web/sex.html.
3.4 What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing
moral values?
Since conservatives believe moral values should be determined more
by the traditions and feelings of the people than by theory and
formal decisions, they typically prefer to rely on informal social
sanctions rather than enforcement by government. Nonetheless, they
believe that government should recognize the moral values on which
society relies and should be run on the assumption that they are
good things that should not be undercut. Thus, conservatives oppose
public school curricula that depict such values as optional and
programs that fund their rejection, for example by subsidizing
unwed parents or artists who intend their works to outrage accepted
morality. They believe the state should support fundamental moral
institutions like the family, and oppose legislation that forbids
discrimination on moral grounds. How much more the government can
or should do to promote morality is a matter of experience and
circumstance. In this connection, as in others, conservatives
typically do not have high expectations for what government can
achieve.
3.5 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?
That depends on what those words mean. They are often used very
broadly.
"Racist"--Conservatives consider community loyalty important. The
communities people grow up in generally have some connection to
ethnicity. That's no accident, because ethnicity is what develops
when people live together with a common way of life for a long
time. Accordingly, conservatives think some degree of ethnic
loyalty and separateness is OK. Ethnicity is not the same thing as
"race" as a biological category; on the other hand, the two are
difficult to disentangle because both arise out of shared history
and common descent.
"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 such stereotypes, since they make it far more
likely that individual men and women will complement each other and
form stable and functional unions for the rearing of children.
Also, some degree of differentiation seems to fit the presocial
tendencies of men and women better than unisex would. Conservatives
see no reason to give up those benefits, especially in view of the
evident bad consequences of the weakening of stereotypical
obligations between the sexes in recent decades.
"Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to
reject patterns of impulse, attitude and conduct that don't fit the
stereotypes, such as homosexuality.
For a more extended discussion from a conservative perspective of
issues relating to the liberal demand for "inclusiveness", see the
Anti-Inclusiveness FAQ, http://jkalb.freeshell.org/web/inclus.html.
3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others
marginalized in a conservative society?
The same as happens in a society based on the liberal conception of
inclusiveness to religious and social conservatives and to ethnics
who consider their ethnicity important. They find themselves 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 both kinds of society, people on the outs may be able to
persuade others to their way of thinking, to practice the way of
life they prefer among themselves, or to break off from the larger
society and establish their own communities. Such possibilities are
in general more realistic in a conservative society that emphasizes
local control, federalism, and minimal bureaucracy than in a
society that demands egalitarian social justice and therefore tries
to establish a universal homogeneous social order. For example,
ethnic minorities in a conservative society may well be able to
thrive or at least maintain themselves through some combination of
adaptation and niche-finding, while in an "inclusive" society they
will find themselves on the receiving end of policies designed to
eliminate the public importance of their (and every other) ethnic
culture.
One important question is whether alienation from the social order
will be more common in a conservative or a liberal society. It
seems that it will be more common in a social order based on
universal implementation of a bureaucracy's conception of social
justice than in one that accepts the 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 that
dominate their lives, and so feel marginalized.
3.7 What about freedom?
Conservatives are strong supporters of social institutions that
realize and protect freedom, but believe such institutions attain
their full value as part of a larger whole. Freedom is fully
realized only when we are held responsible for the choices we make,
and it is most valuable in a setting in which things can readily be
chosen that add up to a good life. Accordingly, conservatives
reject perspectives that view freedom as an absolute, and recognize
that the institutions through which freedom is realized must
respect other goods without which freedom would not be worth
having.
In addition, conservatives believe there is a close connection
between freedom and participation in public affairs. Since how we
live affects others, freedom includes taking part in making society
what it is. Accordingly, the conservative principles of federalism,
local rule, and private property help realize freedom by devolving
power into many hands and making widespread participation in
running society a reality. Respect for tradition, the "democracy of
the dead," has the same effect.
3.8 And justice?
Justice between man and man is respect for concrete obligations and
individual responsibility. Conservatives take both very seriously.
Social justice is the ordering of social life toward the good for
man. Social injustice is systematic destruction of the conditions
for existence of that good. Because the good for man can not be
fully known, because it includes respect for each of us as a moral
agent, and because human affairs are infinitely complex, social
justice can never be fully achieved, nor achieved at all through
imposition of a preconceived overall design on society. Attempts to
do the latter have led to horrendous crimes including, in several
modern instances, the murder of millions of innocents. Since social
justice must evolve rather than be constructed its furtherance
requires acceptance of the authority of tradition. The two cannot
be separated.
Social justice is sometimes thought to mean promotion of equality
through comprehensive government action. That view can not be
correct since men differ and what is just for them must therefore
also differ. In addition, the goods which that view is concerned to
divide equally--wealth, power and the like--do not appear to be
the ultimate human goods and therefore can not appropriately be
considered the ultimate concerns of justice. Finally, a system
guided by such a conception must defeat its own purpose because it
puts enormous and uncontrollable power in the hands of those who
control the government; possession of such power, of course, makes
them radically unequal to those they rule.
4 Economic Issues
4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but in fact
favor laissez-faire capitalism? Doesn't laissez-faire capitalism promote
the opposite?
Conservatives typically are not fans of pure laissez-faire,
although they view economic liberty as one of the traditional
liberties of the American people that has served that people well.
Many are skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on
immigration for the sake of permitting the existence and
development of a reasonably coherent national community. Nor do
they oppose in principle the regulation or suppression of
businesses that affect the moral order of society, such as
prostitution, pornography, and the sale of certain drugs.
Conservatives strongly favor free markets when the alternative is
to expand bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that
clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community. Also, they
tend to prefer self-organization to central control because they
believe that overall administration of social life is impossible.
They recognize that like tradition the market reflects men's
infinitely various and often unconscious and inarticulate goals and
perceptions far better than any bureaucratic process could.
In any event, it's not clear that laissez-faire capitalism need
undermine moral community. "Laissez-faire capitalism" has to do
with limitations on what the government does and only indirectly
with the nature of society as a whole. While social statistics are
only a crude measure of the state of community and morality, it is
noteworthy that in England crime and illegitimacy rates fell by
about half from the middle to the end of the 19th century, the
heyday of untrammelled capitalism, and that the rejection of
laissez-faire has in fact been accompanied by increasing social
atomization.
4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak,
discouraged, and outcast?
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 habits and social relations that enable people to carry on their
lives without depending on government bureaucracy.
Moral community declines when people rely on government to solve
their problems rather than on themselves and those they live with.
It is the weak who suffer most from the resulting moral chaos.
Those who think that interventionist liberalism means that the weak
face fewer problems should consider the effects on women, children,
and blacks of trends of the past 40 years. That period has featured
large increases in social welfare expenditures, as well as
increased crime, reduced educational achievement, family
instability, and an end to progress in reducing poverty.
4.3 What about people for whom the usual support networks don't work?
Shouldn't the government do something for them?
The fundamental question is whether government should have ultimate
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