Perhaps I jumped the gun. I'm still waiting to hear of these set of rules that provide stability and cannot change: You said that 'Stability' or 'status quo' is often like good parenting - we establish a set of rules by which the child then learns to navigate the world, and changing these rules overmuch is a form of abuse; it becomes an arbitrary use of power.". I don't know how progressivism -which, mind you, is an entirely political concept- isn't directly opposite to your depiction of conservatism.
OK, suppose that I give you some parameters and rules to a challenge that I set you: I say, 'if you complete X task, I will reward you with Y reward'. We agree, maybe something is signed.
So you labour assiduously, let's say for two or three years. You solve all the problems, you devote yourself to it... you complete the task.
And then you come to me, expecting the Y reward that was promised, that we agreed to, and I turn to you and say, 'oh, but I changed my mind. Sorry'.
You'd feel more than a little betrayed.
What I'm saying is that people need some measure of 'stability' or 'status quo' - in other words,
conservatism - in order to make informed rational choices about their lives, and navigate their way in the world around them. On the social scale, this means that governments have a moral duty to ensure the continuity of essentially 'everything that was promised'.
A real-world example of this is my best friend from high school, who embarked upon a degree in games design at a time when the industry in the UK was growing massively and benefitted from generous government tax breaks. Then, the same year as his graduation, the coalition government came to power, scrapped the tax breaks, and the industry started to contract, closing its doors on new entrants. He did everything right, he played by the rules, and yet the rug was pulled out from under him through no fault of his own.
It is simply foolish to deride 'conservatism' as something essentially 'bad' or otherwise corrosive to our societies when it represents nothing more than a fairly prosaic and absolutely necessary functional approach to government. It's a useful tool as much as progressivism is.
Kant has an ethical principle that, since human beings are ends in themselves, it is morally right to give them as much
true information as they need in order to make complete, rational, informed decisions about their lives. It's a rule I live by.
If you enter into a relationship looking to find a spouse, only to learn months later that they're already married, then they've obviously failed in this ethical principle, just as does the parent who imposes ever-changing rules upon their child.
Conservatism is like this - it's an instinct which services this principle and, what is more,
everybody has it to varying degrees, and
everybody needs it. I think this is what makes Scruton's analysis so potent, because (like Burke), he seems to uncover what the basal motivations of conservatism
are, untethered from the ideological accretions of the modern age. Personally I don't see what free market economics has to do with 'conservatism', for example, and in fact it doesn't take a long look back in history to find a time when the associations were reversed. The same is true of a multitude of other policy positions and opinions, and this is why we're talking about fundamentals, because to me, most of what is discussed now under these labels are free-floating positions which have switched hands many times before such that the associations are clearly meaningless and/or malleable.
