Positive Depictions of Conservatism

Deleted member 16771 said:
There are many facets to trying to do this - elitism, &c. - but nonetheless I think there is a qualitative difference between politicians who come out of these 'civic' traditions (e.g. Law), and those who attain power from the outside (I'm thinking of the US in both cases).
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One being useful, the other being garbage :laughing:

Take your time, it wasn't a simple ask on my part.
Just interested cuz I know you'll have several relevant points to make and I think it's a good foundation for this topic.
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
@acd You're the most interesting thing about this thread, lol.
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I realize I'm being a bit of a pain in the ass lol.
But who am I kidding?
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Deleted member 16771 said:
Hello all,

I think we're living through some pretty rabid and divisive times, such that I think it might be a good idea to reflect upon the whole spectrum of views that actually resides within each of us, rather than resting within the false strictures of our respective appointed camps.

So in that spirit, this thread is about conservatism. In particular, positive representations or depictions of conservatism; or the kind of conservatism that we obviously need, and is clearly to the social good.

What kind of things have people come across on this theme? Anything that struck you particularly? I'd also like to invite commentary on the concept of 'civic commitment' (described below in my spoiler).

RULES: This thread is not for political debate as such, so please don't engage in critique of what others share. It's more of a celebratory thing, and an attempt to cast aside the false veil of polarisation.


If I were to describe my political views to you, I'm not sure they'd make much sense in terms of how people have been conditioned to digest 'politics' in the last century or two.

In general I might say something like 'I'm of the "left", but I believe in the "centre"', but that's not entirely accurate, either, since I have some opinions which could be rightly regarded as 'conservative', and I'm not ashamed of that despite being on balance 'progressive'.

The core value, though, revolves around the 'centre', or rather, 'the forum' (in the classical sense). I'm committed to the cooperative space of compromise and accord that exists within the core of our societies, and the lofty pillars of civility, respect, and truth which hold up the whole august structure.

There's that phrase of Aristotle's which is usually chucked about by people who want to make some kind of Machiavellian point about the scheming nature of human beings: 'man is a political animal'. However, I wouldn't translate it like this. I'd go with something more like, 'man is a civic animal'; I think that's much closer to the sense of the original Greek. And, in fact, I think this is both what we need more of, and what I'm ultimately drawn to: civics.

There's a couple of people on this forum who I think probably share this same commitment to the civic core as I do. @Pin springs to mind, but when @Reason speaks of 'the Republic', I get a powerful sense of it, especially. Reason and @Asa recently had an exchange in the former's blog which indicated to me that Asa has the same commitment.

In fact, I love to see open displays of that commitment - that respect - and they stick in my heart as memories or knowledge very important to me. I'm thinking of things like the friendship between Tony Benn and Enoch Powell in the UK, or the respect between Barrack Obama and John McCain (encapsulated by his funeral) in the US, and now, of course, between Asa and Reason in our own community.

Conservatism
Conservatism really 'clicked' for me when I first came across the work of the conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton (in fact I just today watched a documentary of his on beauty).

It was his concept of 'oikophilia' to describe the essential conservative mindset of the 'love of home'. To be an oikophile in any sense is also to be conservative (whoever you vote for) - it's to say 'we like it here. We want to preserve the good things that we have.'

It is an attitude fundamentally vested in love.

The constant seeking to improve and change of the progressive is a noble cause; and so is the earnest desire of the oikophile - the conservative - to preserve and protect what is good. And, what's more, all of us have both of these feelings simultaneously.

For me, I am somewhat proud of the parliamentary tradition of my own country, and the legacy of democracy, liberality and 'science' of Europe more generally. I don't have to be an imperialist to love those things from my own culture.

I also tend to place high value in the good that a traditional, stable family structure can provide for the raising of children. As someone raised outside of that, I feel this keenly. There is no hatred in valuing something like this.


Ultimately, I don't really have much tribal attachment to different approaches, systems and ideas. 'Socialism', 'capitalism' - these are mere 'technologies of statecraft' to me. Part of an arsenal of systems and structures from which we ought to pick and choose in the construction of ideal societies and states based on their utility to particular tasks. Marketise this, nationalise that; see what works best and readjust.
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When I first read the title, I had read 'positive deceptions' since the conservatives has been spreading so much fake news that conservatism and deception have already a link on my mind. Only then I realized it was 'depiction', which is a word I have never ever heard of, and then had to translate it on google.

When I was younger, I did know somewhat of a notion of honour coming from conservatism. As if, back then, there was a strong notion of honour on conservatism - specially on male - that you should keep your honour by 'being honourable', and keeping your honour did meant a lot of positive things - it meant telling the truth, it meant keeping to your word, it meant also have some sort of 'right posture', but also keeping some sort of customs? I don't remember, this is from a distant past. I mean I was not ever directly introduced to this idea but I knew it did existed on Conservatism back then and it had it beauty. Since it was never introduced directly I don't know how much I romanticized it, but I know that it is a notion that used to exist. However, the hypocrisy behind it made me quit the whole idea, specially when I had start to do random searches and found phrases like 'only men can have a notion of honour - does not apply to woman', and the fact that a lot of today's conservatives are far from being honourable in such terms. For example, spreading fake news is a big threat to one's honour - but today's conservative doesn't seem to care.

However, it was a beautiful concept I had always appreciated. I hope this is not a fantasy of my own, but I really believe conservatives back then had a notion of honour, even if it wasn't as much ideal as it is in my head.
 
I don’t know if it’s just the way I’m reading this thread, but it sounds like there is considerable cross talk between an idealised expression of conservatism and the way that it is taken up and distorted in factional politics. I like the way that @Deleted member 16771 is trying to focus onto the common good values and institutions that come with the Ancient Roman concept of civis - those that successfully underpin how large groups of people live together collectively and relatively harmoniously to their mutual benefit and relative happiness. That word civis is where the concept of civilised comes from and that is at the heart of the matter. Democracy can only work if there is a beneficial polarity between the competing political movements and if they operate within a set of civilised stable, ethical, social and practical rules that are common to them all and are equally championed by them all.

If I understand correctly I think the American Constitution is an attempt to codify this, at least in part. Changes can only be made to it through a far higher level of political agreement than is normal for other types of law change in order to conserve the collective ideals essential to the American democracy and social fabric.

So it seems to me that, at least in principle, the American Constitution is a concrete embodiment of the kind of conservative ideal that Hos is thinking of. It isn’t the only one and others are not expressed formally like this is - it’s just that it’s so easy to see it. I think this example deals too with the criticism that conservatives necessarily wish to block all change, because there is a process for change written into it. That process is heavily governed though to prevent ad hoc and arbitrary changes taking place too quickly. The risks to the state are huge if things go wrong with it - either losing the trans-political consensus, or actually destroying the underpinnings of the state’s institutions. That’s one way despots gain power.

I’m not at all sure it’s possible to brand this sort of virtuous ideal ‘conservatism’ though, at least in some countries, because, as has been said here, that word has been hijacked by right wingers and is associated with ideals that by no means transcend the political spectrum. That doesn’t discredit the politically transcendent ideals and institutions of civilisation - just the terminology applied to it.
 
John K said:
I don’t know if it’s just the way I’m reading this thread, but it sounds like there is considerable cross talk between an idealised expression of conservatism and the way that it is taken up and distorted in factional politics. I like the way that @Deleted member 16771 is trying to focus onto the common good values and institutions that come with the Ancient Roman concept of civis - those that successfully underpin how large groups of people live together collectively and relatively harmoniously to their mutual benefit and relative happiness. That word civis is where the concept of civilised comes from and that is at the heart of the matter. Democracy can only work if there is a beneficial polarity between the competing political movements and if they operate within a set of civilised stable, ethical, social and practical rules that are common to them all and are equally championed by them all.

If I understand correctly I think the American Constitution is an attempt to codify this, at least in part. Changes can only be made to it through a far higher level of political agreement than is normal for other types of law change in order to conserve the collective ideals essential to the American democracy and social fabric.

So it seems to me that, at least in principle, the American Constitution is a concrete embodiment of the kind of conservative ideal that Hos is thinking of. It isn’t the only one and others are not expressed formally like this is - it’s just that it’s so easy to see it. I think this example deals too with the criticism that conservatives necessarily wish to block all change, because there is a process for change written into it. That process is heavily governed though to prevent ad hoc and arbitrary changes taking place too quickly. The risks to the state are huge if things go wrong with it - either losing the trans-political consensus, or actually destroying the underpinnings of the state’s institutions. That’s one way despots gain power.

I’m not at all sure it’s possible to brand this sort of virtuous ideal ‘conservatism’ though, at least in some countries, because, as has been said here, that word has been hijacked by right wingers and is associated with ideals that by no means transcend the political spectrum. That doesn’t discredit the politically transcendent ideals and institutions of civilisation - just the terminology applied to it.
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No, this would be a misunderstanding of what I'm saying here.

It's not that the ideal of 'conservatism' and the real label of 'conservatism' with all of its connotations and symbolic accretions are separate concepts that ought to be treated separately, it's that the very 'contamination' of the ideal presents precisely a functional mechanism to enact some measure of 'depolarisation' because of the connotations it's accrued.

You don't just throw away an opportunity like that in the search for what might merely be a more precise terminology. A novel terminology possesses exactly zero of the symbolic gravity that we actually want to use, and would achieve none of the necessary emotional redemption.

Polarised epistemic complexes exist as something akin to crystalline structures - if you can imagine that; their bonding force dependent upon their perceived polar opposition to the opposing structure. Removing key elements of these complexes - particularly in the case of concepts highly encrusted with other ideas (like 'conservatism') - reduces the integrity of the polarised complex itself, and often to such an extent that it collapses completely.

I'm probably going to have to post something much more explanatory about this at some point, but if the fundamental driver of polarisation in social networks is the avoidance of cognitive dissonances for the sake of 'social balance', then conversely, breaking those cliques (or at least weakening the degree of polarisation) can be achieved by introducing cognitive dissonances (and the subsequent forced reordering of an individual's internal map of which people and ideas belong to which cliques) in the other direction.

I don't know why this seems so hard to swallow (though it's probably something to do with bloody Ti and PoLR Te, lol), or if I need to explain it better, or if people simply don't buy the mechanism or what.
 
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Deleted member 16771 said:
No, this would be a misunderstanding of what I'm saying here.

It's not that the ideal of 'conservatism' and the real label of 'conservatism' with all of its connotations and symbolic accretions are separate concepts that ought to be treated separately, it's that the very 'contamination' of the ideal presents precisely a functional mechanism to enact some measure of 'depolarisation' because of the connotations it's accrued.

You don't just throw away an opportunity like that in the search for what might merely be a more precise terminology. A novel terminology possesses exactly zero of the symbolic gravity that we actually want to use, and would achieve none of the necessary emotional redemption.

Polarised epistemic complexes exist as something akin to crystalline structures - if you can imagine that; their bonding force dependent upon their perceived polar opposition to the opposing structure. Removing key elements of these complexes - particularly in the case of concepts highly encrusted with other ideas (like 'conservatism') - reduces the integrity of the polarised complex itself, and often to such an extent that it collapses completely.

I'm probably going to have to post something much more explanatory about this at some point, but if the fundamental driver of polarisation in social networks is the avoidance of cognitive dissonances for the sake of 'social balance', then conversely, breaking those cliques (or at least weakening the degree of polarisation) can be achieved by introducing cognitive dissonances (and the subsequent forced reordering of an individual's internal map of which people and ideas belong to which cliques) in the other direction.

I don't know why this seems so hard to swallow (though it's probably something to do with bloody Ti and PoLR Te, lol), or if I need to explain it better, or if people simply don't buy the mechanism or what.
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Are you saying that the principles embodied in the concept and ongoing non-partisan commitment to the American Constitution is not an (admittedly formalised) exemplar of some of the ideals you are expressing? I'm way off target in understanding you if that's so.

I'm not saying that the synergistic bundle of concepts that you are labeling 'conservatism' should be split apart and treated separately - just that the label should be replaced pragmatically with one that lacks partisan contamination. This would be no loss for the vast majority of people for whom the concept has never meant what I think you are expressing - in the UK for example, for most people, it's synonymous with the Tory party, and has been for several hundred years.

I understand that you think the very process of getting people to understand conservatism in the sense you mean would help to heal our societies and promote the ideas that go with it. I can't see why that term is necessary in order to pursue that aim, and fear it would in fact hinder it. Perhaps it would help if you explained why you think the term itself is so important and inseparable from the concepts you are saying it should be associated with - that inseparability seems rather esoteric and unnecessary to me at the moment.
 
John K said:
Are you saying that the principles embodied in the concept and ongoing non-partisan commitment to the American Constitution is not an (admittedly formalised) exemplar of some of the ideals you are expressing? I'm way off target in understanding you if that's so.
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No no, that's a particularly good example. I'm sorry that I quoted your whole post yesterday - I was rushing around prepping for Christmas and just wanted to post an 'acknowledgement' rather than something properly substantive.

I'm not saying that the synergistic bundle of concepts that you are labeling 'conservatism' should be split apart and treated separately - just that the label should be replaced pragmatically with one that lacks partisan contamination. This would be no loss for the vast majority of people for whom the concept has never meant what I think you are expressing - in the UK for example, for most people, it's synonymous with the Tory party, and has been for several hundred years.
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Again, to 'replace' the label defeats the purpose of its 'rehabilitation'. If this 'ideal conservatism' were replaced with something more precise - like 'oikophilia' even - nothing whatsoever would happen to the polarised structure. People would still associate with the label of 'conservative', except what?

I understand that you think the very process of getting people to understand conservatism in the sense you mean would help to heal our societies and promote the ideas that go with it. I can't see why that term is necessary in order to pursue that aim, and fear it would in fact hinder it. Perhaps it would help if you explained why you think the term itself is so important and inseparable from the concepts you are saying it should be associated with - that inseparability seems rather esoteric and unnecessary to me at the moment.
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I understand. OK let's have a go at this...

Before I begin, though, I'd just like to say that two political leaders in the United States recently made some speeches which embodied the 'civic virtues' I spoke about earlier: the President-Elect and Mitch McConnel:


Firstly, to pick up on my earlier point, it's important to point out that if we decided to 'discard' the 'label' of conservatism, the associations would not just magically dissipate. The polarised structure would remain intact; people would still identify with the label and all of its old associations. In other words, the 'polarisation' is real, and pretty resilient, and there is a great danger in not recognising this.

Furthermore, we know what happens when this is attempted. Take Weimar Germany, for example - the identity was suppressed following a military defeat, and humiliation imposed upon them. It was clear to some even in 1919 (Churchill and Foch among them) what the result would be: 'Ce n’est pas un paix, c’est un armistice de vingt ans' ('This is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years').

This level of identity suppression only seems to 'work' when an extremely long-term military occupation is imposed, as in the case of Germany and Japan post-1945. In these cases, what you're actually doing is waiting for generations to die rather than reconciling identity-complexes with each other. Even so, driving identities underground tends to elicit less than desirable effects - they tend to harden and reemerge as extremism some time later.

In any case, the United States doesn't actually have the suppression option because both sides have all their forces intact: no side has suffered a military defeat, and indeed the risk is the opposite: that inflicting unnecessary humiliations could result in some kind of 'mobilisation' at the fringes. In fact you could say that this is why Trump came to power in the first place; that conservatives had been increasingly made to feel excluded from the mainstream of political discourse.

So no, it's not actually possible just to 'discard' the label or suppress it in favour of a more precise terminology; it's there and it has to be dealt with. The associations are inseparable until they are put through a process of 'depolarisation'. It cannot be discarded because it forms a locus of the deep identity of so many, and this is not an esoteric point.

We're fortunate in the UK in that 'being conservative' is not significantly outside the mainstream; it's a respectable position. Roger Scruton or whoever else can go on the BBC and celebrate it (before he died, obviously); make documentaries about it, &c. In the US, this is only possible on a polarised network - there's no 'centre' upon which to perform the respectability of a position.


'You're an oikophile and I can respect that'
'What?'
'An oikophile - it means "lover of home"'
'Well, I'd call myself more of a "conservative" in the traditional sense'
'No'
'What do you mean?'
'We don't use "conservative" any more'
'Well I am one'
'No, you're an "oikophile". "Conservative" has too many negative connotations.'
:neutral::rage:


There's too much to go at in this discussion to keep posts at any reasonable length, so I'll just leave it there for now.
 
Maikl Jexocuha said:
@Deleted member 16771 just a question for clarity: is your view of "conservative" in the US, would you say, is closer to what is often called: "classical liberal"(like Thomas Jefferson)? Because if I were to go back historically to one of the original examples of American conservatism, I'm always reminded of the "Whig Party", which was founded primarily on "economic protectionism".
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No, not really.

In my mind I'm taking an 'essentialist' approach to 'conservatism', focusing instead on what you might say is its psychological 'essence' which transcends the fluid and transient policy positions it's associated with in any given age. This approach needs some defense in itself, but if we can speak of Cicero being 'conservative' in any intelligible sense, then we sort of have an instinct about what the 'essence' or 'core' of 'conservatism' is; there is no need for relativism here because it seems to be a universal feature of human political societies.

If we confine ourselves to popular or prominent philosophers, I think Scruton had a good run at it, as discussed, but of course there is also a very broad psychological literature aimed at parsing the mental underpinnings of 'conservative minds' and 'progressive minds', probably since Adorno. Of course, at lot of this is rather patronising fare (I remember one study which had students play games of risk [or something similar], and concluded that conservative students tended to end their games in nuclear holocaust, while progressive students ended theirs in peace and harmony...) and suffers from inherent biases, but it does reveal some interesting dichotomies, such as how conservatives have larger amygdalae, &c.

Real human beings fall upon a spectrum of biology, of course, but human social networks are polarised and so they tend to get swept up into one camp or the other. The only 'stable' or 'balanced' states are unitary utopias or antagonistic bipolar cliques, and the empirical evidence for this is overwhelming; it's also theoretically sound.

Personally, I think this process (the 'splitting' of social networks from unitary states into mutually antagonistic bipolar cliques) probably had some adaptive advantage in our ancestral pasts, either because it generated an internal mechanism of group selection in times of resource scarcity (the network/village would split, and its 'weaker' half would be destroyed), or forced the topographical spread of the species in times of resource abundance (the network/village would split, and half would stay where they were, while the other half would be kicked out and have to find their own ranges).


In idiographic or contingent terms, American 'conservatism' seems to have had a few evolutions, as you say, typically based upon preserving or entrenching the economic advantages of the classes who espoused it, but I don't think there's anything 'particular' about it - if protectionism worked well in one age, they'd go with that; if the liberalisation of markets worked well in another, then they'd go with that. In either case, the basic principle is still operant: 'this is working well for us; we like it [oikophilia]; we need to defend it or deepen it.'

What's interesting is just how fluid the economic ideology is, and how we've seen the transition to Trumpist protectionism at a time when American manufactures aren't that globally competitive (well, they are in absolute terms, but nowhere near the level they were). When economic liberalisation somewhere (let's say, opening up a third world country to the global market) practically guaranteed US dominance, the ideology espoused liberal free-marketism. There's no consistency in the ideological position.
 
Deleted member 16771 said:
No no, that's a particularly good example. I'm sorry that I quoted your whole post yesterday - I was rushing around prepping for Christmas and just wanted to post an 'acknowledgement' rather than something properly substantive.
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That's a relief Hos - I assumed this was the case but I was a little worried I'd totally misunderstood :sweatsmile:

Deleted member 16771 said:
Before I begin, though, I'd just like to say that two political leaders in the United States recently made some speeches which embodied the 'civic virtues' I spoke about earlier: the President-Elect and Mitch McConnel:
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Helpful examples - I'd heard the Mitch McConnell statement already, but not the Joe Biden one.

Deleted member 16771 said:
No, not really.

In my mind I'm taking an 'essentialist' approach to 'conservatism', focusing instead on what you might say is its psychological 'essence' which transcends the fluid and transient policy positions it's associated with in any given age. This approach needs some defense in itself, but if we can speak of Cicero being 'conservative' in any intelligible sense, then we sort of have an instinct about what the 'essence' or 'core' of 'conservatism' is; there is no need for relativism here because it seems to be a universal feature of human political societies.

If we confine ourselves to popular or prominent philosophers, I think Scruton had a good run at it, as discussed, but of course there is also a very broad psychological literature aimed at parsing the mental underpinnings of 'conservative minds' and 'progressive minds', probably since Adorno. Of course, at lot of this is rather patronising fare (I remember one study which had students play games of risk [or something similar], and concluded that conservative students tended to end their games in nuclear holocaust, while progressive students ended theirs in peace and harmony...) and suffers from inherent biases, but it does reveal some interesting dichotomies, such as how conservatives have larger amygdalae, &c.

Real human beings fall upon a spectrum of biology, of course, but human social networks are polarised and so they tend to get swept up into one camp or the other. The only 'stable' or 'balanced' states are unitary utopias or antagonistic bipolar cliques, and the empirical evidence for this is overwhelming; it's also theoretically sound.

Personally, I think this process (the 'splitting' of social networks from unitary states into mutually antagonistic bipolar cliques) probably had some adaptive advantage in our ancestral pasts, either because it generated an internal mechanism of group selection in times of resource scarcity (the network/village would split, and its 'weaker' half would be destroyed), or forced the topographical spread of the species in times of resource abundance (the network/village would split, and half would stay where they were, while the other half would be kicked out and have to find their own ranges).


In idiographic or contingent terms, American 'conservatism' seems to have had a few evolutions, as you say, typically based upon preserving or entrenching the economic advantages of the classes who espoused it, but I don't think there's anything 'particular' about it - if protectionism worked well in one age, they'd go with that; if the liberalisation of markets worked well in another, then they'd go with that. In either case, the basic principle is still operant: 'this is working well for us; we like it [oikophilia]; we need to defend it or deepen it.'

What's interesting is just how fluid the economic ideology is, and how we've seen the transition to Trumpist protectionism at a time when American manufactures aren't that globally competitive (well, they are in absolute terms, but nowhere near the level they were). When economic liberalisation somewhere (let's say, opening up a third world country to the global market) practically guaranteed US dominance, the ideology espoused liberal free-marketism. There's no consistency in the ideological position.
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I guess what's troubling me is that democracies are necessarily polarised because that's an essential condition for genuine choice to be available in a democracy. The concept of conservatism has been attached to one of these poles in quite a few democratic states, but you are suggesting removing it from any particular political factional perspective and instead have it acknowledged, heart and mind, as a shared set of ideals and values across each whole state community. That sounds very worthy - it does sound very difficult to achieve, though, as long as at least one heavily supported party in each democratic state is claiming ownership of conservatism as their factional raison d'etre, contrasting it with radical change, and adding all kinds of things to the concept that are divisive. It's the practicalities rather than the principle that I'm doubting.
 
Winterflowers said:
Weren't there studies which implied democratic stability stems from a strong center-right party? One capable of holding its base from the allure of more fringe positions?
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That's interesting. I'd like to see that if you do remember.
 
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