01.20.2004
conservative vs. liberal -- an underfunded viewpoint
I've linked before to 2Blowhards, but for some reason I've never added them to my sidebar. Today I was sent their way because of a couple of links from reflections in d minor.
2Blowhards has started a series that I'm very interested in following through to its conclusion. Here's the Introduction, and here's Part One of the series, which consists of an interview with Jim Kalb. I don't know from Jim Kalb, and haven't followed the links to his site, though I'm eager to do so. This discussion is about conservatism, what it is and why it's appealing to a lot of people.
This is a big mountain to try to climb, and I'm well aware that I'm pretty ignorant about the facts. But it's what I often find myself thinking about, so I'm going to plunge right in here, in my usual jot-stuff-down-between-other-activities way.
I'm talking primarily here about philosophies. Something remarkable about the piece on 2Blowhards is its neutrality. Though there are hints within the interview that Kalb's a conservative, he's managed to avoid any inflammatory issues that are so often brought into play in any discussion of this sort. It's difficult for me to separate these things, right/left politics and conservative/liberal philosophy, and I applaud these pieces on 2Blowhards for doing such a good job of that.
My take on society as a whole reflecting the opposing conservative vs. liberal sides of individuals -- conservatism (according to my take on the first part of the Kalb interview) is about keeping things the way they are because they work that way, (implicit then is admitting that they work, which I assume a lot of liberals wouldn't do, but this is something of a different discussion,) regardless of reason. It's an admission that we don't understand everything, and that that's okay. (I think this relates it pretty well to religious conviction -- another tangent.) On the other hand, liberalism, again according to Kalb, is an attempt to model our society based on reason and reason alone. (My own observation: One of liberalism's failures then is that we don't and can't know everything, or what the repercussions of changes based on reasoning will be, and so a purely liberal-based society would tend to fluctuate out of control. It's like an ongoing experiment in which the parameters are modified as new data arrives. The idea of Reason, as the term is used here, comes from the scientific viewpoint. The problem is that proper science has very specific methods for moving things from conjecture to workable theory, and that involves having controlled and test environments. We don't have a test society, so changes have to be made on the control group.)
Oversimplifying a lot to make my point, which is pretty vague and floating around in the ether right now, philosophically these two opposing ideas are a good reflection of human nature. A conscious person has to function under certain assumptions, but also must adjust as new information comes in. I think in society then this battle between liberal and conservative cannot possibly be about right and wrong, but is instead a necessary continuing process. Conservatism says we don't know everything so let's do things the way we've always done them, liberalism says the way we've always done things is screwed up so let's change them based on what (we think) we know. Taken as a whole, a society being pulled by these two opposing ideas is (roughly) reflecting the conscious individuals making it up. The balance between these two sides is important.
Philosophically speaking, an extreme conservative is one who refuses to accept any change, who basically looks to tradition, forsaking reason. An extreme liberal is one who wants society to reflect the way things should work as if what we know is all there is to know. Both of the extremes are blind to important truths: pure conservatism is blind to the fact that things change, chaos emerges; pure liberalism is blind to the fact that we don't know all there is to know.
(There's also a portion where Kalb talks about the liberal pursuit of equality. There's an inherent difference here between the idea that liberalism is based on the extension of logic and the idea that liberals want equality for everyone. Clearly it's not logical to think that everyone can have their own belief systems or ideologies protected, when it's easy to imagine, and to illustrate with real-life cases, belief systems or ideologies that are specifically at odds with one another. So there's a question of viewpoint -- from a thinking liberal perspective, the idea of equality doesn't mean that everyone gets their way, it means something else. If everyone can't push their own value systems on everyone else, then no one should get to do that. Regarding inequality -- one of the things my conservative father has always been fond of saying is that "life's not always fair." The liberal impulse is to question why things aren't fair and attempt to change that, while the conservative impulse is not to question the way things are at all. This last bit is again tangential here, and I'm aborting it here but leaving what I've got there for future reference.)
And finally -- the following was going to go somewhere in my introduction to this, but I've moved it down here so as to try to avoid doing exactly what I said the 2Blowhards pieces didn't do; that being injecting politics on top of the philosophy. It's something I want to note here, however, so now that you (whoever you are) have read the rest of the crap I had to say, you might as well be privy to this part, as well: My own tendency in recent years to describe myself as leaning towards liberalism has been, for the most part, because of politics. In the simplest terms, I'm liberal because W is not. Philosophically I'm exactly what I've thought I was for a long time -- right in the middle. I understand the attractiveness of keeping things working as they do, but I also understand the frustration of wanting to be able to use some of what we learn to improve humanity.
I'm tempted to draw conclusions about how our society reflects the need for this conservative/liberal balance based on some observations I've had recently. I've worked with the group of people I work with now only since shortly after 9-11. I've gotten the mistaken impression, only recently corrected, that the men I work with are pretty much all liberals. It turns out that most of them are traditionally somewhat conservative Republicans. They just all happen to agree with me in regards to W, and where the country's been headed with him at the helm. So as a lot of society swung toward the conservative end of the spectrum, a lot of the rest of us have swung the other way. Overall it could have the effect of keeping things in some sort of balance.
Or maybe everyone else is crazy and we're just fighting not to let the fuckers blow the whole place up. Who knows.
