This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Please, take me somewhere else.
RogerG