The Limitations of Abstract Reason
[T]here are general truths regarding what is good for us that derive from human nature and the nature of human societies. But we are limited in our ability to know these general truths because human reason is weak and fallible: Human beings are capable of exercising reason and yet arriving at almost any foolish, destructive, evil, poisonous thing. Given this reality, conservatives give primacy to inherited traditions, beginning with those descended from Moses. Having been tried and adapted to the needs of many nations over thousands of years, these traditions offer us examples of political and moral order that have proved both beneficial and sustainable. We can maintain and strengthen these traditions as our forefathers did, introducing repairs when necessary by a process of trial and error. When we see that a repair has failed, we must restore the sound traditions of generations past.
Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (p. 197). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The argument is that while reason can perceive some general moral truths grounded in human nature, it is not powerful or reliable enough to serve as the sole foundation for political and moral life. Because reason is "weak and fallible", attempts to reconstruct society on abstract rational principles (as Enlightenment rationalists sought to do) risk disaster.
Hazonys account of conservatism echoes and extends a long-standing critique of Enlightenment rationalism advanced by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott.
Like Burke, Hazony argues that human reason, though capable of discerning certain moral truths, is too frail and fallible to serve as the sole guide for political life. Abstract reason, when severed from inherited practices and institutions, leads not to liberation but to hubris and destructionas the excesses of revolutionary movements demonstrate. Hence, conservatives give primacy to traditions that have evolved through centuries of collective trial and error. These inherited moral and political orders, often descending from Mosaic and biblical sources, embody the accumulated wisdom of generations and provide frameworks for human flourishing that reason alone could never design.
Oakeshott similarly described politics as a conversation between generations, rather than a rational project to construct society anew. For Hazony, as for these earlier conservatives, the task of statesmanship is not to perfect society through rational schemes, but to preserve and prudently amend the tested traditions that sustain moral and civic life.
The persistence of slavery, the subordination of women, and monarchism within Western traditions raises a central challenge for conservatism: if tradition is the repository of moral wisdom, how can it have preserved practices now seen as gravely unjust?
Conservatives such as Hazony, following Burke and Oakeshott, respond that tradition is not infallible but corrigible - capable of gradual moral self-correction. They argue that reform should emerge within the moral framework of inherited traditions, drawing on their deeper principles rather than rejecting them wholesale. Thus, the abolition of slavery and the advancement of womens rights are interpreted as expressions of the Wests own moral resources - particularly the biblical conviction that all humans are made in Gods image and possess inherent dignity.
Progressives, by contrast, contend that such reforms required transcending traditional authority through appeals to abstract reason, universal rights, and moral equality that often conflicted with inherited norms. For them, tradition frequently entrenches power and prejudice, and genuine moral progress demands critical rupture, not deference.
The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles.
Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (p. 197). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The argument is that while reason can perceive some general moral truths grounded in human nature, it is not powerful or reliable enough to serve as the sole foundation for political and moral life. Because reason is "weak and fallible", attempts to reconstruct society on abstract rational principles (as Enlightenment rationalists sought to do) risk disaster.
Hazonys account of conservatism echoes and extends a long-standing critique of Enlightenment rationalism advanced by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott.
Like Burke, Hazony argues that human reason, though capable of discerning certain moral truths, is too frail and fallible to serve as the sole guide for political life. Abstract reason, when severed from inherited practices and institutions, leads not to liberation but to hubris and destructionas the excesses of revolutionary movements demonstrate. Hence, conservatives give primacy to traditions that have evolved through centuries of collective trial and error. These inherited moral and political orders, often descending from Mosaic and biblical sources, embody the accumulated wisdom of generations and provide frameworks for human flourishing that reason alone could never design.
Oakeshott similarly described politics as a conversation between generations, rather than a rational project to construct society anew. For Hazony, as for these earlier conservatives, the task of statesmanship is not to perfect society through rational schemes, but to preserve and prudently amend the tested traditions that sustain moral and civic life.
The persistence of slavery, the subordination of women, and monarchism within Western traditions raises a central challenge for conservatism: if tradition is the repository of moral wisdom, how can it have preserved practices now seen as gravely unjust?
Conservatives such as Hazony, following Burke and Oakeshott, respond that tradition is not infallible but corrigible - capable of gradual moral self-correction. They argue that reform should emerge within the moral framework of inherited traditions, drawing on their deeper principles rather than rejecting them wholesale. Thus, the abolition of slavery and the advancement of womens rights are interpreted as expressions of the Wests own moral resources - particularly the biblical conviction that all humans are made in Gods image and possess inherent dignity.
Progressives, by contrast, contend that such reforms required transcending traditional authority through appeals to abstract reason, universal rights, and moral equality that often conflicted with inherited norms. For them, tradition frequently entrenches power and prejudice, and genuine moral progress demands critical rupture, not deference.
The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles.
Comments (103)
This is a great OP. I was going to say it belongs in @unimportants thread on tradition, but you really have opened a much broader door. Ill think about it and come back with more comments.
I would submit that neither works at this point.
Reason was never all that great at the task at hand.
And refining wisdom of the past doesn't work anymore because the world has changed a lot since the scientific and industrial revolution and is changing at an ever increasing pace, so that refining the tradition incrementally can't really keep up with that pace.
Yes, good post. I need to think about it.
But my first impression is to wonder if the refining process involves both seemingly wise tradition and fresh rational critique - so it seems conservative versus progressive becomes careful/proven versus risky/theoretical (and again, careful conservatives respect risk and theory more than risky/theoretical progressives respect careful proof).
Is tradition really as consistent as this framing supposes? You pointed to the tension between "All Men Are Created Equal" on the one hand and slavery and feminism on the other. There doesn't seem to be complete consistency between the traditions of India and of France, or even between Paris and London. Certainly, the tradition of gun ownership in the US is rejected almost everywhere else.
Was the abolition of slavery a result of belief in universal moral principles or was it to do with making accepted traditions consistent?
And then, is it quite right to describe progressive politicking as guided by a common authority, moral or otherwise? Isn't traditional liberalism about how we get along despite differences in those supposed moral authorities, that I can believe whatever I like, so long as I don't interfere in your freedoms?
So I see two issues. The first, that tradition is not so monolithic as the account supposes, but varies from group to group, leaving a need for consistency between traditions. The second, that progressives might see themselves not as relying on an authority, but as offering a way to negotiate between conflicting authorities.
I am actually very sympathetic to the role of reason in all political discourse probably more so than the Hazony, the author of the quote in the OP.
After all there is not much sense in developing, or uncovering, rights against slavery and in favor of the equality of women, for example, if those rights are not meant to be "inalienable", that is, universal. And if they are universal, then surely what that means is that our abstract reason, rather than tradition, requires this to be so.
Quoting Banno
There is actually a strange relativism within conservatism I think - if we appeal to tradition in one society that tradition is going to differ - sometimes widely - from traditions in other societies, and now how do we converse with each other, unless we again appeal to a faculty of reason which can appeal to universals?
I suppose Enlightenment liberalism is not itself monolithic, we need to define our terms.
What you are describing sounds more like a libertarian position, for example.
But for Hazony in his book, what he is calling Enlightenment "liberalism" is the paradigm of abstract reason, rather than tradition, providing the best method for uncovering certain universal political truths.
This author is skeptical of this method, especially in the political sphere:
Enlightenment rationalism doesnt see reason realistically in this way. The confusion of nature with reason results from the belief that reason is a power that permits every human being directly to access eternal and unchanging nature. And since unchanging nature is assumed to dictate the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time, the belief that reason gives every human being direct access to nature means that every human being also has direct access to the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time. In this way, Enlightenment rationalism removes us from the biblical framework, in which there is a chasm separating what is right in Gods eyes from what is right in mens eyesa chasm that forces us to acknowledge that we are not God, and to treat the deliverances of our own reasoning minds with great caution, humility, and skepticism. In the new world announced by Enlightenment rationalism, there is no such chasm between the reasoning individual and knowledge of the true character of reality. Each reasoning individual suddenly discovers that he is himself the source of reliable knowledge of what nature commands, and therefore of the political and moral principles that hold good for all mankind and for all time.
Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (p. 203). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Doesn't liberalism see itself exactly as a way of negotiating those differences?
It would seem then, with the clashes of irrationalitities, that one must ignore politics to the greatest extent they can, but I just speak for myself. I'm definitely supportive of your desire to discuss cultural idea, but count me out if it must be defended by some sort of institutional or bureaucratic reasoning. I've found in my life that the wisdom of authority can't be relied on in full.
In this view Enlightenment reason represents not rebellion but the establishment of a procedural means of adjudicating moral disagreement, where no authority is immune from scrutiny.
The conservative would say, however, that there is no such thing as a universal rational standpoint, to stand outside the competing views and adjudicate between them.
Reason always operates within inherited languages, moral frameworks, and social practices that give it meaning.
Thus reason in the Enlightenment becomes less of a neutral arbiter and more of an explicit paradigm in its own right.
This hubris manifests in the recurring modern impulse to replace evolved moral orders with ideological systems, each promising universal justice and ending in tyranny.
Sure. Although we've progressed beyond mere enlightenment... :wink: So we accept reason as not being neutral, and ask, "What's the alternative?" Do we wish, then, to be unreasonable?
And so the question becomes more about what sort of person each of us would be. What do we want the world to be like?
Is it just to be my forcing my tradition on to you? What happens if we follow that path?
Reasoning is always situated. it is always already shaped by language, history, and moral tradition.
This means that all reasoning proceeds from within a perspective.
So - to appeal to reason to negotiate different perspectives is impossible, there is no neutral reason which can be an arbiter of different perspectives.
So, you ask, what's the alternative?
You say that if reason cannot be neutral the only alternative is unreason but this is a false choice.
The alternative therefore is that we must base our reasoning on our own traditional virtues.
Reason divorced from virtue can err disastrously, just as unpracticed moral intuition can. Thus, a human being guided by prudence, justice, temperance, and courage can reason well within both moral and social life, even knowing that reason is limited.
Sure. Quoting Colo Millz
Yep.
Quoting Colo Millz
But we don't need a neutral perspective; only an agreed perspective.
Quoting Colo Millz
Not quite. I asked, somewhat facetiously, if that is what you were proposing.
Quoting Colo Millz
Why must? Couldn't you decide to base your reasoning on Hindu Scripture? On Mohist logic? On Rawls' Vail of Ignorance? Is there more here than mere inertia? I guess that'd be fine, but it's not the same as asserting that your traditions are the best, or the right ones. Would "We've always done it that way" be enough for you to die in a ditch for?
Is there some cultural smorgasbord we can all choose from, as if we are autonomous individuals with the leisure and expertise required?
Are you overlooking the possibility that some traditions are morally better or worse than others? I would give some examples but I don't want anyone to accuse me of being extreme.
Quoting Banno
[i]Thought Experiment:
Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to lookit looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditionsgood weather, good hotel room, good food, good guidebe a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain.[/i]
Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book . Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
[i]1. Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty.
2. Individuals, families, tribes, and nations compete for honor, importance, and influence, until a threat or a common endeavor recalls them to the mutual loyalties that bind them to one another.
3. Families, tribes, and nations are hierarchically structured, their members having importance and influence to the degree they are honored within the hierarchy.
4. Language, religion, law, and the forms of government and economic activity are traditional institutions, developed by families, tribes, and nations as they seek to strengthen their material prosperity, internal integrity, and cultural inheritance and to propagate themselves through future generations.
5. Political obligation is a consequence of membership in families, tribes, and nations.
6. These premises are derived from experience, and may be challenged and improved upon in light of experience.[/i]
Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (pp. 100-101). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I think the series of premises is a far more accurate social paradigm than any similar premises of Enlightenment liberalism.
It is an assumption of Enlightenment liberalism that "all men are free and equal by nature".
But this is neither empirically true nor self-evidently true.
It might be an idea to treat it as an aspiration rather than a statement of fact - perhaps as "We should treat all men as equal, for the purposes of the Law".
As in, what sort of world do you want - one in which we are equal under the law? Or something else.
And the crux here is that we are making choices.
My choices for a basis of appropriate action are not limited to general truths established by reason and inherited traditions. There is the matter of what might be called personal conscience. Here is a quote I often use when this kind of question comes up. It's from Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).
I recognize the issue of humans using reason to justify all sorts of foolish, destructive, evil, poisonous things. This is what Emerson has to say about that in "Self-Reliance."
Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don't anticipate you will find this argument compelling. I acknowledge this is more applicable to personal morality than social and political action. It seems to me that the "gradual moral self-correction" you describe often, probably mostly, and maybe always arises from the personal conscience of a significant number of people.
Having said that, even as a liberal registered Democrat in the US, I believe reform should emerge within the framework of inherited traditions not so much because that will lead to better, more moral, choices, but because that is the only way it can be accomplished. Has any significant political change that tosses out the existing social and political order ever succeeded? Is that even possible? I think about the gay rights movement and the drive for marriage equality. That was finally accomplished by judicial fiat and it now it is approved in almost all states, even the most conservative ones. So I guess my answer is "I'm not sure."
Quoting Colo Millz
And, of course, the answer is "both." I don't think my Democratic Party has done a very good job of recognizing that over the last couple of decades, but the Republican Party teaching children about the benefits of slavery to black slaves is probably not the right answer either.
As I said in my first post, a great OP.
Both assume mankind is collectively improvable, and that the political means are the only way to achieve it. But the fact that 6000 or so years of both trial-and-error and pure reason have been applied to every conceivable form of political and moral order, yet have produced very few noticeable results, it ought to have informed all parties a little better.
I think it does.
But do we have to always pit the liberal against the traditional?
Conservatism sees itself exactly as a way of negotiating those differences too.
We need to use both poles to have any chance of negotiating any differences and making progress.
We make both progress and tradition. Thats how progress works. Thats what tradition is - a tradition of making progres is best.
When there is no forward progress then at the same time, there is nothing to conserve; if you lose either one, you lose both.
Banno, you should reasonably agree. You spoke of liberalism as the negotiat[ed] (unified, conserved) among the differences (changing, progressing).
Quoting Colo Millz
Interesting. Number six is a bit of an odd man out. Its better suited to liberalism, dont you think? I myself lean conservative but only because todays liberals wont be reasonable.
But would a deeply conservative English colonial traditionalist living in 1775 Philadelphia have thought of leaving England as a good?
I admit conservatives of the day didnt forge the United Ststes. They were liberals, and they were right.
Thank God for liberal change.
Just dont forget to thank God (as is tradition).
Quoting Banno
What do you mean? Conservatives should be ashamed of being conservative? Or its a shame you two wont likely get along much because you are more liberal and would beg to differ with those 5 or 6 items?
And I dont agree with that list as stated either.
Conservatives merely find the good in what is now, and they are grateful. What is good now is therefore, there to be preserved, to protect, and to conserve. Family, tribe nation are good and it is the peace from even a sliver of present goodness that drives conservation efforts. (Make American great again says it was good enough once and were ruining something precious we should be trying to preserve.)
Liberals, on the other hand, are more inclined to look at what is bad now and seek to find something new and better, to progress. But progress is a positive, a good, much like the good that can be conserved in gratitude. So until progress is finished, liberals preserve and conserve the fight, and fiery activity of change, resisting the present badness.
So both liberals and conservatives chase the same good, working to preserve certain states of activity, just one is directed towards the present (traditionalist) and the other is directed into the future (progressive).
Conservatives and Liberals both have the same relationship with the past; they both find in the past what they find in the present, namely, conservatives see the good in the past, like liberals see the bad in the past.
So conservatives see the good in the present and lean to conserve present things that build a traditional that can then be seen carved into history (the past). Whereas liberals see the bad in the present, institutionalize the badness in the past, and lean towards carving badness out and building new futures.
Extreme leftists are those who dont see any good in the present and need to tear down any obstacles (and they lose sight of good future goals - and you get Russia, China, Cuba, etc.). And the extreme right are those who dont see any bad in their small tribe in the present and seek to prevent any change whatsoever, even if one must destroy all of the ungrateful tribe members (losing all sense of family and what was good in the first place).
Both extremes are shit for brains.
We each are, at times, conservative, and at times, liberal. (That is what western democracy is really made of to me - the unification of liberal and conservative impulses under law in a republic.). People all left alone to make their own private kingdoms to share in the town center as each chooses, but under the law all have ratified.
Quoting Colo Millz
Are you saying you are more conservative than the US Declaration of Independence? Thats like yes kings conservative.
I still dont think its a shame - although I think its foolish. (No shame because fools are everywhere).
We are stuck with the polis - the city, the political board, the laws and social congress. Equality, and freedom are made - and the government we make to allow us such opportunity, but shall not impede anyone any more or any less than all the others.
No one who is wise thinks the US constitution isnt brilliant. We have thousands of years of data showing kings are a crap shoot at best. And over a hundred years of data showing communism and socialism havent allowed more people to be their own masters.
No right to life and liberty and equality before the law is not smart conservatism. Today, such leanings come more from the left than right. The types of kings we get today are communist dictators, not monarchs.
Quoting NOS4A2
One clear one is the US Constitution if you ask me.
Your post quoting Hazony got me thinking about the context of his ideas. It seems to me that at the core of the conservative approach, like the progressive one, lies the desire to find a universal truthsome moral or political compass that could serve as a guide for all.
Our era of globalization reinforces this desire: in a world where borders are blurring, it seems logical to seek a single system of values ??that could unite humanity. However, history shows that such attempts often lead to the expansion of some ideas at the expense of others, often through force, as with colonialism or ideological revolutions, or as continues today through the intervention of some states in others.
What if the problem lies in the question itself? What if the search for a single truth is the wrong goal? Instead of a hierarchical model where truth is imposed from above (be it tradition, as in Hazony, or the rational principles of the Enlightenment), one might propose considering a networked view of society.
In this model, meanings, values, and "truths" are formed locallyin communities, families, or even at the individual level. For example, each individual or group can create their own moral compass, which interacts with but is not subordinated to a single center. This would avoid the trap of universalism, preserving diversity and freedom.
My idea may be utopian and requires further refinement, but it suggests abandoning the construction of "pyramids"whether traditional or rationalisticand reconsidering the very approach to the formation of moral and political systems. What do you think about this shift in perspective?
I dont think a document suffices, personally, especially one that allows slavery.
Thats the idea of the US Constitution. Constrain government power - to let people control their lives locally.
Of course 250 years later the government has taken over quite a bit (which really means stupid people have given their power back to the government quite a bit) - but your utopian vision is a constitution of limited government. This is what todays revolutionaries want to throw away.
It's paradoxical, isn't it? Maybe the problem lies in anthropology? I'm referring to this greedy expansion of meanings.
I can't speak for everyone, but observing my own behavior, I've noticed that as soon as something is revealed to me, I immediately rush to share it. With loved ones or even on this forum. I think I'm not alone in this; otherwise, neither books nor even language would exist.
So, if we look at the situation using my utopian approach, we'll come back to the same thing.
People have had enough time to become smart and create something great, but apparently, the way we live now (including both the good and the bad, the struggle of ideas and the struggle of meanings) is the smartest possible way.
So Hazony has got a whole chapter on the American Revolution and Constitution where he argues that the eventual result was a "restoration" of the original Anglo-American tradition, rather than a radical Enlightenment break from it in the style of the French Revolution.
In this argument he portrays Hamilton as the traditionalist and Jefferson as the Enlightenment radicalist, with Hamilton the eventual winner (Constitution) and Jefferson the runner-up (Declaration of Independence).
The Federalists of the 1780s and 1790s were not radicals who considered America a clean slate on which they could try out new schemes devised by the philosophers of the Age of Reason. They came to abhor Jefferson and others who favored such schemes, especially after 1789, when these were increasingly identified with the murderous policies of the French Revolution. The Federalists understood that the freedom of Americans was a gift of the British constitutional tradition and the English common law, which had been incorporated into American colonial law, often formally so in the constitutions of the colonies. Indeed, it is telling that in the four years prior to independence, no fewer than twenty-one editions of Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of England had been published in America. And when the thirteen newly independent states turned to writing their own constitutions after 1776, these were to a significant extent designed on the pattern of the English system of dispersed power, with a strong executive balanced by a bicameral legislature and an independent court system.
Hazony, Yoram. Conservatism: A Rediscovery (pp. 46-47). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
So he would argue that the American Revolution was really not at its heart an Enlightenment project at all.
Now to the language of the Declaration itself, it holds that rights are "inalienable" and this indeed suggests that they are clear to all men and women by virtue of reason - they are universals regardless of whatever tradition we encounter.
And I am sympathetic to this idea, I think much more than Hazony is.
You see, these ideas are good as a guarantee of protection against outside encroachment on any of these rights. Which turns out to be a huge fake. They claim you can live, and your life is sacred, but only as long as you live by the rules of respect for this very ideology. As soon as you start thinking or speaking outside this liberal paradigm, you're in big trouble.
The problem of modernity, as I see it, is somewhat different. It's that no one is supposedly encroaching on your freedom from everything, but in this aspiration, you can go so deep that the very need to be disappears. I mean to be someonea father, a mother, a man, a woman.
And everyone sees this problem, or rather, feels it and names it in their own way, seeking salvation in tradition or reason.
The essence of my idea is that freedom from everything has ultimately turned out to be, perhaps, the stupidest of human creations.
However, there's no reason to worry. The lack of tradition will quickly be replaced by those other guys (with plenty of tradition), as I wrote yesterday "bearded and with tambourines."
Yes I think this is the key - the grownups recognize that both poles are required - it's just a question of where the Vital Center is located, relative to the current Overton Window
I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic.
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, p.110.
It is tragic because it views the attempt to reach absolutes via human reason to be a doomed project of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel.
Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.
I think that is true if you look at people as a group. History repeats itself in many different facades.
But there are individuals who truly live well. (At least I hope so.) They are saints.
Whether the writers of the constitution knew it or not, limited government allows the individual to figure out how to live such an individual good life. Even if most of us squander the opportunity.
Like three co-equal branches of government that must compromise with each other, in order to limit government so that people can be freer to trade-off with each other?
All things people build are tragic. We dont build - we try to build. That is not just a problem for conservatives.
I would not say the center is more important than the poles. At times, conservative, at other times liberal, and at other times a blend.
Im not a big fan of consensus for consensus sake. Consensus is merely pragmatic when needed for convincing people to act. Consensus is not an end in itself. Consensus and the center is like more evidence of usefulness.
Quoting Colo Millz
Well, it's worth noting that Hamilton himself, while one of the more conservative Founders in some respects, is also within the broader liberal, Enlightenment tradition. Since, you pointed to MacIntyre, I think it's important to note that many liberal conservatives are still very much within the "Enlightenment tradition's" particular form of rationality.
Have you read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed? Its pretty good on this topic in pointing out the ways conservative liberalism undermines itself. Its commitment to Enlightenment forms of rationality and its epistemic presuppositions, and even more so its commitment to the "free market" and liberal political-economy (and its particular, arguably tragic anthropology) ultimately leads to policies that undermine the very social structures, religions, values, etc. that conservativism attempts to conserve. That is, arguably nothing has done more to erode "Western culture" (commitment to the canon, etc.) and traditional social norms than capitalism, and yet this is precisely what conservative liberalism often tries to promote.
Deneen doesn't get at this, but there is a strong connection in the Anglophone world between Protestantism and liberalism, and arguably conservative Protestantism has a similar issue where its tenants undermine its own deep structures (just consider how Luther or Calvin would react to their traditions today, or the fracturing into 38,000+ denominations).
However, traditionalists are also "conservative" and I would say that many of them have a view that, by contrast, renders Enlightenment progressive liberalism "tragic." The view that the Platonist tradition, the Patristics, or the Scholastics held of reason was much more expansive than that of the Enlightenment. Reason had the power for real ecstasis and union with the Good, Beautiful, and True. It could transform us through a sort of knowing by becoming that terminated (often with the aid of grace, even in Pagan neoplatonism) in theosis. Key issues in Enlightenment epistemology and ethics never come up because the nous has a real union with Being and it possess its own erotic appetites that lead it upwards and properly order it (Dante's Commedia is a fantastic example here, or Boethius' Consolation).
And yet, this earlier tradition tends to have an even greater regard for tradition than conservative liberalism. Why? I think a big part of it has to do with the different framing of reason. What is truly most worth knowing and doing is not limited to wholly discursive, instrumental reason and techne. Episteme is not the terminus of knowledge and in a way it is less sure than noesis / gnosis. You can also see this in Eastern thought and its own response to modernity.
An irony here is that the instrumental reason of modern conservatism (often wed to fideism precisely because discursive ratio only gets you so far) is described in Dante, the Greek Fathers, etc. specifically as "demonic" and "diabolical," and this comes out in traditionalist attacks on capitalism and the fetishization of science as mere pragmatism.
Quoting Colo Millz
Right, but consider here Dostoevsky's concern over the goals of the new social physics and liberalism as a sort of "reverse Tower of Babel," attempting to bring heaven down to Earth by force. His answer here is very different from that of Western conservatives.
[Quote]Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.[/quote]
Right, and I would argue that the dominance of the anthropology of liberal political-economy in contemporary thought and culture is underappreciated. Homo oecononimicus haunts the steps of almost all modern social theory. But it is itself hardly an "empirical finding" we are led to "by the facts." Indeed, it emerges before most of the robust data collection and analysis tools of economics even existed. It is instead and interpretive lens through which any human behavior is analyzed. In that sense, it is every bit as unfalsifiable as Marxist economic axioms (a point many economists have allowed). And yet the language of Homo oecononimicus leaks into romantic advice, parenting advice, lifestyle advice, etc. There is an interesting theological origin for this view of man that folks like John Milbank have traced, with it coming out of John Calvin's tradition. It's a good example of how rationality itself (the "rational utility maximizer") is defined within a sort of aesthetic and "theological" context (even if the dominant theology now denies or privatizes God, it has essentially stayed the same and just moved man into his role).
Definitely on the list
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Could you elaborate this, this is an interesting thought and I am v interested in Dostoyevsky.
Sure; the most famous place where Dostoevsky uses this image is in the Grand Inquisitor, which is a short story within the Brother's Karamazov told by Ivan Karamazov (the Enlightenment rational athiest). Ivan has just been giving his brother Alyosha (a novice monk) a litany of horrible and disgusting things that have happened to innocent children. His point here is not so much that these challenge belief in God (although that is also implied) but that no "happy ending" is worth such grotesque suffering. God has demanded too much of man, and allowed far too much evil. Hence, he must "humbly return [his] ticket" to Paradise, for he will not participate in what no one has any right to condone.
The story then is about Christ coming to Spain during the Inquisition and bring taken prisoner. A high ranking church official then tells him that he had asked far too much of people. "Feed them first" and then ask for spiritual development. Christ's freedom (the vision in traditional Christianity, a sort of diefication, the transcendence of man's own finitude) is too hard. At best, perhaps only a few spiritual athletes can attain to it. And yet the people suffer and still fall into vice and sin.
The Inquisitor charges that by rejecting the temptations of Satan in the desert, Christ rejected the three things that truly move the masses: bread (economic security), miracles (irrational comfort), and power (political authority). The Inquisitor has accepted them, and so can lead man to happiness through a "nobel lie."
Christ does not respond to these charges, but simply kisses the Inquisitor. When the story returns to the two brothers, Alyosha kisses Ivan and walks away. There is a lot going on here but part of Dostoevsky's point is that Christ shows us a new way forward. There is still the Platonist idea that out desire for what is truly best (as opposed to what merely appears good to us, or is said to be good by others) and for what is really true, is precisely what allows us to move continually beyond current beliefs and desires, to transcend our own finitude, and to become more fully a self-determining whole. The love of the Good and Beautiful brings us beyond ourselves. But Christ also shows a way to transcend the finitude of the self through sacrificial love (as against the wholly instrumental approach to happiness seen in Ivan or in Crime and Punishment). Christ does not remove suffering to make us merely content, but transfigures suffering, and invites us into this process (a very Eastern view).
There is a lot more there. Rowan Williams book on Dostoevsky is quite good here. I liked David Bentley Hart's book "The Gates of the Sea" which uses the Brothers Karamazov as its main inspiration for addressing theodicy as well.
Anyhow, Peter Theil of all people pointed this out in an interview when he said something like: "the Eastern Orthodox view is actually far more radical than transhumanism, since it implies an even greater transformation of the person." I think that's exactly right. Interestingly, the first usage of "transhumanize" in a Western language comes from Canto I of the Paradiso, where Dante describes what must happen to him for him to move beyond the utopian "Earthly Paradise" atop Mount Purgatory and attain to union with the Beloved.
This is interesting as a contrast for liberal utopianism because transhumanism really helps to bring the contradictions it faces into focus.
Interestingly, by the part in the poem where Dante must be "transhumanized," he has already been purified, and in making it to the "Earthly Paradise," has returned to the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve (Dante, following the Patristics, seems to see this higher state as "natural" to man, and our unfallen state as unnatural). The Paradiso is really a sort of "going beyond," which is perhaps why Beatrice, the erotic other, now has to lead Dante instead of Virgil (human reason). Earlier, Virgil tells Dante that he has reached a state that many transhumanists fantasize about, the perfection of the human will such as to overcome weakness of will. Virgil tells Dante:
[I]Await no further word or sign from me:
your will is free, erect, and wholeto act
against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you over yourself. [/I]
Purgatorio Canto 27 139-142 (Musa)
But for Dante this freedom also requires being internally ordered towards the Good, True, and Beautiful, towards God. For the transhumanists, who tend to be "exclusive humanists," it often seems hard to know what the "ultimate end" is that one would be oriented towards if we somehow had "perfect control" over our own desires. Often, it is either "pleasure" (although allowing for "higher pleasures" á la Mill) or else a sort of sheer voluntarist drive for power (so well lampooned in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet).
Harry Frankfurt has a famous paper about "second-order volitions," the desire to have or not have certain other desires. Having these, and being able to make them effective, does seem like an essential element of any truly rational, self-determining freedom. Otherwise, all our "freedom" would amount to is the instrumental ordering of whatever desires we just so happen to have started with, based on which are the strongest (e.g., Nietzsche's"congress of souls"). That is, must [I] understand[/I] our desires as good, and [I]choose[/I] them on that account. Without some ordering principle, it's hard to see what could drive our decision to prioritize "having one desire" over any others though, and this is the problem for post-humanism; we transcend man towards what? What makes it "utopian" instead of something like A Brave New World (whose residents see their own society as excellent)? If it's just the fulfillment of desire, we face an arbitrary multiplicity of ends, many seemingly horrific to our eyes today.
That seems to me like an interesting fault line here. D.C. Schindler's "Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty" advances the thesis that modernity has tended to define freedom in terms of power/potency (i.e., the ability to choose anything) as opposed to the classical "self-determining capacity to actualize and communicate the Good." The difficulty with a goal of technological, utopian "self-mastery" within the context of the modern vision is that it's not clear exactly what a perfectly "free" super-human ought to seek here. I imagine that would carry over for AI too. If we are orienting AI towards its aims, what are we orienting it towards?
The author R. Scott Bakker had a relevant short story that was published in the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy a while back about the risks of having the ability to essentially "hack our own brains," called Crashspace." It is quite graphic and disturbing for a journal article, but the basic story about people losing control of themselves and committing murder because they are continually messing with their own motivations and desires is an interesting fictionalization of the risks here (although I think people already do this sort of thing with drugs and alcohol, and "better living through chemistry" is sometimes a slogan transhumanists use vis-a-vis "performance enhancing" drug use).
Point being, "utopia" is extremely fraught without some ordering principle, and I think Dostoevsky understands that, but also the infinite value of true freedom, which, as even the Platonists understood, is to "become like onto God."
Wow thank you. I had actually read The Brothers Karamazov but not for a long time, and needed to be reminded of what you were getting at in your first post, which is Christ's
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I have also read DBH's The Doors of the Sea it's super.
However I have not thought about these things in the way you are presenting here it is going to take me some time and reading to digest this perspective.
I guess my initial response is to echo the conservative skepticism re: any "u-topia", i.e. "no-place".
Thus even if we say
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought.
As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky.
You never cease to amaze and delight me.
Unfortunately, I've met few Russians who understand their culture as well as you do.
Rather, this idea of ??non-resistance to suffering is not so much understood as experienced and accepted on a sensory level in Dostoevskys homeland.
For sure. I don't see how it ever could be. Enlightenment thought is in part defined by its blanket denial of noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology. Empiricism is particularly robust in its axiomatic denial here (e.g., Hume just asserts it as a given in the opening books of the Treaties, even though his own epistemology forbids his knowing that this is "how the mind works," and Kant makes human reason discursive through sheer definition).
I got into this comparative difference for our essay competition recently: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15990/tpf-essay-dante-and-the-deflation-of-reason/p1 (it might be easier to read the short or long version with the links).
Quoting Colo Millz
Valid, no. For even on the view that Christ is the fullness of revelation, this does not mean that there is no revelation elsewhere. As Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans (1:20), the signs of the divine are everywhere"written on the Book of Nature" as it would later be put.
Since Christ is the Logos, all reason is a participation in Christ, and yet not all reason recognizes this. Indeed, this must be revealed historically, and illuminated through faith for most Christian thinkers. The perennialists often go too far in flattening different traditions to make them into a single unified philosophy, and so produce strange fictions like the "Buddhist" or "Gnostic" Meister Eckhart or Eriugena, but they do get at something quite deep and apparent in the confluences across the world's great wisdom traditions. Here, it is Western modernity that stands out as an outlier, in that varieties of virtue ethics dominated across the East and West, and an ultimate metaphysical grounding of the Good in a sort of knowledge that becomes self-knowledge is a common factor. Yet even the Epicureans, who come closest to the dominant modern metaphysics, do not face the issue of the modern irreducible plurality of goods that forces ethics to transform from primarily a dialectic of higher versus lower desires (or appearances versus reality) into one of "the self-interested subject versus the society" (a dialectic of "goods which diminish when shared" and so one of irreducible competition). This is because they don't face the same sorts of epistemic limitations that make any questions of value or metaphysics maximally distal uncertain (or even a matter of mere taste).
Charles Taylor is pretty good on the epistemic inversion that drives the problem here.
I think the Good as a unifying principle for ethics and politics can be found in many places, although in more or less full development. Boethius, for instance, relies solely on philosophy in the Consolation, and I think he gets us quite far. Virgil, a symbol of human reason and Pagan learning, also gets Dante to a sort of finite utopia in the Comedy.
In the past, I've tried to look at how a recognition of this in Aristotle could help to inform modern empiricist attempts to "ground ethics," such as Sam Harris project. However, I think Plato's psychological outline is probably the most accessible. There is, to my mind, a fairly obvious sense in which, in order to consistently seek virtue (at the individual or political level), we must establish "the rule of the rational part of the soul," such that our desire for Truth and Goodness comes to rule over and reshape our "lower" desires. Otherwise, our pursuit of virtue will always be accidental, only occuring when truth and goodness just so happen to line up with our "lower desires." There is a sense in which virtue is a prerequisite for freedom and one must be "free to choose the good" in order to choose it. The Enlightenment move to define freedom in terms of power/potency instead of actuality essentially inverts this however.
So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway.
Likewise:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I need to explore this capacity because I don't quite know what it is.
I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".
It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity.
The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all.
Well, the ordering principle would be the rational appetites, i.e., the desire for what is really true and truly good (as opposed to merely appearing so, or a sort of "pragmatism" ordered to sensual or emotional desires). But it's important to note that these would have been considered essential to reason itself, such that this is really just "reason" leading as a principle. For instance, in Aquinas, orientation towards the Good and Truevirtuejust is action in accordance with "right reason," even if it might also be considered a sort of participation in divine love (as it is more explicitly in Saint Maximus the Confessor).
That is, logos must lead, generally through thymos (spiritedness, the desire for honor, recognition, social goods, etc.), over epithumia (sensual desires re pain and pleasure). This sort of "logos narrative" can be seen in negative form in Homer (in the insufficiency of thymos in the Iliad) and the role of logos in ordering Odysseus towards the good of his oikos (household), such that he abandons the pleasures of epithumia (unending life and material comforts with a beautiful lover) even though all the demands of thymos have already been met. And it's stronger in the Aeneid, with Aeneas ordered to thymos and the historical telos of Rome (justice), but mature form comes out in Boethius, Dante, etc.
Whereas, modern literature reveals what undermines this "logos narrative." First, reason loses these ordering desires, becoming merely instrumental, but moreover "sealed off" from being (it is no longer participatory). This leads to a sort of straightjacket intellectualism where discursive human reason is never able to attain to direct contact with its object. You see this in characters like Hamlet ("nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"), Ivan Karamazov, etc. And then, because of this first pathology, you get a voluntarist strain, best represented by Milton's Satan ("the mind is its own place, and in it self/can make a Heav'n of Hell or a Hell of Heav'n). Because being outside the self is unknowable, the will becomes its own object, and sheer self-assertion the purest freedom. A Brave New World is a good societal view of the first issue, because it is a hyper-rational society that can see no good outside the immediacy of sensual pleasure, while 1984 is a great example of the sheer worship of power.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, and it's very hard to escape the caricatures of it as "you just know," a sort of sheer groundless assertion. Yet that is definitely not what Plato is getting at, nor are the Patristics or Scholastics generally fideists or sentimentalists. That's why I think the easiest way to track down this "lost notion" is through the role of the rational appetites in someone like Plato.
I like how I Robert M. Wallace frames this in more accessible modern terms. The relevant "higher experience" here isn't some sort of rare "peak experience," but rather something open to all. This is supported by phenomenological and psychological exploration that secures the metaphysical grounding. Yet, in the older tradition, one could also be more or less unified in the way described, and more or less attuned to and faithful to "what is higher in oneself," and so the measure of wisdom and virtue is that saint or sage, not the "dispassioned, properly skeptical (not "enthusiastic") salon-going everyman of the enlightenment" (or the ironical cynic of the postmodern moment).
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, but it is worth considering how Kant and Hume secure the claim that human reason is wholly discursive. Afterall, their claims run counter to the great sages of both East and West. What sort of discursive argument or empirical observation can justify such a move? It's hard for me to imagine what the answer could be.
The common critique is that none does in their work. Hume just asserts that it is so in the first two books of the Treaties and then follows out the implications of this from there. Indeed, according to his own epistemology, Hume cannot possibly know "how the mind works" in the ways he claims to. Likewise, Kant simply assumes that human reason is discursive by definition.
To be sure, Enlightenment thinkers can appeal to introspection. The problem is that this is exactly what all the past thinkers do as well (and they both make transcendental arguments, e.g. Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being," Plotinus, etc.). For instance, Plato is careful to "guide us through" a sort of form of thinking, rather than asserting his position, and in this he is arguably less dogmatic.
To my mind, it's obvious that no reasoning process can be wholly discursive. One must start with something. The Enlightenment move is to try to make such intuitions "obvious to all" but I am not sure if this is successful, in part because what is "obvious to all" seems to be historically conditioned by traditions themselves (e.g., Hume gets away with his assumptions because they are already popular). Whereas, the total abandonment of any intuition, what you see in more post-modern assertions of "pragmatism all the way down" (i.e., even math and logic are ultimately just games chosen based upon usefulness) doesn't actually remove claims to intuition, so much as it absolutize them by making "usefulness" a sort of unanalyzable metaphysical primitive.
Anyhow, while the argument was originally that noesis must be forsaken because different traditions (say, Hindu and Catholic) couldn't agree, then sheer discursive reason has proven no better in this respect. Liberalism, fascism, Marxism, etc. have been no less violent in asserting themselves, and no better at agreeing. Marxism is a great example because it now seems obviously historically contingent, and yet for so many, until relatively recently, its truths were simply what dispassioned pure reason and the data of history inevitably led one to believe (and yet now we tend to see it as the semi-religion it was for many practitioners).
You're too kind. I don't really know Russian culture that well, I just have some Russian authors and thinkers I quite like. To be honest, while Dostoevsky frames things in unique terms appropriate to the "crises of modernity," I think a lot of the "solution" he slowly and painfully works out can be found in a heritage that is common to Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the Near East and North Africa. Unfortunately, I think this set of ideas ("tradition" would be a fair label) has largely been overshadowed. So, it isn't a uniquely Russian problem to have lost touch with it. It's true in Catholicism too for example, despite a decades long movement to renew interest in the Patristics and the East and West's shared heritage which has been championed by successive popes (I think it was Pope Benedict who called the East and West the "two lungs" of the Faith).
I suppose there are lots of reasons for this. Charles Taylor's stuff about closed world systems probably gets at the intellectual side, but I also think it is also very hard for a heritage that is so contemplative (the Pagan parts and those from Judaism and Islam too) to reach people in our fast-paced and stimulus saturated world. There is a sort of positive feedback loop here too. These ideas tend to be missing from popular media (novels, movies, video games, music, etc.), whereas ideas that were originally self-conscious inversions of the old forms do have a strong presence in popular culture. There are counter-examples like the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, they are just vastly outnumbered.
Interesting. As a completely narrow apologetic for capitalism, (given the much deeper topic you go on to discuss here), isnt the friction between capitalism and tradition a function more of the individual who is trying to be capitalist while trying to be traditionalist? Or to ask this another way, are you pointing to something essential to capitalism that puts it at odds with a traditional conservative, or is it just the unethical capitalist who causes friction with the types of goods traditionalists seek to conserve?
My sense is that capitalism positions the individual best in relation to the government. That is its core value. It alone can fund government of the people, by the people, for the people. It may create challenges when the individual capitalist is positioned against ones employees, ones customers, and ones society, and maybe ones God, but if these are managed privately according to traditional goods, the capitalist system keeps individuals freer than any other economic system I know with respect to government.
I think I am disagreeing with any necessary or essential causal connection between erosion of traditional norms and the rise of capitalism. It isnt capitalism that has eroded western norms. The norms were always aspirational for individuals, not groups, and these norms were always truly practiced by too few. Capitalism doesnt necessarily aid in the fostering of traditional norms either. But it forces one to grapple with charity and humility as one rises out of poverty. It has always been hard for a rich man to enter Gods kingdom, but it has never been impossible.
Deneen is pretty good on this, and I won't be able to sum it up as good as he does. He uses the Amish as a contrast point. The Amish don't use insurance. Prima facie, insurance does not necessarily require any special technological innovation that the Amish might eschew. However, they reject it because it takes the burden of caring for the unfortunate away from the community and displaces it to the anonymous market. It allows misfortune to shift from a communal problem to that of the atomized individual consumer, who must make wise consumption choices in balancing future risks against current consumption. It is bad for the community, and that is the standard they use to judge the adoption of new practices. Whereas, under capitalist competition, there is a sense that one is forced to adopt new technologies regardless of if one thinks they are beneficial, since to not do so would be to lose competitive advantage.
You can see the displacement of community and institutions by the market in all areas of everyday life. Where once people relied on friends and family to pick each other up at the airport, or drive each other to the bus station, now there is Uber. This relationship is now marketized and anonymized. So too, where once people made meals for the sick, bereaved, or those who had just had children, now there is a host of services that will deliver meals to them, or they can simply use Door Dash, etc. Likewise, childcare is increasingly anonymized and marketized. People use app-based systems to find babysitters, they hire "sleep consultants" to help them with cranky babies because relatives no longer live close enough to offer guidance. Romance is no different, where once there were community "matchmakers" (often centered in the church) now there are dating apps, etc.
One upshot of this is that it increases inequality. Those who can pay get all the benefits of community with none of the costs. Those who can't pay lose community, and get the insecurity of the gig work of providing its benefits to the wealthy to boot.
Obviously, something very similar happens with the balkanization of entertainment and prohibitions on public festivals, etc. so as not to impede the "flow of commerce." Something like the Liturgy of the Hours, once a staple of urban Christian life (even if many did not attend) or the Muslim daily prayers is pushed out by the demands of capitalist competition.
This is a goal of capitalism though. Everywhere becomes everywhere else, aided by the destruction of cultural barriers and the free flow of labor and goods across all borders. This standardization only helps growth, and it helps attain the liberal ideal of freedom by dislodging the individual from the "constriction" of tradition and culture. Indeed, we do a great deal in terms of education and urban planning to try to positively engineer people into becoming ever more the "atomized utility maximizer" that liberalism says they are. When foreign peoples fail to live up to this standard and start falsifying supposedly universal economic theories, the move is generally to declare their behaviors as "impediments to growth" that must be overcome.
For a last example, consider minimum lot size requirements and minimum parking requirements, which have helped turn America's suburbs and strip malls into wholly unwalkable isolated islands of private dwellings and private businesses. This is exactly the physical architecture you create if your goal is the atomized individual chooser that liberalism says man is (and that traditionalism generally says he isn't). It's also exactly the sort of physical architecture you'd expect for a country with a "loneliness epidemic." Whereas, if you go to the surviving old town centers of Europe, or a place like the Azore's, you find a sort of compact, if chaotic net with places of commerce tightly wrapped around a core common area and old church; a very different landscape.
Finally, just consider how much people must move to keep up with the capitalist economy. That alone destroys community. All the people I know who are committed careerists in the upper echelon of society have bounced around America's major urban centers in order to continue advancing (this also makes raising children a major liability). Then, on the opposite end, rural areas and rust belt towns, denuded of work by globalization, see all their young people fleeing to find work (which also destroys communities). Maybe it is worth the benefits, but conducive to "conserving tradition" it is not.
You reminded me of the opinion of one amateur philosopher from the 80s:
https://youtu.be/sPLc4hLD3ts?si=JGQqfTqgHXO7XwDR
I'm both impressed and horrified by the fact that for people living in completely different corners of our planet, the problems look the same. There are differences in methodology, approaches, and justifications, but the underlying sense of a shared misfortune is unified. This proves that, at least to me, it's not all just me imagining things.
P.S. When I'm in Semipalatinsk, I'll be sure to send you a couple of photos from the Dostoevsky Museum, where he spent five years in exile and became the "late" Dostoevsky.
I forgot another core part: the marketization anonyminitization of these moves also requires phenomenal state intervention since personal relationships, shame, the threat of losing access to the community (fatal in prior times), norms, etc. can no longer regulate such "transactions." Hence, a massive state must grow up to reduce the friction points between now atomized individuals, to issue licenses for all sorts of marginal professions because trust and reputation have been dramatically reduced, etc.
Hence, the champions of "small government" find themselves wed to the very process by which government must continually grow, such that it is now massively (on orders of magnitude) more invasive to the average person's life than at any prior point in history (when the norm was to hardly ever interact with anyone outside one's local officials).
For instance, transfer payments to older "workers" now dominate the budgets of modern states and have driven their wild deficits because relatives no longer take care of the aged and the default that people have been made to expect (and which our architecture promotes) is that seniors and young parents live in atomized consumer households (increasingly as single worker/consumer parents who shuttle the children between households as a normal).
An interesting facet here is that, because the procedural is generally elevated in the name of "fairness" (the liberal substitute for justice), pension benefits are normally entirely based on how much money you earned previously and no other factor. Whereas in prior epochs people might worry about their future of they alienated their family and community, money now becomes the overwhelming concern.
This is exactly why abstract reasoning should take precedence over empirical observations.
Because, due to human subjectivity and limitations, science will always be a mirage disguised as truth. We'll never learn the objective truth or reality, and we'll never have a finalized, reasonable conclusion. But between the two, the latter is more preferable, especially at the individual level. Whenever we attempt to collectivize something, it spirals into chaos.
Alam, T. B. (2025). The Terminal Truth: On the Economy of Existence [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17378531
Quoting Colo Millz
Youre referring only to a subset of progressives, those at the conservative end of the progressive spectrum. Youve left out those who subscribe to philosophical positions which put into question notions like abstract reason, universal rights, moral equality and timeless, objective truth. Follow the lineage from Hazoni to MacIntyre to Juergen Habermas to Charles Taylor to Richard Rorty.
Quoting Colo Millz
Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure?
According to the Gospels, the arrival of Jesus triggered a clash between a hidebound religious elite and a revolutionary advocate for the common people. Traditions stand good until they don't. Civilizations die, and new ones are born. I don't believe the staunchest conservative would be content to thoroughly regress back to the culture and society of even one hundred years ago.
On the flip side, I doubt even the most woke radical would dive headlong and carefree into a thoroughly unstructured future, anarchic and recalcitrant.
The point being that radicals and conservatives need each other, their rabid partisan rhetoric notwithstanding. History can neither afford to fly out of its orbit on a lark, nor plant itself in in the sand like an ostrich.
Quoting Colo Millz
Perfect society? Who's going to do that anytime soon?
Quoting Colo Millz
How is this any less a rational scheme than the one put forward by the progressives?
That's spot on. Is the purpose here to create another conservative echo chamber? This is how the debate is to be framed, hence conservatism - we are right because we are right- pun intended.
This statement is actually something Burke might point out.
Burke, who was a Whig, himself said
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.
https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/change-from-within/
So the purpose of presenting the binary is not meant as an ontological division but as an epistemological one.
It is a contrast of starting points rather than exclusive camps.
The difference Hazony intends is not that conservatism avoids reason altogether, but that it distrusts abstract reason detached from inherited practices.
In his view, progressivism begins from universal principles (e.g., equality, autonomy) and tries to fit society to them, while conservatism begins from existing norms and asks how they can be prudently adapted.
Thus a deeper question isnt whether we use reason, but rather what kind of reason - abstract or prudential - best sustains moral order.
I bolded a bit of that, so that you can't miss it.
As has been pointed out by others as well as myself, only a very few "progressives" would frame their view as guided by a "universal moral principle".
What about liberté, égalité, fraternité?
Not universal?
What about the Declaration, which says that rights are self-evident and inalienable?
The insistence on universal moral principles is more authoritarian than liberal. I see your framing as an attempt to understand liberal thinking in authoritarian terms, rather than in liberal terms.
Hence this thread is in danger of being an echo chamber, in which conservatives interpret the "other" in only conservative terms, rather than trying to come to terms with what liberals might actually be arguing.
Id argue that consistency is not merely a matter of reason; it carries a moral weight.
Without consistency, principles like fairness or justice become hollow, and commitments lose integrity.
Rational coherence alone doesnt obligate anyone to act justly - moral accountability does.
Anyway If grounded in consent, deliberation, and procedural protections (as Rawls tries to do), universal moral principles are not authoritarian in practice and can coexist with liberal pluralism.
Sure. So consistency is desirable.
Rawls (for example) might agree, so far as that goes. Consider, might we engage in a moral discourse without presupposing consistency? How could that work?
Given diverse traditions, what might a rational, consistent approach to dealing with difference look like?
And when we consider that - then we begin to play by Rawls' rules.
Quoting Colo Millz
Thanks for posting this Burke quote. It's a good model for useful political debate. American conservatives salute the 1776 Revolution, however, at the time, it was a radical change. No one was more aware of that than the minutemen who empowered it.
The US constitution has continued to be radical through the centuries as most people readily acknowledge that some of its ideals are yet to be fully realized.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Insurance displaces the burden from the whole community, that is true. (Although the reason insurance works is when the community all pay a small percentage in premium, pooling the money for big payment of claims.) But the anonymous market is a pool of resources too, often at a discount. And the whole community can fail us like the anonymous can fail us. And the Amish community that makes its own decisions, about insurance or no insurance on behalf of the whole community, is acting basically like any other free market community, permitting this and restricting that. (And insurance isnt a great example for us, because insurance is a way of managing what used to be law suits in equity - chancery court - peoples court. Its contract management of disputes. Its private government in a sense. And the Amish are relatively about 7 or 8 total people to manage compared to most community sizes (350 mil Americans) and can gather into one community easily (God bless them for the sacrifices they make to keep things simple for themselves)).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Arent these just choices we make, to engage the market in ways that displace the community? It is not a consequence of the free market that we no longer ask friends for rides or work as hard on communities. Its a consequence of our decisions on how to spend our money and time. We choose to isolate ourselves and be seduced by products that enable community displacing activity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
One question and one idea here. First, is inequality increased? Unequal on what scale, all scales, or just some? Second, actual inequality has as a corollary: possible mobility. This second one slightly answers the first question. Some inequality (which by nature is inevitable) even if increased, may be worth creating a world where upward mobility is possible. Capitalism facilitates this mobility.
There are more people since America was formed and today who begin life poor and end up in life financially secure, who bring spouses and children with them, than ever before. Capitalism is the platform that enabled this. Inequality financially is not a bad thing - never was. Its a modern liberal idea to make economic goals governmental goals.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Are those who cant pay, who live on the streets, are they absolutely inevitable in capitalism? Or are they still inevitable in any larger society and any economy? Again, why is this a feature of capitalism, and not a feature of human ignorance and greed and other badness in human hearts?
There are all kinds of communities. But here I think you are invoking the morality of capitalist people, which is a different measure than the possibility of freedom and political success of capitalism. This is why charity and humble gratitude and duty to others are necessary in a capitalist society. But they are necessary in any successful society, regardless of economy, from Amish to socialist to capitalist (unless we live in Orwells world where the government is everything).
Capitalism doesnt create those who cant pay. Capitalism creates the platform where there might be less people who cant pay. Maybe there is a greater inequality between the richest and the poorest, but that is just one measurement. Another number is the number of people pulled themselves to a better overall standard of living before the US and after.
Is capitalism really only since the enlightenment and Adam Smith? It seems more basic than something developed in the Enlightenment - like republican government was Roman. Didnt Thales buy up all the olive presses because he predicted a good year for olives and then get rich leasing them come harvest time? Taken to scale with banks and money and insuring agreements and credit, and owner profit and labor fees, all aimed at capital accumulation, under a laisse faire democratic republic - that is a fully formed adult capitalist, but the seeds of capitalism are in the trade that has always occurred and freely; capitalisms seed and heart is the private agreement of this for that.
The Enlightenment got some things right. Free markets, axiomatic core political rights of life and liberty, limited government by consent of the governed, equality of due process before the law - these are products of human reason, and they are good.
They allow one to master ones own flourishing, and build a surplus for family and community. They allow many people to live together with the least governmental (laws, police and courts) obstacles to basic self-determination and pursuit of happiness.
But now we have things to conserve. This is what modern liberals dont admit. The constitution cant be a living document for it to be a document protecting our rights at all. It has to be fixed (like inalienable things are fixed). We have to hold the same fundamental rights up, over and over again and fight to keep them preserved. Today, these one liberal ideas are in danger mostly from liberal forces.
The US was formed in rejection of authoritarian types of government - a king, like a tyrant, like a fascist. Now there is a new conservative, who rejects kings as well as modern liberal forms of totalitarianism (leftism).
When will life and liberty in the face of government no longer be an issue? Never. The idea that each of us by default possesses our own life, and in this life, our own freedom - this idea, now 250 years old, is now a conservative idea. Its no longer a question of reason and enlightenment spirit. Its cannon. Its natural political law. Its self-evident, since around 1776 at least.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Destruction of cultural barriers is a goal within the notion of capitalism? Or is it a byproduct of individual choices and deals?
Standardization helps growth - but trading off ones particular culture for some different standard helps that one particular person grow. Its the particular implementation that you are bemoaning here, not the nature of capitalism. Capitalism can adapt to the non-standard better than any economy I know of.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree its often ugly, boring, and looks the same across whole continents. But isnt part of this the fact that we can live further away from each other and use cars to still get along? We build our towns around cars because we live further spread out, because we can, and we want to. Isnt this again our choices? Arent you more bemoaning technology and industrial advancement than you are the capitalist platform? There is no master planner called mister capitalism that is forcing all of the strip malls to look the same. Things will keep evolving too.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the conservative impulse is to see that the type of freedom we should be concerned about as a community is the freedom to control our own government, and limit its ability to take away equally created free lives. Its not a matter of freedom from sin and to flourish in development of virtue. This activity, moral activity, is not for government to regulate. We need to be free from government first, before we can build true freedom and flourish best. Conservatives get that. Leftists want government to constrict the means towards individual flourishing (as if the government wasnt just another bunch of people who have no idea what rules are good or bad in every situation). The invisible hand of the free market is now a conservative ideal.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That depends on the tradition.
We need some government regulation. We ought build some safety-net through government. But we need individual people to freely build virtuous consciences, and we need individual people to be able to take care of their own lives and their own families - capitalist republics are a worthy starting point.
If not liberal capitalism, (a conservative principle today). do you see a better way to manage billions of people (or, I should say, to allow millions of people to manage themselves)?
I agree. Capitalist republics implode in contradiction to their own principles. It remains to be seen if America can last another 50 years, 100 years or 1,000 years. And if it does, would it be recognizable at such point?
But if it was recognizable at all, it would continue to uphold values of limited government, free markets, and a few key natural rights. And it would be the conservative impulses that protected these institutions. Not the modern liberal impulses.
The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, dont want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. We shoot each other when in a debate, and then do not come together to rebuke the shooter, for instance. We behave like spoiled brats.
Just because someone says they are champions of small government, and joins the republican party, doesnt mean they have any deep understanding of the tradition the notion of small government came from. People are hypocrites. That doesnt defeat logic of value they hypocritically contradict with their actions.
Government is too big, AND, with a smaller government people will surely abuse each other. The thing is, with a bigger government, we may fix certain abuses, but we build all new abuses that are much worse.
The abuses in a liberal democracy are specific and particular (and can be adjudicated in court). The abuses in a leftist big government are systematic oppression of whole nations.
So the conservative tradition is to accept that life is unfair and at times brutish and short - but that no solution for the adult person that might build a moments peace can come from outside that person, but must be built from within. And no government should interfere with our internal development of our own characters.
Yeah, people like bankers, corporate bosses, and billionairesthe first in line for government handouts.
Childishness and irresponsibility cut across all income levels. Do we have to throw out the baby of capitalist self-determination with the bathwater of rich pigs?
For a bit of context.. no, no not at first. Everybody starts out as the noble savior. Here to vanquish those who have forgotten what it means to be human, blah blah blah. And they do so. For quite a time. Until... well, something happens, shall we put it for lack of better terms. Something changes within them. They start to think, perhaps, they were made to make decisions over others, be it by fate be it by the mere physical nature of this world, whatever their mind decides upon, the man or ego of the man calls it all the same: "destiny." And from there, rules, as we think we know them, no longer seem to apply. Consequence, merely an illusion. And so on and so forth. I won't be the one to spoil it. No, not here. Not now. :grin:
An oxymoron.
Anyway, I'm happy to bow out and leave you to have the last word, since I'm probably way off-topic.
Quoting Banno
Deneen is next on my list I think his book is very a propos of this discussion as the Count mentioned.
Well, we might consider here that just because a problem is perennial does not mean that it cannot be better or worse in different eras and systems. "The poor you shall always have with you," (Matthew 26:11) but surely there is a difference between the worst excesses of the Gilded Age and the New Deal Era, where economic mobility (as well as equality) was vastly greater.
We might consider here the pronounced nostalgia people have for the Soviet system in Eastern Europe despite its many infamies.
Part of the problem here is that liberalism is self-undermining in a sort of positive feedback loop. Income and particularly wealth follow a power law distribution, whole all evidence suggests that human ability is largely on a normal distribution. The cumulative exponential gains on capital make this somewhat inevitable without some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth of a quite vast scale. And yet, in a system where wealth is convertible into cultural and political power, this means that there is always the risk of state capture, rent seeking, and moves by the elite to undermine liberalism so as to install themselves as a new sort of aristocracy.
It's worth nothing here that many economists and historians see the rise of strong, absolutist monarchs in the early modern period as precisely a dynamic whereby the poor and emerging middle class decided to align themselves with a push towards dictatorial power so as to have [I]someone[/I] who could protect them from recalcitrant elites. I think you can see something very similar in the West right now, especially as legislatures have largely become too dysfunctional to govern, and power is transfered to the executive.
But the point here is that this sort of problem, positive feedback loops that destroy the system's equilibrium, are part of liberalism itself.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Well, the anthropology undergirding liberalism says that all people are free just so long as they avoid grave misfortune or disability. It's just a power all adult humans attain. This is probably the real crucial difference. Epicetus, the great philosopher-slave, said that most masters were slaves. Plato, Saint Thomas, Saint Maximus, etc. thought that freedom was hard to win. It required cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won. As Plotinus has it, we must carve ourselves as a sculptor chisels marble.
But education in modern liberal states often wholly avoids philosophy and ethics. It's main role is to train future "workers and consumers." Freedom is assumed as a default, and so freedom to consume (wealth) becomes the main focus.
On the view that self-governance requires virtue, which requires positive formation and cultivation, this can be nothing but disastrous. Likewise, it is hardly fair to inculcate people in vice, indeed to give them a positive education in vice (which I would say our system does) and then to say that only problem with the system is that the citizens (the elites as much as the masses) are childish and vice-addled.
The traditionalist critique of conservative liberalism is precisely that it makes people unfree. Consumerist culture and secularism are not liberatory. What is required for freedom is not merely "small government," or as progressive liberals would have it "redistribution such that all have wealth." The path out of the cave is rather arduous and requires a virtuous society.
Without a substantive paradigm of the good, freedom devolves into the freedom to consume or to satisfy preference - what Plato or Augustine would call license, not liberty.
The liberal state produces slaves of appetite, not citizens of reason.
Again, quite inaccurate. Liberalism uses - invented - strong notions of positive freedom.
There's a line from Kant and freedom as autonomy, through Rousseau and freedom as collective self-legislation, and Mill with freedom as self-development, and T.H. Green with freedom as the power to do or enjoy something worth doing or enjoying, to Rawls and freedom as the capacity for a conception of the good and the sense of justice and Nussbaum and the freedom to exhibit one's capabilities. These are positive in that what unites them is precisely the move beyond mere non-interference to autonomy, self-legislation, and self-realisation.
Quoting Colo Millz
But which one? This question, asked multiple times, remains unaddressed.
And why ought we follow tradition? There's a naturalistic fallacy lurking here - "we've always done it this way, therefore we ought do it this way".
Again, the danger in looking only at the account of liberalism given by conservatives is that your thread become only an echo chamber.
The core here is that we can negotiate our differences rationally. If we so choose.
This reads as if reason was somehow exclusively the provence of progressives. In their rhetoric conservatives and progressives appeal to reason more or less equally, afaict. Both regard the other side as irrational . I reject the framing that reason is what separates liberalism and convervatism.
And I reject the notion that traditionalism is what defines conservatism. One only has to look to the American conservative of today to put the lie to this. What is actually being conserved is not tradition, but hierarchy and power. It was not the breaking of the traditions of slavery and women's lesser rights that was noisome to conservatives then, and is still today. It is that blacks and women occupied lower rungs in the social ladder then, and still should today. To claim and act otherwise is obnoxious to them, bullshit, "woke".
Against this progressives offer fundamentally a moral appeal, not a rational one, though it may come clothed in reason.
Re: naturalistic fallacy:
The historical existence of a practice is evidence of its utility, not the source of a moral obligation in itself.
Given human fallibility and the difficulty of creating social institutions from scratch, the safest path is to follow practices that have been validated over centuries.
Tradition is not sacred because it is old; it is valuable because it is tested, functional, and morally formative.
Please present evidence that American conservatives believe this.
I have a feeling this is the very definition of a "straw man".
Yes, but isnt America evidence that the liberal capitalist system has been the best opportunity for the most poor people so far in history, across 250 years now? America, today, is literally sitting in the best position of anywhere on earth, maybe anytime in history if you factor in America is 350 million people. There are many millions of solid adults in America - seeking the virtuous for virtues sake. Lets see if Chinas poor can catch up to Americas poor (while the US continues to grow) before we conclude that wealth distribution/consolidation can be better managed by some sort of dictatorial government, or king, or leftist regime, or socialism, or pure democracy, or caliphate (which is equivalent to dictatorial regime), or something else. If China catches up, I would bet it will be because they free up their markets even more, and more importantly, free their people from government restraint.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Are you saying inherited wealth isnt fair and rigs the system? Ok, but is that some sort flaw in the system or is the poisoning of the entire well?
Are you saying there could be some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth that is more fair than what people have been doing for the past 250 years in America? Im open to suggestions, because the only needed improvement I thought of is more charity and sacrifice for others (voluntarily of course). Certainly nothing a government can do.
The world is never going to be utopia, even if we could get 10 people to agree on what utopia might look like. That cannot be the goal.
There is a reason, I think, that Jesus had very little to say about economic systems and political systems and earthly governing of earth dwellers. This is all our problem.
I still dont see any of these points about the badness in society as being rooted in the nature of capitalism. Rich people who dont help the poor is the exact same evil as poor people who dont help those that are even poorer still. All of us need to be more charitable. Some people learn this, and some people dont. The economic, political environment surrounding this failure in charity has nothing to do with politics and economics. Knowing that (which maybe only I believe), capitalism, as evidenced by the last 250 years of human history and as it was employed by America, seems worth a little more consideration as a platform to build a sense of charity and other virtue.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What system is there where wealth is not convertible into cultural and political power? That isnt a problem, its a feature of wealth. It is what we do with our wealth that breeds our problems. Capitalist liberal democracy does make the conversion of wealth to political power much easier - but should we invent a mechanism to limit government influence and thereby limit the temptation and possibility to influence government, or should we invent some mechanism to make it more impossible to be wealthy?
Lets say we turned the US into some form of socialist state tomorrow. And lets say it is 1,000 years in the future and we are writing history. Historians would see the birth of a new nation around 1780 (a new structure of government and economics), and see poor people educating themselves and becoming presidents, senators, mayors, poor people becoming billionaires, all races and creeds flourishing, millions of poor people in America living better than middle class folks throughout all of history before them, the country becoming the lone worlds super power economically and politically, and then a whole bunch of whiney children who dont know when enough is enough tearing it all down with no sense of what could replace it. Its not a systemic issue we face, its user error. As it was in the garden of Eden. The rest of the world is struggling simply to survive, struggling to build any platform that might last beyond a charismatic leader, certainly more so than the US (save for all of the people who confuse an elected president with a fascist monarch).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is all spot on. How does capitalist liberal democracy get in the way of any of that? How does any other system better guarantee the pursuits you outline for happiness? America is a place where, with very basic effort, one can devote oneself to pursue freedom hard to win [that] require(s) cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won .
Just because people dont understand what remains their sole responsibility, doesnt mean we need to scrap the system that they are failing to uphold. Government isnt supposed to provide us with jobs, food, housing, wages - these are new leftist ideas, and liberalism perverting itself.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Only undergirding liberalism? In what system is that not true? In communist systems you can be disabled and remain safe? In socialist systems? Monarchies? I dont understand how these are points showing liberal capitalism is worse than anything else, or how it isnt better than everything else. Or that capitalism is clearly not helpful to more people given the possibility (and reality) of misfortune and eventual disability for everyone in history.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Id rather every university be similar to Hillsdale College myself. Isnt it illiberal, leftist forces that have torn down true liberal arts and the importance of philosophy and ethics? Its not conservatism that objects or subverts a classical education.
And isnt our assumed freedom the freedom to generate and consume wealth, not just consume it? Freedom to save money and protect your self in the uncertain future - and protect your family and community?
Im not sure we are not seeing eye to eye simply because of semantics surrounding my likely less informed notions of liberalism and conservatism and classical education and leftism and tradition and capitalism. But I dont buy into what sounds like a leftist/ postmodern critique of capitalism, mostly because Ive never seen anything else that makes any sense at all. We dont need to eliminate capitalism. We need to raise children that arent materialistic, who seek virtue and seek to do good.
I do see the point that liberalism unfettered devours itself. This happens in real time when various liberal factions try to resolve a dispute among themselves - that always ends badly for one or all factions. I think it is conservative forces, the adults in the room, that need to temper these often self-destructive impulses.
Conservatism is recognition of what is good enough to conserve. Good enough is as good as it gets when it comes to man-made institutions, which any government on earth is. We arent building the kingdom of God.
Liberalism tempers unfettered traditionalists who dont realize what needs to change, and conservatism tempers unfettered liberals who dont realize what needs to be saved. We needed the enlightenment to become truly responsible. As far as I can tell, only modern conservatives understand this. The progressives (and other less influential groups) seek to alleviate themselves of the burden of this new responsibility.
Libertarians are an interesting thing to characterize here. Libertarians take full responsibility for themselves - and that is good. But they also act like society will just take care of itself and so they take no responsibility for the needed power even limited government must wield. So libertarianism wont work for our billions of people either.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So you would say the liberal capitalist system is itself, the problem, or a system that exacerbates this problem? I know many, many people have versions of this argument, but none convince me - I find no evidence to support that. The charge is that liberal capitalism inculcates vice - like money is the root of all evil. But it is love of money that is the root of all evil, not just capitalism. We dont need to eliminate money.
The answer is not new government. The answer is not new economics. Frankly, there is no answer, no hope, nor any reason to care if there is no God, but again, that is another conversation. We are left with the only best solution being the possibility that is inherent in capitalist liberal democracy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree completely.
I think the analysis of liberal capitalism as an empty promise though is a bit overly simplified.
I would just say one of the many paving stones on that path out of the cave has to be government by consent, and the political right to life, liberty, and property, and another paver is a free marketplace.
But most of all, I cant conceive of any other way. Certainly nothing conceived or tried in the past promised as much for as many as liberal capitalism.
Your own, of course. By which I mean the one shaped by you, your family, your community, and your nation.
Or, if you prefer, we could discuss the pros and cons of various traditions.
But I have a feeling if I do that I'd just be accused of living in an echo chamber.
For now, I can safely say that I'm confident you would prefer to live in certain environments and would prefer not to live in others.
Tradition defined as "we've always done it this way, therefore we ought do it this way" is not accurate either.
Traditionalists simply look for the reason it has always been done this way. Traditionalists recognize that the way its been done for so long has led to this moment where I get to decide for myself what to do. Traditionalists dont assume we would come up with something totally different if we had no recourse to tradition. Reasoning is all over the practice of tradition. Enlightenment reasoning is simply its narrow (at times) application when considering traditional ways. Enlightenment reasoning starts when one already seeks to change something to make it new, so it is biased against the tradition. But traditional reasoning isnt biased against the new, it just takes more proof to convince that a tradition should be ended.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, something like that.
But let's look at what you have said, and take it seriously: "it is valuable because it is tested".
Ought we not continue to put it to the test? And continue thereby to demonstrate its worth? If its worth derives from its having been tested, then it seems so.
It's not as if there is but one worthy tradition. Which tradition are we to say has shown its worth by its longevity? If longevity is a mark of value, then The Dao and the Vedas ought have some weight...
So again, beyond the mere chauvinism of "my country right or wrong", what is the justification for adherence to a tradition? Has it been put to the test?
There is the additional problem, that the criteria used to test a tradition are themselves largely determined by that tradition - unless we have some rational, charitable way to test traditions one against the other.
So by all means, adhere to your tradition, but also, put it to the test, be open and honest, and perhaps even try to understand how your tradition is seen by others.
The naturalistic fallacy is of course the mistake of thinking that we can get an ought from an is - that because it is traditional, it is what we ought do; to fail to put one's tradition to the test.
In a political and economic context, which moral good need not be at issue. (It can be, but need not be.)
Progressivism and conservatism can be contrasted for practicality and historical success. Which one fosters sins and which doesnt need not be the issue. What works?
Clearly the 1776 liberal progressives in Philadelphia made something that works really well. Now 250 years later, clearly there are some traditions that are most reasonable absent significant convincing evidence.
But why? Why not test Zionism against Mohism? How do you move from "This is what we do" to "this is what we ought do?" without falling to the Naturalistic fallacy?
Hey, I'll take the Vedas and Upanishads any day, for sure.
I used to be quite a serious student of a Swami in the line of Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati.
I don't have the words to describe how highly I regard that body of literature and learning.
To be honest, I almost answered your question "which one?" with this:
At this point I'll take any one.
I literally think Enlightenment liberalism has produced so many abortions at this point that following any of the world's ancient teachings would be better.
But then, extreme examples come to mind, and I don't want to mention them, because I don't want to disturb anyone or ruffle any feathers.
Is this the question here?
And Vedanta and Toasim are in consideration. There is a ton of wisdom in those traditions. But they are less political and less economic, no?
Modern conservatism and traditionalism versus progressive liberalism - this is politics before morality. So Ancient Greece and Rome might be instructive (although I think the enlightenment thinkers extracted and distilled the fruits of those political systems fairly thoroughly.)
Why do we have to choose just one? The idea of a state (at least an imperial one) is that it can contain and include many nations thriving within it.
Anyway, all of this remains mere speculation.
The fact remains that I believe that we cannot become un-situated outside of our family, tribe, congregation, community, nation.
We are unable to achieve an Enlightenment "view from nowhere" or u-topos, "no-place".
We have to work with what we have been given.
From over here, it looks as if the problems had in the USA at present are a result not of the breakdown of liberalism, but of it's murder.
Again, this is not what liberalism calls for. Rather, we can look for that on which we have agreement - the view not from nowhere, but from anywhere.
I dont think we needed any more instruction since the New Testament myself.
But life is proceeding. We need to learn these things all anew in each age. We need to leave something for our children to take up. Enlightenment liberalism contributed some goods.
Well that's the first time I've encountered someone presenting a book including "spiritual" exercises in order to become more liberal.
Anyway I'd point out the obvious which is that his "17 reasons to be liberal" are mostly all modern updates of the Christian virtues. He even includes "gratitude", "avoidance of hypocrisy", "humility", "gracefulness" and "redemption"!
So instead of trying to be a liberal Ignatius de Loyola and convert us all to "liberalism", the real question is why is he not literate enough to convert himself to Christianity?
Then maybe you might benefit from reading more widely on liberalism? There's a strong liberalism in many forms of christianity, for a start, and a liberal tradition in Islam that gets little attention.
Those "Christian" virtues were borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, especially from Stoicism. Christianity might arguably have introduced "charity" as a virtue. That's about it. And his argument isn't aimed at conversion, but at encouraging folk to noticing that their core values are liberal.
Back to what I take as the main question here: How are we to decide between conflicting traditions?
Violence or conversation?
We cannot decide between any traditions, we remain situated within our own.
Diplomacy is always preferred at first, but if we are attacked first, then we must decide if we are to engage in a just war, or not.
Again, that is simply the realist, not utopian, position.
Yeah, we can. And do.
Violence is a choice.
Gadamer and MacIntyre, for example, seem to say otherwise.
The lie here, over this whole thread, is that you are making a choice and advocating an attitude, while pretending that it is the inevitable consequence of the human condition.
Any ideology, including your conservatism, is ideologically and normatively loaded.
You set out a faulty description of how things are, and then conclude that this is how they ought to be. This can bee seen quite explicitly. Take a look.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, we are born in to families; you slide into the ought of loyalty.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, we compete. We can also cooperate. Your leaning on competition is a choice. Your leaning on violence, more so. Again, the"is" of competition slides into he "ought" of conflict.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, we tend to hierarchies. We can also build democracy and cooperation. Which ought we do? Again, it's a choioce.
Quoting Colo Millz
Yes, Institutions evolve to stabilise society. But we change those institutions over time. We decide how they ought be.
Quoting Colo Millz This presumes that obedience to inherited authority is morally required. It isn't. Again, this is a moral stance masquerading as a fact.
Quoting Colo Millz
Even here, the openness is circumscribed to preserve the conservative framework, ideology is still being smuggled into the discussion under the guise of empiricism.
The naturalistic fallacy pervades your posts. You are not a realist, but an ideologue.
"Ought" appears nowhere whatsoever in the list. Point it out.
The list simply describes the way things are, not the way things "ought" to be.
All human understanding is historically effected. We cannot step outside our historical and linguistic horizons.
There is no absolute or neutral standpoint outside tradition.
Neither are prejudices necessarily distortions - they can be enabling conditions of understanding.
As for "leaning on violence", I think you are drifting into a straw man.
Quoting Banno
Understanding through tradition can be sufficient for emancipation and truth.
Real understanding always takes place within history, language, and culture; there is no pure, ideology-free space from which to critique.
Quoting Banno
Those are the options?
Can I be a "hermeneutical" ideologue, at least?
It can never be "transcendent".
That is indeed the whole point.
Always, already, loaded and situated. Always immanent, never transcendent.
Are you saying we ought not respect tradition? Of course not. That you did not use the word is irrelevant. It is a normative list, pretending to be factual.
Quoting Colo Millz
That's the lie. You want to pretend that you have no choice, yet it is clear that you could become a Muslim, or an Atheist.
And we could decide what to do by discussing our needs and capabilities, instead of by waving a gun. It's a choice.
Yes, I could. But if I did it would not be because of some isolated choices, but in terms of understanding, tradition, and belonging.
We always begin within a historically effected consciousness: our language, culture, and inherited prejudices shape how we encounter possibilities like Islam or atheism.
You cannot step outside your horizon and objectively choose between belief systems as if you were shopping for one. You can only encounter them through the horizon of your own tradition
Quoting Banno
You seem a little fixated on this whole violence thing.
You do not choose beliefs like consumer goods.
I may indeed find yourself drawn toward Islam, or away from faith - but this will not be a choice made from nowhere.
It will be an event of understanding, in which my horizon is transformed.
Sure. But you conclude that there fore we cannot choose between traditions. That doesn't follow. The choice may not be objective - what choice is? - but we can so choose...
But even that wording is framing the discussion in a way that presupposes traditions as monolithic. Protestants do become Catholic, Irishmen do become American, and conservatives can learn.
Quoting Colo Millz
Not I. I'm suggesting we can talk about our differences and reach an accomodation. You seem given to understand that no accomodation is ever possible. Violence is implicit in that approach.
Well thank you for throwing me such a nice bone from such a high table.
Quoting Banno
I'm not sure reaching an "accommodation" is the point.
After all, if both of us are understood by the other, wouldn't that automatically transform our horizons?
To understand is to be transformed by what we understand.
Quoting Banno
That's sounds a little hysterical. Reasonable people can disagree. Isn't that what you advocate? That everyone living in a state can adhere to their own traditions, but nevertheless thrive?
Quoting Banno
Reason is dialogical and historical. It is never "abstract". Reason is indeed a dialog, a back and forth. It requires an opnnness to being addressed and a willingness to be changed - providing real understanding can indeed be reached.
So reason is like Hegel's dialectic, it is the capacity to listen and respond meaningfully - in a dialog.
To that extent, we don't "obtain" understanding, we "undergo" it. We "stand under" something. In a dialog, that something is the (temporarily) fused horizons of two persons. Thus understanding is an event, not an act of control. It happens to us - through language, history, and tradition.
We are always already participants in the ongoing dialog, never outside of it. Thus reason, since it is the same as dialog, is participatory.
Rather than, that is, instrumental, which is the Enlightenment or positivistic type of reason. That is, participatory reason does not calculate or "choose" a means to an end. It does not operate by control or deduction.
That form of reason is far more prone to your "violence". That form of "choice" is a way of dominating nature.