Atreides
Jedi Master
Some people have been using conservative and liberal, here's my admitted limited perspective on the two.
Liberalism is a thing, a thing in fact we can define, but conservatism not so much. Liberalism is an ideology, which comes complete with a, largely, predefined epistemology. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. This implies some kind of idea about 1) a natural state, and 2) and observable reality and what it means (limitations on man are "chains").
Conservatism on the other hand has largely been the absence of ideology, because an American conservative is very different from a Russian conservative. During the communist rule of Russia, some that we would consider radical leftists in the US were considered Communist conservatives in Soviet Russia etc.
At least until recently this has been the case. Whatever a conservative was, he was attempting to merely conserve some relative social organization or principle. One could even say that a liberal, or a classical liberal, can become a conservative if they feel classical liberalism is declining and they wish to conserve it, i.e. keep it around.
In the last few years, conservatism, especially American conservatism has kind of decided that without a well defined ideology and dialectic, it really cannot survive the hydra of liberalism, which while having a constant ideological premise, is not actually limited by any definite goal. How liberated must you be? Should you be liberated from having to wear clothes? To obey laws? By what rationale does an ideological liberal stop liberating himself and others? At first, and perhaps acceptably so, it was equality of opportunity, today it has become equality of outcome, which is of course an inversion of the stated principles of classical liberalism. If all people must win the race equally, then some must be coerced to run slower, because natural endowment plays a part in performance.
Conservatism today, both in America, and in Russia, has merged with Christian Conservatism, which likes to imagine, whether rightly or wrongly, that Christian thought and values were indispensable in the West's hegemony and are a net good. The conservative ideology can be defined as a results oriented view of traditional culture. It starts from the premise that life is live. That is to say - life is an ongoing process, and we can't just pull over and take the bus apart to figure out how it works objectively, but we can observe from history that certain things seem to work better and others worse. The appeal to traditional values and processes in society is simply to point out 1) they must have come about for a reason, 2) they seem to produce some good, and 3) the radical deconstruction of them has not in fact led to an improvement.
Whereas the liberal looks at the world and says: "Hey, there's a lot of bad, let's change everything!" the Conservative says: "Well the natural state is rude and terrible, so why is there any good at all? Let's keep stuff the way it is and make incremental changes over a long term to prove they work."
Both wish to develop human beings, but the manner they go about it is very different. The one seems to believe that man is just inherently good, it's merely society that must change, as society stifles man's inherent goodness - all would achieve equally if only society would let them!, whereas the conservative says: no, man is flawed, and the only improvement is through the personal battle with character, the development of personal virtue and excellence. Society is then, to a liberal, a stifling or supporting construct and changes to that construct will reflect themselves internally in man, and the conservative thinks oppositely: Society is an epiphenomenon of man, improve him and society will improve as a matter of course.
Depending on your epistemology, one or the other has copious evidence to support it. These are, in effect, orienting perspectives based on some primary assumptions about the nature of man, society, and the meaning of results and outcomes etc.
Just my two cents, and penned rather quickly.
Liberalism is a thing, a thing in fact we can define, but conservatism not so much. Liberalism is an ideology, which comes complete with a, largely, predefined epistemology. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. This implies some kind of idea about 1) a natural state, and 2) and observable reality and what it means (limitations on man are "chains").
Conservatism on the other hand has largely been the absence of ideology, because an American conservative is very different from a Russian conservative. During the communist rule of Russia, some that we would consider radical leftists in the US were considered Communist conservatives in Soviet Russia etc.
At least until recently this has been the case. Whatever a conservative was, he was attempting to merely conserve some relative social organization or principle. One could even say that a liberal, or a classical liberal, can become a conservative if they feel classical liberalism is declining and they wish to conserve it, i.e. keep it around.
In the last few years, conservatism, especially American conservatism has kind of decided that without a well defined ideology and dialectic, it really cannot survive the hydra of liberalism, which while having a constant ideological premise, is not actually limited by any definite goal. How liberated must you be? Should you be liberated from having to wear clothes? To obey laws? By what rationale does an ideological liberal stop liberating himself and others? At first, and perhaps acceptably so, it was equality of opportunity, today it has become equality of outcome, which is of course an inversion of the stated principles of classical liberalism. If all people must win the race equally, then some must be coerced to run slower, because natural endowment plays a part in performance.
Conservatism today, both in America, and in Russia, has merged with Christian Conservatism, which likes to imagine, whether rightly or wrongly, that Christian thought and values were indispensable in the West's hegemony and are a net good. The conservative ideology can be defined as a results oriented view of traditional culture. It starts from the premise that life is live. That is to say - life is an ongoing process, and we can't just pull over and take the bus apart to figure out how it works objectively, but we can observe from history that certain things seem to work better and others worse. The appeal to traditional values and processes in society is simply to point out 1) they must have come about for a reason, 2) they seem to produce some good, and 3) the radical deconstruction of them has not in fact led to an improvement.
Whereas the liberal looks at the world and says: "Hey, there's a lot of bad, let's change everything!" the Conservative says: "Well the natural state is rude and terrible, so why is there any good at all? Let's keep stuff the way it is and make incremental changes over a long term to prove they work."
Both wish to develop human beings, but the manner they go about it is very different. The one seems to believe that man is just inherently good, it's merely society that must change, as society stifles man's inherent goodness - all would achieve equally if only society would let them!, whereas the conservative says: no, man is flawed, and the only improvement is through the personal battle with character, the development of personal virtue and excellence. Society is then, to a liberal, a stifling or supporting construct and changes to that construct will reflect themselves internally in man, and the conservative thinks oppositely: Society is an epiphenomenon of man, improve him and society will improve as a matter of course.
Depending on your epistemology, one or the other has copious evidence to support it. These are, in effect, orienting perspectives based on some primary assumptions about the nature of man, society, and the meaning of results and outcomes etc.
Just my two cents, and penned rather quickly.
