- 21 Oct 2020 08:39
#15129087
August 8th, 2019
I found this to be a really interesting set of observations -- very pointedly stated as well. Lots of potential discussion points!
Orthosphere
There is an interesting appendix to this short blog post there as well.
Left-liberalism is the ideology of the elite, and the inculcation of its doctrines is what is regarded as education, so of course liberals are on average smarter, better behaved, richer, more industrious, fitter, and more sexually attractive than conservatives. Failure to conform is almost always a sign of defect; almost never a sign of being more perceptive than one’s host society. However, when liberals say that conservatives are hostile to reason, they are making a more interesting claim, one about the role of public reason in our system compared to theirs.
Unfortunately, there have been few first-rate conservative epistemologists, and some, like Burke and Maistre, have spoken rather too sweepingly on this matter, so liberals cannot be blamed for any inaccurate conclusions on our attitude toward reason. We should admit that, while reason has a role in conservative governance, it is more subordinate than in liberal governance. We really do have a lower estimation of man’s ability to deduce principles of social justice from a priori reasoning. In this sense, conservatism is anti-reason in the same way that empirical science is anti-reason. Just as scientific reasoning begins from observations about the world and may not appeal to a priori reasoning to demand the data be different, so conservative moral reasoning begins with inherited practices and may not appeal to a priori reasoning to demand an overthrow of tradition.
Let’s try to draw this distinction more sharply, to be as fair as possible to both political traditions. Most liberals recognize that we first learn particular normative practices of an established social order, and then, by generalizing from them, apprehend abstract concepts such as fairness or equality. They would say, though, that once apprehended, such concepts are intelligible in themselves and can be used to critique the social order itself.
Conservatives lean toward more emergentist, less Platonist, understandings of abstract moral imperatives. A conservative would say that general normative principles–“treat others as ends and not merely as means”, “love thy neighbor”, etc–abstracted from a social context have very little definite content, that we need a society and its tradition to say what it means to treat someone fairly, what it means to recognize persons as ends in themselves, and which people are to be regarded as equal in what way. The particular rules always serve as a guide to understanding the general principles, so that when the former seem to conflict with the latter, it is usually our understanding of the principles that must be corrected.
There is another way conservatives could be said to assign reason a more humble role, regarding not what our intellects are able to prove but what they are able to say. What we can articulate is not the totality of what we know or to what we can commit ourselves. Conservatives often emphasize the importance of tacit knowledge and the power of symbolism, sacrament, myth, and ritual. Magnanimous liberals will often admit that ritual and symbolism can embody knowledge beyond the powers of the ignorant masses to directly comprehend, but they will usually assume that if this is true knowledge then the elite can know it in explicit propositional form, dispensing with all non-literal packaging. Conservatives will insist that the meaning of the sacraments is inexhaustible, that the fact that they are not literal speech allows them to exceed the limits of literal speech, and that we never outgrow our need for them, no matter how smart or articulate we get. The fact that most of us are not very smart or articulate perhaps makes it easier for us to accept this truth, but truth it remains.
Orthosphere
There is an interesting appendix to this short blog post there as well.
August 8th, 2019