[Wellsy]

Is modern conservatism as liberal and individualist as modern neoliberalism? Is there much which defines it other than following Burkes contrasting between reason and tradition, between conflict (seeking change) and stability (defending a status quo)?

And does it merely appeal to an already dead tradition as opposed to ongoing/living traditions?

I ask this due to the grouping made by Alisdair MacIntyre.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf

(MacIntyre’s conception of liberalism, and his critique of it, generally extend to the “conservatism” of people like George W. Bush. It seems to me that liberal individualism, as MacIntyre understands it, encompasses the most essential features of mainstream conservatives such as Bush, though clearly in his case there are overlays of “traditionalism” and anti-liberal ideas.)

Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. IV and 222

That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. And, where liberalism by permissive legal enactments has tried to use the power of the modem state to transform social relationships, conservatism by prohibitive legal enactments now tries to use that same power for its own coercive purposes.
...
We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate.

For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution - a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital- is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke's own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

[Potemkin]

Is modern conservatism as liberal and individualist as modern neoliberalism? Is there much which defines it other than following Burkes contrasting between reason and tradition, between conflict (seeking change) and stability (defending a status quo)?

And does it merely appeal to an already dead tradition as opposed to ongoing/living traditions?

I ask this due to the grouping made by Alisdair MacIntyre.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf

Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. IV and 222

I agree with this, and I would ascribe it to the success of the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century. Traditionalism, as properly understood, died then, and ever since we have lived in a liberal world order. And the successful European imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries ensured that the traditional societies of even the most far-flung corners of the globe could not escape the same fate.

[SolarCross]

What do you mean by Traditionalism? Christianity? I think the death of Christianity may have been over-sold. Nietzsche might have killed god but he did not kill all the Christians. There are still billions of them kicking around.

[Wellsy]

What do you mean by Traditionalism? Christianity? I think the death of Christianity may have been over-sold. Nietzsche might have killed god but he did not kill all the Christians. There are still billions of them kicking around.

Christianity is an example of a practice which is part of a tradition through history. It had customs and standards passed through generations and of course there has been much criticism and change through the times yet they in a sense are still a part of Christianity even if some are seen to be such fundamental breaks that they are in a sense a regression as not everything inevitably progresses with time.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/p-macint/

MacIntyre also emphasizes that chess, like other practices, has a history and is part of a tradition. So he might point out that an important part of becoming a grand master at chess is studying the records of games that have been played by previous grand masters, reading commentaries on those games, examining their philosophies, practice regimens, and the psychological tactics they employed on their opponents, and so on. The rules and standards have developed in the past and are binding on the present, and although they can sometimes be changed by the community as a whole those changes should be consistent with the principles of the game as it has developed in the past. This would seem to be a very conservative doctrine, as it is in the hands of someone like Edmund Burke (cf. Reflections on the Revolution in France), but MacIntyre is explicit that traditions that are in good order require ongoing internal debates about the meaning of the tradition and how it is to be improved and developed for the future. He is not advocating blind loyalty to the past, nor is he saying that all change is bad. He is only acknowledging that the present rests on the past and must take that past into account in its self-understanding as well as in its planning for the future. We have already mentioned changes in the rules of chess, but other transformations can occur without changing the rules. Today, for example, chess players may decide that they must revise what they know about the game and how it is played in order to compete against computer opponents which use very different methods of playing than human opponents do. This requires new approaches and tactics which will become part of the tradition that is available to players in the future. But developing new methods does not require starting from scratch – the past provides materials for use in the present and should not be dismissed as irrelevant.

Although MacIntyre does not emphasize this, he likely would agree with Burke that the idea that one is part of a tradition can serve to strengthen the community, as it encourages the present practitioners to think of themselves as tied to the past and with an obligation to the future, so that they will work to surpass the standards of the past and leave a tradition that is in good order to those who will practice it in the future.

Whilst many claim to be christians, many are quite a watered down variant of what it once meant and in the modern age one of course can be a Christian but they do so under fundamentally different circumstances.

[url]rickroderick.org/301-paul-ricoeur-the-masters-of-suspicion-1993/[/url]

And ah, Ricouer himself is a Christian, and so he says the following: “A Marxist critique of ideology, a Nietzschean critique of ressentiment and a Freudian critique of infantile distress, are hereafter the views through which any kind of mediation of faith must pass”. Now, does that mean that every ordinary religious person has to know these writers and stuff? No… these suspicions have become widespread in our culture. We don’t need anymore, in a way, to be instructed in them, because they permeate our culture.
...
They have become a common possession of our culture, and they have cut off one of the reservoirs within we might find a coherent meaning for our life. One of the reservoirs being religious faith. Not entirely. It’s not like we can’t go back and have it. It’s that we must have under the mark of complexity… follow me? Under the mark of insecurity. Under the mark of confusion about it. It’s not that you can’t… it’s just under those… marks.

Then there is the great defender of Christianity who isn’t to broad of his idea of what a Christian is because its not enough to say you believe in God as many Americans can do quite causally whilst being no more distinguished from an atheist like myself.
[url]rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard-and-the-contemporary-spirit-1990/[/url]

Kierkegaard is the author of a famous remark, and he says “In a country – or in a place – where all are Christians, ipso facto none are Christians”. He reminds us that the Gospel – the challenging Gospel – that arguably someone like Martin Luther King took probably too seriously, not in my view, but in the view of some, that arguably there it would be dangerous to be a Christian. But we all know today to be a Christian – a famous Christian – like Billy Graham doesn’t mean you have the task of Moses which is to lead your people out of bondage. It means you have the job of playing golf with the Pharaoh, you know. I mean… that’s a different function of religion, right? To play golf with the Pharaoh isn’t the same thing as leading your people out of bondage. So, ah… religion in that sense is just a bullwort for the status quo. You know, it’s praying for the troops, praying for victory and so on.

[SolarCross]

Ok so you did mean Christianity. It is pretty clear that the main shock to Christianity came from the rationalists though. Both the American and French revolutions were more or less boring peasant uprisings with no serious theological implications either way.

A generation or two before the French revolution King Louis XIV that most genius of monarchs had succeeded in taming the church so there were plenty of loyal priests at the disposal of his very much less talented grandson but it is not like there were any atheists among the revolutionaries. Indeed rationalism was really more the likely to found among the nobility, as gentlemen had more leisure for reading and thought. A similar thing goes for the American revolution, except the rebels were also landowners but they tended to be god fearing more than their British counter parts for being more rural fellows less connected with the latest theories.

Even the rationalists would not have had the impact they had if the scientists had not left the church to join them. Darwinism was the hardest knock they took but the drift started with Galileo and Giordano Bruno. However most of European Christendom has by now absorbed Darwinism. It may only be a matter of time before that spreads to the Christian colonies around the world such as the Americas, Russia, Africa and parts of Asia. Christians adapt and there are a lot of them.

It is foolish to underestimate them.

[Deutschmania]

One should differentiate between liberal conservatism , and traditional conservatism . The latter of which I believe , for worse and / or for better , has been experiencing a resurgence , in recent times , as people are reacting against neo-liberalism , and globalism . I feel that this is comparable to Germany's conservative revolutionary movement , of old . In my opinion , a negative expression of this tendency would be identarianism , and a positive expression would be communitarianism .