Replies

After lurking for a year and a half during the start of Impeachment, I finally registered six and a half years ago. The first thread I posted was largely based upon Kirk's intro and entitled "The Errors of Ideology.

Alas, it is one of the threads from the era where they can't currently be brought up, but perhaps they will be recoverable some day.

It got only modest contributions -- semantics doesn't make for passionate debate.

I pinged IronJack as he appreciates Kirk and he and I generally agree, but the alteration of the term through liberal predominance in the written word has so predominated for the last fifty years that even he finds Kirk's definition as archaic.

However, that chapter was my first post because of the idea behind it. Conservatism holds to Principles and those principles span politics, morals, religous views, culture and society. They do not offer a magic formula that can be followed and solve all of our problems.

Totalitarian rationalistic democracy (an extension of Hayek's term) or progressive liberalism as it is known in this era, espouses a formula that once discovered and adhered to solves all political and societal problems.

Part of how it is sold is its isolation as theory and formula. When the hesitant see conflicts with true Virtue, heritage, or institutions, they are convinced to see it as from a seperate, and more pure world.

As Heyek says in Chapter Four of the Constitution of Liberty:

Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once its advantages were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom and, for that purpose, to inquire how a free society worked. This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not.
As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic –the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalistic, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline.

I have found that the great thinkers of Conservatism -- Burke, Kirk, Weaver, Hayek, Sowell -- all hold a similar view about the distinction. For Burke, it is the inhereted freedom largely supported by time honored institutions as opposed to sophisters and metaphysics. For Kirk, its First Principles as opposed to Ideology. For Hayek, see above and for Sowell he shows us in A Conflict of Visions the difference between the Constrained and Unconstrained views of man and his nature.

The commonality is seen by many who do deep analysis of political theory, but as IronJack so aptly points out, we must have the straight forward and plain rhetoric to charge our adherents and advance the unconvinced and often deep study is not something we can get that audience to devote the time to doing.

My caution is that we must watch for the traps of rationalistic totalitarianism and the way the arguement is framed. If a comparison of various simple formula is the artifical limit of the debate, the rationalists will always win. However, if the whole Heritage of Mankind is considered; the whole weight of civilization and our patrimony is measured up; if the inherited worth of what mankind has achieved is defended, then magic formuli pale in comparison.