I mostly agree, that’s all good and well… until it comes to moral choices, especially big ones. Here, even if people are very biased, don’t know their own preferences, just plain don’t care about others, etc… shallow conformism is still a worse option in many situations. If everyone just looked to their current group’s authorities in deciding how or whether to do the right thing—and those authorities looked to the past - … wouldn’t we have, for example, 0% of Germans resisting the Holocaust instead of 2%? Wouldn’t slavery be a respected institution to this day, lazily “justified” by things like genetic differences? Wouldn’t, say, husbands be allowed by law and public opinion to beat, rape and essentially own their wives?
No, no, “conservative”/”traditionalist” ethics are a path to nowhere without a complex semi-conscious system, varying from individual to individual and acting on both rational and emotional levels, that would allow one to relate one’s personality and preferences with their group’s tradition and accumulated knowledge/heuristics, and which would be given priority during judgment-making by an appeal to a higher, ideal authority—in short, without an essentially religious worldview.[1]
Unfortunately, not everyone has it in them to be Oskar Schindler or Sophie Scholl, but many people only had to be “good Christians” when the moment of truth came—to follow the output of that deep and broad system, which had been known as “Christianity”, “Western values”, “common decency”, but which ultimately drew upon similar sources, and had the ethical advice of centuries encapsuled within it. Alas, it was the 20th century, and things like that—old, complicated, below-the-surface systems—were just falling apart everywhere. But we shouldn’t just sit back and allow our own system to follow this course.
This is why I’m against any “rational” tampering with today’s mainstream Western worldview, even where I’m to the left or to the right of its political aspects. Any attack on “Liberal hypocrisy” that has indeed taken root in the last 50 years and largely replaced Christianity is short-sighted simply because this system is likely the only thing really holding our civilization together. If anything, perhaps we should move towards giving it more religious trappings—official commandments, saints, etc—without necessarily adding any supernatural element, but certainly without naively preaching that e.g. “Human Rights” don’t make much sense.
Today, a thinking conservative should be focused on improving and stabilizing the prevailing liberal dogma, not trying to return to the failed Protestant/Catholic one or make a “dogma-free” system. In short, I’m for free individual search through the collected conscious and subconscious ideas of your culture—its narrative. And where you’ve got a narrative, you’ve got humans’ natural ability to work with stories; abstract ideas are counter-intuitive, but picking out, combining and adapting stories is, IMO, how we can best handle social thinking.
(Sorry for such a rambling comment, I was just prompted to unload some under-construction ideas by seeing a post that’s related to them. Paragraphs here can be read separately.)
[1] I’m not talking about any kind of “faith” here, a belief in the suprenatural and so forth, but about the style of thinking that organized religion or advanced ideology seems to foster in developed, all-around intelligent people—like Chesterton or Orwell. My argument is that the average human also benefits from such a system, and this would be more noticeable with better systems. (Compare the Socialism/Communism of the students and professors who were behind the dismantling of the Segregation in the U.S. - mostly good people, for all their flaws and possible delusions—with e.g. the primitive, simplified worldview of early Bolsheviks. Both are clearly religions, but one does its adherents more good than the other.)
This is why I’m against any “rational” tampering with today’s mainstream Western worldview, even where I’m to the left or to the right of its political aspects. Any attack on “Liberal hypocrisy” that has indeed taken root in the last 50 years and largely replaced Christianity is short-sighted simply because this system is likely the only thing really holding our civilization together.
Would you have taken the same stance when dealing with say 18th and 19th century Anti-Christian thinkers in their own time? If not, why?
I very likely would; hell, the effects of Christianity’s all-around decay in the late 19th century—which was hastened on purpose by those people—are probably among the best evidence for the case I’m making. For starters, I’d quote this at them—and Dostoevsky too, and similar stuff by other thinkers who bemoaned the course that materialist civilization was taking.
I’m taking my chances on mind-killing here, but I’m (ethnically) Jewish, and my reflexive take on Christianity is “unreliable” rather than “holds civilization together”.
In the interests of avoiding the obvious… WWI was committed by Christian nations.
I believe (without having done a bunch of research) that a lot of the “tear it down” in current culture comes ultimately from seeing the hope of civilization’s steady improvement was inaccurate after the governments of Europe couldn’t find a way to avoid killing millions of each other’s citizens.
This is why I’m against any “rational” tampering with today’s mainstream Western worldview, even where I’m to the left or to the right of its political aspects.
This is an interesting sentence especially in a comment that started out discussing how bad conformism on moral issues is.
I’m basically speaking against “shallow” (bad) conformism and for “religious” (good) conformism in this comment. Only emulating the here-and-now surface patterns of your group = bad. Taking care to choose among your culture’s traditions carefully, taking a sprout and nurturing it if there’s no grown branch (like the moresuccesfulattempts at democracy in Africa, which clearly did NOT come from a mere copy-paste of the Western model, but partly drew on colonial or tribal past), perhaps promoting one branch (say, American Protestant radicalism) at the expense of other (say, Southern slavery and its mode of life) but not cutting any memories and ideas off = good.
Were you aware that even the Bolsheviks in Russia were following an established tradition of “nihilism” and radical upheaval? Their fault was not steering the nation in a direction they wanted, but (nearly) pruning all the other branches of possibilities inherent in the Russian culture, from monarchism to tribal/feudal democracy. Today in the US, slavery might be gone but the positive image of the “Southern Gentlemen”, with its associated aristocratic values, lives on in vestigal form (and has plenty of fans), while the memory of Russian aristocracy is sadly gone.
That’s roughly the difference I’m talking about, between treating the culture as an unique living thing vs. as a generic simple machine.
(And yet still somehow I don’t call myself a conservative. Don’t ask.)
(like the more succesful attempts at democracy in Africa, which clearly did NOT come from a mere copy-paste of the Western model, but partly drew on colonial or tribal past)
Perhaps, but the linked articles don’t go into enough detail to support this assertion.
perhaps promoting one branch (say, American Protestant radicalism) at the expense of other (say, Southern slavery and its mode of life) but not cutting any memories and ideas off = good.
I would like to point out that decentralized systems, e.g., libertarianism, are better at this then centralized systems, e.g., socialism.
Yeah, I suppose if you believe Christianity is/was the only thing holding civilization together, then adopting “Liberal hypocrisy” to fill the same role might make sense. Many people would disagree with the premise, though, by pointing to the Dark Ages and such. I don’t really know what to think about this.
Religion was very important to people at least around the time of the Roman Empire’s collapse (4th century onwards). Ordinary people around the Mediterranean used to argue about the nature of God and the doctrine of Trinity while standing in line at a shop!
The ecumenical councils of the day, for example, were massively important political events—the Council of Nicaea certainly held no less significance for the people under their jurisdiction than, say, the Nuremberg trials did for contemporary Europeans; it issued a controversial yet generally accepted verdict on what’s OK to believe and what’s vile heresy. I’m making that comparison because Christianity used to occupy, among other spaces, the niche in public consciousness that nationalism took in the 19th century.
Yeah, I suppose if you believe Christianity is/was the only thing holding civilization together, then adopting “Liberal hypocrisy” to fill the same role might make sense. Many people would disagree with the premise, though, by pointing to the Dark Ages and such. I don’t really know what to think about this.
The Christian religion was adopted much earlier and by a much larger proportion of the population in the Eastern Roman Empire than in the Western Roman Empire. The former outlived the latter by over 1,000 years. Obviously, the degree of Christianization was not the only difference between Rome and Constantinople, but it is an important fact to keep in mind when reasoning about these sorts of things.
I mostly agree, that’s all good and well… until it comes to moral choices, especially big ones. Here, even if people are very biased, don’t know their own preferences, just plain don’t care about others, etc… shallow conformism is still a worse option in many situations. If everyone just looked to their current group’s authorities in deciding how or whether to do the right thing—and those authorities looked to the past - … wouldn’t we have, for example, 0% of Germans resisting the Holocaust instead of 2%? Wouldn’t slavery be a respected institution to this day, lazily “justified” by things like genetic differences? Wouldn’t, say, husbands be allowed by law and public opinion to beat, rape and essentially own their wives?
No, no, “conservative”/”traditionalist” ethics are a path to nowhere without a complex semi-conscious system, varying from individual to individual and acting on both rational and emotional levels, that would allow one to relate one’s personality and preferences with their group’s tradition and accumulated knowledge/heuristics, and which would be given priority during judgment-making by an appeal to a higher, ideal authority—in short, without an essentially religious worldview.[1]
Unfortunately, not everyone has it in them to be Oskar Schindler or Sophie Scholl, but many people only had to be “good Christians” when the moment of truth came—to follow the output of that deep and broad system, which had been known as “Christianity”, “Western values”, “common decency”, but which ultimately drew upon similar sources, and had the ethical advice of centuries encapsuled within it. Alas, it was the 20th century, and things like that—old, complicated, below-the-surface systems—were just falling apart everywhere. But we shouldn’t just sit back and allow our own system to follow this course.
This is why I’m against any “rational” tampering with today’s mainstream Western worldview, even where I’m to the left or to the right of its political aspects. Any attack on “Liberal hypocrisy” that has indeed taken root in the last 50 years and largely replaced Christianity is short-sighted simply because this system is likely the only thing really holding our civilization together. If anything, perhaps we should move towards giving it more religious trappings—official commandments, saints, etc—without necessarily adding any supernatural element, but certainly without naively preaching that e.g. “Human Rights” don’t make much sense.
Today, a thinking conservative should be focused on improving and stabilizing the prevailing liberal dogma, not trying to return to the failed Protestant/Catholic one or make a “dogma-free” system. In short, I’m for free individual search through the collected conscious and subconscious ideas of your culture—its narrative. And where you’ve got a narrative, you’ve got humans’ natural ability to work with stories; abstract ideas are counter-intuitive, but picking out, combining and adapting stories is, IMO, how we can best handle social thinking.
(Sorry for such a rambling comment, I was just prompted to unload some under-construction ideas by seeing a post that’s related to them. Paragraphs here can be read separately.)
[1] I’m not talking about any kind of “faith” here, a belief in the suprenatural and so forth, but about the style of thinking that organized religion or advanced ideology seems to foster in developed, all-around intelligent people—like Chesterton or Orwell. My argument is that the average human also benefits from such a system, and this would be more noticeable with better systems. (Compare the Socialism/Communism of the students and professors who were behind the dismantling of the Segregation in the U.S. - mostly good people, for all their flaws and possible delusions—with e.g. the primitive, simplified worldview of early Bolsheviks. Both are clearly religions, but one does its adherents more good than the other.)
Would you have taken the same stance when dealing with say 18th and 19th century Anti-Christian thinkers in their own time? If not, why?
I very likely would; hell, the effects of Christianity’s all-around decay in the late 19th century—which was hastened on purpose by those people—are probably among the best evidence for the case I’m making. For starters, I’d quote this at them—and Dostoevsky too, and similar stuff by other thinkers who bemoaned the course that materialist civilization was taking.
You biting this bullet in spite of it violating tribal attire has made me take your argument much more seriously.
I’ll spend some time thinking about it in the next few days.
I’m taking my chances on mind-killing here, but I’m (ethnically) Jewish, and my reflexive take on Christianity is “unreliable” rather than “holds civilization together”.
In the interests of avoiding the obvious… WWI was committed by Christian nations.
I believe (without having done a bunch of research) that a lot of the “tear it down” in current culture comes ultimately from seeing the hope of civilization’s steady improvement was inaccurate after the governments of Europe couldn’t find a way to avoid killing millions of each other’s citizens.
This is an interesting sentence especially in a comment that started out discussing how bad conformism on moral issues is.
I’m basically speaking against “shallow” (bad) conformism and for “religious” (good) conformism in this comment. Only emulating the here-and-now surface patterns of your group = bad. Taking care to choose among your culture’s traditions carefully, taking a sprout and nurturing it if there’s no grown branch (like the more succesful attempts at democracy in Africa, which clearly did NOT come from a mere copy-paste of the Western model, but partly drew on colonial or tribal past), perhaps promoting one branch (say, American Protestant radicalism) at the expense of other (say, Southern slavery and its mode of life) but not cutting any memories and ideas off = good.
Were you aware that even the Bolsheviks in Russia were following an established tradition of “nihilism” and radical upheaval? Their fault was not steering the nation in a direction they wanted, but (nearly) pruning all the other branches of possibilities inherent in the Russian culture, from monarchism to tribal/feudal democracy. Today in the US, slavery might be gone but the positive image of the “Southern Gentlemen”, with its associated aristocratic values, lives on in vestigal form (and has plenty of fans), while the memory of Russian aristocracy is sadly gone.
That’s roughly the difference I’m talking about, between treating the culture as an unique living thing vs. as a generic simple machine.
(And yet still somehow I don’t call myself a conservative. Don’t ask.)
Perhaps, but the linked articles don’t go into enough detail to support this assertion.
I would like to point out that decentralized systems, e.g., libertarianism, are better at this then centralized systems, e.g., socialism.
Yeah, I suppose if you believe Christianity is/was the only thing holding civilization together, then adopting “Liberal hypocrisy” to fill the same role might make sense. Many people would disagree with the premise, though, by pointing to the Dark Ages and such. I don’t really know what to think about this.
Religion was very important to people at least around the time of the Roman Empire’s collapse (4th century onwards). Ordinary people around the Mediterranean used to argue about the nature of God and the doctrine of Trinity while standing in line at a shop!
The ecumenical councils of the day, for example, were massively important political events—the Council of Nicaea certainly held no less significance for the people under their jurisdiction than, say, the Nuremberg trials did for contemporary Europeans; it issued a controversial yet generally accepted verdict on what’s OK to believe and what’s vile heresy. I’m making that comparison because Christianity used to occupy, among other spaces, the niche in public consciousness that nationalism took in the 19th century.
The Christian religion was adopted much earlier and by a much larger proportion of the population in the Eastern Roman Empire than in the Western Roman Empire. The former outlived the latter by over 1,000 years. Obviously, the degree of Christianization was not the only difference between Rome and Constantinople, but it is an important fact to keep in mind when reasoning about these sorts of things.