Is it conservative?

December 19, 2008 12:57 PM

Understanding conservatism: Is seeking a solution to a current situation with knowledge/action from the past a conservative act?

I was listening to a group of people talk about Hindu philosophy and how it helps them cope. It occurred to me that this might be conservatism (in the academic/theoretical sense of the word). Am I wrong?

posted by larry_darrell to society & culture (8 comments total)

Funny you should ask about this. I just finished reading Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, which included a list of ten guiding principles, outlined here. Among them is a belief in the strength of custom, convention and continuity. Chesterton called this "the democracy of the dead."

So: perhaps, yes.
posted by jquinby at 1:42 PM on December 19, 2008

I think you're essentially right coming to "conservatism" from a literal or traditional understanding, but recognize that the context in which "conservative" and "liberal" are used varies widely and that you'll need to establish the baseline assumptions on which you're operating before characterizing something as conservative in order to avoid the "no true Scotsman" type of problem.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:07 PM on December 19, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Knowledge is by definition from the past, because all we have "from" the future is speculation. Conservatism is a reluctance to change and a suspicion of the unfamiliar and the recent. The way I see it, the more the world around you is changing, the less appropriate conservatism tends to be.

This gets complicated, because much of activist conservatism agitates for a bowdlerized and idealized imaginary past (like the way Norman Rockwell painted New England towns but left out the gaudy advertisements and neon, and in more recent years those same towns outlawed gaudy advertisements and neon so they could look like the Rockwell paintings "again", or the movement to get women back in the role of housewives, when this was never common in the US before the post-war economic boom of the '50s). Not to mention the fact that the concept of conservative activism seems a little oxymoronic on the face of it. Even the ancient Greeks talked about a much older time when people knew their duties and respected the gods and wives were faithful etc. etc. etc. Conservatives tend to dress up the past to look like the Utopia they are trying to change society into.

Really, environmentalism should be considered conservative, as should other lefty hippy "fads" like suspicion of modern medicine, suspicion of modern chemicals (particularly in agriculture), fear of genetic engineering and patented GMO crops, avoiding TV, preferring to be out in nature and not being as meticulous about hygiene as the mainstream culture. Add to this a fondness for acoustic/folk music, a preference for subsistence lifestyle, the tendency to wear home-made clothes, and a preference for ancient pagan pre-christian spirituality, and you couldn't find a more "conservative" USian than a hippy.
posted by idiopath at 2:38 PM on December 19, 2008

Your example could almost certainly be described as spiritual conservatism, in that the people you mention are seeking answers through a long-established religious philosophy.

But the fact that these people are looking outside the traditional western sources for philosophical ideas could mark them as being either conservative or non-conservative. It's probably that, like most people, their motivations are complex and involve a mixture of conservative and non-conservative impulses. And to further muddy the waters, Hinduism itself has both conservative and non-conservative aspects.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 3:22 PM on December 19, 2008

Political conservatism, as idiopath says, is a scepticism of change for it own sake, not necessarily an idealisation of the past.
Solutions involving acts from the past are not necessarily conservative ones. Consider that past political problems have often elicited radical and revolutionary responses.
The dichotomy you're looking for, considering acting with or without regard for the past, is wisdom against ignorance, and both can be conservative.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:51 PM on December 19, 2008

"Conservatism" as it exists in the US currently is a combination of free economic policy and authoritarian social policy.

Spun one way, it is allowing people to the freedom to prosper or fail on their own, and maintaining strict rules for social behavior. That the only way to truly motivate people is for their future to be solely in their hands and where failure means you try again. And socially, don't buck the trend.

Emotionally, yes, it definitely comes from a mythological past where everything was better. I believe that it is a sort of childishness, ignorance and egocentricity, where adherents fail to realize that the wonderful times had in their childhood weren't so wonderful, that their parents shielded them from a lot of the troubles, and that as they grow up and see and learn more about the world, clearly the *world* must be changing around them and not their perspective on it.

It's also a rhetorical trick, an appeal the authority of the past.

I would posit that this fetishizing of the perfection of the past is by definition flawed, because if what they did in the past really worked, we wouldn't be having any problems now.
posted by gjc at 5:37 PM on December 19, 2008

Leaving aside any notions of political conservatism, I think that you're failing to define terms and being overly broad. Certainly someone could rely on Hindu philosophy in a way that reinforces conservatism of thought and cultural tradition, but most Americans would see Hindu philosophy as something liberating and liberal by comparison with mainstream Christianity. Certainly it has attracted many adherents, few who would consciously describe themselves as politically conservative, although of course it really has nothing to do with politics in any substantial sense.

Returning to your first question, though, I would have to say that learning from the past is, if anything, anti-conservative, but recapitulating the past is by definition conservative. ("Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- Santayana) It certainly isn't conservative to re-examine and deconstruct how the past viewed things or worked things out. In fact, a lot of the times this is viewed as a threat to conservatism.

So, the answer must be "It depends."
posted by dhartung at 10:43 PM on December 19, 2008

Is seeking a solution to a current situation with knowledge/action from the past a conservative act?

All knowledge is from the past, right? I don't mean to be pedantic, but in the present moment--the very present moment--we have at most perception or sensation. And even that is slightly delayed relative to the actual state of the world, as it takes a short amount of time for light and sound to travel to us and then be converted into nerve impulses and sent to our brains.

My point is that an implicit assumption of your question--that if an action is informed by beliefs older than x, that action is conservative--may be problematic. And what to make of the swings of history? Are the beliefs of Robespierre more conservative than the beliefs of Reagan because they're older?

The way I think about it, an idea cannot be conservative (or progressive, or radical, or any of those) on its own. These concepts only make sense relative to a larger social context. Reagan was conservative relative to his contemporaries, even more conservative relative to mine, and utterly radical relative to a 17th century monarchy.

If someone in my social circle drew comfort from Hinduism, it would not be conservative at all, as this is not part of the status quo (at least, Hinduism straight from the source, and not filtered through Thoreau or Gandhi). If someone in a traditional (i.e., relatively unchanged from the previous generation) Hindu household drew comfort from Hinduism, yeah, that could be considered conservative, I suppose.

Conservative, progressive... these are such weird, loaded, individually-defined words, and probably best avoided for this reason.

All this should go with a caveat, though. My way of thinking of these terms often contradicts the standard way people use them--George W Bush is, in my opinion, a radical, not a conservative. It's quite possible that I'm crazy.
posted by kprincehouse at 3:36 AM on December 20, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]