The two relevant ideas I know are:
1. Chesterton's Fence: "I don't understand why this exists, so let's tear it down" is an big and tempting error. Wait until you understand.
2. Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.
The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.
I'm not a conservative myself, but as I've grown older and wiser, I've come to understand and respect the philosophy.
Right, but the quote I was questioning seemed to indicate that this principle should be applied in cases where no one knows or perhaps even there is no way to know what the purpose is or even in there is one.
That’s a much stronger claim than Chesterton’s fence, because a fence is at least a pretty clear indication of human intent (prevent creatures or objects of a certain size from traveling from one particular area to another), and the class of reasons to build a fence is fairly bounded and can feasibly be investigated.
Also, I’m not sure how Chesterton’s fence is used in detail, but I wouldn’t agree that you must discover the original reason for the fence to justify removing it. You should investigate all the normal reasons a fence would be there, and if no extant reason turns up, tear down the fence and maybe keep an eye out for a while in case you missed something.
I don’t want Chesterton’s fence to devolve all the way to the precautionary principle. Sure, maybe the fence was never needed as a traditional fence, and instead was built by ancient people because they were visited by aliens who said they will destroy Earth if there is ever not a fence in that location. Sure, that’s probably physically possible, but keeping the fence around because of that possibility is terrible epistemology.
No, you should give up the idea that you can justify tearing down the fence by any intellectual investigation. If you really believe it would be better if the fence came down, then you need to work to convince everyone who has an interest in the fence to agree with you. If you succeed, then the fence will come down on its own without you having to force anything. And if you don't succeed, perhaps your belief that it would be better if the fence came down was wrong.
And the point is that no individual person can figure out, just by using their own reason, whether it's a good idea for the fence to be removed. The only way to know that is for the long-winded social process of people interacting with each other to either eventually convince them that the fence should be removed, or not.
That clearly doesn't apply to every argument.
There are lots of times when "society" was wrong, and regular people could see that, and also aught change it.
Yes, sometimes society makes makes mistakes, or, even worse, does things for fully understandable, but bad reasons.
> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation
I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.
The more charitable one is called "progressive conservatism". Progressive conservatives believe, among other things, that "instant change is not always the best and can sometimes be damaging to society, therefore cautious change that fits in with the nation's social and political traditions is necessary." [1] Progressive conservatives were the driving force behind abolition in Britain as well as natural conservation and the national park system in the United States, for example, so it's hardly a philosophy that resists all change.
A few presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower have called themselves progressive conservatives but in reality, the philosophy underpins the entire US Constitution and system of government going back to the founding fathers. It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning. It's the court systems that can delay or outright kill hasty legislation. The conservatives want to let the progressives leap into the future while they focus on conserving the good things about the present so that they don't become casualties to progress.
To be clear the GOP is neither conservative, nor progressive, nor progressive conservative. They're just the elephant in the room.
These gradients feel more armchair philosophical than things that speak to the actual problems and patterns of the world as I, at least, know it. I can't imagine getting so hung up on some naturalistic sociological question of consensus, with the idea that would actually change our general trajectory. It all very much reeks to me of a history walking on its head.
> It's the checks and balances that keep our (ostensible) democracy functioning.
I'm a fan of TR and Eisenhower to a lesser extent, so this isn't exactly a criticism. The US Constitution was definitely founded under the model you describe, but those things aren't necessarily indivisible from each other. The progressive conservatism you defined is a commitment to a hierarchical model of liberalism. Many of the achievements of both Roosevelts and Eisenhower were in the name of warding off Socialist and Communist movements in the early and mid 20th century. They were progressive in giving more rights and services to the common person (well, some of them, some of the time) and conservative in maintaining the ability of the wealthy to continue on with their necks and bank balances intact.
Although some of the critiques of conservative liberalism (as opposed to the historical, royalist conservatism) can be waved off as "the Republicans aren't actually conservative any more", there is a still a valid critique to be made if you believe that 250 years is more than enough time to embrace a more egalitarian model.
Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough to be the main source of resistence to Progressive political movements.
After all, isn't the whole goal of Progressivism to create a society so good that one wants to Conserve it?
This sounds like a position that a conservative would take, because it paints them as eminently reasonable (and progressives, by comparison, must be unreasonable).
They are both right for their own reasons, but they both appear insane to the other at first glance.
In my experience, the main source of political conflict is direction, not speed.
Yeah, many people with very different ideas call themselves conservatives.
> I've never known conservatism to be anything except opposition to change as that's the most conservative thing you can generally do: nothing.
Have you never known conservatives wanting to lower taxes, deregulate the economy, and decentralize decision making?
I know its not conservative or liberal, it depends how you look at it. Deregulation of markets was seen as liberal at one time, devolution is pretty well supported except by some that support strong central government control, and lower taxes is often seen as American conservative, instead of offering services that they skim, or taxing you and giving you back more money (lol) they just won't take it in the first place. Milton Friedman's negative income tax is a beautiful way to help the poor without sudden cutoffs for when they try to become wealthier too.
I would say that these labels aren't as useful as top down control (big government, tell people what to do) or bottom up control (power to the people, let them do as they want to). Both can be useful for different reasons. The ozone hole and banning freon was top down but the tragedy of the common would mean it would never get fixed. The federal government also shouldn't raid dispensaries and prevent weed smoking.
I know that's the case for every conservative I know, at least. They stand for those values in the abstract, as an ostensibly philosophy to undergird their politics... But oppose those values in practice.
Republicans want to decentralize this to democratic decisions in each state.
> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation
Trump was not traditional, and Obama was very moderate, even stating he did not support gay marriage. Don't trust general labels!
> The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.
Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.
"People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.
To use your example, last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.
My personal opinion is that individual jurisdictions should experiment more at a small scale. Maybe SF abolishes the police, and Minneapolis increases funding for social work, and the Chicago police install robocops at every corner, and Nashville provides benefits only to families which stay intact. Then after two years it will be obvious which policies _really_ don't work, and after five years there will be a good handle on the set of policies that might work, and after fourty years most of the magnitudes of the possible second- and third-order effects will be understood, at least as well as it is possible to know them.
But it is impossible to have local experiments when the popular call is for immediate action on the national level. Alas, one is left with digging through the archves of history and trying to see where natural experiments have been done, and what confounding variables there were.
It's a necessary and important argument, but not sufficient by itself. I agree that decisions must be analyzed closely.
At the same time, that approach is used to create endless delays by people who are unmotivated for or opposed to change. Police reforms have been delayed for generations. It's not credible to either say 'people are suffering' or 'we must think it over'. Analysis can happen quickly.
> last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.
A bit tangential: 'Defund the police' didn't mean defund the services, just shift them between departments. The idea is to move many services to other government agencies. As a simple example, move response to mental health crises from police to mental health agencies. For a long time, police have (reasonably) complained that they are somehow expected to solve all of society's problems.
I'm not sure this is always true. Or at least, it is important to specify what confidence you demand here. If you demand an infinite regress of dissertations before taking any action, you can perform a denial of service attack on all progress. Almost any policy change can have chaotic and unpredictable effects and demanding flawless prediction of the outcome is demanding the impossible.
And further, "some bad outcome will come from this change" should not be sufficient to stop progress. You cannot make perfect be the enemy of good, and net progress can be achieved even if there are some things that regress with a new policy.
At almost every step of major social progress, agitators were told that they were unruly and moving too fast. In hindsight, can we really say that women's liberation or civil rights or gay rights movements actually moved too quickly? We can even have a historical example of aggression being more effective than respectability politics. Women's rights movements largely failed in the late 19th century and it wasn't until the "disrespectful" suffragette movement ("suffragette" was a derogatory term to contrast with the more respectful activists of the prior generation) that real progress was made.
Let's imagine for a second that we really believe is this idea - society is in a fragile equilibrium, and any change is dangerous and could be for the worse.
Well, first obvious effect is that any change regarding woman rights, etc. would not have happened the way it did. That's in line with the Conservative viewpoint.
But more importantly, the society changes all the time from technology and market forces- it has changed massively with globalization, introduction of mobile phones, and social networks. Nobody talk about that!
No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'. So if you are not willing to apply the principle consistently, are you just using it a a charade to mask some irrational belief of personal gain? It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.
That's not what the GP said. He only said the consequences of societal change are unknowable. That doesn't mean we should never change society because we're afraid it will break. It means we should change society slowly, gradually, recognizing the limitations of our knowledge, instead of forming grandiose plans and trying to impose them top-down.
Women's rights is actually a good example of gradually changing society. Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything they thought was wrong. It took centuries for changes relating to women's rights to happen (and they're still happening). And even then we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences of those changes. But I don't think any reasonable conservative would say we shouldn't have made those changes.
> society changes all the time from technology and market forces
Yes, that's quite true. And we're still figuring out how to deal with unintended consequences from those changes as well. And I would say that the changes that are the most problematic in these areas are the ones resulting from some one person's top-down intentions, rather than from bottom-up evolution based on the natural interactions of many people. For example, Facebook isn't a problem because of gradual social evolution; it's a problem because Mark Zuckerberg has grandiose visions about how social media and society should work.
Are you sure about that? I think they felt quite strongly about their cause
"The suffragettes had invented the letter bomb, a device intended to kill or injure the recipient, and an increasing amount began to be posted... the former home of MP Arthur Du Cros was burned down. Du Cros had consistently voted against the enfranchisement of women, which was why he had been chosen as a target"
How much of this is simply a consequence of the fact that if you take care of your kids, it is not counted as a part of GDP, but if you pay someone else to take care of your kids, it is a part of GDP. So the GDP would increase even if the kids get exactly the same care, and even if all the money the woman makes is spent on paying the babysitters.
The man makes $1000, the woman stays at home with kids = GDP $1000.
The man makes $1000, the woman makes $1000, they pay $1000 for babysitting = GDP $2000.
In the latter scenario, GDP is twice as high, but the family only keeps $1000 either way.
I don't think you fully got my point.
The idea is not to oppose every change, but to change incrementally, letting society adapt, and learn from it when you do the next change.
Women's rights changed gradually over the whole 20th century as society gradually changed. To me that's a very well executed set of incremental changes!
Surely you see the problems with technology, you don't think that the world was more social, people less polarized, and less isolated? Why do we have to assume its not when its obviously true, smartphones did change society greatly, so did online dating apps. They are not beliefs or guesswork.
>No mainstream conservatives proposes 'let's ban kids form having mobile phones and Facebook until we fully understand their effect'.
American conservatism isn't about preventing changes, its about less govenment control. In fact to other countries they are considered very liberal. Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?
>It seems hypocritical, a bit like 'pro life' people not supporting healthcare reform.
They think aborting which is killing an unwanted baby is murder, but they ignore who takes care of the child after, its something I have a problem with too.
Who legalized marijuana in California, and said he inhaled on video?
>more supportive of police than liberals.
NIMBY are not liberal or conservative, when did you last hear defund the police?
I don't trust polls. Dehumanizing people into numbers is pointless. People are not numbers, and the elections showed how worthless they are.
During Obama there were raids on dispensaries. These labels are meaningless.
We are not liberal or conservative. We are people with many different often hypocritical viewpoints, nobody is consistent. Nixon’s universal healthcare would have been more comprehensive than Obamacare, but Senator Kennedy rejected it. Politicians are opportunistic, Obama said he was not pro gay marriage, and Nixon said he’d never put in price controls (he did). Clinton was a carbon copy of a republican and weakened welfare and popularized super predators as well as deregulate heavily.
Let’s not fight over labeling, let’s agree all politicians are dishonest.
I’m a fan of lower taxes (I think it’s silly to expect to give money to government and expect a bigger return), deregulation in over regulated markets that serves to only help big businesses, entropy in energy waste/use, removing subsidies from farming since it’s harmful to the environment and health, making natural resources into corporations so they have the sane rights as citizens and can sue for damages done.
Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless. https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-... Also polling people isn't dehumanizing them.
83% of Democrats support legalization vs 48% of Republicans. These margins are too great to be explained away by poor polling.
So again if Conservatives were actually about less government control then they wouldn't support the government making marijuana illegal.
Republican and Democrats are not conservative or liberal.
Example: Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?
Clinton defunded welfare, was racist, and also deregulated the market. Is he conservative?
Trump mentioned he would like to deregulate all drugs. Does that make him liberal?
Obama raided on dispensaries for federal reason, does that mean he is conservative, or does that mean he is liberal for strong central government?
I mention these heads because the polls don't matter, the policy makers do. The politicians do not work for the people, they are not beholden to their promises or any morals. Does it matter that a bunch of people want weed to be legal and have no way to make it legal, or does one person who can sign it into law matter more? I know my answer, hundreds of my pot smoking friends have less power than one politician.
>Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless.
Lets look at the example of "Political ideology"
How do you quantify that? If I consider myself liberal, I am liberal? If I consider myself conservative, I am conservative? These are not concrete definitions. I don't vote downballot. People are hypocritical. What value does this poll give to anyone? What use will it have? What can anyone use it for? When Trump ignored polls he won. When Florida was a bellwether, it is not anymore. I don't see any use in them at all.
Would you call Schwarzenegger a liberal despite him being Republican? Do moderate Democrats share the same value as the ones that are openly communist? Do fundamental christians, libertarians, tea party members, and Trump's MAGA cult of personality really deserve to be lumped together? They are all hypocrites like all humans. I edited my comment, I care about values, not parties and neither party is either or.
I hate politics usually, but I hope my point is clear: I see conservatism as devolution and and I am happy Oregon is deregulating all drugs, there are more democrats than republicans, many unaffiliated with either and they are not letting central government push them around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Oregon
In another thread I mentioned how Bob Dole's achievements are very left wing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/us/politics/bob-dole-dead...
>He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995.
>Russell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.
also:
>It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.
Lets not focus on labels, and lets focus on policy, and remember nobody follows the rules, especially politicians.
But this also seems like sloganeering since the data suggests they also donate more to poor children. It’s a good slogan though.
Instituting a new, wide-sweeping government ban is itself a major change. It's not unusual for conservative families to implement those sort of rules in their households.
But you might never understand; that is part of Hayek's point. Which means you can never just "tear it down". Your #2 is really the essential point.
Accepting that it's essential and helpful is also blind faith.
A more judicious takeaway might be that revolutions often have tragic periods.
The French revolution had its blood-soaked Terror and Thermidor, lead to the Napoleonic wars in which many perished, etc. But it also liberated millions, spread an ideal of democracy and human rights cherished by much of the world today.
The U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction were in every sense a revolution against slavery. Who can deny that despite it all, this revolution was necessary, and did not go far enough in achieving its aims?
As for the Civil War, the U.S. had to spend a million lives in that war to end slavery. (And, as you appear to recognize, that still didn't really improve the lives of the former slaves all that much--more than a century of Jim Crow was still to come.) The British Empire did it without spending any lives at all, and has never had the kind of Jim Crow issues the U.S. has had. So what is the advantage of revolution, again?
While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back.
Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized that thought.
That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.
liberty equality fraternity - yes, the revolution was bound to happen. You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes. And democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.
You must be joking. Even ostensibly democratic governments have no problem at all treating the people as subjects instead of as masters.
> That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.
There are lots of ways to end a monarchy which, while they are not bloodless, do not involve insane murderers rising to the top. But the fact that insane murderers did rise to the top in the French Revolution was not a "side effect"; it was an obvious consequence of the way that revolution was done, dictated from the top down by a small group of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason".
> You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes.
The totalitarian regimes that killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century were not "monarchist". They were, as I have said, inspired by the French Revolution, and by the horrible idea that a small group of people can totally restructure society based on "reason". Every time it's been tried it has ended in, to use your phrase, insane murderers rising to the top.
> democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.
You do realize that "democracy" is also the term that regimes like the one installed by the French Revolution, and the Soviet Union, and the other totalitarian regimes that arose from small groups of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason", used to describe themselves, right?
The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.
'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII.
Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great.
We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also describe those as a 'worse outcome for the citizenry'?
[1] Which could also be described, if not as de-colonization, as an end to Soviet imperialism.
And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.
If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!
The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.
This is absolutely a case of survivorship bias.
In other words, if the actual facts had been different, we would use a different word to describe what happened. Yes, indeed. That's why we have different words: to capture meaningful differences in the facts we are using the words to describe. If we simply called every change in government a "revolution", the word would be useless.
I think that's rarely the case, at least not when the people starting the revolution are reasonably sane (by which I mean they have a reasonably good grasp of reality and use that to guide their actions). I think the people in Eastern Europe who started "revolutions" when the Soviet Union fell had a pretty good idea that little or no bloodshed would be required.
It's quite possible that the people who started the French Revolution didn't realize how much blood would be shed, but to me that just means those people were not reasonably sane. And there is plenty of other evidence that they were disconnected from reality.
(By contrast, I think the people who started the Russian Revolution, and the Communist revolution in China, were well aware that much bloodshed would be required, and they were perfectly OK with that. That makes them reasonably sane by my definition, but it does make them "insane" by other definitions--psychopathic or sociopathic, for example.)
For one thing, when it's won, the losers go back home. After a revolution, they stay around. Which is you often end up killing them.
It should be noted that often when wars of independence happen there are still many people who identify with the side of the "losers" whose homes are on the "winners" side, and vice versa.
For example Greek independence did not magically transmit the Turks living in their borders to Turkey, nor did it transfer the Greeks living in Turkey to Greece. What was needed to resolve that situation was ethnic cleansing via the deportation of the populations to their respective countries, in such that a country where they hadn't lived before can be called "theirs".
I don't think you have any appreciation for how the basic rights you take for granted were a direct product of the rivers of blood shed in those struggles.
So if I were to pick a revolution or revolutions that set the pattern for guaranteeing basic rights, it would be the English and American ones, not the French one.
But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses.
Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many of which immediately backslid during reconstruction, because the Union's policy of appeasement and compromise with the losers
And that's just the English-speaking world. In much of the rest of Europe, it took the industrial-scale slaughter of the first world war to destabilize its monarchies of the early 20th century. Autocrats rarely give up power without violence, or the threat thereof.
I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.
The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
uh Why? Because of the rights of man and the metric system? Think you need to elaborate.
"So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one."
Because if they're so terrible, the hidden reason to keep them in place must be specially strong. Or they could be extremely difficult to change because of some shadowy societal forces that lead to unintended consequences.
However, the system works "well" for the status quo, and questioning their rule and methods can also be dangerous. You could end up with your name smeared in the media, tortured for years, and imprisoned without a fair trial.. Or chainsawed up. Or sent to prison for trumped up charges. Etc
Honesty is very, very necessary in figuring out how to solve the problems we are facing as a species - but lies are cheap, and power corrupts, and a lot of people just have other shit to do than pick through the mountains of manure to find truth nuggets.
Don't drink alcohol because... well, luck favors the bold...
There's a reason a pen containing goats is typically thought of as a pasture whereas a pen containing pigs is generally thought of as a mud pit.
The strength of Western society was that we had freedoms that were managed by a elaborate social and information architecture that ensures we don't drift too far beyond the bounds (such as ethical failure in public office and being anti-science). Once you remove this it you find that there is a limit to how much 'free' speech can correct itself, and we discover how easy it is to divide and manipulate people with misinformation.