Conservatism, as I understand it, is the presupposition that if a community has always done something a certain way, there is probably a good reason for it.
That is not the usual definition. I have seen it only one time, many years ago on a website I can no longer find. But it nicely epitomizes the philosophical basis of everything other conservatives say that I happen to agree with.
The qualifier "probably" is essential. Sensible conservatives, however they define their political philosophy, are not opposed in principle to change. They do, however, maintain a skepticism, as Michael Shermer defined the word, toward proposals for reforming society. Skepticism, according to Shermer, is just a "show me" attitude: Show me the evidence that you think justifies what you are telling me, and then let's discuss how strongly that evidence supports your conclusion. This attitude is just another name for one of the defining characteristics of the Enlightenment.
It's also how some of us conservatives can be atheists. We have examined the arguments for religious beliefs and found them wanting. Unlike some of the more famous religious skeptics, though, we don't then infer that religion is a bad thing. As William F. Buckley Jr. reportedly told one of his proteges, you don't have to be religious to be a conservative, but you can't be hostile to religion and be a conservative.
Conservatives believe that there is such a thing as human nature. Culture is powerful, but not omnipotent. Whatever it is about the human mind that disposes it toward religious beliefs, it is as nearly universal as anything else.
But it does not have to be anything we would characterize as a religious intuition. What it seems to be instead is a set of cognitive shortcuts that were necessary for our survival as a species and, as a byproduct, facilitated our acquiring certain kinds of ideas now associated with religion. The philosopher Daniel Dennett discussed this notion in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and he is by no means the only modern thinker to propose or endorse the idea.
This would explain why some political ideologues, including many who actually are hostile to religion, succumb to many of the same cognitive errors that they can so readily identify in the work of religious apologists, because no cognitive error is unique to religious belief or any particular religion.
A few folks pointed this out several years ago after a segment of the atheist community decided it was time to ally themselves with political progressives and formed a movement they called Atheism Plus. Typical of some early responses was a blog post by one David Osorio, titled "Atheism Plus: We’re Atheists . . . But We Behave Like Christians!" I mention the article not because I agree with Osorio's apparent suggestion that Christians typically behave badly (I don't agree), but because he makes the point that if some Christians behave badly, some of their adversaries don't behave any better. The larger point I wish to make, which Osorio does not make, is that both sides behave badly for the same reason. We all make these mistakes, and we all make them because we're all human.
And, just as no cognitive errors are unique to any political, religious, or other tribe, so too is no cognitive virtue unique to any tribe. As John Stuart Mill reminded us (see previous essay), we're always obliged to listen closely to our adversaries, because notwithstanding whatever mistakes they're making, they're probably also making some point that we need to get.
What we don't need is to get it just because they say so. There is no cognitive virtue in trying to evade the burden of proof, or in thinking you have met the burden by quoting some intellectual with a reputation for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. The truth of any idea cannot be measured by assessing the character of those who accept it.
A more recent analysis, far more nuanced than Osorio's, of the the overlap between religious and political thinking appeared last month in the online journal Quillette under the title "Religious Progressivism."
The author, Colin Turfus, says, "The essence of religion . . . is the fact that it addresses a fundamental human need for moral certainty." But as he also observes, this quest for moral certainty is not unique to religion. It usually costs us something to do what we think is right, and we'd like to feel certain that the price is worth paying.
And then, says Turfus, having decided that we really cannot be mistaken in our moral judgments, "we also become evangelists for our moral framework."
Evangelism as such is not a bad thing. The word seems to be of Christian origin, but the desire to propagate one's beliefs is as old as humanity. A perfectly good way to defend one's tribe is to persuade members of other tribes to change their allegiance. The problems are with certain methods of persuasion and with our treatment of those who fail to be persuaded.
There is nothing particularly conservative about the stifling or repression of dissent. It happens under conservative regimes, but it has lately been happening as well in a few academic bastions of liberalism. It is something people are inclined to do whenever they acquire the kind of power requisite to doing it.
Which is why the best conservative thinkers nowadays are champions of free speech. In my younger days when I was still a liberal, I read with much approval some newspaper articles about the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, led by a liberal activist named Mario Savio. My fellow liberals confidently told me that conservatives were against free speech. It took me a few years to discover that that wasn't quite the case. Real conservatives don't have a problem with free speech, but they do have concerns about who, if anyone, should be empowered to restrict it and under what circumstances they should be able to exercise that power.
So it is with social reform. We're not against it, but we are hesitant to empower the advocates of reform the way they want to be empowered. Nobody in their right mind denies that our society needs some fixing, but reasonable people can and do disagree about how those fixes should be implemented. If you think otherwise, I'm not sure whether you're a liberal or a conservative, but I'm pretty sure that if given the opportunity, you would be a thug.
Next: About climate change
(This page last updated on December 2, 2019.)