sobota 28. února 2009

Splendors and Miseries of Conservatism

This post is an reaction to public news, by which fourteen years old Jonathan Krohn formulated the manifest of conservatism in his book Define Conservatism. The common criticism of conservatism is based on the vagueness of this philosophy, in relation to liberalism in particular.

Click to View Jonathan's Introductin

By this this page (which is somewhat biased against liberalism) the conservatism is defined by following six apparently nontransparent principles:

  1. Belief in natural law.
    Here we can met with biased stance often, because proponents of conservatism tends to neglect just these laws, which are supporting a synergies and evolutionary advantages of collectivism and strong central government.
  2. Belief in established institutions
    Belief in institutions, the government in particular makes a belief in individual somewhat problematic, just because established institutions tends to subdue individual freedom very often. Here's no intersubjectively accepted criterion of level, by which institutions can affect the life of individual safely without violation of individual freedom.

  3. Preference for liberty over equality.
    This may sound well, but by principle, the freedom of individual begins exactly where freedom of others ends the maximal freedom of individual exists just in completely egalitarian society.

  4. Suspicion of power—and of human nature.
    This is vague stance as well, because just the established institutions are dispersers of true power. Human nature can lead to misuse of conservative principles by the same way, like misuse of libertarian ones.

  5. Belief in exceptionalismus.
    This belief manifest often in biased meritocratic elitism, which defies the individual right very often.

  6. Belief in the individual.
    The general reason, why individuals are organizing itself into "established institutions" is just to promote the collective opinion (groupthink) over the opinion of individuals.

It's evident, all principles of conservatism are rather weekly defined and supersymmetric by their very nature: the abuse of some of them leads to violation of other conservative principles immediately. Generally high tendency to manipulation and hypocrisy in conservative stance manifests itself by various ways. From AWT follows, the only relevant stance from long term perspective is strictly balanced one, which considers both individual, both democratic principles of social arrangements. As the density of society increases, the need of balanced approach becomes more pronounced gradually, and it converges to the duality of conservative and liberal approach in 1:1 ratio. Which practically means, the "Tax Free Day" ("The Cost of Government Day") should converge to end of July, for example.

With respect to the above definition main principles of conservatism, as postulated in Krohn's book appear even more vague and childish, if not manipulative. They're implying on background, the opponents of conservatism doesn't believe in "life" or "personal responsibility" or "founding principle", thus becoming a sort of naive demagogy. For example, communism relies strongly just on personal responsibility and its founding principles, thus becoming an utopistic ideology by the same way, like definition of conservatism by Jonathan Krohn. The idealization/ideologization of conservatism can be perceived as a natural defensive reaction to undergoing financial crisis, which implies a temporal need of public interventions and it illustrates, how deeply guardians of traditional "conservative values" become confused by recent situation.

“...Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism...”— Karl Marx, 1867, Das Kapital (a hoax?)

1 komentář:

  1. CIP recently defined the main quality one needs to be a conservative as the ability to believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It seems, conservative approach to life leads to hypocritical behavior in lawful way.

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