In Defense of Conservatism
In Defense of the practices of our ancestors, of the the undeniable and inescapable nature of Conservatism I will post the real truth of Conservatism which is based on Rationale and not dishonest Reason by Atheist hecklers like Sublime.
These are basic understandings of Conservatives to one degree or another
(1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, whatColeridge called the understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keither Feiling: says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the jusitce which ought to prevail in a community of souls.
(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitraianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"- a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."
(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "Classless society." With reason, conservatives often have been called "the party of order". If natural distinctions are effeced among men, oligarchs fill the vaccum. Ultimate equality in the judgement of God, and equality before courts or law, are recognized by conservatives, but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.
(4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.
(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "Sophisters, calculators, economists and theologists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.
(6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke is prudence.
These are the basic Assertions of Radicalism and are the foundations for their attack (which this post by Sublime as most of the rest of his certainly are) to the prescriptive arrangement of society:
(1)The Perfectability of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.
(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and variousl ideologies are presented as substitutes.
(3) Political levelling. Order and priviliege are condemened; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.
(4) Economic levelling . The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.
(5) Radicals unite in detesting Burke's description of the state as ordained of God, and his concept of society as joined in perpetuity by a moral bond among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born- the community of souls.
