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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   28474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".

A traditional criticism of Conservativism has been that it is the "Coalition of the Comfortable." Conservatives are those doing well in the current system. So in addition to your distinction that:

Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle.

Revolution, and advocacy for Revolution, is also a tell. It's outing yourself as someone who is uncomfortable.

Assuming that one finds the current stratification sufficiently justified, whether it purports to be a meritocracy of talent or effort or blood, then you equally assume that those seeking to overthrow the current regime are losers, whether by effort or by talent or by blood.

So when

we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending?

I don't really care. The tradition I was born into is worth defending for me. The point at which enough human capital, in numbers and in quality, is uncomfortable, then they won't be conservative.

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