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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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do in fact have values beyond comfort, and are willing to both endure and inflict significant discomfort to ensure those values are conserved.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are. If they weren't, they wouldn't be trying to conserve it. They would be trying to destroy it, to uproot the world as we know it and create a new one, a progressive or reactionary utopia. I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built. But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

As a general rule, the answer is "because the people tearing it down didn't care about/didn't know about X thing, and if X wasn't a concern the fence would be obviously insane".

Haidt made the point in The Righteous Mind that conservatives understand progressives much better than the other way around, because it's easier to hypothetically take things out of your moral compass than to correctly conceptualise and hypothetically insert things into it.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

That's not exactly hard. We've been swimming in propaganda for why fences must be torn down. Some of us are even old enough to have seen a fence or two being torn down, and all the promises of what would and would not happen after it's gone.

But a conservative must, by definition, be comfortable with how things are.

That is not a definition of Conservative that seems useful. It's conservatism as a tendency, an unreflective inclination, a mood.

I always return to Chesterton's Fence as the definition of conservative: before you tear down a fence, know why it was built.

Chesterton's Fence does not preclude Chesterton from believing that he does, in fact, understand exactly why a fence was built, and why tearing it down is vitally nescessary.

But it applies equally to reactionaries, Chesterton's Ruins: if you found evidence a fence was once here and was torn down, tell me why it was torn down before you build it up again.

Yes. Hanania's problem is that, increasingly, the general class of people he is complaining about are confident that they can do this, for what seem to me to be good reasons. It seems to me that this portion is growing fairly rapidly, and its presence is starting to have serious real-world consequences. When it gets large enough, which fences are up and which ruins are down will change.

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