Your Humble Blogger has reached the longest of the Conservative Tenets:
17. The primacy of the community—a wondrous, divinely ordained union of land, laws, customs, institutions, traditions, ideals, things, and people dead, living, and unborn—over the whims and rights of any individual, and consequent rejection of both individualism and collectivism as solutions to the persistent problem of reconciling liberty and authority.
I think that ultimately, this is really The Conservative Tenet; the basic mindset is pretty much encompassed here. The others are details. Important details, and worth discussing on their own, as they reveal both consistencies and inconsistencies of the philosophical structure, but still, this idea of the 'wondrous divinely ordained community' is pretty much where Conservatism is when it's at home.
This is new thinking for Your Humble Blogger since he started this whole Rossiter business. I thought that Conservatives were simply out for themselves: greedy, short-sighted, suspicious, and mean-spirited. Now, I think that Conservatism is about this idea of the 'wondrous divinely ordained community' which must be protected or preserved.
Oh, there are plenty of greedy, short-sighted, suspicious, and mean-spirited Conservatives, and plenty of greedy, short-sighted, suspicious, and mean-spirited Liberals, too. Whether there are more of one than the other, and whether one does more damage than the other, well, I'm not best placed to answer that question in any but a partisan way. Further, many Conservatives are at the top of the pecking order, so there is a certain element of self-interest in keeping the pecking in order, but that ad hominem argument, like all such, doesn't address actual substance. Conservatives, greedy, short-sighted, suspicious, and mean-spirited or otherwise, believe in (or believe that they believe in) the Conservative idea; Conservatism isn't responsible for them, but they are responsible for Conservatism. A whole nother topic.
Anyway, I am more troubled by Conservatives who want to preserve a community that is not the community I perceive, or one I perceive to have ever existed, in a way that makes it clear that they think that such a community does or did really exist. The Republican Party did a lot of that in the 80s, and some in the 90s as well; it still troubles me, although the Party is not emphasizing their Conservatism at all, these days.
It's one thing for a Conservative to say that things, as they are (or even as they actually were at a particular point), are divinely ordained and wondrous, and therefore attempts to change the social, economic, political, cultural, or intellectual world are Bad, prideful attempts to go against Nature and the Lord (you don't actually have to believe in the Divine to be a Conservative, by the way, but you do have either a belief in the Divine or a belief in Natural Law, or some such thing that can dictate that whatever is, is right).
I'm going far afield here, and I haven't even looked into "the persistent problem of reconciling liberty and authority." And I haven't really even finished talking about the idea of preserving, rather than improving (to me, the essence of Vardibidianism) the world. But I'm busy, and tired, and haven't posted for a couple of days, so perhaps I'll add to it later.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.