At this rate, Your Humble Blogger will finish the Conservative Tenets before he forgets why he started them...
11. The indispensability and sanctity of inherited institutions, values, symbols, and rituals.
OK, can we assume, for the sake of sanity, that Rossiter is implying the word "some" in from of the word "inherited"? Can we, in fact, converse the argument, so the Conservative is saying that the absence of inherited institutions, values, symbols and rituals (ivsrs, if you will) is what he fears and deplores? It seems to me that the problem is not that all inherited ivsrs are bad, or that they are all indispensable and sanctified, but the difficulty of distinguishing which ivsrs have value in the present and which do not.
The Conservative, being by nature conservative, is likely to look at the ivsrs with an indulgent eye. If an ivsr is old, it is good prima facie, or our illustrious forebears would have already gotten rid of it. Sure, changing times (which are bad in and of themselves, to the Conservative) may require some alteration, but the sacrifice is great, and should be made reluctantly.
The Progressive, being by nature interested in change, is likely to look at the ivsrs with a jaundiced eye. The past being a swamp of slavery, exploitation and oppression, the benefit of freeing ourselves from the shackles of old ivsrs is, prima facie, worth whatever value may be remaining in them. Sure, society may need its ivsrs, but we should throw out whatever we can afford to, create exciting new ones, and keep the rest reluctantly.
Do I exaggerate? Yes, of course I exaggerate; I'm a blogger. And, as you may have noticed, I am a liberal with an instinctive love for tradition, so naturally I think the correct answer is in the middle. Deeper than that, though, I think that humans are, at heart, pattern-matching creatures, and that the ivsrs are aids to pattern-matching. New ones are weaker than old ones, if only because the patterns take a while to become routine. New ones are necessary, because it's hard to repair the world with the old ones. Ideally, every generation would look at each institution, each value, each symbol, and each ritual, and choose whether to keep them or not, depending not on a Progressive or a Conservative bias, but on the actual value, the actual indispensability, and the actual sanctity of each.
Hereditary monarchy? Slavery? Get rid of it. The Pledge of Allegiance? Modify it. Patriots' Day? Keep it. Representative Democracy? Keep it. George Washington on the dollar bill? Keep it. The public school system? Improve it. Racism? Root it out. The flag? Keep it.
And so on. My point isn't the specifics, but the process, and the need for the process to involve the specifics.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
V writes, “The Conservative, being by nature conservative, is likely to look at the ivsrs with an indulgent eye. “
I’d add that the Conservative, being by nature conservative, is likely to be suspicious of the capacity of any living persons to have the wisdom and integrity to improve upon the ivsrs, especially given that lack of respect for ivsrs would tend to be a sign of moral idiocy. All that you need to make this way of thinking totally rigid and self-contained is the belief that the ivsrs have been ordained, not by fallible men, but by the wisdom and authority of the Deity or His (infallible) representative on Earth.
what i love about cults of IVSRS is what kinds of things are allowed to be inherited. current changes are looked at badly, but old decisions of one thing over another, as radical as they may have been in their day (for instance, uh, the first preaching of most evangelical religions), get carried through to the present with whatever historical modifications the cult feels are the most deserving.
my feeling is that this tenet is a trap. it is preceded by all those behavioral rules because the behavioral rules establish the real goal: an ongoing logical framework, or, the conditions one must meet to be allowed to make “appropriate” changes.
i think we can agree that to believe in the utter imperfectability of human beings is also a romantic idea?
it seems this particular method of thinking is so romantic and reactionary, it believes not only in continously documenting the imperfections of “man,” it also charts a single, artificial, political route to getting close to perfection, only in part based on those divine standards which are held to be perfect by admittedly imperfect humans.
this feels like a total nosedive out of the flow of reality.
… and yet …
There are ivsrs which are valuable, and when they are valuable, the mere age of them can make them more powerful. Take, as an example, old labor-movement songs. Some of them are good, and the ones that stink aren’t any better because they are associated with the labor movement, but isn’t “This Land is Your Land” better, as a symbol or ritual or whatever, because everybody grew up singing it?
Thanks,
-V.
Having spoken against this conservative tenet above, let me now reverse myself and speak in part for it. Where I part ways with it, as my first post suggests, is in the “indispensibility and sanctity” phrase. “Sanctity” in particular bespeaks a tendency to confuse human institutions with divine ones, with consequently damaging results.
However, if one replaces “indispensibility and sanctity” of iivsr with “the importance of respect for” iivsr, I find the position much more tenable. Indeed, I find the “progressive” as caricatured by V., to be particularly objectionable in the predisposition to reject what is established simply because it is established.
This sort of conservative view is ably represented, in literary terms, in _The Lord of the Rings_. I’ll just quote a passage from Appendix F, on languages, where Tolkien rather directedly promotes the idea of valuing things that are old for their very ancientry:
“In those days all the enemies of the Enemy revered what was ancient, in language no less than in other matters, and they took pleasure in it according to their knowledge. The Eldar, being above all skiled in words, had the command of many styles, though they spoke most naturally in a manner nearest to their own speech, one even more antique than that of Gondor. The Dwarves, too, spoke with skill, readily adapting themselves to their company, though their utterance seemed to some rather harsh and guttural. But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. “
Language, in this sense, is among the most indispensible of our inherited institutions, and the challenge to us of gaining the knowledge to value that institution properly, before we could be qualified to modify it well, is great. This, I hope, is a somewhat stronger, more reasonable version of the conservative case.
It should be noted, however, that Tolkien’s conservatism presented itself, in _LotR_ at least, as seeking to preserve what could be preserved in the face of necessary changes, some for the better and some for the worse.
I don’t know that I’ve added much to V’s original analysis, but I think that the example of language as an inherited institution may be of interest, or at least stir interesting objection.
Chris,
And to stretch it a bit further, we can see that language Conservatives and language Progressives each prepare for themselves traps to their own detriment. By resolutely ignoring current slang, usage trends, and the vernacular poetry of (for instance) sports broadcasters and rappers, Conservatives sacrifice their potential vocabulary revenues. By failing to carefully study the inherited tradition, Progressives squander their legacy.
Most important, members of both groups lose the opportunity to communicate with members of the other group easily and clearly. Both dialects are impoverished, and both mindsets are susceptible to atrophy.
An excellent example, Chris.
Thanks,
-V.
in other words, the laws are written in an old style of language. people who want all power to rest on speaking that language will lose touch with the changing world, and people who are frustrated by the slow pace of legal language in coming to terms with the world, who abandon the language, will lose touch with power.
i wonder if our conservative traditionalist gently grieves the passing of latin as the language of power.
i think i was gently misunderstood as advocating throwing away inherited institutions. let me put this another way. i live in san francisco. it is a beautiful example of an american city, a real relic of the time it grew. it’s old enough to feel durable, but young enough that, at its peak, it hit the media age, and has been for nearly all its existence photogenic, telegenic. so san francisco is sort of the grande dame of american urban photogeneity.
i would be very disappointed, very angry, if new construction here was done without regard for that beauty. in fact as i sit here, a freeway overpass around the corner is being torn down. local 70s radicals finally won another part of the 30-year fight and another part of the city has been beautified. all hail the earthquake that shook things up.
questions of progress and cost abounded… removing the overpass means car traffic traversing the city will have to use slower roads… but then, the cars have high costs on their own, and recent focus on car movement has damaged the excellent local mass transit system and throttled regional integration.
but see the difference here is that while riding a train, i don’t get the desire to dress up in a 1905 suit and talk funny. history may be a strong argument for some people but i find that the heritage i enjoy in this case is one of having used the tools of industrial society to give people more power without making them paranoid.
it seems very natural as we are sprawled across the world, to want to attach ourselves to ideas and objects from periods of greater restraint, things that are more sensitively made maybe because resources were tighter.
but, but. we inherit lots of things. i insist that the context is different. all kinds of assumptions have flown apart, sometimes, seemingly, doing themselves in. the theater has changed. there is no one producer casting his family in the best parts, everybody else scrambling to get good at playing the fool, the merchant, the old woman.
i am no longer the fool because it pleases the audience, i am now the fool because it is better to be the fool than nothing…?
the difference here is that while riding a train, i don’t get the desire to dress up in a 1905 suit and talk funny.
as various train nostalgia groups do. there are so many quiet little societies for creative anachronism! someday though, i hope to reenact a scene from the civil war. i want to die a bloody death once in my life.
David,
You would look great in a 1905 suit, you know.
I think we’re all in agreement about the obvious stuff: some inherited stuff is good, and other inherited stuff is bad, and it’s crucial to tell which is which. The hard part is (a) distinguishing good from bad, (ii) trying to compensate for my own biases (I am a traditionalist by instinct, and also gently grieve the passing of Latin), and (3) keeping in mind that some of the people guarding the inheritance have a vested interest in the status quo, and tracking the resources involved in the IVSRs.
Thanks,
-V.
A comment on Jed’s blog led me to this Umberto Eco piece on fascism, traditionalism, etc.
It’s scary, in the eight years since this piece was written, how many of his characteristics of Fascism are true of Our Only President’s cronies.
Thanks,
-V.
umberto eco wrote: Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such “final solutions” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
see but the problem here is that until just this century, nobody had put together an organization as threatening, shadowy, and megalomaniacal as S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
not even the FEMA-USPS-AT&T-banker conspiracy can match the power of terrorists, lead by their fearsome leader, osama bin saddam! (oh you thought “the phone company” had been broken up? nimrod.)
(i’d also like to mention that in regard to his writing on movies, umberto eco is a nutcase. however lots of good thinkers seem to go berserk when confronted with the monstrosity of relationships and signs in just one ordinary movie.)
(isn’t signs a foreign term? if i could get away with it i’d probably italicize everything about semiology and semiotics.)
to go with the eco article, bill safire says: Our post-GW2 policy should be to reward our friends and remind others that actions have consequences. Those last three words are not a euphemism for “punish our enemies”; France and Germany are democratic states, not our enemies, and no punishment is in store — only a withholding of rewards that fairly should go to those who joined freedom’s cause.
see, nothing is inherently fair; but some things, some things can be made fair by decree. freely spoken words of dominion are also a luxury of liberty.
The whole consequences-for-choosing-the-wrong-side business which Safire is encouraging is the most egregiously wrong-headed …
No, it isn’t. There have been lots worse. But, damn, the man should know better.
Thanks,
-V.