{"id":1122,"date":"2003-05-07T10:42:47","date_gmt":"2003-05-07T14:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/07\/1122.html"},"modified":"2003-05-07T10:42:47","modified_gmt":"2003-05-07T14:42:47","slug":"conservative-tenet-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/05\/07\/conservative-tenet-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Tenet # 9"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying the discussion about Tenet # 8<\/a> so much, # 9 is irresistible. \n\n

9. The duties of man-service, effort, obedience, cultivation of virtue, self-restraint-as the price of rights.\n\n

Again, this is a conception of rights with which I entirely disagree. But there is something more to this than that. I think it's at the heart of the Conservative mindset: an inherent difference between Good People and Bad People. I've seen this in American Conservatives both of the Social and the Fiscal stripe; a sense that there are the Deserving and the Undeserving, and most of the poor are Undeserving Poor.\n\n

This is crap.\n\n

1) Most people are a mix of good and bad habits, good and bad intentions, and good and bad outcomes. Obedience, self-restraint, and service come mixed with laziness, self-absorption and cupidity. Effort and service come mixed with cultivation of vice and self-indulgence. Effort comes mixed with laziness, self-restraint with self-indulgence, vice with virtue, and service with exploitation. People are complicated. That doesn't mean that people aren't good or bad; the bad in people sometimes outweighs the good, or vice versa, and each human is responsible for his own choices. But good or bad is not inherent in the person, and human rights are not dealt to some humans and not others.\n\n

B) How much obedience will buy how much right to dissent? How much cultivation of virtue will allow me to use freedom of religion to decide what virtue is? How much effort and service makes me eligible for due process? Who decides? Well, usually people with power decide, which can often mean either those who have exercised little self-restraint, obedience, and service or those who have little interest in vesting rights in people unlike themselves. After all, I'm sure that Dennis Kozlowski and A. Alfred Taubman don't think of themselves as criminals, just because they happened to break a few laws, but I suspect they think of otherwise law-abiding drug dealers as criminals by nature, who have forfeited their human rights.\n\n

iii) Are those even the duties of man in the first place? What about teaching and learning? What about creation of beauty? What about dissent? What about alleviating misery (OK, that is or ought to be part of service, but somehow \"service\" is a trifle too vague for me)? What about ... oh, heck, you can play this game as well as I can. I think that the duties of man, as seen by Rossiter's Conservative, are, as I might have expected, inherently conservative, and I lean toward the progressive duties, those that improve or repair the world, in addition to those that preserve or protect it.\n\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger has been enjoying the discussion about Tenet # 8 so much, # 9 is irresistible. 9. The duties of man-service, effort, obedience, cultivation of virtue, self-restraint-as the price of rights. Again, this is a conception of rights…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}