Long-established customs and traditions embody a “latent wisdom”—or so says the Burkean conservative. Such customs, Burke held, benefit us at such a distance from the time and place of their practice, and through causal mechanisms so indirect, that to their practitioners, those benefits are well-nigh invisible. They were unseen, Burke warned, by the French Revolutionaries, who were further blinded by principles for reorganizing moral and political life that they could defend with abstract arguments, but had never tested in the field of real human life. Since Burke was a politician writing pamphlets, he never attempted a systematic overview of the form of moral life he held in such high esteem. Such an attempt may be found in Michael Oakeshott’s essay “The Tower of Babel.”
Really excellent post. In my view, there is no answer to the questions you raise because there cannot be. As soon as a society has to intentionally reconstruct some major institution the conservative simply falls silent on how that should be done, by necessity.
Moreover, the standard conservative move is to say that we shouldn't preserve just any old institutions, only the good ones, and so slavery had to go. But this renders their view indistinguishable from that of a hardline revolutionary socialist, who agrees that we should preserve the good institutions, but who just thinks that communism is a precondition for having good ones.
The valorization of conduct "[done] without reflection” strikes me as reminiscent of the Bhagavad Gita, or at least Eliot's version of it ("So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field of battle. / Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers."). Could there be a connection here, or am I hallucinating like an overzealous LLM?
Really excellent post. In my view, there is no answer to the questions you raise because there cannot be. As soon as a society has to intentionally reconstruct some major institution the conservative simply falls silent on how that should be done, by necessity.
Moreover, the standard conservative move is to say that we shouldn't preserve just any old institutions, only the good ones, and so slavery had to go. But this renders their view indistinguishable from that of a hardline revolutionary socialist, who agrees that we should preserve the good institutions, but who just thinks that communism is a precondition for having good ones.
If you're interested, I ask many of the same questions in this paper: https://philarchive.org/rec/SMYTIN
Excellent--thanks!
The valorization of conduct "[done] without reflection” strikes me as reminiscent of the Bhagavad Gita, or at least Eliot's version of it ("So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field of battle. / Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers."). Could there be a connection here, or am I hallucinating like an overzealous LLM?
I don't know! I'm not familiar enough with those ideas...
This was 🔥
I have so much follow up reading to do after this! Fascinating stuff. Thank you for writing!