Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. The central tenets of conservatism include tradition, organic society, hierarchy, authority, and property rights.
Conservatism is opposition to rapid changes, and promotes keeping traditions in society. Gradualism is one form. The first known use of the term in a political context was by Fran?ois-René de Chateaubriand in 1818. The term is associated with right-wing politics. It has been used to describe a wide range of views since.
Perceived by some as a general ideology, Conservatism is opposed to the ideals of Liberalism and Socialism. Conservatism generally refers to right-wing politics which advocate the preservation of personal wealth and private ownership (Capitalism) and emphasize self-reliance and Individualism.
The central tenets of conservatism include tradition, human imperfection, organic society, hierarchy, authority, and property rights. Conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as religion, parliamentary government, and property rights, with the aim of emphasizing social stability and continuity.
The five principles of Conservatism are:
- Protect & maximize individual rights
- Ensure a limited government
- Uphold the rule of law
- Commitment to federalism and the separation of powers
- Maintain free & open markets (economic & social)
The main advantage of Conservatism is freedom. Individual freedom is the core of Conservative ideology. Freedom to own property, worship as you wish, speak what you want, and live without fear of an oppressive government force. Because of these principles, Conservatism creates more opportunity than any other system.
Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use the word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata.
Religious conservatism is growing in the world. In addition, the irreligious population is declining in the world as a percentage of the global population. A study conducted by the 'Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life' says that Africans are among the most religious people on Earth.
Conservatism is at times confounded with Islamism which has been defined as: "the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life", a form of "religionized politics" and an instance of religious fundamentalism.
In most countries, political conservatism seeks to uphold traditional family structures and social values. Religious conservatives typically oppose abortion, homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage.
Although conservatives sometimes claim philosophers as ancient as Aristotle and Cicero as their forebears, the first explicitly conservative political theorist is generally considered to be Edmund Burke, because the social contract as Burke understood involves future generations as well as those of the present and the past, he was able to urge improvement through political change, but only as long as the change is evolutionary.
Burke shocked his contemporaries by insisting with brutal frankness that “illusions” and “prejudices” are socially necessary. He believed that most human beings are innately depraved, steeped in original sin, and unable to better themselves with their feeble reason.
A common way of distinguishing conservatism from both liberalism and radicalism is to say that conservatives reject the optimistic view that human beings can be morally improved through political and social change. Conservatives who are Christians sometimes express this point by saying that human beings are guilty of original sin.
Skeptical conservatives merely observe that human history, under almost all imaginable political and social circumstances, has been filled with a great deal of evil. Far from believing that human nature is essentially good or that human beings are fundamentally rational, conservatives tend to assume that human beings are driven by their passions and desires and are therefore naturally prone to selfishness, anarchy, irrationality, and violence.
Accordingly, conservatives look to traditional political and cultural institutions to curb humans’ base and destructive instincts. In Burke’s words, people need “a sufficient restraint upon their passions,” which it is the office of government “to bridle and subdue.”
Families, churches, and schools must teach the value of self-discipline, and those who fail to learn this lesson must have discipline imposed upon them by government and law. Without the restraining power of such institutions, conservatives believe, there can be no ethical behaviour and no responsible use of liberty.
Conservatism is as much a matter of temperament as of doctrine. It may sometimes even accompany left-wing politics or economics as it did, for example, in the late 1980s, when hard-line communists in the Soviet Union were often referred to as “conservatives.”
Typically, however, the conservative temperament displays two characteristics that are scarcely compatible with communism:
- The first is a distrust of human nature, rootlessness (social disconnectedness), and untested innovations, together with a corresponding trust in unbroken historical continuity and in the traditional frameworks for conducting human affairs. Such frameworks may be political, cultural, or religious, or they may have no abstract or institutional expression at all.
- The second characteristic of the conservative temperament, which is closely related to the first, is an aversion to abstract argument and theorizing. Attempts by philosophers and revolutionaries to plan society in advance, using political principles purportedly derived from reason alone, are misguided and likely to end in disaster, conservatives say. In this respect the conservative temperament contrasts markedly with that of the liberal.
Whereas the liberal consciously articulates abstract theories, the conservative instinctively embraces concrete traditions. For just this reason, many authorities on conservatism have been led to deny that it is a genuine ideology, regarding it instead as a relatively inarticulate state of mind. Whatever the merits of this view, it remains true that the best insights of conservatism seldom have been developed into sustained theoretical works comparable to those of liberalism and radicalism.
In opposition to the “rationalist blueprints” of liberals and radicals, conservatives often insist that societies are so complex that there is no reliable and predictable connection between what governments try to do and what actually happens. It is therefore futile and dangerous, they believe, for governments to interfere with social or economic realities as happens, for example, in government attempts to control wages, prices, or rents (see incomes policy).
The claim that society is too complex to be improved through social engineering naturally raises the question, “What kind of understanding of society is possible?” The most common conservative answer emphasizes the idea of tradition. People are what they are because they have inherited the skills, manners, morality, and other cultural resources of their ancestors.
An understanding of tradition specifically, a knowledge of the history of one’s own society or country is therefore the most valuable cognitive resource available to a political leader, not because it is a source of abstract lessons but because it puts him directly in touch with the society whose rules he may be modifying.
Conservative influences operate indirectly, i.e., other than via the programs of political parties largely by virtue of the fact that there is much in the general human temperament that is naturally or instinctively conservative, such as the fear of sudden change and the tendency to act habitually.
These traits may find collective expression in, for example, a resistance to imposed political change and in the entire range of convictions and preferences that contribute to the stability of a particular culture.
In all societies, the existence of such cultural restraints on political innovation constitutes a fundamental conservative bias, the implications of which were aphoristically expressed by the 17th-century English statesman Viscount Falkland: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Mere inertia, however, has rarely sufficed to protect conservative values in an age dominated by rationalist dogma and by social change related to continuous technological progress.
Conservatism has often been associated with traditional and established forms of religion. After 1789 the appeal of religion redoubled, in part because of a craving for security in an age of chaos.
The Roman Catholic Church, because of its roots in the middle Ages, has appealed to more conservatives than has any other religion. Although he was not a Catholic, Burke praised Catholicism as “the most effectual barrier” against radicalism. But conservatism has had no dearth of Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and strongly anticlerical adherents.
The great irony is that it was the populist chaos and violence associated with events that ultimately led Burke to harden his own conservatism principles…
Food for thought!