In many tangled puzzles one searches for a “linchpin,” a key part that holds the complex together.
Consider the complex set of ideas that construct the bailiwick called “Conservatism.” Isn’t the fundamental idea, the linchpin, that “workable” human society is so structured that any fundamental change “might,” very likely will, crash the whole structure? Or cause a cascade of ruin?
That is, we cannot know enough to perform healing surgery on society, our attempts will be more random than fully understood, even the wisest judgement and interventions are clumsy attempts to correct one “evil” at the inevitable cost of threatening the whole structure.
That is, Conservatives, while willing to admit that contemporary society is a place of sorrow and woe, of war and famine, of enslavement and exploitation, of myriad of power arrangements that leave people without effective freedom, oppose most attempts to improve the human condition, realizing that, with the exception of some individual arts of charity, any “cure” is likely to do more damage than help.
And as complexity grows these days, the dilemma only becomes more insolvable. Conservatism is therefore, the humble, the sorrowful choice. And its advocates, the underappreciated heroes of our time.
This seems to me to be the linchpin idea. It gives the views of Conservatives their intellectual strength.
They believe all paths from here to a better future must pass over the tripwire of disaster, more complete and more damaging that can be realized.
And if you are like me, a “liberal” or “progressive” and see the future as a potential phase change with the past, then it is this viewpoint you must confront.
How?
Not with dreaming wishful simplicity. Not with Band-Aids that technology has made almost invisible. Not with miracle cures. Not by imaging a metaverse.
I suggest we think differently about human society. I don’t see constructions; I don’t see linchpins. Or perhaps I just don’t believe I live within a cleverly build machine.
I see the world as patterns alongside, across and including each other. Redundancies across the spectrums. Organic relationships that are often graceful in their adaptation to new realities.
Life is lived within many different narratives, many different patterns. We are constantly choosing and rejecting, finding and losing the strands of our lives. And any given choice or action is reflected by myriad adjustments in the patterns themselves. Society, that is, is adaptive, and not only in the sense of preserving its form by incorporating “disturbances” and restoring the preexisting balance.
Society is fluid and redundant. We find many doors available when our favorite “retreat” is blocked.
That is to say the “linchpin” view is simply one of our ideological default categories. As pattern seeking animals, we use our imaginations to complete “pictures.” And the pictures are reflections of our current cultural motifs. In this “machine age” we see reality as machineries of indispensable and highly interrelated parts. And we hesitate to touch any piece of the mechanism. We’re taught not to go to near, to “fool around” with the structure. We may get guided tours of the mechanisms but are asked to stand behind the ropes.
In point of fact both history and anthropology are the story of adaptation and change. Our survival over thousands of years (remember the other competitors for “our” niches had sharper teeth, longer claws, stronger shoulders and moved around a lot better) required any number of shifts and feints, of risks and challenges, of confronting changing environments and deceptive Gods, to emerge in command of new surroundings.
We didn’t build our world with colored blocks and Lego links. We grew into hope through our compassion for each other.
And “society” will not necessary “fight back,” it will, as it often has, emerge from change, more bountiful, more forgiving and in greater harmony with life.
[I’m getting some ideas from a new book “The Dawn of Everything.”]
Are most conservatives actually conservative?