Sunday, December 18, 2005
Cognitive Dissonance, Pt. II
When David Cameron calls for the creation of "a modern, progressive, liberal, mainstream opposition to Labour", I assume, as the leader of a political party, that he's not handing out helpful advice to other political parties, looking for a niche in the British political system. That can only mean that he thinks that the Conservative party can be "modern, progressive, liberal, mainstream opposition to Labour". I had been operating under the impression that conservatives and progressives were diametrically opposed, since conservatism is about, as the name suggests, conserving things, while progressives believe in progress and so changing things, but obviously I must have been mistaken. Although it's a little late given the battering he's been getting, Charles Kennedy's retort to all this, that if he believes this, it is David Cameron who ought to be switching parties, seems to me eminently sensible.
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6 comments:
I don't think conservatives and progressives have to be diametrically opposed by definition, although I can see that up until now they've been used as synonyms for right and left. I think what some conservatives might be interested in conserving are certain moral values and certain economic strategies, and it might be that progress is the best way to conserve those things. In a changing world. Personally, I'd like to see New Labour without the social authoritarianism, so I'm waiting to see whether "modern conservatism" will deliver. They'll have to change their opinions on immigrants, though. I mean, for heaven's sake.
Conservative and Progressive aren't synonyms for left and right, and I didn't (quite) mean to suggest that they are. I do think they are more or less diametrically opposed though, because progressives are basically holding out the hope of some improvement in society - change is for the better - whereas conservatives, even if they find it impossible to preserve society in aspic, do tend to look backwards for their ideal polities. That seems like a fairly fundamental opposition to me.`
The definition given to me of conservatism was to conserve the 'core values', to use a trite phrase as a shorthand we can reasonably understand in some way as being quite similar were we asked to define it independently, yet still look to change that which challenged or weakened the ability of those to preserve the stability of the society in question.
That can be taken as you mean, or it could be said to apply to each and every political philosophy, no?
That on the basis that any philosophy has a grounding in a set of views/opinions that by so being considered as 'grounding' are in the past and thus are something that is in the past that can be referred to and which, so the thinker conceives, must be conserved.
So. Ultimately, what does a progressive offer over a conservative other than just a question of degree and focus? Which, again, leaves each party in the same boat as it already is.
Well, we could expand the concept of conservatism so that it includes any thinking at all, but equally, we could expand the concept of progressivism - by thinking about any set of political beliefs in terms of the changes that they want to achieve - so that it includes any (political) thinking at all. So, as a strategy, it's hardly particularly helpful or interesting.
Robert, I'm mostly with you on this, but then I never expect coherence from political pronouncements...
On the terminology, it seems to me that being a conservative means to refuse to accept the modern idea of progress as such (i.e., that change will mean better - think Whig history). I would though point out that doesn't mean conservatives are against change as such - think of Edmund Burke's stuff on this, or else the line in Lampedusa's The Leopard ("if things are going to stay the same, they're going to have to change.")
Blimpish,
there is certainly an interesting question about at what point a conservatively-motivated change - which is, as you correctly point out, not an oxymoron in the sense that a conservative progressive is - becomes progressive simply by virtue of being a change. I suppose, in the grand conservative tradition of worrying about unintended consequences, it might be wise to draw a distinction between the act as intention and the act as consequences.
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