We each are, at times, conservative, and at times, liberal. (That is what western “democracy” is really made of to me - the unification of liberal and conservative impulses under law in a republic.). — Fire Ologist

Yes I think this is the key - the grownups recognize that both poles are required - it's just a question of where the Vital Center is located, relative to the current Overton Window

People have had enough time to become smart and create something great, but apparently, the way we live now (including both the good and the bad, the struggle of ideas and the struggle of meanings) is the smartest possible way. — Astorre

I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, p.110.

It is tragic because it views the attempt to reach absolutes via human reason to be a doomed project of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel.

Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.

People have had enough time to become smart and create something great, but apparently, the way we live now (including both the good and the bad, the struggle of ideas and the struggle of meanings) is the smartest possible way. — Astorre

I think that is true if you look at people as a group. History repeats itself in many different facades.

But there are individuals who truly live well. (At least I hope so.) They are saints.

Whether the writers of the constitution knew it or not, limited government allows the individual to figure out how to live such an individual good life. Even if most of us squander the opportunity.

Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith. — Colo Millz

Like three co-equal branches of government that must compromise with each other, in order to limit government so that people can be freer to trade-off with each other?

All things people build are tragic. We don’t build - we try to build. That is not just a problem for conservatives.

Yes I think this is the key - the grownups recognize that both poles are required - it's just a question of where the Vital Center is located, relative to the current Overton Window — Colo Millz

I would not say the center is more important than the poles. At times, conservative, at other times liberal, and at other times a blend.

I’m not a big fan of consensus for consensus’ sake. Consensus is merely pragmatic when needed for convincing people to act. Consensus is not an end in itself. Consensus and the center is like more evidence of usefulness.

I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic. — Colo Millz

Well, it's worth noting that Hamilton himself, while one of the more conservative Founders in some respects, is also within the broader liberal, Enlightenment tradition. Since, you pointed to MacIntyre, I think it's important to note that many liberal conservatives are still very much within the "Enlightenment tradition's" particular form of rationality.

Have you read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed? Its pretty good on this topic in pointing out the ways conservative liberalism undermines itself. Its commitment to Enlightenment forms of rationality and its epistemic presuppositions, and even more so its commitment to the "free market" and liberal political-economy (and its particular, arguably tragic anthropology) ultimately leads to policies that undermine the very social structures, religions, values, etc. that conservativism attempts to conserve. That is, arguably nothing has done more to erode "Western culture" (commitment to the canon, etc.) and traditional social norms than capitalism, and yet this is precisely what conservative liberalism often tries to promote.

Deneen doesn't get at this, but there is a strong connection in the Anglophone world between Protestantism and liberalism, and arguably conservative Protestantism has a similar issue where its tenants undermine its own deep structures (just consider how Luther or Calvin would react to their traditions today, or the fracturing into 38,000+ denominations).

However, traditionalists are also "conservative" and I would say that many of them have a view that, by contrast, renders Enlightenment progressive liberalism "tragic." The view that the Platonist tradition, the Patristics, or the Scholastics held of reason was much more expansive than that of the Enlightenment. Reason had the power for real ecstasis and union with the Good, Beautiful, and True. It could transform us through a sort of knowing by becoming that terminated (often with the aid of grace, even in Pagan neoplatonism) in theosis. Key issues in Enlightenment epistemology and ethics never come up because the nous has a real union with Being and it possess its own erotic appetites that lead it upwards and properly order it (Dante's Commedia is a fantastic example here, or Boethius' Consolation).

And yet, this earlier tradition tends to have an even greater regard for tradition than conservative liberalism. Why? I think a big part of it has to do with the different framing of reason. What is truly most worth knowing and doing is not limited to wholly discursive, instrumental reason and techne. Episteme is not the terminus of knowledge and in a way it is less sure than noesis / gnosis. You can also see this in Eastern thought and its own response to modernity.

An irony here is that the instrumental reason of modern conservatism (often wed to fideism precisely because discursive ratio only gets you so far) is described in Dante, the Greek Fathers, etc. specifically as "demonic" and "diabolical," and this comes out in traditionalist attacks on capitalism and the fetishization of science as mere pragmatism.

It is tragic because it views the attempt to reach absolutes via human reason to be a doomed project of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel. — Colo Millz

Right, but consider here Dostoevsky's concern over the goals of the new social physics and liberalism as a sort of "reverse Tower of Babel," attempting to bring heaven down to Earth by force. His answer here is very different from that of Western conservatives.

Instead of a project of absolutes, we should therefore constrain ourselves to a system of trade-offs and compromises, in the style of Adam Smith.

Right, and I would argue that the dominance of the anthropology of liberal political-economy in contemporary thought and culture is underappreciated. Homo oecononimicus haunts the steps of almost all modern social theory. But it is itself hardly an "empirical finding" we are led to "by the facts." Indeed, it emerges before most of the robust data collection and analysis tools of economics even existed. It is instead and interpretive lens through which any human behavior is analyzed. In that sense, it is every bit as unfalsifiable as Marxist economic axioms (a point many economists have allowed). And yet the language of Homo oecononimicus leaks into romantic advice, parenting advice, lifestyle advice, etc. There is an interesting theological origin for this view of man that folks like John Milbank have traced, with it coming out of John Calvin's tradition. It's a good example of how rationality itself (the "rational utility maximizer") is defined within a sort of aesthetic and "theological" context (even if the dominant theology now denies or privatizes God, it has essentially stayed the same and just moved man into his role).

Have you read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Definitely on the list

His answer here is very different from that of Western conservatives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you elaborate this, this is an interesting thought and I am v interested in Dostoyevsky.

Sure; the most famous place where Dostoevsky uses this image is in the Grand Inquisitor, which is a short story within the Brother's Karamazov told by Ivan Karamazov (the Enlightenment rational athiest). Ivan has just been giving his brother Alyosha (a novice monk) a litany of horrible and disgusting things that have happened to innocent children. His point here is not so much that these challenge belief in God (although that is also implied) but that no "happy ending" is worth such grotesque suffering. God has demanded too much of man, and allowed far too much evil. Hence, he must "humbly return [his] ticket" to Paradise, for he will not participate in what no one has any right to condone.

The story then is about Christ coming to Spain during the Inquisition and bring taken prisoner. A high ranking church official then tells him that he had asked far too much of people. "Feed them first" and then ask for spiritual development. Christ's freedom (the vision in traditional Christianity, a sort of diefication, the transcendence of man's own finitude) is too hard. At best, perhaps only a few spiritual athletes can attain to it. And yet the people suffer and still fall into vice and sin.

The Inquisitor charges that by rejecting the temptations of Satan in the desert, Christ rejected the three things that truly move the masses: bread (economic security), miracles (irrational comfort), and power (political authority). The Inquisitor has accepted them, and so can lead man to happiness through a "nobel lie."

Christ does not respond to these charges, but simply kisses the Inquisitor. When the story returns to the two brothers, Alyosha kisses Ivan and walks away. There is a lot going on here but part of Dostoevsky's point is that Christ shows us a new way forward. There is still the Platonist idea that out desire for what is truly best (as opposed to what merely appears good to us, or is said to be good by others) and for what is really true, is precisely what allows us to move continually beyond current beliefs and desires, to transcend our own finitude, and to become more fully a self-determining whole. The love of the Good and Beautiful brings us beyond ourselves. But Christ also shows a way to transcend the finitude of the self through sacrificial love (as against the wholly instrumental approach to happiness seen in Ivan or in Crime and Punishment). Christ does not remove suffering to make us merely content, but transfigures suffering, and invites us into this process (a very Eastern view).

There is a lot more there. Rowan Williams book on Dostoevsky is quite good here. I liked David Bentley Hart's book "The Gates of the Sea" which uses the Brothers Karamazov as its main inspiration for addressing theodicy as well.

Anyhow, Peter Theil of all people pointed this out in an interview when he said something like: "the Eastern Orthodox view is actually far more radical than transhumanism, since it implies an even greater transformation of the person." I think that's exactly right. Interestingly, the first usage of "transhumanize" in a Western language comes from Canto I of the Paradiso, where Dante describes what must happen to him for him to move beyond the utopian "Earthly Paradise" atop Mount Purgatory and attain to union with the Beloved.

This is interesting as a contrast for liberal utopianism because transhumanism really helps to bring the contradictions it faces into focus.

Interestingly, by the part in the poem where Dante must be "transhumanized," he has already been purified, and in making it to the "Earthly Paradise," has returned to the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve (Dante, following the Patristics, seems to see this higher state as "natural" to man, and our unfallen state as unnatural). The Paradiso is really a sort of "going beyond," which is perhaps why Beatrice, the erotic other, now has to lead Dante instead of Virgil (human reason). Earlier, Virgil tells Dante that he has reached a state that many transhumanists fantasize about, the perfection of the human will such as to overcome weakness of will. Virgil tells Dante:

Await no further word or sign from me:
your will is free, erect, and whole—to act
against that will would be to err: therefore
I crown and miter you over yourself.

Purgatorio Canto 27 139-142 (Musa)

But for Dante this freedom also requires being internally ordered towards the Good, True, and Beautiful, towards God. For the transhumanists, who tend to be "exclusive humanists," it often seems hard to know what the "ultimate end" is that one would be oriented towards if we somehow had "perfect control" over our own desires. Often, it is either "pleasure" (although allowing for "higher pleasures" á la Mill) or else a sort of sheer voluntarist drive for power (so well lampooned in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet).

Harry Frankfurt has a famous paper about "second-order volitions," the desire to have or not have certain other desires. Having these, and being able to make them effective, does seem like an essential element of any truly rational, self-determining freedom. Otherwise, all our "freedom" would amount to is the instrumental ordering of whatever desires we just so happen to have started with, based on which are the strongest (e.g., Nietzsche's"congress of souls"). That is, must understand our desires as good, and choose them on that account. Without some ordering principle, it's hard to see what could drive our decision to prioritize "having one desire" over any others though, and this is the problem for post-humanism; we transcend man towards what? What makes it "utopian" instead of something like A Brave New World (whose residents see their own society as excellent)? If it's just the fulfillment of desire, we face an arbitrary multiplicity of ends, many seemingly horrific to our eyes today.

That seems to me like an interesting fault line here. D.C. Schindler's "Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty" advances the thesis that modernity has tended to define freedom in terms of power/potency (i.e., the ability to choose anything) as opposed to the classical "self-determining capacity to actualize and communicate the Good." The difficulty with a goal of technological, utopian "self-mastery" within the context of the modern vision is that it's not clear exactly what a perfectly "free" super-human ought to seek here. I imagine that would carry over for AI too. If we are orienting AI towards its aims, what are we orienting it towards?

The author R. Scott Bakker had a relevant short story that was published in the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy a while back about the risks of having the ability to essentially "hack our own brains," called Crashspace." It is quite graphic and disturbing for a journal article, but the basic story about people losing control of themselves and committing murder because they are continually messing with their own motivations and desires is an interesting fictionalization of the risks here (although I think people already do this sort of thing with drugs and alcohol, and "better living through chemistry" is sometimes a slogan transhumanists use vis-a-vis "performance enhancing" drug use).

Point being, "utopia" is extremely fraught without some ordering principle, and I think Dostoevsky understands that, but also the infinite value of true freedom, which, as even the Platonists understood, is to "become like onto God."

Wow thank you. I had actually read The Brothers Karamazov but not for a long time, and needed to be reminded of what you were getting at in your first post, which is Christ's

way to transcend the finitude of the self through sacrificial love — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have also read DBH's The Doors of the Sea it's super.

However I have not thought about these things in the way you are presenting here it is going to take me some time and reading to digest this perspective.

I guess my initial response is to echo the conservative skepticism re: any "u-topia", i.e. "no-place".

Thus even if we say

"utopia" is extremely fraught without some ordering principle — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought.

As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky.

You never cease to amaze and delight me.

Unfortunately, I've met few Russians who understand their culture as well as you do.

Rather, this idea of ​​non-resistance to suffering is not so much understood as experienced and accepted on a sensory level in Dostoevsky’s homeland.

I am in some doubt if any such "ordering principle" has yet been discovered by Enlightenment thought. — Colo Millz

For sure. I don't see how it ever could be. Enlightenment thought is in part defined by its blanket denial of noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology. Empiricism is particularly robust in its axiomatic denial here (e.g., Hume just asserts it as a given in the opening books of the Treaties, even though his own epistemology forbids his knowing that this is "how the mind works," and Kant makes human reason discursive through sheer definition).

I got into this comparative difference for our essay competition recently: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15990/tpf-essay-dante-and-the-deflation-of-reason/p1 (it might be easier to read the short or long version with the links).

As you are proposing, perhaps Christ really is the only valid such "ordering principle", as it was for Dostoyevsky. — Colo Millz

Valid, no. For even on the view that Christ is the fullness of revelation, this does not mean that there is no revelation elsewhere. As Saint Paul says in the Epistle to the Romans (1:20), the signs of the divine are everywhere—"written on the Book of Nature" as it would later be put.

Since Christ is the Logos, all reason is a participation in Christ, and yet not all reason recognizes this. Indeed, this must be revealed historically, and illuminated through faith for most Christian thinkers. The perennialists often go too far in flattening different traditions to make them into a single unified philosophy, and so produce strange fictions like the "Buddhist" or "Gnostic" Meister Eckhart or Eriugena, but they do get at something quite deep and apparent in the confluences across the world's great wisdom traditions. Here, it is Western modernity that stands out as an outlier, in that varieties of virtue ethics dominated across the East and West, and an ultimate metaphysical grounding of the Good in a sort of knowledge that becomes self-knowledge is a common factor. Yet even the Epicureans, who come closest to the dominant modern metaphysics, do not face the issue of the modern irreducible plurality of goods that forces ethics to transform from primarily a dialectic of higher versus lower desires (or appearances versus reality) into one of "the self-interested subject versus the society" (a dialectic of "goods which diminish when shared" and so one of irreducible competition). This is because they don't face the same sorts of epistemic limitations that make any questions of value or metaphysics maximally distal uncertain (or even a matter of mere taste).

Charles Taylor is pretty good on the epistemic inversion that drives the problem here.

I think the Good as a unifying principle for ethics and politics can be found in many places, although in more or less full development. Boethius, for instance, relies solely on philosophy in the Consolation, and I think he gets us quite far. Virgil, a symbol of human reason and Pagan learning, also gets Dante to a sort of finite utopia in the Comedy.

In the past, I've tried to look at how a recognition of this in Aristotle could help to inform modern empiricist attempts to "ground ethics," such as Sam Harris project. However, I think Plato's psychological outline is probably the most accessible. There is, to my mind, a fairly obvious sense in which, in order to consistently seek virtue (at the individual or political level), we must establish "the rule of the rational part of the soul," such that our desire for Truth and Goodness comes to rule over and reshape our "lower" desires. Otherwise, our pursuit of virtue will always be accidental, only occuring when truth and goodness just so happen to line up with our "lower desires." There is a sense in which virtue is a prerequisite for freedom and one must be "free to choose the good" in order to choose it. The Enlightenment move to define freedom in terms of power/potency instead of actuality essentially inverts this however.

noesis/intellectus, or the role of any sort of "contemplative knowledge" in valid epistemology — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway.

Likewise:

What is truly most worth knowing and doing is not limited to wholly discursive, instrumental reason and techne. Episteme is not the terminus of knowledge and in a way it is less sure than noesis / gnosis. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I need to explore this capacity because I don't quite know what it is.

I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".

It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity.

The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all.

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway. — Colo Millz

Well, the ordering principle would be the rational appetites, i.e., the desire for what is really true and truly good (as opposed to merely appearing so, or a sort of "pragmatism" ordered to sensual or emotional desires). But it's important to note that these would have been considered essential to reason itself, such that this is really just "reason" leading as a principle. For instance, in Aquinas, orientation towards the Good and True—virtue—just is action in accordance with "right reason," even if it might also be considered a sort of participation in divine love (as it is more explicitly in Saint Maximus the Confessor).

That is, logos must lead, generally through thymos (spiritedness, the desire for honor, recognition, social goods, etc.), over epithumia (sensual desires re pain and pleasure). This sort of "logos narrative" can be seen in negative form in Homer (in the insufficiency of thymos in the Iliad) and the role of logos in ordering Odysseus towards the good of his oikos (household), such that he abandons the pleasures of epithumia (unending life and material comforts with a beautiful lover) even though all the demands of thymos have already been met. And it's stronger in the Aeneid, with Aeneas ordered to thymos and the historical telos of Rome (justice), but mature form comes out in Boethius, Dante, etc.

Whereas, modern literature reveals what undermines this "logos narrative." First, reason loses these ordering desires, becoming merely instrumental, but moreover "sealed off" from being (it is no longer participatory). This leads to a sort of straightjacket intellectualism where discursive human reason is never able to attain to direct contact with its object. You see this in characters like Hamlet ("nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"), Ivan Karamazov, etc. And then, because of this first pathology, you get a voluntarist strain, best represented by Milton's Satan ("the mind is its own place, and in it self/can make a Heav'n of Hell or a Hell of Heav'n). Because being outside the self is unknowable, the will becomes its own object, and sheer self-assertion the purest freedom. A Brave New World is a good societal view of the first issue, because it is a hyper-rational society that can see no good outside the immediacy of sensual pleasure, while 1984 is a great example of the sheer worship of power.

I mean I know the philosophical definition, it is a non-discursive insight into truth, a kind of intellectual "seeing".

It's just so unfamiliar to me, living in an Enlightenment environment that I need to picture what it even could be as a human capacity. — Colo Millz

Yes, and it's very hard to escape the caricatures of it as "you just know," a sort of sheer groundless assertion. Yet that is definitely not what Plato is getting at, nor are the Patristics or Scholastics generally fideists or sentimentalists. That's why I think the easiest way to track down this "lost notion" is through the role of the rational appetites in someone like Plato.

I like how I Robert M. Wallace frames this in more accessible modern terms. The relevant "higher experience" here isn't some sort of rare "peak experience," but rather something open to all. This is supported by phenomenological and psychological exploration that secures the metaphysical grounding. Yet, in the older tradition, one could also be more or less unified in the way described, and more or less attuned to and faithful to "what is higher in oneself," and so the measure of wisdom and virtue is that saint or sage, not the "dispassioned, properly skeptical (not "enthusiastic") salon-going everyman of the enlightenment" (or the ironical cynic of the postmodern moment).

The limits of "discursive" reasoning after Kant are so absolute for someone like me, I have a hard time imagining there can be some other capacity which is non-discursive, or that that kind of insight can have any validity at all. — Colo Millz

Yes, but it is worth considering how Kant and Hume secure the claim that human reason is wholly discursive. Afterall, their claims run counter to the great sages of both East and West. What sort of discursive argument or empirical observation can justify such a move? It's hard for me to imagine what the answer could be.

The common critique is that none does in their work. Hume just asserts that it is so in the first two books of the Treaties and then follows out the implications of this from there. Indeed, according to his own epistemology, Hume cannot possibly know "how the mind works" in the ways he claims to. Likewise, Kant simply assumes that human reason is discursive by definition.

To be sure, Enlightenment thinkers can appeal to introspection. The problem is that this is exactly what all the past thinkers do as well (and they both make transcendental arguments, e.g. Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being," Plotinus, etc.). For instance, Plato is careful to "guide us through" a sort of form of thinking, rather than asserting his position, and in this he is arguably less dogmatic.

To my mind, it's obvious that no reasoning process can be wholly discursive. One must start with something. The Enlightenment move is to try to make such intuitions "obvious to all" but I am not sure if this is successful, in part because what is "obvious to all" seems to be historically conditioned by traditions themselves (e.g., Hume gets away with his assumptions because they are already popular). Whereas, the total abandonment of any intuition, what you see in more post-modern assertions of "pragmatism all the way down" (i.e., even math and logic are ultimately just games chosen based upon usefulness) doesn't actually remove claims to intuition, so much as it absolutize them by making "usefulness" a sort of unanalyzable metaphysical primitive.

Anyhow, while the argument was originally that noesis must be forsaken because different traditions (say, Hindu and Catholic) couldn't agree, then sheer discursive reason has proven no better in this respect. Liberalism, fascism, Marxism, etc. have been no less violent in asserting themselves, and no better at agreeing. Marxism is a great example because it now seems obviously historically contingent, and yet for so many, until relatively recently, its truths were simply what dispassioned pure reason and the data of history inevitably led one to believe (and yet now we tend to see it as the semi-religion it was for many practitioners).




You're too kind. I don't really know Russian culture that well, I just have some Russian authors and thinkers I quite like. To be honest, while Dostoevsky frames things in unique terms appropriate to the "crises of modernity," I think a lot of the "solution" he slowly and painfully works out can be found in a heritage that is common to Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the Near East and North Africa. Unfortunately, I think this set of ideas ("tradition" would be a fair label) has largely been overshadowed. So, it isn't a uniquely Russian problem to have lost touch with it. It's true in Catholicism too for example, despite a decades long movement to renew interest in the Patristics and the East and West's shared heritage which has been championed by successive popes (I think it was Pope Benedict who called the East and West the "two lungs" of the Faith).

I suppose there are lots of reasons for this. Charles Taylor's stuff about closed world systems probably gets at the intellectual side, but I also think it is also very hard for a heritage that is so contemplative (the Pagan parts and those from Judaism and Islam too) to reach people in our fast-paced and stimulus saturated world. There is a sort of positive feedback loop here too. These ideas tend to be missing from popular media (novels, movies, video games, music, etc.), whereas ideas that were originally self-conscious inversions of the old forms do have a strong presence in popular culture. There are counter-examples like the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, they are just vastly outnumbered.

That is, arguably nothing has done more to erode "Western culture" (commitment to the canon, etc.) and traditional social norms than capitalism, and yet this is precisely what conservative liberalism often tries to promote. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting. As a completely narrow apologetic for capitalism, (given the much deeper topic you go on to discuss here), isn’t the friction between capitalism and tradition a function more of the individual who is trying to be capitalist while trying to be traditionalist? Or to ask this another way, are you pointing to something essential to capitalism that puts it at odds with a traditional conservative, or is it just the unethical capitalist who causes friction with the types of goods traditionalists seek to conserve?

My sense is that capitalism positions the individual best in relation to the government. That is its core value. It alone can fund government of the people, by the people, for the people. It may create challenges when the individual capitalist is positioned against one’s employees, one’s customers, and one’s society, and maybe one’s God, but if these are managed privately according to traditional goods, the capitalist system keeps individuals freer than any other economic system I know with respect to government.

I think I am disagreeing with any necessary or essential causal connection between erosion of traditional norms and the rise of capitalism. It isn’t capitalism that has eroded western norms. The norms were always aspirational for individuals, not groups, and these norms were always truly practiced by too few. Capitalism doesn’t necessarily aid in the fostering of traditional norms either. But it forces one to grapple with charity and humility as one rises out of poverty. It has always been hard for a rich man to enter God’s kingdom, but it has never been impossible.

Deneen is pretty good on this, and I won't be able to sum it up as good as he does. He uses the Amish as a contrast point. The Amish don't use insurance. Prima facie, insurance does not necessarily require any special technological innovation that the Amish might eschew. However, they reject it because it takes the burden of caring for the unfortunate away from the community and displaces it to the anonymous market. It allows misfortune to shift from a communal problem to that of the atomized individual consumer, who must make wise consumption choices in balancing future risks against current consumption. It is bad for the community, and that is the standard they use to judge the adoption of new practices. Whereas, under capitalist competition, there is a sense that one is forced to adopt new technologies regardless of if one thinks they are beneficial, since to not do so would be to lose competitive advantage.

You can see the displacement of community and institutions by the market in all areas of everyday life. Where once people relied on friends and family to pick each other up at the airport, or drive each other to the bus station, now there is Uber. This relationship is now marketized and anonymized. So too, where once people made meals for the sick, bereaved, or those who had just had children, now there is a host of services that will deliver meals to them, or they can simply use Door Dash, etc. Likewise, childcare is increasingly anonymized and marketized. People use app-based systems to find babysitters, they hire "sleep consultants" to help them with cranky babies because relatives no longer live close enough to offer guidance. Romance is no different, where once there were community "matchmakers" (often centered in the church) now there are dating apps, etc.

One upshot of this is that it increases inequality. Those who can pay get all the benefits of community with none of the costs. Those who can't pay lose community, and get the insecurity of the gig work of providing its benefits to the wealthy to boot.

Obviously, something very similar happens with the balkanization of entertainment and prohibitions on public festivals, etc. so as not to impede the "flow of commerce." Something like the Liturgy of the Hours, once a staple of urban Christian life (even if many did not attend) or the Muslim daily prayers is pushed out by the demands of capitalist competition.

This is a goal of capitalism though. Everywhere becomes everywhere else, aided by the destruction of cultural barriers and the free flow of labor and goods across all borders. This standardization only helps growth, and it helps attain the liberal ideal of freedom by dislodging the individual from the "constriction" of tradition and culture. Indeed, we do a great deal in terms of education and urban planning to try to positively engineer people into becoming ever more the "atomized utility maximizer" that liberalism says they are. When foreign peoples fail to live up to this standard and start falsifying supposedly universal economic theories, the move is generally to declare their behaviors as "impediments to growth" that must be overcome.

For a last example, consider minimum lot size requirements and minimum parking requirements, which have helped turn America's suburbs and strip malls into wholly unwalkable isolated islands of private dwellings and private businesses. This is exactly the physical architecture you create if your goal is the atomized individual chooser that liberalism says man is (and that traditionalism generally says he isn't). It's also exactly the sort of physical architecture you'd expect for a country with a "loneliness epidemic." Whereas, if you go to the surviving old town centers of Europe, or a place like the Azore's, you find a sort of compact, if chaotic net with places of commerce tightly wrapped around a core common area and old church; a very different landscape.

Finally, just consider how much people must move to keep up with the capitalist economy. That alone destroys community. All the people I know who are committed careerists in the upper echelon of society have bounced around America's major urban centers in order to continue advancing (this also makes raising children a major liability). Then, on the opposite end, rural areas and rust belt towns, denuded of work by globalization, see all their young people fleeing to find work (which also destroys communities). Maybe it is worth the benefits, but conducive to "conserving tradition" it is not.

You reminded me of the opinion of one amateur philosopher from the 80s:

https://youtu.be/sPLc4hLD3ts?si=JGQqfTqgHXO7XwDR

I'm both impressed and horrified by the fact that for people living in completely different corners of our planet, the problems look the same. There are differences in methodology, approaches, and justifications, but the underlying sense of a shared misfortune is unified. This proves that, at least to me, it's not all just me imagining things.

P.S. When I'm in Semipalatinsk, I'll be sure to send you a couple of photos from the Dostoevsky Museum, where he spent five years in exile and became the "late" Dostoevsky.

I forgot another core part: the marketization anonyminitization of these moves also requires phenomenal state intervention since personal relationships, shame, the threat of losing access to the community (fatal in prior times), norms, etc. can no longer regulate such "transactions." Hence, a massive state must grow up to reduce the friction points between now atomized individuals, to issue licenses for all sorts of marginal professions because trust and reputation have been dramatically reduced, etc.

Hence, the champions of "small government" find themselves wed to the very process by which government must continually grow, such that it is now massively (on orders of magnitude) more invasive to the average person's life than at any prior point in history (when the norm was to hardly ever interact with anyone outside one's local officials).

For instance, transfer payments to older "workers" now dominate the budgets of modern states and have driven their wild deficits because relatives no longer take care of the aged and the default that people have been made to expect (and which our architecture promotes) is that seniors and young parents live in atomized consumer households (increasingly as single worker/consumer parents who shuttle the children between households as a normal).

An interesting facet here is that, because the procedural is generally elevated in the name of "fairness" (the liberal substitute for justice), pension benefits are normally entirely based on how much money you earned previously and no other factor. Whereas in prior epochs people might worry about their future of they alienated their family and community, money now becomes the overwhelming concern.

we are limited in our ability to know these general truths — Colo Millz

This is exactly why abstract reasoning should take precedence over empirical observations.

Because, due to human subjectivity and limitations, science will always be a mirage disguised as truth. We'll never learn the objective truth or reality, and we'll never have a finalized, reasonable conclusion. But between the two, the latter is more preferable, especially at the individual level. Whenever we attempt to collectivize something, it spirals into chaos.

The pursuit of knowledge is often mistaken for the pursuit of truth. They are not the same.
Knowledge is aesthetic; it beautifies the mind. Truth is theoretical; it exists only as a limit we can never reach.

The terminal nihilist studies not to “discover” but to experience the pleasure of comprehension.
Science and philosophy, when freed from the burden of eternity, become art forms — games of intellect that reward curiosity without demanding conclusion.

It is not necessary to believe in what one studies. Belief is possession; it creates anxiety and defense. Knowing without believing — observing, testing, and discarding ideas as one does melodies — allows freedom of thought without the sickness of conviction.

Thus, the scientist’s laboratory and the philosopher’s desk are stages, not temples. The experiment and the essay are performances of curiosity, not pilgrimages to revelation.
The wise man learns as a connoisseur, not as a missionary.

Alam, T. B. (2025). The Terminal Truth: On the Economy of Existence [Zenodo]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17378531

Progressives, by contrast, contend that such reforms required transcending traditional authority through appeals to abstract reason, universal rights, and moral equality that often conflicted with inherited norms. For them, tradition frequently entrenches power and prejudice, and genuine moral progress demands critical rupture, not deference. — Colo Millz

You’re referring only to a subset of progressives, those at the conservative end of the progressive spectrum. You’ve left out those who subscribe to philosophical positions which put into question notions like abstract reason, universal rights, moral equality and timeless, objective truth. Follow the lineage from Hazoni to MacIntyre to Juergen Habermas to Charles Taylor to Richard Rorty.

The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles. — Colo Millz

Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure?

According to the Gospels, the arrival of Jesus triggered a clash between a hidebound religious elite and a revolutionary advocate for the common people. Traditions stand good until they don't. Civilizations die, and new ones are born. I don't believe the staunchest conservative would be content to thoroughly regress back to the culture and society of even one hundred years ago.

On the flip side, I doubt even the most woke radical would dive headlong and carefree into a thoroughly unstructured future, anarchic and recalcitrant.

The point being that radicals and conservatives need each other, their rabid partisan rhetoric notwithstanding. History can neither afford to fly out of its orbit on a lark, nor plant itself in in the sand like an ostrich.

For Hazony, as for these earlier conservatives, the task of statesmanship is not to perfect society through rational schemes... — Colo Millz

Perfect society? Who's going to do that anytime soon?

...but to preserve and prudently amend the tested traditions that sustain moral and civic life. — Colo Millz

How is this any less a rational scheme than the one put forward by the progressives?

Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure? — ucarr

That's spot on. Is the purpose here to create another conservative echo chamber? This is how the debate is to be framed, hence conservatism - we are right because we are right- pun intended.

Why do you present the debate in such a rigidly binary structure? — ucarr

This statement is actually something Burke might point out.

Burke, who was a Whig, himself said

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.

https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/change-from-within/

So the purpose of presenting the binary is not meant as an ontological division but as an epistemological one.

It is a contrast of starting points rather than exclusive camps.

How is this any less a rational scheme than the one put forward by the progressives? — ucarr

The difference Hazony intends is not that conservatism avoids reason altogether, but that it distrusts abstract reason detached from inherited practices.

In his view, progressivism begins from universal principles (e.g., equality, autonomy) and tries to fit society to them, while conservatism begins from existing norms and asks how they can be prudently adapted.

Thus a deeper question isn’t whether we use reason, but rather what kind of reason - abstract or prudential - best sustains moral order.

by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles. — Colo Millz

I bolded a bit of that, so that you can't miss it.

As has been pointed out by others as well as myself, only a very few "progressives" would frame their view as guided by a "universal moral principle".

What about liberté, égalité, fraternité?

Not universal?

What about the Declaration, which says that rights are self-evident and inalienable?

I'd suggest re-reading Rawls. Is consistency a moral principle, and not a rational one?

The insistence on universal moral principles is more authoritarian than liberal. I see your framing as an attempt to understand liberal thinking in authoritarian terms, rather than in liberal terms.

Hence this thread is in danger of being an echo chamber, in which conservatives interpret the "other" in only conservative terms, rather than trying to come to terms with what liberals might actually be arguing.

I’d argue that consistency is not merely a matter of reason; it carries a moral weight.

Without consistency, principles like fairness or justice become hollow, and commitments lose integrity.

Rational coherence alone doesn’t obligate anyone to act justly - moral accountability does.

↪Colo Millz I'd suggest re-reading Rawls. Is consistency a moral principle, and not a rational one? — Banno

Anyway If grounded in consent, deliberation, and procedural protections (as Rawls tries to do), universal moral principles are not authoritarian in practice and can coexist with liberal pluralism.

I’d argue that consistency is not merely a matter of reason; it carries a moral weight. — Colo Millz

Sure. So consistency is desirable.

Rawls (for example) might agree, so far as that goes. Consider, might we engage in a moral discourse without presupposing consistency? How could that work?

Given diverse traditions, what might a rational, consistent approach to dealing with difference look like?

And when we consider that - then we begin to play by Rawls' rules.

The point here, of course, is not to argue in support of Rawls alone, but to show the lack of depth in Hazony.