Conservatism has three centers of gravity:
1. The wisdom of centuries and even millennia, adapted to the present day. (Implied teleology)
2. What Grandpa and Grandma used to do.
3. What I think the adult world was like when I was a child.
Liberalism has three centers of gravity:
1. Where I think the culture is gradually headed. (Implied teleology)
2. What seems Nice, and therefore somehow moral.
3. What's hot right now.
Yes, let us make allowances that most ideas, and certainly most people, do not adhere entirely to one or the other or the other. Still, there's something to it.
Considering it this way, it's easy to see where sneers develop.
5 comments:
"Where I think the culture is gradually headed."
That's what Orwell called 'power worship, the belief that present trends will continue.'
Your liberal No 1 lacks a little punch relative to the conservative No 1, as well as shorting the 'Right Side of History' claim. Their vision is not where culture may wind up, someday, by some meandering path. It's a visiin of the path to the pinnacle of human development.
"Where I think the culture is gradually headed." Rather, where they want it to go. And intend it to go.
My Grandma used to imagine she was wringing her husband's neck every time she wrung a chicken's neck. Feminism was different in those days.
That's a great line.
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