Tag: conservatives

Satisfying or Beneficial?

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

A thinker who made interesting contributions to the discussions of conservatism is John Kekes. He makes a very important point which is that conservatives define what it means to live a good life based on how one’s course of actions corresponds to the existing moral order. This moral order exists in reality and outside of individual wishes of human beings. To a conservative, “lives are good if they conform to this moral order and bad if they do not,” says Kekes.

A liberal also looks for a path to a good life. His compass, however, is moved from the external reality into his inner world. The measure of good and bad is not external to him. It is, on the contrary, completely internal. Things are good if they emanate from the from the desires of his authentic self. His goal in life is to reveal this inner self as fully as possible to himself and others. The external moral order is, to him, not a good and wonderful thing. It is, rather, an absolute horror that places limitations on the manifestations of his inner authentic self.

This is a great way to draw a defining line between conservative and liberal worldviews. Does the idea of a moral order to the creation of which you did not contribute attract or repel you? Should there me external moral limitations on the desiring self? Yesterday we talked about the over-reliance on the concept of consent. This is precisely what happens when we do not accept an external moral order (whether it comes from God, tradition, history, or anything else) and try to resolve every moral issue by appealing to the desires of individuals.

Here is how Kekes puts the contradiction between inner desire and outward goodness:

Good lives must be satisfying and beneficial, but these
requirements often conflict because satisfying lives may
not be beneficial and beneficial lives may not be satisfying.
This raises the question of which requirement should
be dominant, and it has far-reaching political consequences
how it is answered.

Are the “Iwannas” of the desiring self the most important thing in the world? Or should there be limitations placed on ways in which individuals seek satisfaction? Should “social authority prevail over individual autonomy”? Or vice versa? And in what areas of life?

Let’s stop here for the time being but I will have more about Kekes later.

Oakeshott and Being Forever Young

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

OK, one last post on Oakeshott and I will move on to other conservative thinkers on my voluminous list. Oakeshott believed that young people should not have much of a place in politics because the great qualities of youth are poisonous for politics.

But here is the problem. When I read Oakeshott’s description of youth, it becomes clear to me that, in a setup where the most important thing is to remain always young to avoid being replaced by a newer, shinier model, everybody is like this at any age:

Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands – unless it be a cricket bat. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. . . Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own.

Our politics today is a battle between the eternal adolescents described perfectly by Oakeshott. He was conservative in a different world, one in which people were people very unlike to how we are people. What he said is still very much on point but in a much larger way than what Oakeshott himself could have imagined.

Who likes this new series and how much do we like it? I’m liking it a lot.