Liberalism and Conservatism

Michael DeDora over at Rationally Speaking has a pretty interesting post about the essential differences between liberalism and conservatism, and he focuses his discussion on their respective attitudes toward tradition:

The conservative mindset tends to value traditional institutions and values because they are traditional. If people believe institutions and values are wrong or outdated, conservatives tend to think the problem is not with the institutions and values, but with the people who have gravitated away from them for some unfathomable reason. The liberal approach is that institutions and values are only worth following if they are correct or serve a worthwhile purpose. If they are false or outdated, they deserve to be thrown into the scrap heap and replaced with better and more worthwhile ways of doing things.

DeDora is on to something with this, but I think his analysis is incomplete (and clearly biased towards liberalism).  But it pretty closely tracks a distinction that one of my history professors, Ron Suny, made in a class on the history of the ideas of modernity.  Liberalism and conservatism* have taken a variety of forms over time, he says, but at base they disagree about one main point: the mutability of human nature.  Conservatives believe that human nature is basically fixed; structure, authority and tradition are required to prevent people from doing bad things, which they would inevitably do in the absence of these stabilizing forces.  Liberals, on the other hand, are a bit more optimistic, and they believe that society and culture as we know it should be viewed critically and replaced, if possible, with something better.

I basically agree with this understanding, and I think there’s some truth to both sides of the divide.  Conservatives are probably right in understanding the importance of structure and relatively stable meaning in our lives, while liberals are right to point out that we can and should make improvement to the social worlds we live in.

Of course, as DeDora points out, sometimes people will only pay lip service to their respective political ideologies and use them as cover to do some bad things (he targets conservatives on this, but it’s certainly true of liberals, too).  But we shouldn’t let this abuse blind us to the lessons that the Left and the Right both have for us.  The best approach is a critical one—constantly subjecting all viewpoints to scrutiny and doing our best to sort the good from the bad in each one.

*This isn’t quite accurate, but I’m using these terms to refer more broadly to the political Left and Right and not liberalism and conservatism as they’re more narrowly understood in American politics.

(Image by ghindo used under a Creative Commons license.)