Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

http://www.socialmatter.net/2014/06/24/whither-intellectual-conservatism/THE WRONG QUESTION?

Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong question.

I’ll argue that yes, intellectual conservatism does exist. Although, when you say “intellectual” it is somewhat troublesome, because it’s not sufficiently articulate for the purpose you intend. Instead, humans demonstrate the ability to argue( persuade or justify) using a limited number of frameworks – and those frameworks constitute a spectrum of complexity from the simplistically intuitive to the ratio-empirical. The question is, what form of argument do you consider to be classifiable as intellectual, where on this spectrum to conservatives conduct their arguments, and for what reason do they fail to conduct their arguments in the manner you consider intellectual.

ARGUMENTATIVE SPECTRUM

1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject. While used as an argument, it is not. It is merely an opinion or expression.

2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.

3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.

4) HISTORICAL (analogical / correlative):

5) RATIONAL (internally consistent)

6) SCIENTIFIC (correlative and directly empirical)

7) ECONOMIC: (correlative and *indirectly* empirical)

8) RATIO-EMPIRICAL (Comprehensive, internally consistent and externally correspondent)

Conservatism, when discussed outside of economics, where it is almost never discussed, is almost always expressed in arational terms (moral argument). Sometimes it is expressed in legal terms – the classical liberal and constitutionalist argument). Sometimes it is expressed in what we call the Burkeian or ‘psychological’ form of argument. But rarely as an analytic, scientific, or economic argument. And never as the central propositions of conservatism – because those central propositions would be untenable to a popular democratic polity – even if they were indeed morally, economically, and politically superior. This is because the popular democratic argument is a failed one, that is in direct conflict with conservatism as a social, economic, political and legal strategy.

So, conservatism is argued most often, “arationally”. The value of conservatism, as an *ARATIONAL* social system of myths, traditions, habits, and formal institutions, is that such a structure, much like religious faith, is impervious to fashionable changes, and in particular, verbal manipulation by Schumpeterian public intellectuals. In fact, I have argued, and I think successfully, that conservatism as practiced is demonstrably scientific: evidentiary – while progressivism is demonstrably and successfully verbalist. A fact which is somewhat humorous or ironic or depressing depending upon one’s own disposition: in effect while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious). Furthermore, science itself is practiced demonstrably, not argumentatively – which only serves to lend credence to the conservative prohibition on hubris, and the mandate for demonstrated results rather than verbal hypothesis.

THE PROBLEMS OF AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONSERVATISM

1) Just as we solved the calculus and physics, before we solved economics and social science, conservatism has been unsolved (unarticulated in ratio-scientific terms) because it is a more complicated system than we had anticipated. And such complicated systems of thought are very hard to use in argument. Worse, they are hard to use in political argument because, under a democratic polity, we require numbers, and complicated arguments are the province of a permanent minority. Until conservatism is articulated in ratio-empirical form, and until public intellectuals can reduce those complex statements to simple narratives and memes, conservatism (Anglo-European Aristocratic Egalitarianism) is an advanced form of social order that is nearly impossible for ordinary people to argumentatively defend.

2) There doesn’t appear to be demand for intellectual argument in conservatism, precisely because conservatives are so dependent upon taught, learned and innate moral intuition. If conservatives cannot ‘feel’ it then they don’t trust it. This turns out to be fairly good when one prevents adding false ideas to conservatism, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to argue conservatism rationally. So therefore, as a majority, conservatism can function and persist in a body of people. But under democratic rule, cultural and political diversity, the need to argue rationally in order to produce laws, and the ability to use law to impose changes upon the body politic, conservative arationalism is a weakness because conservative principles are not sufficiently defensible against (dishonest) framing, loading, overloading, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudoscience. Which is why the 20th century has been so harmful to conservatism: the cosmopolitans were merely superior at using the media to broadcast and repeat as a mantra, nearly any framed, loaded, overloaded, pseudo-rational (postmodern), and pseudoscientific (marxist-socialist) program.

3) I generally test my ideas in the libertarian (libertine) community precisely because libertarianism (libertinism) is an intellectual ideology: structured as a very rigid, very analytic, moral, legal, and economic argument. Libertarians (libertines) are wrong, which is why their argument fails universally in all political populations. But at least it is possible to conduct conservative argument in moral, legal, and economic terms, and develop one’s arguments there. Most of us find, that even if we produce, as you say ‘intellectual’ philosophy, but I would state as ‘ratio-empirical, moral, analytic, legal, and economic philosophy’, conservatives behave so anti-intellectually, that the advocacy of conservatism in ratio-empirical, analytic, moral, legal, and economic terms, is exasperating.

SO THE QUESTION MAY BE “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO ANTI-INTELLECTUAL” rather than why are no conservative philosophers extant. I’m here. A few others are. But the conservative community does not demonstrate a demand for ‘intellectual’ arguments. All things considered, that is not necessarily a criticism. It just so happens that if the academy and the state conspire rather than are separated as were church and state, and in an age of expensive consumer-driven media, financed by hedonistic consumption, conservatives face a perfect storm of destructive incentives, against which traditionalism is not a sufficiently resistant means of argument, because we lack the economic means of ostracizing bad behaviors.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.