There's another generic defence of conservatism, which runs along the following lines. From a given starting point, there are many directions in which we can change things. On plausible ways of counting the great majority of these will be for the worse. And we don't have great foresight.
So, we should stick to changes that are either small enough that it doesn't matter much if they turn out badly, or else easily reversible if they go wrong.
I have a fair bit of sympathy with this view, which seems similar to expressed by Ro,
I think a better version of pure conservatism is Chesterton's fence: don't fiddle with the status quo until you have understood why the status quo exists. Now it may be that a particular existing institution, law or norm was brought about by a corrupt elite looking looking entrench their own privilege; or maybe it's a pointless vestige from a bygone age where it served a genuine purpose. But most of the time it exists for better reasons, than that, there are meaningful losses incurred when you tear it down, and it behoves you to think carefully about the trade-offs.
I have to run so I can't think much about this comment --sorry--but it's on this topic I find fascinating which is basically 'why are the social political forms/norms/instantiations (for lack of a better word) often pretty far from the theoretical underpinnings they claim.
I AM in some ways a conservative of the type you initially describe. (Those aren't my exact positions.) Though people scoff when I say so. I suppose my heuristic is 1) humans don't understand themselves very well and operate under many illusions about themselves 2) things that they think will be great or work well often aren't or don't. I also agree with 3) the extreme complexity of society thesis and suspect 4) drastic changes that sound good have unintended bad consequences so we must be careful.
So social norms and practices that work well enough can be not so great but I don't see the point of necessarily ending them OR more saliently, because they usually don't end--getting too obsessed with how bad they are. Maybe an example are things like family structures, which I hope WILL change but maybe very gradually because we might not know how to make things that sound good in theory work well in practice and it would take a lot of time to figure this out.
The reason people who know me scoff is that almost every social hierarchy just seems so arbitrary to me and I think people really ARE equal and we rarely flourish under high authority or high conformity contexts. And the worst and most destructive human illusion involves our acquisitive nature so capitalism just seems insane. Violence is another bad trait we have. But I don't really have an account of how people should arrange society because it's really something you have to DO, very slowly.
So the 'take social change slow' of conservatives makes sense if you believe SOME social forms are partly crowd sourced, possibly because they are what people don't mind living with and see as beneficial --and you can tell this because you don't need a lot of violence or coercion to maintain.
An ad hoc big utopia through violence doesn't seem like a great idea but Burke and others were wrong about the French revolution in the end so I am not sure I can even trust my views about that.
In real life though, Robbins is right about conservatives--they want to REVERE the markers of hierarchy, they love it for its own sake. But I suspect there's another kind of conservativism that's the kind you describe that many people have, that's about our mistrust of our capacity to shape collective processes, and our tendency to fool ourselves and be fooled by people promising improvements.
There's another generic defence of conservatism, which runs along the following lines. From a given starting point, there are many directions in which we can change things. On plausible ways of counting the great majority of these will be for the worse. And we don't have great foresight.
So, we should stick to changes that are either small enough that it doesn't matter much if they turn out badly, or else easily reversible if they go wrong.
I have a fair bit of sympathy with this view, which seems similar to expressed by Ro,
I think a better version of pure conservatism is Chesterton's fence: don't fiddle with the status quo until you have understood why the status quo exists. Now it may be that a particular existing institution, law or norm was brought about by a corrupt elite looking looking entrench their own privilege; or maybe it's a pointless vestige from a bygone age where it served a genuine purpose. But most of the time it exists for better reasons, than that, there are meaningful losses incurred when you tear it down, and it behoves you to think carefully about the trade-offs.
I have to run so I can't think much about this comment --sorry--but it's on this topic I find fascinating which is basically 'why are the social political forms/norms/instantiations (for lack of a better word) often pretty far from the theoretical underpinnings they claim.
I AM in some ways a conservative of the type you initially describe. (Those aren't my exact positions.) Though people scoff when I say so. I suppose my heuristic is 1) humans don't understand themselves very well and operate under many illusions about themselves 2) things that they think will be great or work well often aren't or don't. I also agree with 3) the extreme complexity of society thesis and suspect 4) drastic changes that sound good have unintended bad consequences so we must be careful.
So social norms and practices that work well enough can be not so great but I don't see the point of necessarily ending them OR more saliently, because they usually don't end--getting too obsessed with how bad they are. Maybe an example are things like family structures, which I hope WILL change but maybe very gradually because we might not know how to make things that sound good in theory work well in practice and it would take a lot of time to figure this out.
The reason people who know me scoff is that almost every social hierarchy just seems so arbitrary to me and I think people really ARE equal and we rarely flourish under high authority or high conformity contexts. And the worst and most destructive human illusion involves our acquisitive nature so capitalism just seems insane. Violence is another bad trait we have. But I don't really have an account of how people should arrange society because it's really something you have to DO, very slowly.
So the 'take social change slow' of conservatives makes sense if you believe SOME social forms are partly crowd sourced, possibly because they are what people don't mind living with and see as beneficial --and you can tell this because you don't need a lot of violence or coercion to maintain.
An ad hoc big utopia through violence doesn't seem like a great idea but Burke and others were wrong about the French revolution in the end so I am not sure I can even trust my views about that.
In real life though, Robbins is right about conservatives--they want to REVERE the markers of hierarchy, they love it for its own sake. But I suspect there's another kind of conservativism that's the kind you describe that many people have, that's about our mistrust of our capacity to shape collective processes, and our tendency to fool ourselves and be fooled by people promising improvements.
By 'family structure' I don't mean same sex couples--as you are correct this is a minor change in marriage and so conservative in the end.