Traditional conservatism - Fight or flight

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“On Human Nature” is altogether more serious. Its four essays pull together high-level complaints that the author has been making since his classic “The Meaning of Conservatism” (1980). The argument is more philosophical than polemical. His starting point is that every political outlook presupposes a philosophical picture of the human person. Liberals, as he sees them, picture people as self-possessed beings free to choose their attachments, conservatives as creatures with social roots that impose duties and allegiances. The liberal picture, he says, involves three mistakes.


They can be labelled (to use this reviewer’s terms) scientism, libertarianism and transactionalism. Scientism mistakenly takes evolutionary biology and psychology to offer the whole truth about human nature. Science does explain humankind’s animal selves, but not the irreducibly personal perspective by which people recognise who they are and hold each other to account. Libertarianism is correct that individuals are each morally free and personally accountable, but it neglects unchosen social ties that impose duties and flesh out who they are. Transactionalism considers anything of value to have acquired it by preference or consent, which threatens to equate value with price and render everything that matters open to trade.


Together those three mistakes encourage a flattened picture of people that makes too much a matter of choice and cannot account for what we owe to things of value in themselves such as beauty, the natural environment or the nation. For Sir Roger, the proper attitude to such “lasting things” is not to ask “what is this for?” but to acknowledge them without question and show what, in a non-religious sense, he calls piety. A sickened culture, he argues, could be cured if more people returned to this kind of piety.


“On Human Nature” is a tour de force of a rare kind. In clear, elegant prose it makes large claims in metaphysics, morals and, by implication, politics. It will be asked exactly what connects the three mistakes it exposes, and how far political liberalism depends on them. When liberals and conservatives turn to philosophy, perhaps political lines blur more than cultural conservatives might think.

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Lafayette said:

From the Economist: Fight or flight.

Excerpt:


My own observation (and that of others, I sense) is that America has become overwhelmed by the importance of "Transactionalism" because it is the fast-lane to inordinate riches. And, in a country with around 14% of the population (more than 40 million men, women and children) eking out a living below the Poverty Threshold, one perhaps should question the primacy of transactionalism in our daily lives.


Are we not expecting "too much of one another"? Transacting relationships based upon personal criteria judgments with only money-sums as a basis of deciding good from bad?


I wonder ...

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joG said:

And meanwhile in the model social democratic powerhouse of the EU:

"In its latest summary, based on figures from 2014, the Paritätische said 15.4 of the population nationwide was stuck below the poverty line.
That was down a slight 0.1 percent on the level measured it 2013, but still up significantly on the 14 percent measured ten years ago, it said.

Highlighting child poverty, the federation said 19 percent of Germany's youngsters lived in relative poverty. Half of these were children living in a single-parent household.
And, at 15.6 percent, poverty among pensioners had for the first time risen above the nationwide average."
?Massive? rich-poor gap in German society | News | DW.COM | 23.02.2016

It is odd, how you try to spread discontent and envy. Why do you do that?

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