Conservatives and Nostalgia

Tradition is not the past; it's a method for the present At Right Reason, Rkoons continues his exploration of what a conservative is. I linked to his first post in my Links! post yesterday. He makes a few more points today, including this one that I want to highlight:

... Conservatives do not seek to conserve the past or the present. In fact, the very idea of conserving the past is absurd and self-contradictory. The past no longer exists and so cannot be conserved. Similarly, the task of conserving the present is self-defeating. The present is always in motion and undergoing change. To bring all such change to an end would be to bring about the greatest possible change of all. Freezing the present is to destroy it, not to conserve it. Thus, the conservative has no particular attitude toward change as such. He is, in general, neither for it nor against it. Obviously, he is for good change and against bad change. Good change is that which strengthens reality and weakens those forces that threaten it: bad change is the opposite.

Let’s define a nostalgist as one who seeks to recreate some supposed Golden Age in the past (or to freeze the present, on the assumption that this is the Golden Age). A nostalgist is an anti-conservative. In fact, a nostalgist is a kind of leftist, since nostalgia is exactly the kind of external imposition that is the characteristic aim of leftism (a nostalgist is a kind of romantic, as opposed to rationalist, leftist).

Conservatives are often tagged as nostalgists by their critics. It might even be fair criticism of some people who call themselves conservative - such as Pat Buchanan. It seems fair to say that both the left and the right want things to realize their potential. They differ on what that means and on how we are to know what it means. For the left, true form is usually some form of intuition or rationalization. It can manifest as a desire to see a past idea reasserted or a desire to "let future progress take place unhindered." They then propose actions to liberate something from the "dead hand of the past" or to correct a "historical error." A conservative asks how the future could possibly be "hindered." He also asks how one can know what the essence of something is without referring to some solid evidence, such as traditions that have been kept for a long period and even revered. It does not matter how well understood these traditions are in the light of scientific rationalism. He is much more skeptical about our ability to know why things have been handed down. He doesn't dislike or devalue science but he does think using it in these areas is to commit a category error. Not easily convinced that he can improve a thing without knowing what "really is," he is reluctant to act on something in an effort to change it. He believes in evolution rather than revolution. How cautious one needs to be is a matter of debate in conservative circles. Some are more doubtful than others. I think one can be too cautious and in doing so, become an idealist, fixated on one point in time rather than a method of dealing with the present. When an idea becomes more important than a real thing before us, then the line has been crossed. The past and the future are only two of the most common manifestations of idealism in politics and have no inherent tie to conservatism.