If history's social conservatives have always been wrong, why would we think today's are right?

Social conservatism reduces to two primary claims:

  1. The way we (meaning the social conservative) live now (or at some chosen point in the past) is the best way to live
  2. Deviations from that style of living (whether proposed, or by way of example of those choosing to live differently) are not improvements, but steps in the wrong direction, and potentially quite harmful ones

Social conservatism thus rejects social liberalization, or the increasing freedom of people to choose new ways to live, to express personal identities in increasingly diverse ways, and to achieve social acceptance in that diversity. (Update: I wrote a follow-up post clarifying the distinction between “social liberalization” and “the political left.") The social conservative tells us to trust his judgement that the contemporary forces for social liberalization have either gone too far, or are asking us to go too far, and that if we continue along that path, we will regret it.

But the social conservative’s claim runs into a rather obvious problem: history. For there have been social conservatives before him, stretching back as far as we have historical records. And so in light of his claim now about this time social liberalism has gone too far, or threatens to do so, we can ask, “Were those prior generations of social conservatives right in their echoing claims?”

And there’s the rub. Because if we think back, to history’s cavalcade of social conservatives saying, “Now we’ve gone too far” or “Now is just the right about of social liberalism,” in every instance it’s turned out they were wrong. We didn’t have enough social liberalization a thousand years ago, or five-hundred, or even one-hundred. Every one of those points we can look back on and think it’s a good thing the forces of social liberalization won out, because we (or, at least, most of us) wouldn’t want to go back to that.

If that’s the case for every prior social conservative standing athwart his moment’s history and demanding the liberalization stop, why wouldn’t we assume that it’s the case for today’s social conservatives, as well?

Two Kinds of Moral Thinking

This post from several years back by Michael J. Sigrist at the blog of the American Philosophical Association gives what I think is the correct answer–or part of the correct answer–to a question that motivated a lot of my own thinking lately. Namely, study data seem to indicate that moral philosophers aren’t, by and large, any more ethical than the rest of us.

He subtly teases out what might be going on, but here’s the core of it:

There’s a kind of thinking that we do when we are trying to prove something, and then a kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person—when we are trying to forgive someone, or be more understanding, or become more confident in ourselves. Becoming a better person relies on thinking of the latter sort, whereas most work in professional ethics—even in practical ethics—is exclusive to the former.

I like this. It nicely gives clarity to a distinction I’ve been wrestling with regarding contemporary moral thinking often getting something wrong about morality. What I’d add on to Sigrist’s distinction, though, and so tie it into my parallel approach, is that ethics needs to be a practice. Even if we think about ethics in the right way (e.g., the “kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person”), “becoming” is active and requires more than thought. We need ethical training, in the same way a baseball pitcher can think about how to throw a slider, but also needs to get out and throw a ton of bad sliders before he can inch his way toward a good one.

This is one of the elements I like in Buddhist philosophy: meditative practice gives us tools for cultivating an ethical mindset and habits, and give us a way to practice them, so that we will be more naturally inclined towards ethics in the world–just as the pitcher who practices throwing will more naturally throw well when next called upon to do it when it matters.

I’m going to keep thinking about Sigrist’s essay, hopefully in the right way. And I encourage you to read the whole thing.