Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > So my question is, what circumstances or personality traits make these
> > intellectual "gardener's dogs" fervently protecting what they will not eat
> > themselves? That is, how does one become a dogmatic theologian or an
> > economist manufacturing legitimacy for the rich and powerful without
> > sharing
> > the spoils their wealth and power?
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> >
>
>[clip]
> I think the answer is that at the end of the day, they believe in the
> importance of ideas more than they believe in the *usefulness* of the ideas
> they espouse/defend/attack/decry/whatever. We don't want a whole society
> made up of such people, but I guess I think they're good to have around.
>
> that's kind of off the cuff, so probably needs adjustment or I might even
> abandon it altogether, but it's what occurs to me.
Twentieth-century "Conservatives" are a pretty sad lot, and t hey seem unable to formulate the actual foundations of conservatism -- or if they do, not many leftists pick up on it.
The Greks had a proverb: "Best is not to be born; next best is to go hence quickly." If that (or something like it) is a person's fundamental conviction about what human society necessarily is, regardless of what kind of state, then the political possiton which most fits it has two parts: (1) The World isn't fair (I'm cheating here a bit by quoting Jimmy Carter) and (2) as unfair and horrible as the present political arrangements are, any channge would be unimaginably worse. As Eliot put it, "We fight not in the hope of victory but only in the hope ofkeeping something alive" (paraphrased from memory.
Of course if an intellectual is him/herself caught up in the Bourgeois Myth of Progress, this argument becomes hard to formulate. But I suspect even when not argued it's in the conservative's mind.
Note: I am arguing here that ad hominem arguments are a serious barrier to clear though even when applied to the defenders of an oppressive system. It sets leftists off on wild-goose chases after hidden motives. In fact regular or frequent use of ad hominems becomes a sor t of conspiracy theory of history. Assume conservatives really believe what they argue, and meet the arguments. Or beteter, ignore them and go to work organizing the part of the population that, at a given time, can be mobilized by leftists. That's what the abolitionists did -- and they so disrupted the political system and so freaked out the slavedrivers, that (a) LIncoln was elected and (b) the slaedrivers lost their heads and rebelled, forcing the North to put them down.
Carrol