Critique of conservative principles, part 2

Here's #2:
The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. ... Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.
The interesting thing to point out here is that under this formulation, anything unknown is implicitly considered to be the devil. I think this reveals a fear of change that goes far deeper than a prudent skepticism of untried methods and ideas (which I think is a very good thing). It smacks of a knee-jerk reaction against any possible form of improvement or betterment: Even if circumstances now are hellishly bad (i.e. the devil they know), they are preferable to what might otherwise come about (the devil they don't know). I am doubly suspicious when this formulation comes from the mouths of those who are tremendously well-off with "the devil they know" and are directing this "wisdom" at those who are suffering from the defects of the current system.

#3:
Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. ... The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.
"Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants" Whoa! I thought conservatives believed that human nature was constant! Now they're saying that modern people are dwarfs and ancient people are giants. Don't dwarfs and giants have different natures? Now maybe they just mean that given a uniform distribution of "giants" throughout time, there are more giants in the past than there are currently, simply because history provides us with a larger sample space than do our contemporaries. But the whole thrust of the passage denigrates the present and elevates the past. This directly contradicts the belief in unchanging human nature.

And even if we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, doesn't that mean we can see just a little bit further than those giants? And if that small improvement of vantage allows us to see a cliff that was hidden from our giant forebearers, shouldn't we avoid that cliff, even if it means straying a bit from the path laid out by our wise predecessors? Maybe their accumulated wisdom is greater than our own. But we are here, and surely that counts for something. Conservatives are always championing local control over distant rule by educated elites with their utopian plans. But shouldn't the principle of local rule apply to time as well as space? Why should we be ruled by a bunch of wise elites from the distant past? They're not here. And they didn't have to deal with global climate change, intellectual property law in a digital age, or the threat of nuclear weapons.

I agree that the accumulated wisdom of our culture, embodied in our existing laws, customs, social norms, and precedents exceeds that of that of anyone's "petty private rationality". Marxism and Maoism make the mistake of believing that one person, or a small group of people, got it "all right" can thus trump tradition at will. I would agree with conservatives that this is a foolish delusion. At the same time, I would argue that the point of our private rationality isn't to attempt to re-make society wholesale, but rather to find places where it could be improved without imperiling the existing benefits that it provides. One needn't claim that one's own intellect is superior to the collective wisdom in order to do that. I might not be a great playwright, but nonetheless I might offer a suggestion or a criticism to a great playwright that makes the work a slightly better one.

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