This post is inspired by a lot of recent reading, too much to reference here. Some of it pertains to Sohrab Ahmari David French. But most of it pertains to Scott Alexander’s recent posts inspired by Joseph Henrich’s work. (Note that I also praised the Henrich book myself.)
In the latter post, Scott writes,
We are the heirs to a five-hundred-year-old tradition of questioning traditions and demanding rational justifications for things. Armed with this tradition, western civilization has conquered the world and landed on the moon. If there were ever any tradition that has received cultural evolution’s stamp of approval, it would be this one.
Sometimes, there is a conflict between the approach that you arrive at using your reasoning of the moment and the existing tradition. For example, Bryan Caplan argues that a reasoning libertarian should oppose immigration restrictions.
Under such circumstances, which should prevail: your momentary reason or tradition?
Conservatives argue for paying considerable respect to tradition. Your individual, momentary reason is not sufficient to overwhelm generations of experience. Henrich’s anthropology supports that (although Henrich does not define himself as a conservative). Always going with momentary reason would mean depriving ourselves of cultural intelligence.
But obviously, if you always go with tradition, you never evolve in a better direction. So you want some experimentation.
The Whig history is that our current society reflects retention of successful experiments. The dour conservative point of view is that it has all been downhill since. . .the radical Social Justice turn of the last five years. . .or the 1960s. . .or Rousseau. . .or John Locke. Take your pick.
A few hundred years ago, a lot of cultural transmission depended on the elderly. Old people knew more than young people, so it was hard for young people to question tradition.
Today, old people don’t know how to use smart phones as well as young people do. So why should young people think old people aren’t equally antiquated on issues of race relations, gender, or free speech?
I wish that old people and traditions had somewhat higher status than they do with young progressives, and I wish that momentary reason had somewhat lower status.
UPDATE: After I wrote this post but before it was scheduled to appear, Scott Alexander elaborated further. I will have another post on this tomorrow soon.
we can try breaking the value of listening to old people down into two components:
1) The volume of their knowledge (weighted by the relevance of their knowledge). There are multiple signs that the social/economic/tech (the three are morphing) evolution is accelerating. So the more recent knowledge has more relevance and 30-year-olds have more of it than 60-year-olds.
2) Old people’s gray hair was an automatic credibility signal that they actually did have the greater volume of knowledge. With more formalized credential allocation system (aka “higher ed”) that signal is less valuable.
So this ‘momentary reasoning’ makes me a lot more tolerant of 30-year-olds’ views than my conservative gut reaction wants.
Yeah, the world has seen, fewer of those alive, this “youth movement” before. Didn’t turn out great. It too happened at a time when old people struggled with new technology and the dispersion of information and expansion of communications suddenly increased.
“In the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.
“The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.
“It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content.
“The chiefs of the youth movement were mentally unbalanced neurotics. Many of them were affected by a morbid sexuality, they were either profligate or homosexual. None of them excelled in any field of activity or contributed anything to human progress. Their names are long since forgotten; the only trace they left were some books and poems preaching sexual perversity. But the bulk of their followers were quite different. They had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin.”
—von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
Not sure conservativism is about creating a static world. Incrementalism, tolerance for religious people and unpopular minorities evolving as they will, pluralism, autonomous discovery, bottom-up consensus, bounded democratic processes, safe spaces for individualism, non-coercive communal norms, freedom of contract to harness dynamic cooperative enterprise, as well as clear rules and fair enforcement, all these seem part and parcel of whatever it is that you want to call conservatism or for that matter the current spasm of populism.