Is social conservatism ever viable?

Is social conservatism ever viable? (Read 351 times)

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goldenratio

#1 August 20, 2012, 11:46:12 pm

now das fresh
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So first off, I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here, I'm not intending to create a circlejerk topic here I just want to try and get some opinions.

Second, I don't mean for this to sound as "attacky" as it probably does.

So, I want to say right off the bat that the way I see it, your "political" ideology is made up of a few parts, essentially your belief in an economic/fiscal system, and a social one. I think most things can be fit into these two categories. In order to simplify things (I know this is a sliding scale, but just for the sake of this argument), let's say you can be "liberal" or "conservative" in each of these categories (also "progressive" as a synonym of "liberal").

Personally I'd consider myself liberal in both aspects. However I understand fiscal conservatism, I think economic matters come down to ideology that can't really be proven one way or the other. It's possible to have a successful society that is very fiscally conservative (disregard how unpleasant that society might be). At the very least, I understand the point of view and I just think it's sort of insoluble. It's a problem that essentially requires compromise. Not a big deal.

But in terms of social conservatism, I don't see how this is viable. Never in the history of mankind has a socially conservative society managed to stand the test of time. Progressive societies have also fallen, but not for reasons relating to their liberalism necessarily.

It just seems to me that history has proven time and time again that society evolves, and things considered unspeakable to one generation can be commonplace for the next. It doesn't make sense to me to try and prevent progression. A society whose values stagnate forever will never progress, can't survive, and doesn't make sense. In fact regardless of what you think our "purpose" as humans is, regardless of what you think our "ultimate goal" should be as a society, being socially conservative never makes sense. It's always born of fear and being uncomfortable, and the desire to just ignore that stuff instead of learning to deal with it. It's obvious nowadays when you have something like gay marriage, which is identical in every aspect to interracial marriage (I mean, in terms of why people are against it and whatnot), and you'd have to be a fool to think it'll never be legalized.

I don't want to ramble too much. Maybe I'm an idiot and I'm just not looking at things correctly. Maybe I don't know about societies that were very socially conservative but yet somehow lasted a great deal of time. I don't know! Again I'm not try to just attack conservatives or anything, I'm just curious if there is any validity to social conservatism at all. To me, it always seems like it doesn't make sense and could never work long-term.

What are your thoughts? Have you got any examples or ideas of how a society can be socially conservative and successful?

yes coulombs are "germaine", did you learn that word at talk like a dick school?

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DDay

#2 August 20, 2012, 11:59:35 pm

Dead man
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"Salt World Attack" As DDay doesn't lead the charge

I can't think of us as a human race having purpose. Life is like a joke to me so all of it is funny in my mind.

Also no I don't think you can unless you hold everything by force and that would involve laws and a lot of deaths

Moives used to be taboo and blamed for ever thing same for video games and music. Anything new and different there will always be an outcry from the older generation trying to push conservative ideas.

DDay is Dead I am a dead man typing

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Biggles

#3 August 21, 2012, 01:53:15 am

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As you pointed out at the beginning of your post, the view of politics you have presented is a reductionist one. Unfortunately, this makes your question difficult to answer for a lot of people, as "political compass position" does not describe their political views very well. I suspect that we have many members who fit this description.

Quote

I think economic matters come down to ideology that can't really be proven one way or the other.

There has been a concerted effort to convince people of this, and I feel that it's really unfortunate. So many things in our lives are implicitly economic, and most economy has underlying politics. Mainstream (neoclassical) economics, of course, is unlikely to tell you much about what's going on. It has been repeatedly pointed out that much of neoclassical economics does not uphold standards expected of scientific research. Since the fiscally liberal / fiscally conservative dichotomy lives in this world, it is unsurprising that it comes off as a bunch of thoroughly baseless ideological proofs. This, however, does not mean that nobody is studying economy, or that any attempt to analyse trade and production is pure ideology.

There is, I guess, also the hidden assumption in your model that economy is not social. And that a particular kind of change is progress & is good. If progress is merely positive social change, I don't think that any group would consider themselves "conservative". I can only really say that I don't agree with most (any?) of the ideas I've heard put forward under the banner of "conservatism", and I find many aspects of liberalism distasteful too.

I am not really an expert on political ideological groupings, though. I am much more interested in the details than the Who To Vote For and the Who Knows Who of electoral politics. And my details have a lot of "I don't know yet"s in them. Perhaps someone more capable of conviction can answer on more concrete terms.

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Barack Obama

#4 August 21, 2012, 07:21:24 am

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Quote

But in terms of social conservatism, I don't see how this is viable. Never in the history of mankind has a socially conservative society managed to stand the test of time. Progressive societies have also fallen, but not for reasons relating to their liberalism necessarily.

I don't really find the term "conservatism" very helpful but it depends on the scale of time we're looking at. For most of human history societies much older than our current modern capitalist society had shit like slavery, human sacrifices, treated women as property/babymachines, and all kinds of fucked up shit like the Hindu caste system which is still goin' on today.

Ultimately no society has 'stood the test of time'.

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Barack Obama

#5 August 21, 2012, 07:23:51 am

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also "progress" is a pretty vague term as well, especially when it comes to social values... there was a time when people considered eugenics as a really forward-looking 'modern' progressive idea.

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dada

#6 August 21, 2012, 08:54:22 am

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To echo Biggles' comments, economics is not something that's purely ideological. There's an ideological aspect of it, namely: what's the purpose of the design of the system of economy that a society operates by? To put it in very simple terms, an economic system can be designed to favor only a few extremely rich people and leave everyone else starving, and it'd still be working perfectly. After all, you judge success based on whether the goals set out from the onset have been met.

The aspect of what a system's goals are, however, are completely separate from the science of being able to determine whether an economic system will be successful. Whether you build a system that favors a stark income gap or complete egalitarianism, it has to have a solid theoretical basis, or it's going to end up a failure.

Like Biggles said, there's been a concerted effort to try and convince people that economics is all ideology, and you have to ask yourself for what purpose they might be doing that, and who benefits from such a belief.

Quote from: goldenratio on August 20, 2012, 11:46:12 pm

But in terms of social conservatism, I don't see how this is viable. Never in the history of mankind has a socially conservative society managed to stand the test of time. Progressive societies have also fallen, but not for reasons relating to their liberalism necessarily.

I actually don't think there's much of a correlation between the two. You can have a perfectly successful society that brutally represses minorities. The US developed during a time when everybody still had slaves that were considered less than fully human. There's usually a natural progress towards solidarity, at least in recent centuries, which can be both stinted as well as strengthened in times of economic trouble, but I don't think that a society stands or falls on this basis. All you need is for the workers to shut up and keep working, so it doesn't matter if you also torture and kill gay people or encourage children to report their parents to the police when they hear them criticize Stalin.

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EvilDemonCreature

#7 August 21, 2012, 07:06:32 pm

i don't like change
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Well, looking at economic policy straight from a "will doing things this way stand the test of time" viewpoint. It seems like the goal of any economic system should be how long it can keep the workers working, and how well it is at shutting them up the entire time they are working.

Making an extremely small part of the population extravagantly rich, while starving the rest does not seem very relevant. Except in the case where it is so blatantly obvious, that it's impossible for the workers actually working for that money to ever shut up about it.

As for social conservatism, in my biased viewpoint, I see such a thing as something that can never stand up all on it's own, but all too necessary for a society to actually make any sort of relevant social progress. I mean, if you view the advancements in society that have all been fought against by social conservatism, if there was no pervasive overbearing force fighting against such change, just how relevant would those advancements actually be seen in the eyes of history?

I am certainly oversimplifying the matter here, but I think of it as any sort of social change whatsoever having people that belong to one of three categories, the people who support the change, the people who oppose the change, and people who are entirely indifferent to either outcome. It's not like by removing every proponent of conserving society as it is right now through some kind of magic trick is going to make every possible social change imaginable happen all at once.

I would almost be willing to argue that without people to adamantly oppose such change, the change would never happen. My reasoning for this is that without any of the people who oppose such change, any social movement where the people who are indifferent to that change outnumber the people who support the change is simply not going to happen.

It is all about making it so that the people who are indifferent, change their minds by finding a reason to join the people who support the change. In that respect, I believe that social conservatives are the most effective force imaginable for convincing the people who are initially indifferent to actually support social change, if for nothing else than their treatment of the people who did nothing but want that change the most out of anybody.

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Warped655

#8 August 21, 2012, 08:26:27 pm

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Sounds like you think its a necessary evil EDC.

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goldenratio

#9 August 22, 2012, 01:54:10 am

now das fresh
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Thanks for the replies everyone. When reading your posts it just became obvious to me that this is way too dubious to have an important discussion about, too subjective and too relative. I mean we can have an "important discussion" but, much of what I said isn't as inherently obviously true as I would have thought. Interesting stuff. I don't have anything to add, at the moment, however.

yes coulombs are "germaine", did you learn that word at talk like a dick school?

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