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Between Liberal Utopia And Conservative Dystopia

John Holbo launches a long, rambling post about slavery and the South by reflecting on the antebellum writings of pro-slavery Southerners: But most of these writers are barely polemical. The tone is concessive, gentleman-scholarly, mild, punctuated by patronizing sighs and arched eyebrows, to add some tone. Of course slavery is … unfortunate; but you can’t expect this old […]

John Holbo launches a long, rambling post about slavery and the South by reflecting on the antebellum writings of pro-slavery Southerners:

But most of these writers are barely polemical. The tone is concessive, gentleman-scholarly, mild, punctuated by patronizing sighs and arched eyebrows, to add some tone. Of course slavery is … unfortunate; but you can’t expect this old world to be perfect so we must make the best of it together. Does anyone have a plausible, practical plan for abolishing slavery, starting tomorrow? No. So what are we talking about? Just a bunch of Northerners who won’t be personally called on to do anything so painful. Yet they expect Southerners to give up most of their wealth, and destroy the value of their land in the process? Is that plausible? Abolitionism is so wrong not because slavery is so right – it isn’t! – but because utopianism must always fail. Indeed, it must always cause suffering, by the law of unintended consequences. Better to respect existing property rights, even though we know that if you look far enough in the past, there will always be ugliness at the root. It is the wonder of human institutions that beauty may flourish even from ugliness! (It is only utopians who do not appreciate this!)

This got to me, because I recognize all too well this approach to questions of law, morality, and public policy. It is my instinctive approach, and the instinctive approach of most conservatives; it is what makes us conservative. I do believe that in the main, it is a more reliable approach than liberal idealism, which rarely seems to consider that the progressive cause it champions today may bring disaster. But at its worst, this conservatism serves an evil like slavery and, later, Jim Crow.

In our own time, liberals would accuse conservatives of making the exact same mistake on gay rights, while conservatives would say (and do say) that liberals are pushing for a utopianism that disregards human nature and human flourishing, and are doomed to fail. I don’t want to raise that argument in this post, but only wish to show how this tension plays itself out in a heated contemporary debate.

Slavery is the best example of the moral failure of the conservative instinct towards prudence and gradualism. Can you think of examples of the moral failure of the liberal instinct towards utopianism? The first thing that comes to mind to me is the Sexual Revolution; a second case is forced busing. You may have others.

In the conservative case, we find an evil defended because the alternative is supposedly worse; in the liberal case, we find the potential for evil denied because the existing alternative is supposedly worse. It seems to me that society always lives in tension between the two outlooks, and it only can tell which one was correct from the vantage point of the relatively distant future. Then again, history is written by its victors.

It is not entirely clear that Bashar Assad, evil though he is, stands for a greater evil than those who intend to overthrow him. But the Congress and the US president have to decide whether or not to add American military power to the effort to overthrow Assad. The liberal/conservative moral calculus I talk about in this post comes into play.

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