Maggie's Farm

That should really be followed with "Aaaaaahhhhhhmen."

Really Meta? First, I don't think many Republicans have tried any of those particularly conservative beliefs recently. Second, let's look at the "what if" and consider if they aren't sound beliefs.

1) If life doesn't have a transcendant character to it then the only thing that matters is material stuff. They call this materialism. It generally isn't viewed as a path to a rewarding life, even by secularists.

2) If variety in human existence is not to be valued, then the default position is approval (or active seeking) of uniformity.

3) I'm not sure society requires classes per se, but if you deny natural distinction and the resulting orders, then you might as well draft cripples to be mixed martial arts fighters and downs syndrome kids to operate your nuclear plants.

4) If property and freedom - in the sense of individual rights are not linked - then why should the state not feel free to take your property from you whenever it feels like it, whether in the guise of a 5th Amendment taking, a 4th Amendment seizure (arrest)?

5) If you don't believe in faith, custom and prescription - rules - then how exactly do you propose to order society? The alternative is Rousseau's noble savage-ry. Even aboriginal tribes can't order their lives without rules and customs.

6) If political innovation is not to be prudent, then it is reckless. Could you name us some reckless politicians whom you would hold up as models?

I don't mean to harrangue you. I know a lot of progressives reject these notions out of hand without really considering them and would submit to you that they are worth considering.

1. If something is not immaterial, then it must be immaterial. That seems a pretty clear dichotomy, does it not? Perhaps there is a class of immaterial stuff in cosmology that does not matter - perhaps you could call it the frivolous. So that if you do not believe in materialism, and you do not believe in the higher order of the immaterial - the transcendant things like love and ideals such as truth - then you can believe in the frivolous immaterial. Frivolism - is that a word?

2. I'll note that the article's criticism of Kirk as basically off the deep end, is sort of the opposite of an endorsement of Kirk. I didn't feel it necessary to endorse the criticism of Kirk as my point was to endorse Kirk's summary of conservatism which the link more or less did capture. I don't agree that you have to be christian to be conservative; I do believe that you need to have some form of internal restraint on your impulses and that this restraint generally stems from either religion, or a strong secular internal moralistic sense that quite resembles traditional judeo-christian religion. George Santayana is a good example of that.

Luther,
1) If you truly love somebody else, that is you put their interest before your own at all significant times, I think that is a pretty fair definition of the transcendant.

2) I guess you don't have any kids in public schools, where the smart kids get stuck in the same classes with mainstreamed developmentally disabled kids; and I am also pretty sure you haven't dealt with employment discrimination law, where inequality of outcomes at work is thought to make out a prima facie case of discrimination. I suppose also that you have not had to sit in a university classroom getting gender critical theory rammed into your head, with the principle that women and men would be just as strong physically if only society didn't tell women they are physically weaker. That is the kind of uniformity that conservatives are opposed to - a state-imposed uniformity that refuses to accept the fact that people are unique in their strengths and weaknesses.

3) Life should be ordered in accordance with people's natural gifts and how they choose to use them - in other words with due respect for individual differences. That is what Burke was getting at, you could call it order consistent with natural law. Again, I suppose you're missing all the rhetoric coming from the levelers in Congress and the media. These wealthy people of immense power are taking it upon themselves to define how the business sector of society should be ordered. So too with their sneaky health care oversight rules inserted into the stimulus package. To answer your question, our political and media classes are purporting to be able to define how life should be ordered.

4) No, we're not particularly lucky here w/r/t property rights and freedom. We have freedom because our notions of the rule of law respect property; freedom follows from our decision to respect individual autonomy, part of which is individual property. We don't have property and freedom due to luck, but through hard work and conscious decisions, though we're lucky nobody has managed to take it from us.

5) Reason alone is a wonderful thing but it leads you into dead ends. Peter Singer's philosophy is a great example of where reason without transcendent value leads a person. If man has no transcendent value - Peter Singer's premise apparently - then the life of a chicken is equivalent to the life of a man. If you start with the transcendent notion that all men have inherent value, then logic is useful in determining how we ought to treat men.

6) Do you really believe that Nietzschean crap you're spouting? It's the underpinning of a particularly soulless form of totalitarianism. Politics, like law or informal social institutions is what we use to mitigate conflicts between individuals and states. In the absence of politics, you have life as a blood feud. All laws that have arisen out of disorder have come as a reaction against the blood feud. Politics is just a subset of the rule of law. If you really believe that, you should live someplace where there is no law for a while and then report back on how nice it is.

As for great ideas directly contradicting established order and prudence, what do you mean by "great"? If you mean "big ideas," then yes, I agree, they tend to be disorderly and imprudent. I give you Cromwell, the French Revolution, Marxism in all its Stalinist, Maoist, Pol Pot-ist glory, Eugenics, and Fascism. All big ideas, all directly contradicting the established order, and all ultimately shown to have been utterly imprudent.