A Great Definition of Conservatism
Lawrence Weschler may have stumbled upon one of the best ways to describe conservatism in one of his essay on Yugoslavia. He is describing the evolution of a liberal-left friend who reluctantly comes to the view that ethnic partition is the only way to preserve peace. In doing so, he ends up siding with exactly those people who were the greatest threat to peace, the extreme nationalists.
To describe the difference between them, Weschler employs the following analogy. An envious man spurned by a beautiful women attacks her with a knife slashing her face. After the assault, he yells “You will never be beautiful again!” After some time recovering, the women consults plastic surgeon who informs her that there is not much he can do. But, she does not understand the hopelessness of the situation, so he feels forced to bluntly tell her, “You will never be beautiful again.” Same sentence, very different meanings.
A political movement is conservative when it equivocates between these two meanings. Some parts of the coalition think that life’s seeming cruelties are just. Others think them inevitable. Too much of the first and the movement ceases to be conservative; they are just earnest libertarians, integralists, or pugilists. Too much of the second, and they just become (potentially excessively) pragmatic liberals. There’s some mysterious way that these seemingly opposite meanings can happily cohabitate.