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Why Conservatives Only Grudgingly Approve of Modernity
Luckily for them, liberal institutions can go wrong
One way to understand the difference between liberals and conservatives is to reflect on the positive and negative senses of the word “artificial.”
Primarily, the word refers to something “made by human skill; produced by humans,” in which case the artificial contrasts with the natural. This meaning isn’t so much positive as it’s neutral rather than pejorative, but we’ll see in a moment that anyone in favour of civilization should read the first sense as being based on some positive values.
The word’s remaining several senses, though, are all pejorative. Thus, “artificial” can mean:
- “imitation; simulated; sham”
- “lacking naturalness or spontaneity; forced; contrived; feigned”
- “full of affectation; affected; stilted”
- “made without regard to the particular needs of a situation, person, etc.; imposed arbitrarily; unnatural”
The relevance of this to politics is that conservatives would prefer the negative senses since effectively, at least, they side with the natural over the artificial, which amounts to saying that they prefer animals to people, and default norms to progress.
