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Nicholas Smyth's avatar

Really excellent post. In my view, there is no answer to the questions you raise because there cannot be. As soon as a society has to intentionally reconstruct some major institution the conservative simply falls silent on how that should be done, by necessity.

Moreover, the standard conservative move is to say that we shouldn't preserve just any old institutions, only the good ones, and so slavery had to go. But this renders their view indistinguishable from that of a hardline revolutionary socialist, who agrees that we should preserve the good institutions, but who just thinks that communism is a precondition for having good ones.

If you're interested, I ask many of the same questions in this paper: https://philarchive.org/rec/SMYTIN

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Quiop's avatar

The valorization of conduct "[done] without reflection” strikes me as reminiscent of the Bhagavad Gita, or at least Eliot's version of it ("So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna / On the field of battle. / Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers."). Could there be a connection here, or am I hallucinating like an overzealous LLM?

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