I Wonder If That's True?

AVI speculates:
Most of your ancestors did about as well as they could under the circumstances, but their times were not ours and you wouldn't have liked them much. You would have found them slow, ignorant, indifferent to violence, intolerant of people twenty miles distant, dirty, and smelly. On the other hand, they would find you pampered, soft, arrogant, overfed, sexually uncontrolled, irreligious, and wasteful. And they would be right, I suppose, though I don't think I would hang around to hear them talk about it.
Well, I don't have to care what anyone thinks of me who isn't my wife or a few close friends. I've built my life that way on purpose.

Still, I've spent a lot of time with the dead -- at least the ones who wrote books, or who had books or sagas written about them. I usually like them fine, often better than my contemporaries. It's a subset, of course, of the whole population; but then again, the population was a lot smaller in the old days and traveled a lot less. It wasn't as important that you learn to like people who were from far away, because it wasn't as likely to come up that you'd need to do so.

As an aside, I sometimes tell a story about how progressive and conservative thought are both the result of psychological illusions, and AVI's speculation reminds me of it. I'll run through it quickly here just because I haven't written it down in a while, and maybe it'll be interesting to some of you or at least useful to someone someday. The story goes like this:

For the most part people learn their values by contact. You can think of values as 'rubbing off' in an almost literal sense: you get yours by rubbing up against someone else who already has them. That's how they teach you to have them. Now you're more likely to rub up against people who are closer to you than who are further away. That closeness holds for both time and space: those who are closer to you in time rub up against you a lot more than those who are distant, unless you're one of those who goes out of their way to seek out the old books, or institutions that bring old things forward anew.

The illusion that gives rise to progressivism, then, is just that this process makes it seem like those who are closer to you in time are increasingly like yourself. Since what you believe is right is what you believe is right, and you got your values by rubbing up against those closer to you than further from you, naturally as you look further and further back the moral world of those older generations looks less and less in agreement with your own. Because you believe your own values are right, this fact makes it appear as if there is an 'arrow of progress' in history that points in your direction. Every generation gets closer to you, as if they were learning lessons that are bringing them closer to the true values you hold in your heart.

Of course it's just an illusion. As things get further away from you in the future, those people will have rubbed up less against you and those you rubbed against. Their values will change in a different direction. There's no arrow of history. It's an illusion, almost an optical illusion. It comes from this fact of perspective.

The illusion that gives rise to conservatism comes from picking a point in history -- real or imagined -- and holding it up as the exemplary one. It doesn't matter if it is the Founding, the Age of Mohammed and his Companions, the Early Christian Church, the Viking Age, the 1950s or the High Middle Ages. King Arthur. Camelot. Whatever. Once you've picked a point and a set of values as exemplary, this very same process I have been describing means that history looks like a long falling away from that moral ideal. Every generation is less and less like the one that lived in the great days.

That's an illusion too. It's an illusion of the very same kind.

What isn't illusory in the moral world is the transcendent values, the ones that hold true by virtue of the structure of reality and human nature. Courage is a virtue in every generation, because the courageous are more likely to succeed in achieving whatever it is they want to achieve. So too the self-disciplined. So too the ones who love at least certain particular others enough that they lead lives they enjoy and value. Courage, honor, moderation, discipline, love, friendship. These things really matter. They are not illusions.

Almost everything else is. Some of the illusions are harmless; others give rise to terrible tragedies. But they should be recognized by the wise for the illusions that they are.

5 comments:

Christopher B said...

Interesting observation. I'd say that a great paradox is that if you think about distance rather than time, the inverse applies. Progressives seem to think their contempararies who they don't often meet are uniquely different in values while people who come from far away will share them. Conservatives are more apt to think people in the same location share the same values, and distrust those who come from outside.

David Foster said...

Grim, if you haven't already read it, I think you'd enjoy C S Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength. (re the current discussion, Merlyn transported to the 20th century has some observations about moderns and their way of life)

I reviewed the book here:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58059.html

douglas said...

So both Progressives and Conservatives have these illusions. But one is closer to seeing the eternal values you refer to as valuable and eternal- conservatives.

Progressives see progression, but it's not a developmental progression- It's an inevitable casting off of primitiveness, or evil, or whatever you want to call that which is pre-utopic.

Conservatives at least see that the past can show us the good, as the virtues are there too, and seek to build structures that will preserve those values as desirable, and develop them more fully in the future.

So clearly, one of those two positions does far more to recognize and advance the eternal values than the other.

E Hines said...

In addition, Progressives have no limiting principle(s); things just keep moving, developing, changing toward no particular thing.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have a built-in limiting principle--that universal, timelessly eternal set of moral values.

Eric Hines

raven said...

"Most of your ancestors did about as well as they could under the circumstances"

Yes, and most of us would be damned hard pressed to do half as well, under the same circumstances. Most could not cope at all.

first three or four things that pop to mind-

No DEET. And most everyone worked outdoors, dawn to dusk, to grow enough food to eat.

No penicillin. any compound fracture was most likely lethal. Pneumonia? Dead.

No anesthesia , no Tylenol, no aspirin- Imagination serves. Pain was a constant enemy.

Chores. Endless unceasing chores. Firewood. Water. Cooking. Cleaning. Butchering. Harvesting. etc.

"You would have found them slow, ignorant, indifferent to violence, intolerant of people twenty miles distant, dirty, and smelly."
Sounds lot like the current crop of street protesters.
This is different than antifa how?