Kevin Holtsberry uses Russell Kirk‘s opus The Conservative Mind to analyse his own views. I find this approach interesting because I suspect the devil is in the details. Here is my libertarian take on Kevin’s listed summation of ‘The Conservative Mind’:
1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
Yes: I believe that morality is something objectively derived but the understanding of which is often an evolutionary process. However it is this objectively derivable morality, which being the basis for all natural law, which transcends the custom of time and place and complex utilitarian constructs of written law, business and economy. It is the test all custom and law must in the end be subject to.
2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Yes, this is surely one of the keys to a libertarian or classical liberal mindset: an antipathy to conformity as a desirable objective independent of context. It is liberty and the inevitable diversity of objectives and understandings that spring from minds freed from literal coercion that is the highest objective of the classical liberal, rather than a utilitarian objective such as tractor production or discouraging single mothers. I am not so convinced “proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” is actually a true conservative value however.
3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders an classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
Yes, but given that ‘class’ is just a moving amorphous set of social cues, it is not something that is an end in and of itself, anymore than ‘classlessness’ should be. It is only when concepts of class take on force backed statutory characteristics that ‘class’ becomes an objective ill. ‘Class’ when rationally understood is an emergent phenomena that means a whole lot less than Marxists would have people believe.
4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.
Yes. All true libertarians would regard this as axiomatic.
5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would restructure society upon abstract designs.
Yes. Civil society is the product not of reason and imposed models of ‘what should be’ but rather of evolutionary processes. To think otherwise is to confuse the essential difference between society and state, which is the underpinning fallacy beneath all forms of statism. Yet a willingness to let ‘nature take its course’ invariably means a willingness to accept the inevitability that as economic realities shift and readjust dynamically within any rational economic system, so too will society… and not all people who have ‘abstract visions of society’ want those visions imposed at bayonet point.
6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.
Yes, see above. But the libertarian/classical liberal is also a dynamist, and thus grasps that rational understanding of the gradualist evolutionary nature of societies does not preclude an enthusiasm for innovation and the changes that tend to spring from that. A society which accepts change through social evolution and development towards a less statist/stasist imposed order is not a society unmaking itself but rather one becoming deeper and denser: an adaptable society is a successful society.
