Chapter 53 Part Two Results Chapter Thirteen Ideology: The Secular World 3

3 Compared with these coherent progressive ideologies, the anti-progressive ideologies are hardly systems of thought.They are ideas that lack a common way of thinking, that rely on their keen insight into the ills of capitalist society, and ideas whose beliefs come from life rather than liberalism.Therefore, they require relatively little attention. At the heart of these ideas is that liberalism undermines the social order or social groups that people regard as fundamental to life, and uses all against all competition ("man for himself, heaven and earth"), intolerable anarchy, and the power of the market. Dehumanization takes its place.Conservative and revolutionary anti-progressives, or representatives of rich and poor, even tended to agree with the socialists on this point, a phenomenon of convergence which, in the case of the Romantics (see Chapter 14 ), and produced such bizarre programs as "conservative democracy" or "feudal socialism".Conservatives like to compare the ideal social order (or a social order that is both close to the ideal and practical, since the social aspirations of the comfortable are always milder and more modest than those of the poor.) with any regime threatened by a dual revolution, Or with specific institutions of the past, such as feudalism in the Middle Ages, as the same thing.Naturally, they also emphasize the "order" element in it, since it is this that protects the upper in the social hierarchy against the lower in the social hierarchy.As we have seen, the revolutionaries preferred to look back to those more distant golden ages, when things were good and there was no real society for the poor.They also emphasize the distant golden age, the feeling of mutual help and unity among people, rather than its "order".

Both agree, however, that in some important respects the old system was, and still is, better than the new.Under the old regime, God ordered the high and low (which pleased conservatives), but imposed obligations (however inadequately and badly enforced) on the noble.People are not equal, but they are not commodities priced according to market conditions.Above all they live together, in a tight network of social and personal relationships, clearly guided by customs, social institutions and obligations.Undoubtedly, there were very different medieval ideals in the minds of Metternich's secretary Genz and the radical British journalist Corbett.But both attacked the Reformation equally.They believed that the Reformation introduced the principles of capitalist society.Even Engels, the staunchest believer in progress, once compared the ancient society of the 18th century destroyed by the industrial revolution with a yearning idyllic painting.

Without a solid theory of evolution, anti-progressive thinkers found it difficult to determine what was "wrong".Their favorite culprit is reason, or rather eighteenth-century rationalism, for allowing stupidity and evil to intervene in matters too complex for human comprehension and organization: society cannot function as Plan like a machine.Burke wrote: "It is better to forget forever the Encyclopedia and all economists, and return to those rules and principles that made princes great and nations happy." Intuition, tradition, religious belief, "human nature ", "true" rather than "false" rationality, organized by the thinker's intellectual proclivity against systematic rationalism.But its most important conqueror was history.

If conservative thinkers do not have a sense of historical progress, they have a very keen awareness of the difference between a society that is naturally and gradually formed and stabilized in the course of history, and a society that is suddenly "artificially" established.If they cannot explain how historical clothes were cut, and deny that there is any tailoring at all, they can admirably explain how the clothes become comfortable through prolonged wear.The most serious intellectual pursuit of anti-progressive ideology is devoted to the analysis and restoration of past history, to the investigation of historical continuity as opposed to revolution.Therefore, the most important interpreters of the conservative camp are not elusive French exiles such as Bonnard and Maistre (Joseph de Maistre, 1753-1821), who always try to use rational arguments bordering on madness. The dead past revived, and they did so even if their aim was to restore the virtues of irrationalism—but the "historical school" of Englishmen like Burke and of German jurists, which devoted themselves to The continuity of history makes the existing old system legitimacy.