There's also, I think (disclaimer, righty lean), kind of a lack of understanding that goods conflict with each other.
For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves.
Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep.
On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created.
> Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet.
Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of?
It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal.
Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway.
This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith.
Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground.
The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.
I don't have the courage to have a deep conversation about everything you're talking to, I'm just going to give a different perspective on a couple things (disclaimer: I'm talking about leftists and non-conservative like they have uniform opinions about these things. They do not, it's mostly my POV that I know to be somewhat common):
> Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it
The idea that "liberalism is about more liberty" (or something we often hear in France "the left values equality more, the right values liberty more") is something is disagree with _so much_. Liberalism is about laissez-faire, jungle law, survival of the fittest. That means the powerful/rich are very free, the less-powerful are free within the bounds set by the powerful: they have to work long hours in stupid jobs and their whole society (laws, means of consumption, social benefits) is set by the powerful. In effect, almost nobody is free to do what they want, only to do what they manage to get resources for (which is often not much). Being a "wage slave" is just one aspect of it.
You're talking about the French Revolution, which is an _excellent_ example of an uprising of the working class that's been subverted by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie set the foundation of liberalism on the back of the people's uprise and continues to reap the benefits, the ideals of the revolutionaries most definitely were not aligned with liberalism. We see this again in the second French Revolution, then with the National Council of the Resistance whose ideals and achievements have been deconstructed by decades of liberalist policies.
> Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing
I think it's probably the argument that non-conservative struggle the most to argue against, because it's something that's simply not important to them. They just wave it away, because having their locality remain like it is is not particularly important to them. It's not _not_ important, but it's very secondary to making sure that the people's condition (both in this locality and outside of it), ie their rights/freedom/outcomes/wellbeing, is as good as it can be. I personally find it hard to think that one can morally think otherwise, but moral is a very personal thing.
And _in addition_ to having different values on what's important (human's condition versus the locality staying the same), I also believe that more than enough diversity is created, and we need more diffusion of it rather than less. I think the biggest threat to diversity is not people moving across borders, it is global corporations flooding local markets (Americanism is an obvious example, Chinese manufacture flooding Africa is another).
> Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
I abhor the very notion that because something is "natural", it is a good thing for society. Especially when we're in the realm of metaphors and analogies.
For example, how is diversity really born? Friction, separation. That's how it works biologically, and that's how cultures have grown different as well. Japanese people figuring out Japanese solutions to Japanese problems, Brits doing that in Britain, and so on. There were a lot of these when travel was more difficult, and we couldn't just bruteforce eg. heating/cooling and water away with tech and energy expenditure. And those are the things that have created the charm of the cultures themselves.
Biology's the same, animals become different to cope with environmental pressure and we celebrate this. We rightly think it's a richness.
Wanting a locality to remain more like it is and retain its character is a desire for a good, it's not an evil thing. But when we run into something that triggers moral sentiment, thought often stops there. If we close borders, we will in fact be doing nasty things to people who could use help. But that doesn't have to precisely be because those outsiders are bad, them being different is enough: They will damage a good that we'd like to keep.
On the other hand, letting them in helps said people, but abandons the good the friction of moving into the country created.
> Violation of the right's values are much less personal, more indirect, closer to annoyance than outrage.
I think this is more because the right's grown up in an environment where the things they ought to hold holy haven't been allowed to be held holy, so we get substitutes like excessively economic politics, or the ugliness of populism: It's a moral impulse that has no dignified outlet, at least yet.
Ever wonder why many right-leaning people feel like they're more or less making apologies for their existence, that there's things that should feel important, but summon the air of dusty closets and mothballs to the mind when spoken of?
It's partly because the right-wing society concept was built on a somewhat different stack. Said conservatives often call themselves right-liberals, and therein lies the problem: Liberal.
Liberalism is not merely valuing liberty, and wishing a high degree of it. It's a descendant of French Revolution type thinking, an enlightened, rationalist concept where we've finally figured out via Reason how to conduct human life, an a John Stuart Mill -ish idea of freedom as the maximization of available choices being the end in itself. Liberalism is inherently universalist in conception, since it knows the right way to live. To a liberal bent, humanity is malleable given sufficient perseverance and wisdom. Rationalist Revo!Liberty is the bedrock of society, on top of which it is built. There is an inherent devaluation of the past here, since reason will tell us how to go forward, and we can't even tell what all this rickety nonsense does - it's likely a pile of superstitious junk anyway.
This does not work for the conservative attitude - in a Burkean sense, law is the slow accumulation of patches onto a rickety pile, that contains a lot of wisdom on how to live that we don't even remember why they're there in the first place: A mountain of Chesterton's fences. Man is held to be fallible, but something that can be honed by society and faith.
Drop the Revo!Liberty lego, let a Burkean patchwork law, religion as humans must have, and more secular tradition fall into its place at the bottom as the bedrock, and insert liberty as a product. Suddenly, the mothballs disappear. The conservative no longer needs to be a brake on Revo!Liberalism's inevitable forward march, an outdated version ten years late that will assimilate most anything their ostensible opponents push as the good status quo. The ideological stack becomes alive, and he can stand on his own two feet, on solid moral ground.
The Millian concept of liberty is troubled otherwise, too: A healthy society considers its own norms Good, and thus renders the human desire to conform a moral act. If the norms cease to be that, and are just arbitrary impositions, the only real moral act is defiance, it's the only one that contains proof of moral acts having been taken. Thus we go from stained glass to obese women holding severed heads, from public sculptures to giant public buttplugs. From melodic music to Yoko Ono, from beautiful paintings reflecting the wonder of creation to random splatter driven by hype. Subversion feels radical for the while but grows empty, fast. The only real 'morality' is in not being something, and that is it. There is nothing to truly aspire to except transgression or one-upping the Joneses.