And the tales you have taught me
From the things that you saw
Make me want out your heart please
From behind that locked door
George Harrison
In the previous section I talked about the "pitch," the message of conservatism. This section is about those who find conservatism deserving of their commitment. Although I find some sympathy for the logical/conceptual arguments in favor of defence of the status-quo and laissez-faire economics, I find the overall arguments unconvincing. I hope sometime to find time to explain my reasoning in the section "The Claims."
In this section I discuss the attraction ("draw") of conservatism and the characteristics of the people ("marks") who are attracted to it. The terms are a bit cynical, but fit the tenor of the times.
The notion that the attractiveness of conservatism is affected by personal characteristics of adherents is not novel. Still, it seems a bit biased to begin by assuming that it is the personalities, not the arguments, that are important. Intelligent and knowledgable thinkers make sophisticated arguments in favor of the various conservative planks. Why don't I focus on the arguments? As it turns out, the evidence presented herein shows that personal history and disposition explain conservative or liberal leanings even without reference to the education of adherents. It doesn't make a great deal of difference whether you ignore people's economic and sociologic beliefs. For most people the ideology is the understanding.
This section explores questions that are difficult. Why are some of us conservative and others not? What is it about conservatism that makes it attractive? Why does conservatism sometimes look like authoritarianism? The answers I will offer up come from the work of social scientists who have been puzzling over this for quite some time. Their research has built an understanding of conservatism which is increasingly detailed and which eerily has predicted much of what we’ve recently been bewildered or bemused by.
Ideology attracted the attention of the first social scientists in the late nineteenth century. Emile Durkheim in France (d. 1917) published “The Division of Labor in Society” in 1893. Max Weber in Germany (d. 1920) published his still-influential “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in 1905. Marx and Engels had already put their own influential spin on things. Both Durkheim and Weber endeavored to apply scientific methods to understanding the social turmoil of their time. Old feudal agricultural systems of production had been rapidly replaced by modern wage labor systems, which were largely urban. “Labor” as an identifiable sub-culture was a new phenomenon, and labor as a political combine was challenging conservative hegemonies across Western Europe. Thus the birth of sociology and social psychology.
These related disciplines endeavor to understand human behavior within the context of social organization. This sounds like a hard thing, and indeed it has proven to be hard. It is hard to observe it in process. It is hard to devise experiments that provide firm conclusions and at the same identify general effects. It has been hard to gain broad acceptance of findings in a field that so touches peoples’ wallets and rouses their spleens. Both subject matter and investigative method are abstract and indirect, making it difficult to understand and easy to ignore or explain away.
How would you begin to “explain” conservatism, supposing it occurred to you to want to explain it? And to what end would you explain it?
An early hurdle might be identifying what in the world it is. You might think (like the U. S. Supreme Court with pornography ;)), that even if you can’t define it, you know it when you see it. Just as that isn’t a satisfactory approach under the law, it isn’t satisfactory in the world of science. So that’s a hurdle.
If you had an accepted definition (if you could distinguish what is conservative from what isn’t), what can you expect to learn about a process or object that exists in peoples’ minds? That’s another hurdle.
This set of essays describes how and why researchers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries dealt with these hurdles, and more important, what they’ve been able to learn and pass on to the rest of us about the framework of conservatism. You’ll find that they’ve managed to construct a convincing and useful narrative that ties conservatism in to our rapidly-expanding understanding of human psychology and social organization.
“The Search for an Authoritarian Personality” describes the effort to explain authoritarianism as a personality trait following the trauma of World War II and the revelations that followed it.
“Two Types of Conservatism: Conformity and Dominance” explains the important realization that there are two distinct forms of conservatism, a submissive form and a dominating form.
"January 6, 2021" shows how the two conservatism scales helped a survey researcher to predict the storming of the Capitol. Strange science, indeed.
“The Motivation for Conservatism” provides an answer to the important question of why ideological conservatism is attractive. The answer to that question touches upon related questions, such as how conservatives differ from non-conservatives.
“A Causal Chain for Conservatism?” takes a somewhat different approach to the question “Why?” by asking "How?"
“A Dynamic Picture of Authoritarianism” describes research on the why and how of authoritarianism. It stands on a different foundation than the other research. This should strengthen our confidence in all of these findings. In addition, it ties our models of conservatism more deeply into the emerging scientific consensus on individual psychology and social organization. It offers an explanation for why authoritarianism seems to ebb and flow, appear and recede. It offers insights as to how authoritarianism may be different from status-quo conservatism and from economic laissez-faire.
I go into the weeds a little, as we say, of the science in these essays. Too much summarizing removes the meaning. As I’ll show, there is art (technique) to condensing people's gossamer thoughts and preferences into a tangible form that can be observed and examined. In this kind of research, much of the meaning lies in the definitions of concepts.
Inductive science, the search for useful and reliable generalizations, depends upon the ability to evaluate the strength of evidence. This evaluation relies on mathematical statistics, which allows us to separate pattern from randomness, signal from noise. I’ve described the strength of the evidence behind these conclusions in a way that requires no particular knowledge of statistics, but relies on your ability to compare magnitudes. At the same time I’ve tried to communicate the statistical strength of the findings for those who understand that. I’ve also tried to be explicitly skeptical about the strength of the methodologies and conclusions. Part of science is understanding the strength of your knowledge.
My investigations have led me to feel that our separation into opposed camps is not just a by-product of our political institutions, but that it reflects basic differences in how we respond to life, what we fear, and what we hope for. As uncomfortable as this may be, a clear understanding of our brothers and sisters is probably needed if we aspire to do unto others as we would be done to. Without an objective view of them and ourselves we will only impose ourselves on others.
Next: The Search for an Authoritarian Personality
© 2021, Ross A. Hangartner