Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative - 3rd session

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 3rd reading group

I came in about 10 minutes late, and people were talking about the release of Cho Doosoon. I think Mori said that when people come to distrust whether the police can properly do their job, they fall into a kind of collective madness(?), and that anarchism is dangerous because it too can descend into collective madness. Come to think of it, anarchism is achieved by rendering every role of government powerless. Liberalism does not hold that government should disappear. It says that government should perform only the role of defining and protecting each individual’s freedom within a social context. But if people try to abolish government in the name of anarchist ideology, then the power that government must legitimately exercise in order to perform that role is also neutralized, and people would be thrown into a situation where everyone has to fend for themselves. (It reminds me of Hobbes’s idea that the natural state of man is a war of all against all.) It also briefly made me think of the “Defund the Police” movement in the United States. That is, in fact, probably a representative anarchist movement. What I realized here is that the more government loses the ability to properly fulfill its legitimate role, the less different that is, in effect, from plunging people into a state of anarchy. Of course, the current situation is not happening because anarchist ideology is gaining force, but because government is neglecting its proper role and instead performing functions opposed to that role, namely socialism. At a time when socialist ideology is expanding, anarchist ideology will probably continue to strike many people as unrealistic, but in any case, like socialist ideology, both ultimately destroy individual freedom.

What we read today was Chapter 1.

The atmosphere in which conservatives are forced to make excuses for themselves, and conservatives give in to it: “compassionate,” “progressive conservative”... bowing to class conflict rhetoric (“friends of the rich privileged class”! Oh, no, that’s not me, I’m a warm-hearted conservative...)

What Barry Goldwater means by “conservatism”

The fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives: considering only economic “needs” / placing greater importance on the elevation of man’s spiritual nature

A political thinker must understand human nature through the accumulated wisdom of history.

Each individual possesses a sacred soul, and we must recognize each person’s differences and allow them to develop their potential. No one is merely part of a uniform majority, an “ordinary person”; each has the potential to be an “extraordinary person.”

The economic and political dimensions cannot be separated.

Each individual’s choices belong solely to that individual.

Protecting and expanding freedom

The tyranny of monarchy and the tyranny of the collective: conservatives see human dignity being trampled. Through an understanding of human nature, they seek to preserve social order while making the greatest possible freedom available to the individual; it is a technical problem of achieving a balance between order and freedom.

“For the American conservative, the first concern of our day in the political realm... is that we preserve and extend freedom”

Among the things that came up in discussion, I felt that claims such as “distribution according to ability is right” or “economic freedom is not freedom” are already built on accepting collectivist premises, and therefore already grant collectivists ideological superiority. So I wanted to say that we need to be clear about the definitions of the terms we use, so that we know exactly in what sense we are using them—but I’m not sure that came across.

Dandi said something, I think, about the line, “The conscience of a conservative is afflicted by anyone, whoever he may be, who seeks to degrade the dignity of the individual human being.” But to me, that sentence suddenly felt like an extraordinary maxim.

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Original title: 베리 골드워터 <보수주의자의 양심>-3차

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseo Toronmoim

Date: 2020-12-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=7&idx=23355