What Makes the Neocons "Cons": More on "Conservative Principles"

My second response to Stephen Bainbridge's post of Kirk's 10 principles of conservatism, focuses on the second and third principles:

Once again, I want to emphasize that these principles are not necessarily anything the average conservative subscribes to, but one man's opinion. But it's that opinion I'm addressing, so here goes:

1. "The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity..."
   
   Not true. The human race—and every single culture—has multiple customs and conventions. As I've pointed out elsewhere, for example, the broad traditions of wisdom and legalism have ancient roots, are equally customary in western culture, and each have their own set of conventions. The same applies to many sub-traditions which go to make up the larger, traditional western culture.
   
   Conservatives don't adhere to custom or convention as such, but to certain customs and conventions. rather than others—insofar as they adhere to custom and convention at all.
   
   But there's a second sense in which this claim is misleading. Conservatives don't even adhere to the customs and conventions of the tradition which they claim. You would be hard put to find a conservative—outside of certain executives working for certain major corporations which operate in third world countries—hard put to find a conservative who actually believed in slavery, or who did not believe in universal suffrage, or who thought that disobedient children and women who had affairs should be stoned to death.
   
   The simple fact is that conservatives do not hold to custom or convention any more or less than anyone else. They pick and choose, just like the rest of us; they just pick and choose different things.
2. "Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know..."
   
   Conservatives, do, however, often represent themselves as champions of custom and convention—as champions of tradition in general—and this is also misleading.
   
   As I pointed out above, there is more than one tradition. Alongside the conservative tradition, which values a legalism over wisdom, property over people, and the kingship model over the democratic model, is the liberal tradition—which values wisdom over law, people over property, and democracy over dictatorship. Liberals champion a tradition as well, just a different one.
   
   Liberals don't assume, however,  that every option is satanic. It's telling that Kirk characterizes the customs and conventions he champions as familiar devils. It's not that he thinks those customs are good, but that he's more afraid of the alternative. This points to another characteristic of the kind of conservative he's describing—a person who is motivated by fear, particularly fear of freedom. Why kid yourself that there is only one tradition, and then cling to it for dear life? Because you are both a human hater and a human. You do not trust yourself or others. If you even admit that there are more than one tradition, then you will have to trust humans—yourself and others—to choose between them. And that scares you.
3. "Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time."
   
   It sounds like great humility, but we could point to dozens of places where modern conservatives dismiss the views of their ancestors without thinking twice. They do not consider themselves dwarf's, and they do not consider their ancestors to be giants, at least not in any way that affects their own decisions. It's a good rhetorical justification for pushing certain interpretations of the constitution, or certain moral stances, but it doesn't stop a single conservative from ignoring a single tradition when they want to.
4. "Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary."
   
   The "immemorial usage" would seem to indicate those things the human race has agreed upon since it was young. In fact, of course, most conservative values don't go back anywhere near that far, and they contradict the values that actually do. How many conservatives are in favor of polygamy, like the patriarchs in the Bible? How many accept Jesus' attitude toward property—as something to be avoided or given away? How many would even endorse the idea that all real estate (originally "Royal Estate") belongs, in principle, to the government, which has the right to reclaim it or reassign it as it pleases? A conservative in California has just recently attempted to change the traditional custom of winner-take-all in presidential elections.  
5. "There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often."
   
   Yes. Property rights. Not, you'll notice, civil rights. Not life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. On this point, he is being completely forthright. This is a traditional conservative value.
6. "the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality"
   
   This brings us full circle. This particular conservative blindly asserts that the set of values he picks and chooses from the vast smorgasbord of human tradition is the chief wisdom of the race, that it is prescriptive by nature (against equally honored traditions) and that individual humans cannot be trusted. He fails to ask himself one question: why we, or he, should be willing to trust his own "petty private rationality" on such weighty matters.

Fear, distrust of humanity, denial, false claims to humility and to authority from the past, and a devotion to property and those who hold it. Once again, it's not a surprise that this kind of thinking gave birth to the neocons.