Burke, Kant, and Taxis

Progressives sometimes accuse conservatives of the following contradiction. On the one hand, conservatives want to preserve practices that they believe are endangered, like the nuclear family. But conservatives also resist changes to the systems doing the endangering, e.g., by fighting increases to paid parental leave or child support.

Conservatives could accuse progressives of an analogous contradiction. Progressives want to change or abolish various practices. But they also like to meddle with the systems that are already abolishing those practices. Progressives aiming to abolish the use of fossil fuels, then hamstringing the nuclear energy sector with regulations, could be an example.1

The Taxi of State

Imagine the archetypal progressive and conservative are passengers in a taxi. I’ll call the progressive Kant, and the conservative Burke. Suppose Kant yells ‘Move forward!’ at the driver, and Burke yells ‘Stay here!’. In this debate, the two are disagreeing about the ideal location of the car. But this isn’t the only thing they could disagree about. Instead, Kant could yell ‘Speed up!’ and Burke could yell ‘Slow down!’. Now they’re disagreeing about the ideal velocity of the car. Or again, Kant could yell ‘Accelerate faster!’ or ‘Brake slower!’, and Burke could yell ‘Accelerate slower!’ or ‘Brake faster!’. Now they’re disagreeing about the ideal rate of acceleration of the car.

The point of the analogy is that, when considered as general attitudes towards change, conservatism and progressivism can be divided into several types. The simplest types are location conservatism and progressivism. These attitudes concern the ideal value of some basic variable. The next simplest are velocity conservatism and progressivism. These attitudes concern the ideal rate of change of the basic variable. More complex again are acceleration conservatism and progressivism. These attitudes concern the ideal rate of change in the rate of change of the basic variable.2

This distinction has two uses. The first is explaining away the mere appearance of contradictions within progressivism or conservatism. The second is explaining the actual existence of contradictions within progressivism and conservatism.

Apparent Contradictions

Imagine the taxi is at a standstill, and Kant tells the driver to speed up. The driver does so. Sometime later, Kant tells the driver to slow down again. Burke asks Kant if he changed his mind, and Kant denies that he did. So Burke charges Kant with contradicting himself.3

Did Kant contradict himself? It depends what he meant when he first asked the driver to speed up, then asked him to slow down. If Kant was being a location progressive, and we fill out his implicit requests as “Speed up (so we can get to the train station faster)” and “Slow down (we’re almost at the train station)”, then there’s no contradiction. If Kant was being a velocity progressive, and he was telling the driver to “Speed up (so we’re driving at the speed limit)”, then “Slow down (we’re over the speed limit)”, again, there’s no contradiction. The only way Kant must have contradicted himself, when he said “speed up”, then “slow down”, then claimed not to have changed his mind, was if he was speaking as an acceleration progressive. In that case we can fill out his initial request as “Speed up (so we can enjoy the sensation of accelerating)”, and his request to slow down must be expressing boredom, or some other change of mind.

The more general point, which applies equally to conservatives and progressives, is that claims about the ideal location, velocity, or rate of acceleration of some variable underdetermine what positions the speaker is actually committed to. In order to determine what someone is actually committed to in these cases, you need to have some idea of why they’re making that claim. Since people rarely make these reasons explicit, normative claims about variables are usually ambiguous.4

Actual Contradictions

The second use of the location/velocity/acceleration distinction is explaining the existence of genuine contradictions in progressive and conservative ideologies.

Consider the taxi analogy again. The changes in the taxis location over time are fixed by its velocity, and the changes in its velocity over time are fixed by its acceleration. These relations between location, velocity, and acceleration also hold between the cars various parts, and between individual parts and the taxi as a whole.

For example, if you change the location of the accelerator pedal, the acceleration, velocity, and location of the car as a whole will change. An inverse relation holds between the location of the break pedal and the cars acceleration, velocity, and location. Various more complex relations hold between the cars location and the location, velocity, and acceleration of its other mechanical parts.

The problem this raises is that any simple, unified progressive or conservative attitude, when applied to a complex system like a taxi, (or society) will engender contradictions, not just by chance, but by necessity.

At the level of analogy, if the taxi is driving along at 60 kilometres an hour, and Burke doesn’t want its location to change, he better be ok with its velocity and acceleration changing. Even if Burke is only a location conservative, if he wants the location of the car to remain the same, he better be ok with the location of the brake pedal changing pretty quickly.

At the level of attitudes to actual social change, this highlights a limitation in how general progressivism or conservatism can be while remaining internally coherent.

Even if Burkean notions about the wisdom of evolved traditions make us reluctant to alter these traditions, this is of little use when following a tradition of inaction results in the destruction of another, equally valuable, tradition. In the same way, pro-abundance progressivism has its limits as a heuristic when it comes to building technologies that might cut off the sources of progress entirely.5

Further questions






Footnotes

  1. I know that actual conservatives and progressives can object to the particular examples. They can claim that the contradictory aims don’t often exist in the same minds, and when they do, there’s some sociohistorical explanation for this. I won’t try to provide such an explanation. Instead of focusing on progressivism and conservatism qua contemporary social movements, I’ll use the terms to refer to more general attitudes towards change.↩︎

  2. Of course, there’s no reason to stop with these three types. In theory, so long as the function representing some change remains differentiable, conservatives and progressives could keep disagreeing about the proper value of its higher-order derivatives ad infinitum. Please insert your preferred joke about the possibility of jerk-progressivism/jerk-conservatism and the fact that politics makes people jerks here.↩︎

  3. Strictly speaking, Kant also wouldn’t contradict himself if some preference unrelated to the movement of the taxi, like a concern for his own safety, overpowered his initial reasons for asking the driver to speed up. I’m not sure how to actually make this precise, “a preference whose satisfaction doesn’t supervene on the location, velocity, or acceleration of the taxi” is too broad. “A preference whose satisfaction is unlikely to supervene on the location, velocity, or acceleration of the taxi” sounds better, but I’m not sure how much sense it actually makes.↩︎

  4. To give another real world example, suppose John claims we should increase the annual number of STEM graduates. Is John being a location progressive, and claiming this because there’s some ideal number of engineers that we haven’t yet reached? Or is he being a velocity progressive, and claiming this because there’s a rate at which new engineering jobs at created, and current graduation rates aren’t enough to meet it? Or is he being an acceleration progressive, and claiming we should suddenly and significantly increase the number of graduates just to flex on nations without the state capacity to do so?↩︎

  5. This point about the limits of simple heuristics doesn’t just apply to the rational drivers of conservatism and progressivism. It also applies to their merely psychological sources; traits like conscientiousness and openness to experience. On the assumption that these a-rational traits are harder to revise in the face of contradiction, people who are extremely conscientious or extremely open to experience should have more contradictory political views than people with equally extreme political views, but more typical levels of these traits. I have no idea if this is actually true.↩︎