One thing that often gets forgetten in the rush to take action and the moral pressure to “do something” is the historical reality of how much of what we think of as the terrible crimes of the past were committed out of a similar desire to take action and do the right thing. It’s very seldom that people have done things on a large scale out of mere brutality or conniving evil. Especially for actions that required a decent amount of planning and effort and social and institutional coordination, the real explanation is often closer to “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
As much as liberals, who are generally a bit higher in compassion, as well as more psychologically sensitive and open to experimentation, complain about the terrible things done by society in the past, upon looking back at the actual arguments used to advance those actions, it was often those exact same people (by type) who originally generated those practices. This isn’t always true, of course, but it’s been true quite a lot. Being sensitive creates emotional motivation, being compassionate (or at least socially oriented) provides moral motivation, and being open to experimentation provides practical motivation. Add in a dash of competence, get some conscientious people who will make it happen on an administrative level, and you’ve got broad social action and experimentation in action. And sometimes that goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t.
And that’s why, curiously enough, the people who are most likely to complain about the sins of society are also those, in many ways, who were most likely in times past to have produced those sins as innovations. The conservatives are loath to change anything once it’s in place and functioning. They’re more averse to change or to experimentation and have a weaker tendency toward the kind of utopian social experimentation that liberals like to engage in. Once something is set up and working and becomes a sort of default, they’re the ones who will maintain it. But they don’t like making bets that aren’t fairly sure, and they like to be able to clearly see and measure and control and react to the results of anything they do.
To pick one tiny, random example, liberals are the ones most likely to complain about the sort of schools for native American children that were used as an attempt to Americanize or Anglicize native cultures, by separating them from their cultural and familial influences so they could be directly remediated and improved by the state. That’s the sort of thing that is regularly decried by liberals and held up as an example of the sort of sins they are trying to point out and act to correct. And that’s why you need to listen to them and vote for them, so they can take action and prevent these conservative sins from recurring. But, in looking at the actual ideas that gave rise to these sorts of practices in the past, as well as their contemporary equivalents, it becomes clear that, both then and now, that approach is a fundamentally liberal, not conservative. It’s not so much the pot calling the kettle black as it is the pot calling tea soup.
Before we go to far into this, I think it’s important to note that I’m not arguing that liberals are “worse” or “too blame”. I’m just trying to parse how the actual genesis of ideas and practices happens in a society. It’s a dance, in which both halves of society take part. And there isn’t an inherent moral advantage to either, in that both can go equally and catastrophically wrong, and both can be right. They simply employ different strategies. One betting on the tried and true and standing on principle, and the other betting on adaptation and experimentation and challenge.
Because our society tends to assign so much glamour to innovation and rebellion and challenge and disruption, it’s necessary to speak back to that particular cultural bias and remind ourselves of a more balanced and nuanced view that takes into account the value of stability, tested and functioning institutions, and takes into account the real dangers presented both in the past and in the present by attempts to intervene and reinvent and destabilize social constructs.
To put it more bluntly, we need to recognize the value of what conservatives are conserving and recognize the danger that the compassionate intervention and utopian experimentation of the left has and may currently be causing. The call to take action and do something may sound heroic, and no doubt it did to generations past. But for so much of what we look back on with regret, that was the “doing something” of the time, and only further time and consequences have provided the clarity of hindsight that allow us today to so easily identify them.
Good intentions and positive expectations have never been in short supply. It’s just much less easy to get good result than you would think. And if your assumption is just that people of the past were wither so much worse or more stupid than yourself, and that’s why it will be different for you, then you’re simply ignorant of just how much you have in common with the dreamers of the past.
Making Nobody Happy 