Conservatives and Progressives: You’re not all that different.

Seeing as I’ll be away from today until the end of the week on a field trip and cannot properly promote this post, I figured I may keep it short and more general.

Over recent months, exploring the sociological aspects in response to empirical data, an idea has dawned upon me (although, I’m not suggesting that it has not been realised before). In short, political slants only reflect, when one removes all the noise to discover the core, an ideology in which one expects human fulfilment to be maximised. That’s it.

Regardless whether one is progressive, conservative, libertarian or otherwise, it is all about prosperity.

I would argue that forgotten to those who would tend to hat tip traditionalism is key general virtues of modesty and humility (although, not always). Fusionism is the extreme expression of this contradiction in that it expects a free-for-all attitude towards resource access.

At the end of the day, progressives hold that we are a changing society and thus change needs to be reflected in our values and approach to resource management while conservatives reject the first premise and thus cannot approach the rest. The latter is of course wrong.

Conservatism needs to revamp for it does has immense value in itself. For instance; an important principle exists that states that societies which are ignorant of history tend to repeat their mistakes – as conservatives do concern themselves with our history, they should convert this into their philosophy to be the bearers of philosophical insight so that progressives do not hurtle through the darkness, hitting the same pitfalls as earlier generations.

Another principle of conservatism is conservation in general; not just history, but environment, general know how / rule of thumb. We achieved so much as a species before having the scientific explanation for it (my favourite example is the trebuchet, built entirely on Newtonian physics before Newton; it was more or less genius guess work) – this ingenuity is valuable.

We all have a lot to offer and we all care about having a world in which we can prosper. Starting from here, one would hope we could open a civilized dialogue rather than persist in this entrenched warfare of words.