Anonymous asked: Do you know anywhere I could read about inclusive conservatism?

I’m pretty sure I made it up, so no.

The political philosophy I’m sort of stumbling towards has three principles. The first is that shared experiences and a sense of common purpose, with a common tradition or history behind them, are tremendously important to many people. Many people are empowered by systems that have roles and expectations for them; “this is how our people do things” and “these are the skills you will grow to have and wield” and “this is a life lived well” are guidelines that can provide a really meaningful framework for some people to realize their goals.

On the other hand, it’s a framework that sucks when it doesn’t fit you. Lots of my friends have intense allergies to all of the above, because they were the people who didn’t benefit from that style of encouragement, or who couldn’t (with any amount of guidance) grow into the sort of person those traditions encouraged, or who didn’t want to, and most traditionalism is relentlessly terrible to those people; at best, it makes it so there’s a very high cost of leaving.

A useful traditional/conservative outlook needs to be more than just sympathetic to those people; it needs to have something to offer them.

The second principle is that societies and communities often learn from their mistakes on a subconscious level that is hard to make explicit; a tradition is in place to guard against a specific category of errors and harms, but no one can explain this very well, and lots of people adhere to it without a full historical understanding of what mistake it was a reaction to. For example, untiltheseashallfreethem​ speculated recently that chastity norms were one solution to the problem of compulsory sexuality.

The third principle, which hopefully was on all your minds as you read the last sentence, was that existent traditions are definitely not the best conceivable way of providing that framework and that tradition, or of preventing various harms. It is unlikely that chastity norms are the best possible way to reduce the pressure for people to have sex they don’t want, and actual extant purity culture has just as much (and substantially more coercive) compulsory sexuality as modern sex-positive societies. Coming to an understanding of the reasons a tradition exists is an important project, but it can’t happen by denying that the tradition has harmed people, or with our eyes closed to the possibility it is, on net, harmful.

So, inclusive conservativism suggests a few things. Firstly, we should be reluctant to throw out traditions, but we should be very determined to engage with them. Sincere engagement with tradition isn’t possible in a society that treats its own fundamental principles as so fragile they cannot survive questioning; it also isn’t possible in a society that alienates all its own members who don’t fit the existing system, or a society that doesn’t give people a chance to realize whether or not the system is in fact what will empower them most. People picking-apart-why-an-expectation-doesn’t-work-for-them is a valuable form of inquiry and, ideally, there should be space within the system for that form of inquiry; if it’s all coming from outside it’ll prompt defensiveness instead of introspection.

Secondly, the essential project of modern conservativism is going to be figuring out which elements of tradition matter. I called “shared experiences and a sense of common purpose” one of the things that was essential to happiness and health for many people. Some conservatives (particularly in Europe) use this conviction to argue against immigration, because they worry that nations with a high rate of immigration can’t have the shared experiences and sense of common purpose that I’m seeking. This is a factual question and I think they’re wrong, but I do think it’s possible to build a nation or a community that lacks those things, has low social trust, and makes most of its residents miserable. Stopping immigration won’t solve it and is in any event too high a price, but what pieces do we need to keep to preserve strong communities? When we look at healthy and vital communities, which of their traditions are the trappings - bound to change with time, not worth fighting for - and which are the content, the essential elements that contribute to success and happiness?

Excluding gay people from marriage was clinging, I believe, to an element of tradition that didn’t matter; mixing up the trappings and the content. But the content is good; the community has an interest in ensuring that co-parents of children have a healthy constructive relationship and that the children have a stable home. Inclusive conservativism would be about critiquing marriage with that content in mind, and trying to figure out how to let our traditions grow.

I used the word “let our traditions grow”, and that was deliberate. Changing traditions is hard; they come across as artificial, you sometimes do more damage than you intend. I think of it as the equivalent of digging up a thousand-year-old tree and replanting it somewhere you think it’s needed more. If you know what you’re doing and have a lot of resources, it can be done, but more often than not you’ll kill the tree.

What you want to do instead is to shape the way the branches grow. It’s hard to mess up catastrophically. It’s possible to achieve amazing results. And no one who was dependent on shade where the old tree stood gets screwed over. It’s slower, and takes finesse, and it genuinely takes longer and doesn’t accomplish as much as digging the whole damn thing out of the ground - I’m not going to pretend traditionalism doesn’t have real costs! And those costs fall disproportionately on marginalized people and inclusive conservativism really does need to answer for that. But in the end, we have a thousand-year-old tree learning to stretch its branches in fascinating new directions, and you have a substantial probability of a dead tree.