Abstract

Practical politics is plagued by an unabashed and unrelenting mutual demonization of a given ideology, with each side classing each other’s cluster of ideas as pathological, i.e. “indicative of disease” and/or “extreme or excessive” or hopelessly irrational. This chapter specifically argues that the demonization, or the pathologization of conservatism as an ideology runs on a straw man fallacy—that is, detractors (and vulgar catechumen-like defenders) blithely assume that conservatism is coextensive with an ideology. This chapter argues for the view that not only is political conservatism not an ideological worldview, it is a cluster of epistemic virtues that should temper the rationalistic impulse regardless of ideological commitments—at least within the domain of sociality. Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held. Cognitive closure, otherwise known pejoratively as “new mysterianism”, is the view that the mind is structurally constrained in its computational power. Situated cognition, or ecological rationality, is a stance emphasizing rationality as being constitutive of activity, context, and culture. Social externalism is the view that much of our thinking is individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of a thinker’s community. The social complexity thesis is the view that there cannot be a predictive science of politics to drive a radical reconstitution of society. Complexity in the social realm, intrinsically stochastic, is coordinated by a voluntary manifold of self-organizing emergent spontaneous orders. Though each of these theses have resonance to so-called “political” conservatism they are not political positions per se. Regardless of ideological commitments, a cast of mind displaying a significant over-preponderance of rationalist traits, could well be deemed a neurodevelopmental disorder.