THE PITHY MAVERICK

Why am I a conservative?  The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, states in two pithy paragraphs what it took me to say in my long essay "History Matters":

>>Conservatives take a sober and realistic (not pessimistic!) view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. Potency is known through act and not through Lennonesque and Leninesque 'imagining.' (The allusion, of course, is to John Lennon's "Imagine.")

>>Liberals and leftists, by contrast, joined by many anarchists and libertarians, labor under the misapprehension that human beings are inherently good, and would achieve an optimal condition either through massive statist intervention, or the elimination of the state altogether. Strange bedfellows these, but lying together in the bed of a common illusion.<<

Amen.