Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology. Individual freedom is certainly a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the sole or the true goal of politics. Conservatism involves the conservation of our shared resources—social, material, economic and spiritual—and resistance to social entropy in all its forms.
Conservatism, in the eyes of its critics, will therefore seem to be doomed to failure, being no more than an attempt to escape the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is always increasing, and every system, every organism, every spontaneous order will, in the long-term, be randomized. However, even if true, that does not make conservatism futile as a political practice, any more than medicine is futile, simply because ‘in the long run we are all dead’, as Keynes famously put it. Rather we should recognize the wisdom of Lord Salisbury’s terse summary of his philosophy and accept that ‘delay is life’. Conservatism is the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.
(Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006], ix)
Note from KBJ: I highly recommend this book.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 