America's health-care debate is like a grown-up version of the silly '90's-era ``culture wars'': Today's fights are exposing profound and serious differences between ``progressive'' and ``conservative'' worldviews.

There is some research to suggest that these differences are rooted in temperament (more on this in future posts, but for now, see this pdf of a new paper by John Jost and his colleagues on temperament and ideology in last year's election). If that's so, then the left-right divide probably has a genetic component, and the basic question of politics (how do people change their minds?) gets more interesting. Because if we're temperamentally wired to go left or to go right, then it's not rational argument alone that sways us.

It's clear to many now that reason has its limits, as we follow the health-care debate and confront arguments that make no sense to us. In such moments, you don't think ``I disagree heartily.'' You think: ``How could anyone think like this?''

That is how I feel about conservatism as a philosophy. I want to say why -- not to persuade anyone but because, in circumstances where reasoned arguments won't move people, the best we can do is understand each other better.

So, here goes.

As a general principle, I think, conservatives  believe (a) what we've inherited from the past should be protected from change (because it is inherited, no other justification necessary) and (b) attempts to change people and society will generally make life worse, not better.

Case in point: This explanation by the ever-lucid Megan McArdle about why conservatives prefer markets to governments when it comes to distributing goods and services. ``Progressives are so fond of rules,'' she writes, because

 

they don't want to tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker. It's much nicer if you create a mathematical formula that makes some doctor tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker. Then the doctor can disclaim responsibility too, because after all, no one really has any agency here--we're all just in the grips of an impersonal force.

 

Two things leap out of this, like Thoreau's trout in the milk, to a non-conservative mind. First, the assumption that Grandma should get her bypass (because grandmothers have in the past, because no one would tell her own granny to go off and die). Second, the assumption that an impersonal force must be worse for decision-making than personal feelings and habits. Both those notions seem essentially conservative to me, and I don't understand either of them.