Conservatism: looking backward for wisdom and understanding about human being and about all of God’s Creation.
Progressivism (of a truer type): moving forward into an everchanging world.
Liberalism: unleashing individual human beings from traditions and from true progressive movements to the benefit of would-be centralizers in (corrupt) politics and (corrupt) business.
The real point I’m making is that there are bad forms of conservatism and bad forms of progressivism, but liberalism—in all its forms of political centralism and market centralism—is inherently bad just because it tears individual human beings from our communal reality, especially from our movement through time. In fact, that’s the only point I’m trying to make, but I’ll have to provide short comments on each of conservatism, progressivism, and liberalism in order to make greater sense of my claim.
Even in a time of greater wisdom, of greater strength in thinking and feeling and doing to proper moral purposes, there will be those calling themselves conservatives who are outright reactionaries as well as progressivists who are advocates of an unbalanced attitude of “any change is good.”
We aren’t in a time of such greater wisdom, and unwise conservatives and progressivists dominate in number and authority and power.
We have a multitude of conservatives who understand the past well but don’t see the possibilities ahead of us—one reason we’ve failed to take advantage of openings and now seem doomed to some very hard times in the West. Those conservatives seem to believe:
If it is good to study the past to learn the wisdom of earlier ages of men, if it is good to keep what is wise in our current human minds and hearts and hands, then surely it is good to try to recreate the past or, at least, to fight to keep any given present with its peculiar mixture of traditional wisdom and nonsense, of more recent wisdom and nonsense.
We also have progressivists who see any change as good. They seem to believe:
If it is sometimes good, or at least necessary, to tolerate people with morally dangerous behaviors or thoughts, then it must be good to move on and to nurture those behaviors or thoughts in young people still struggling to develop their personal identities.
If those with conservative dispositions and those with progressive dispositions were to come to their senses, we would be able to do much that could be good.
Liberals take human being, mind and heart and hands in their individual manifestations, out of the stream of time, out of the reality of human being in its communal manifestations. Though individual liberals have done good, mostly by acting as conservatives or progressives on specific issues, liberalism is dangerous: it is destructive to human being by way of first being destructive to human communal being, even that of Western Civilization which, along with Western Christian churches as central organs, was the first large-scale manifestation of the Body of Christ.