My charitable ode to (Hegelian) conservatism

The feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that others have felt the exact same emotions before, whether about everything from ambition and compassion to Hegel's great philosophical contemplations of human dependency, is staggering. Rather than receding into anonymity, we thenceforward can act with the belief that our actions are significant - we are freed from individuality in the petty details to launch our own independent projects within it. When you are alone in the world, any new start can seem overwhelming; but if you are simply following a long-traveled trail that you know has led to some goods, your eyes are more peeled for the more efficient shortcut or the more illuminating detour; even a new destination is no longer beyond question.

But the sense of history is also not one to be dismissed: it is the home of empathy and emotional resonance. When we watch a movie Apollo 13, it carries emotional resonance because it is not just a random team of explorers, but the culmination of long efforts to reach beyond the human condition, part of the human project. When someone recites the Gettysburg Address, it can bring some to tears and everyone to chills because we recognize the significance bestowed on it by everything that had preceded it, the mindset that spawned it. Perhaps more importantly, we understand how it would have affected so many people in the future with certain values.

Of course, from the liberal standpoint, we cannot take that emotional resonance as a bearer of truth. Humans can be easily swayed by a force of history (and the weight of human numbers, essentially) behind something that may only be contingent. For example, it is unclear to me that the Civil War really did most perfectly uphold the values of democracy and peace that Lincoln espoused in his battlefield speech. And I think this is the chief danger, even a Nietzschean one: that the old way is not necessarily the most perfect way. Sometimes it is hard to part with that historical association, but we must realize that new histories may be better ones.